Quote:
Originally Posted by lateralus
It's not easy to forget about equality of the sexes and just "get the **** on with life" when you're receiving less wages than you would if you were a man, and when you're constantly being patronized and reminded that you are the 'lesser' sex, and when 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime due to the way women are portrayed as subordinate to men in every avenue of representation and the men that choose to believe this...
I choose not to get the **** on with life, but to argue about equality as long as I live because having a vagina has already cost me so many disadvantages in my life and I'm only 21. So don't tell me, or anyone else who feels this way, that there's more equality when people just "get the **** on with life." Because arguing is the only way to achieve equality and move forward.
I think having a child is one of the most emotionally and physically straining things anyone would ever have to go through in their lifetime, and something that would require a world of strength. I'm sure there are some men that are better at dealing with emotions than women... but you don't even have the right to comment on these issues because you have no ****ing idea what it's like being born a girl. A girl has to learn to fight for her rights as soon as she leaves the womb, to a degree that men will never understand.
*deep breath* I knew my soapbox moment would come out sooner or later. Sorry guys.
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I love the way that fact comes up in these situations every time. Yes its been proven the average female wage is lower than the average male wage, however its also been proven that women choose to go into lower paying fields of work than men.
As for constantly being patronized and so on, theres plenty of media out there that portrays women as being the more powerful of the sexes. There has been such media in ever increasing quantities since the 60's, and its not going to stop growing now. Hell, there are women produing porn for female audiences. I'd say you don't GET a more male dominated field than that, and the woman in question is the reciever of much success.
As for the having a child argument, I'm sorry but as I said before, for every argument there is a counterargument. I proved that much with the first damn paragraph of this post. Theres plenty of emotional strain with a hell of a lot of things, and while having a child is definitely one of the bigger ones, theres equal and bigger that happens to everyone, and some people never have any of any of them because they're lucky and go through life relatively easily.
Sexual assault? Again, a valid point from your perspective and another of those facts that gets trotted out at every showing of this discussion. Its true. Women are more likely to be sexually assaulted than men. But then...
Theres also the other side of the statistics coin. Women are more likely to have higher grades than men in schools. Women are more able to initiate a relationship. Lots of little tidbits of information that add up to basically bring every argument a balancing argument.
Women have plenty of advantages in a lot of areas, and while not everything is perfectly equal yet, threads and discussions like these don't help it.
What threads and discussions like these do is to highlight the divide with debatable facts or personal opinion, put forward by people with agendas in making one or other side look good. I couldn't care less about saying men are better than women. I just hate being put forth as some kind of scapegoat for something I personally have no involvement in. Its just guilt by association and exaggerating the divide between the groups just makes everyone more and more likely to think in terms of groups and delineations rather than as personal cases and individuals, which is what most of us would do in real life to each other and what all of us should be doing to get rid of the ridiculousness once and for all.
If I hear someone say as a blanket statment women are better than this, how many personal cases has each and every one of us met that breaks that description? The statistics say that women are less likely to cheat on men, but I know many more the other way round. The statistics say women are more nurturing and caring. The statistics say men are more impulsive and rash, that women are less violent, that women are less likely to drink and do drugs.
In other words, statistics say a hell of a lot of things, but if I treated every woman as indicative of those statistics, I'd be making a hell of a lot of mistakes, because I know women that have fallen on all sides of those statistics. Instead, what I do is I treat and intend to treat everyone as a single individual with their own preferences and tastes because thats what true equality IS.