Labyrinth said:
Serenegoose said:
F-I-D-O said:
In summary: Equal means equal. I think in the more modern countries, women are equals now, but the annoying thing is that they keep pushing for more rights. They've become equal. What more do they want?
Yeah, they get on average paid less than men for the same work.
They're more likely to be assaulted, infinitely more likely to be raped, and more likely to be killed.
They're encouraged to be sexually repressed, because if you're sexual you're a slut. They're encouraged to be quiet around others because being outspoken is bitchy.
Femininity itself is associated with being vapid (like duh), shallow (all girls think about is shoes!), meek (save me, manly mansome!) and submissive.
Think about it for a moment. When was the last time you seen a woman start one of these 'has feminism gone too far?!' threads? Yeah, because it is almost always guys saying WOMEN ARE TRYING TO BE SUPERIOR NOW.
Err... no. Sorry. Not the case.
Reading this made me very, VERY happy. I do however wish to extend on it.
My approach to feminism, and yes, I'm one of THOSE people, is that it is about equality. Not just for gendered reasons (there are more than two) but it links in to the struggle for race equality and the struggle for sexuality equality. I'll go with the most obvious gender divide for now.
The second wave of feminism in the sixties saw a lot of women come away from the housewife-defined lives that conservatism in the fifties forced them into. We started to enter the workforce, and we're still increasing the proportion of women who work. This is great. Fantastic. Three cheers. Unfortunately for us we still get landed with all the domestic work. Raising children, housework and such are still resoundingly female areas, save for some very progressive households. We thought with the second wave we'd be having more jobs. Instead, we wound up doing everything.
What it comes down to is not what it means to be female, but what it means to be male. "Man" needs to be redefined for this whole thing to work. The masculine needs to include taking up housework and childrearing, all those typically feminine, and unpaid might I add, jobs. I think we also need to stop devaluing the role that home parenting and housework have, whoever does them. There's a very fine balance between encouraging women to take the opportunity to get out of the home and work, have financial independence, and deriding those who in full knowledge choose to be mothers and housewives. This respect will be helped by better gender equality in the home.
Some people are going to shout that I'm trying to make women superior in the home. If that's the case, they need to acknowledge their prejudice which states that housework is an inferior position. Or maybe the idea of a home dad appears to them to be forced feminisation. What horseshit.
The question is though, how many households will be established on those - entirely fair - terms?
Whether by some male nature or because that's the role
they're caught in, men are focused - or expected to focus - heavily on external careers that bring in money. This can of course be done combined with an active home life, as successful career mothers have already proven, but will men be
willing to settle in with a monogamous relationship with children, do "they" want that scenario enough to labour for it on fair terms?
It's completely socially acceptable for a man to be single and amorous with numerous women throughout his entire life (in the west at least), so there's no social pressure to take on all that work. Nor should there be, neither on women. It's hard deny that there is - even now - aspects of such pressure and ideal for what home life women should
also pursue, which alone would sway a larger number of women than men to "hold" this dream.
Add to this the fact that in many parts of the west males are continuously sacking behind in the education system, ironically especially in the most "gender equal" parts such as Scandinavia. The higher we get, the less male students there are, even in areas traditionally considered male such as law or medicine. The list of eligible partner to pursue that dream with, imposed by society or voluntarily chosen as it may be - grows ever shorter the higher a women advance in the educational system; and many advance far.
With a numeric lack of suitable partners already, and an unwillingness amongst (and no societal pressure on) some of those to put in an equal share of the work necessary for a household with children, (highly) educated women especially could find it difficult to establish a household on the ideal terms put forth here. Yet these would of course be the ones least willing to settle for the unfair traditionalist model.
If women want a household established, for whatever biological, sociological, psychological or voluntary choice reasons such want might spring from, then some of them will have to settle for doing more than their share of the work for the foreseeable future. The societal pressure on males to do that house work simply isn't the same, and changing that - or rather lift the societal pressure on women to fit this dream - will take some time. Hell, theorizing that our basest nature is not yet set completely out of effect, and probably never will be, there might even be less of a biological motivation for men to want (to put a lot of work into) a monogamous relationship.
Until men become as bound by societal norms to the household as women generally are, or women as free of it as men generally are, complete equality will be unfeasible. Even if such societal shift, which will take generations, was to materialize, the number of households would probably go down, in favour of more liberated singles. This of course is every bit as equal a construct as the nuclear family, but it is also radically different from the current call of equality within the nuclear family, and might rob some on both "sides" of possibilities they might have wanted to embrace; even at the cost of unfairness.
Has
feminism gender equality gone too far? Certainly not, but as far as it want - and should - go, a societally stable transition resonating within the population at large will take generations yet to achieve. A redefinition of deeply ingrained patterns is not something which can be achieved in mere decades, not successfully at least. And once we get there, the personal structures of society will certainly we different from what we imagine today. More will (have to) change than even most feminists themselves suspect, I believe.
