There is no pan-woman and recognition of that is what keeps us from a fully developed conversation about women rights, roles, responsibilities.

Our reproductive abilities binds us as much as any man does. We carry babies. For nine months we gestate and it’s hard to give up that control afterward. I chose to breastfeed my babies, which meant from the get-go that no matter how many diapers my hubbie changed I was still the primary care giver. That ain’t 19th Century, that’s prehistoric! And, whether I like it or not, it has impacted my “career.” Not only that, it put me at odds with other women (breast or bottle, cloth or disposable, day care or home care). If we were to be honest, we must admit that we are as hurtful to each other as men are to us.

The American male is more evolved than we credit. I don’t think, for the most part, that American men adore a subjugated woman. They like the dual income, as long as they aren’t threatened by being out earned. They enjoy the sexual freedoms of women, as long as it isn’t their mother, sister, daughter or wife out of wedlock. I’m also sure a number of them would give up their weekend field work in favor of house work – esp if it’s cold, rainy, hot outside. So the idea that, in this country anyway, the average male wants a “traditional” woman verges on delusional. It’s the excuse we use for not uniting and/or demanding more.

Obviously women lack equality; obviously women are oppressed; obviously life is unfair to women. I don’t think we can put all this at the feet of men in any era. When we want something as a collective, we will make it happen. Right now, we are entirely too comfortable with our lot. We don’t need men to give us equality, we need to take it for ourselves.

You are so right about me needing to get out more. I can’t wait to go to Paris and see the European Reagan put down the Muslim riots in the streets — it’s so forward thinking and so, so modern that I can hardly remember that it’s what Europeans have been doing since the 11th Century. Just about the time Europe invented the anti-Semitism that ran straight through the Dreyfuss affair and WWII, as I recall.

Darlin’? B? You are SO last century. You see, nowadays, we have this internet thing that has collapsed time and distance. You may have heard of it. It was in all the papers. We can find out things from all over the world even here in the middle of rural, 19th Century thinking America.

And, if you missed the catfight between Eagle Forum’s Phyllis Shafly and NOW’s Andrea Dworkin, both manicured, over the ERA, it was a beaut. I thought Dworkin won, as did most American men who watched, but the ERA was defeated principally because fewer than 1/2 of American women favored the amendment.

Yet, are women that much more “liberated” in Vienna than in Oklahoma City? Not that I can tell, my interlocutor nonwithstanding.

Maybe you should leave your rural state with its 19th century state- of mind and go to NYC or Europe and meet some real ones. Man, are you backward.

1. B doesn’t like personal aggression in any circumstance for any reason and since testosterone makes humans agressive, she doesn’t like it.

2. B thinks any time any male disagrees with her or would make a different decision than she would make — hospitals or bombs, for example — that the reason is due to male testosterone driven oppressive decision making.

Can either of those propositions withstand scrutiny? No. There are a great many occasions when testosterone is precisely what is required to do things like go to the moon and explore new territory.

We may dislike some of the facets of our modern society and we can fix the blame and not the problem if that’s what you insist we do. Personally, I guess I don’t have much of a problem for taking the blame for our present society as it sits as long as I also get the credit for The Englightenment, Western Rationalism, cures for Polio and smallpox, all the works of DaVinci and Michealangelo and those massively misogynist painters Gaugan and Picasso.

Meanwhile, B and the feminists have to take the blame for the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment movement in America because it was defeated by women and not by men. Oooops. So sorry, girls. You got so busy pulling each other’s hair that you let your chance for redress of all this slip through your manicured fingers. Maybe if you’d had a tad bit more testosterone?

And of course this is a society designed by men. Do you think real women go out and buy guns and fighter planes instead of, say, building hospitals? Only the few who imitate men to make it in a male society, like Thatcher, and like with drag queens, the imitation is always more crass than the original.

Why don’t they fight? Because they don’t have the testosterone AND because after many millenia of one-sided conditioning, it takes centuries to snap out of it. They won’t for ages.

The problem is, I’ve been dealing with these issues for decades and I’ve seen thousands of studies and statistics and I’ve equally been to the places where the majority of the world population lives. Many handbooks written by well-to-do people in not Third World countries just don’t live up to realities, not even to the realities in their own country among the underprivileged.

It’s the old fight we used to have in the women’s liberation (unfortunately, that word is forgotten, it means definitely not to want to live like a man!) movement with those who thought that Marxism and particularly Engels’ “Origin Of the Family” had summed it all up (it IS still THE book about family and marriage, I have to admit), that it all was primarily a class struggle – which explains why neither you nor any other male have designed the society we live in, but the usual suspects, albeit male, mind you – BUT the counterargument always was that every downtrodden men in this society on this planet still tries to have a woman to trample on, to ease his own misery.

And together they still have animals to trample on, by the way.

Again, read Susan Faludi, I think she’d resonate with you.

And, B, you know better than to baldly assert that men constructed and designed this society. Do you think John X and me and Oz got together and decided that society would be like this? We’re as much captured by our gender, our DNA, our time and place as you are. I would assert that women, in their roles as gatherers in pre-civilized, pre-agricultural times, invented religion and medicine and otherwise equally participated in much of the structure — and especially the child rearing practices — of the family and tribe with the hunter males tagging along and adding an amendment here and there where their values seemed vital.

Finally, the third paragraph of your post almost makes me angry with you it’s so absurd. I refuse to let a multilingual international highly educated female try to play the victim card. Boo Hoo, darlin’.

Maybe instead of less testosterone, it’s a need for more estrogen. I can make fantastic claims as well, you know. What claptrap! Shall we fall back on tropes about having a nuclear war every 28 days with a woman as president?

Personally (obviously), I prefer the view of the professor who wrote the article, that being that we all have to take a bite of the shit sandwich, regardless of gender, and that the reasons for the distribution of income and privileges don’t have to be a matter of fixing blame.

Do I think that women lawyers, for example, should be able to command the same $400/hour fee as men? Oh, hell yes. Should women doctors have $500,000/year practices just like their male counterparts? Sure. Should female-dominated professions like teaching be more honored for their utility by higher wages? Absolutely. Further, is poverty a huge, global problem? Of course, and poverty is a FAMILY problem that affects both genders as long as women in poverty have male children and husbands.

Do I think that feminists are doing themselves, men or society any favors by victimizing themselves and blaming men? No. I don’t. And, I am a little surprised that smart women fall for that crap.

Again, it’s men’s own constructions that got them to where they are. They designed the societies we all live in. Women had next to nothing to do with it.

While OTOH it wasn’t women who got women into the situation they are in most places around the world.

And less testosterone would surely solve a lot of these problems.

Hers is the classic feminist critique, but the author of the piece deals with it in a straightforward manner, including a few statistical clues why it appears like a bad deal for women, but that the statistics may be misleading about the relative status of the genders.

And, while Ms. B has no pity for the men, looking at the status of women, I think in all fairness I’d rather be living in poverty than blown apart by bombs or be caged in a prison. I don’t think this means I’m particularly happy about world poverty and oppression worldwide of both genders and all ages, races, religions and sexual orientations. It simply means that I can understand a rationale that doesn’t require all men to be pigs as an axiom, the predicate to all subsequent conclusions about the way of the world.

Still waiting for the Debster.

blogblah’s evil twin

“Economic inequality includes a range of conditions from utter destitution to the overall inequality of women’s share of wealth, property, income and resources.

Women make up 70 per cent of the world’s poor and own 1 per cent of the world’s wealth.

In every country of the world, women are poorer than men, and their poverty and economic inequality affects every aspect of their lives.

Women’s economic inequality is closely linked to their sexual exploitation and to their lack of political power. As long as women as a group do not have an equal share of the world’s economic resources, they will not have an equal say in shaping the world’s future.

There is growing evidence that the standardized global economic agenda, which encourages diminishing the size of Governments, cutting social programmes, privatizing public services and deregulating markets, is having a negative impact on the economic and social conditions of women. In fact, women’s inequality is deepening, as evidenced by their increasing poverty and the proliferation of sweatshops and other forms of economic exploitation including trafficking in women.

On a global level, economic policy is being treated as if it were unrelated to women’s human rights.”

So I am shedding seas of tears about the plight of men right now.

BTW: The INTELLIGENT book to read about the fate of men in your society is “Stiffed: The Betrayal Of the American Man”, by Susan Faludi.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiffed:_The_Betrayal_of_the_American_Man