I agree with the OP wholeheartedly. Absolutely right.
I’m not going to take sides at the moment. But I would like to point out that it is generally men who make men (usually) go to war. It is men who allow themselves to be pressured into paying for dinner and a movie.
On the other hand, it is usually women who load themselves down with the obligation to cook and clean after they get home from work – where they are paid at the rate of about 75 cents for every dollar the male is paid.
Both men and women might want to consider releasing themselves from their self-imposed senses of obligation.
BlackKnight, I’m just curious. Have you ever been serious injured on your job? I have. I spent seven hours in the emergency room, three days in the hospital and two weeks recuperating at home. Yet my job is most commonly held by women. I was a teacher beaten by a trespasser.
I’ve had two students with loaded guns removed from my classroom and I have taken knives out of the hands of students. I was in my classroom when a student poured duplicating fluid down the hallway and set it afire.
There was a shootout at the football game with a sawed off shotgun.
None of my students ever hurt me although one did threaten to throw acid in my face. I taught eight murderers and lost count after that. I taught a convicted rapist too but the school administration didn’t bother to tell me about his record.
All of this took place in a neighborhood where pizzas and newspapers weren’t delivered and school system repairmen were afraid to come.
Sometimes it takes ovaries to get the job done.[/hijack]
That’s right Zoe. And sometimes it takes testes. 
The problem with this debate is that we don’t have a good working definition for what sort of treatment constitutes “worst”.
The OP suggested a comparison between cultural treatment of women and the genocidal treatment that Native Americans experienced. So should we limit our discussion to “who has been murdered (subjected to physical violence) more?” Or do we mean who got the vote sooner? Perhaps heraldgwena can clear this up.
BlackKnight, I just wrote a very long point by point reply, which the server ate. I don’t have the time to repeat it, but I wanted to let you know that somebody cared.
False. This number comes from adding up all the money made by all the women in this country (well, making an estimate of such) and comparing it to all the money made by all the men in this country. It has nothing to do with being paid less for the same work.
I agree very strongly with this. I think restrictive gender roles are a plague. I will note, however, that I think these senses of obligation are not always entirely “self-imposed”.
I’m sorry to hear about your troubles, but I don’t think your anecdote and this question are relevant to the topic, unless you think one person’s experience is useful data.
Thanks. 
I guess that maybe part of the question might be wether mass murder or long term suffering is worse
I think that both types of oppression need to considered when you are discussing who had it the worst, as situations would factor in.
Although I do feel a need to say that many women have died at the hands of men, either as abusive husbands, or too much child-bearing.
Is it me, or did anybody else notice that Aldebaran referred to his “wives”? Or has this been covered already, and I missed it?
B.
He’s a Mormon.
Well, my understanding of Islam is that it’s perfectly acceptable for a man to have up to four wives. Frankly, I look at it the same as someone mentioning their same-sex lover, or their polyamorous relationship: none of my business.
To Agent,
Mormons, or - if I’m not wrong in my definition - the people who call themselves members of the group “The Latter Day Saints” are a US phenomenon.
I don’t think this religion is very much exported or exportable.
And certainly not to my countries.
I didn’t have any occasion so far to meet a member of that religion in real life. I did have some cyberspace conversations with a few, but I have no idea if they were representative for their faith since I konw close to nothing about it.
Salaam. A
Get off your tush, Aldie, and check www.lds.org and you might discover that the religion practiced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is very exportable.
Here’s to save you some legwork:
Now, unless you think that having 900,460 people less in the United States than outside of the country means that’s a majority, then you have some rather interesting ways of doing math.
Since you used the expression above, “my countries,” perhaps you’d care to check this link to catch what the LDS presence is in “your countries.”
Also, since the world-wide General Conference of that particular church was recently conducted, you might care to click on this link to listen to some of the speeches given at said conference. Perhaps one of the languages listed is one of your languages. Just a note here: one of the languages listed is Bahasa Indonesia–last time I checked, Indonesia and Malaysia are predominately Muslim countries; however, one link provided above says:
For Indonesia:
&
For Malaysia:
I include Malaysia because Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia are essentially the same language. These sites prove that not only is the faith exportable outside of the United States of America, but it is also exportable to predominately Muslim countries.
If you want to eradicate your ignorance about what our (yes, I’m LDS) basic beliefs are, here’s a good place to start.
Here’s a word of advice for you: don’t try to teach that you don’t know.
And maybe you might like to know that Czarcasm is just joking about his reference to Mormon & wives. LDS are not permitted to have (as in being married) more than one wife at a time.
BTW, every single link I provided above is an official site of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Not only is my posting providing official info about the organization in question, but it’s also a dandy (IMHO) way of showing you how citing is done here.
This link, on the other hand, is from a reputable site regarding the world’s languages. Here’s their take on Indonesian and Malaysian:
I await your dismissal of these sites as being wrong, prejudiced, irrelevant, or just not worth your trouble because they’re internet sites.
I would like a couple of wives myself.
But seriously, don’t you think that soemtimes women have contributed to their oppression a little bit?
What if they had risen up as one and protested?
Something to think about…
united we stand…
But do you really think that women have died at the hands of men more than men have? Or does that not count since its men one men violence
For instance what if I suggested that the disporportionate number of men in prison was some sort of female conspiracy?
Seriously, though, if we are going to say that woman are treated badly because they die in childbirth, then we have to include the fact that only men become color blind. And just for fun, they can’t get it from our fathers. Certainly this is a difference, but I don’t think it is a edifference about how either sex treats the other.
Now if you are saying that all sex is rape, then you might have a point about the dangers of child birth. However you would have to prove such an assertion.:dubious:
I’m certainly not saying that women have never been treated badly. I’m just suggesting that it might not be as universal as you seem to assume.
Ask yourself which minority group to this day is denied the right to marry the person of their choosing – even in the overwhelming majority of supposedly tolerant Western societies.
Ask yourself which minority group is subject to everyday harrassment for displays of public affection, threats of violence, actual violence, arrests and convictions for having sex, denial of social security benefits afforded to other unions, inequality in age of consent laws, denial of immigration rights for their partners, institutionalised discrimination, workplace discrimination, police harrassment and the occasional murder for the simple act of being.
Mimes?
If I say pedophiles, will I be vilified?
Gays weren’t universally oppressed throughout history. Ancient Greece comes to mind.
Regarding the OP, I thought that human society was matriarchal for several hundred thousand years. Or am I mistaken in that?
Radical feminists (a phrase that means “believing the oppression of women is the core problem”, not “boot-clad bitches who look and talk like Andrea Dworkin and castrate and kill men”, in case you’re not familiar with the term) have generally not asserted that the oppression of women was always the most severe, although some have made that assertion, so much as that the oppression of women is older and that the other types of oppression may have come about by already having an example category of people subjected to oppression.
Most of the other groups mentioned in this thread have not even always existed throughout the history of women’s oppression – or, if they did, the juxtaposition of the oppressors and the oppressed may not have. We know women’s oppression goes back as far as the dawn of agriculture and therefore the dawn of recorded history. (This was one of the difficult accomplishments for feminism: getting people to entertain the possibility that this wasn’t “just how things are” and to consider that it was both fair and harmless to extend equal rights and general equal treatment and consideration on the basis of sex).
Nine thousand years ago, Southern American whites were not oppressing enslaved African blacks. European settlers were neither practicing genocide against nor stealing the land of native American Indians. Hutus were not rising up against Tutsis and Tutsis were not ruling over Hutus. Roman imperial forces were not conquering and imposing taxes and foreign government on barbarian tribes of Europe and Northern Africa. Egyptian pharaonic dynasties were not even enslaving the Jews yet.
But we have reason to believe that females did not have equal social and legal rights then or through the long millennia stretching between then and the era of Sisterhood is Powerful. There have been societies that did not have both blacks and whites, or Jews and non-Jewish people, or Asians and non-Asians. But there have been no civilization, no culture, no social system, in which men and women did not encounter each other. And even the most severely sexually segregated systems put men in women in more integrated contact on a more regular basis than most of the other us-versus-them group conflicts across which oppression could exist. And that constant, integrated, day-to-day, in-your-face, perpetual interaction of 9000 years’ duration has been characterized by inequality and oppression the entire time.
It has often been milder and gentler in certain ways than the subjection of other races or nationalities: women often have experienced the material comforts available to the men of their social class, and have often held the social authority of that class over other classes even if held subordinate to the men of their own class. And oppression wears a different face when you are so up close and personal, with your life interwoven with the group that oppresses you. Hell, your own sons, as well as your husband and father, would be “them” if you were female. Mostly men did not objectify women so thoroughly as foreign “them” things as conquering ethnic/cultural groups did in the course of their oppressions. But where oppression was directly felt and experienced, it was all the more personal for that, yes?
If there is an oppression and old and primeval and as central to oppression in general as the oppression of women, it is as swami said, the oppression of children. If explaining the oppression of women to a world that had never known things to be different was difficult, coming to grips with how things could be different between adults and children is more difficult by an order of magnitude. Many radical feminist theorists have deliberately characterized “patriarchy” with an emphasis on the adult as well as the male aspects of (literally) “father rule”, and said that the parent/child relationship would be different if women were not an oppressed group. But the full articulation of how power and interaction could be different between adults and children has not been politically and socially achieved.
I think you are mistaken, or at least there is no way of knowing, since recorded human history only goes back about 12,000 years. Everything farther back than that is guesswork, and given female limitations, my guess would be that no, women weren’t running things.
In any stress on a society, women are the first to be oppressed, murdered, raped, abused, and enslaved, no matter what color they are. Throughout history and cultures, women have been considered expendable chattel.