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Author Topic: Feminism  (Read 2195 times)

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Büge

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Feminism
« on: January 08, 2010, 02:56:39 PM »

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SCD

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Re: Culture Wars
« Reply #1 on: April 12, 2010, 05:14:15 PM »

Buge:  I agree with that statement, given how many girls right now are in my math and science classes compared to men.  Let them trash it.
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Miss Cat Ears

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Re: Culture Wars
« Reply #2 on: April 12, 2010, 05:23:20 PM »

What statement?  I was the first girl in several years to receive my particular degree.  Math is for boys.
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SCD

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Re: Culture Wars
« Reply #3 on: April 12, 2010, 05:37:56 PM »

The statement of the article buge linked... oh wait I'm the only one here with an Economist Subscription..

[spoiler]THE late Paul Samuelson once quipped that “women are just men with less money”. As a father of six, he might have added something about women’s role in the reproduction of the species. But his aphorism is about as good a one-sentence summary of classical feminism as you can get.

The first generations of successful women insisted on being judged by the same standards as men. They had nothing but contempt for the notion of special treatment for “the sisters”, and instead insisted on getting ahead by dint of working harder and thinking smarter. Margaret Thatcher made no secret of her contempt for the wimpish men around her. (There is a joke about her going out to dinner with her cabinet. “Steak or fish?” asks the waiter. “Steak, of course,” she replies. “And for the vegetables?” “They’ll have steak as well.”) During America’s most recent presidential election Hillary Clinton taunted Barack Obama with an advertisement that implied that he, unlike she, was not up to the challenge of answering the red phone at 3am.

Many pioneering businesswomen pride themselves on their toughness. Dong Mingzhu, the boss of Gree Electric Appliances, an air-conditioning giant, says flatly, “I never miss. I never admit mistakes and I am always correct.” In the past three years her company has boosted shareholder returns by nearly 500%.

But some of today’s most influential feminists contend that women will never fulfil their potential if they play by men’s rules. According to Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alison Maitland, two of the most prominent exponents of this position, it is not enough to smash the glass ceiling. You need to audit the entire building for “gender asbestos”—in other words, root out the inherent sexism built into corporate structures and processes.

The new feminism contends that women are wired differently from men, and not just in trivial ways. They are less aggressive and more consensus-seeking, less competitive and more collaborative, less power-obsessed and more group-oriented. Judy Rosener, of the University of California, Irvine, argues that women excel at “transformational” and “interactive” management. Peninah Thomson and Jacey Graham, the authors of “A Woman’s Place is in the Boardroom”, assert that women are “better lateral thinkers than men” and “more idealistic” into the bargain. Feminist texts are suddenly full of references to tribes of monkeys, with their aggressive males and nurturing females.

What is more, the argument runs, these supposedly womanly qualities are becoming ever more valuable in business. The recent financial crisis proved that the sort of qualities that men pride themselves on, such as risk-taking and bare-knuckle competition, can lead to disaster. Lehman Brothers would never have happened if it had been Lehman Sisters, according to this theory. Even before the financial disaster struck, the new feminists also claim, the best companies had been abandoning “patriarchal” hierarchies in favour of “collaboration” and “networking”, skills in which women have an inherent advantage.

This argument may sound a little like the stuff of gender workshops in righteous universities. But it is gaining followers in powerful places. McKinsey, the most venerable of management consultancies, has published research arguing that women apply five of the nine “leadership behaviours” that lead to corporate success more frequently than men. Niall FitzGerald, the deputy chairman of Thomson Reuters and a former boss of Unilever, is as close as you can get to the heart of the corporate establishment. He proclaims, “Women have different ways of achieving results, and leadership qualities that are becoming more important as our organisations become less hierarchical and more loosely organised around matrix structures.” Many companies are abandoning the old-fashioned commitment to treating everybody equally and instead becoming “gender adapted” and “gender bilingual”—in touch with the unique management wisdom of their female employees. A host of consultancies has sprung up to teach firms how to listen to women and exploit their special abilities.

The new feminists are right to be frustrated about the pace of women’s progress in business. Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission calculated that, at the current rate of progress, it will take 60 years for women to gain equal representation on the boards of the FTSE 100. They are also right that old-fashioned feminism took too little account of women’s role in raising children. But their arguments about the innate differences between men and women are sloppy and counterproductive.

People who bang on about innate differences should remember that variation within subgroups in the population is usually bigger than the variation between subgroups. Even if it can be established that, on average, women have a higher “emotional-intelligence quotient” than men, that says little about any specific woman. Judging people as individuals rather than as representatives of groups is both morally right and good for business.

Caring, sharing and engineering
Besides, many of the most successful women are to be found in hard-edged companies, rather than the touchy-feely organisations of the new feminist imagination: Areva (nuclear energy), AngloAmerican (mining), Archer Daniels Midland (agribusiness), DuPont (chemicals), Sunoco (oil) and Xerox (technology) all have female bosses. The Cranfield School of Management’s Female FTSE 100 Index reveals that two of the industries with the best record for promoting women to their boards are banking and transport.

Women would be well advised to ignore the siren voices of the new feminism and listen to Ms Dong instead. Despite their frustration, the future looks bright. Women are now outperforming men markedly in school and university. It would be a grave mistake to abandon old-fashioned meritocracy just at the time when it is turning to women’s advantage.[/spoiler]

yeah, the photowalls of the BSc grads in the U of Ottawa have changed vastly in demographics in the last five..
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Mongrel

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Re: Culture Wars
« Reply #4 on: April 12, 2010, 05:44:07 PM »

I recall that article, it was pretty decent.

Also: men r dum dur hur [/obligatory]
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Royal☭

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Re: Culture Wars
« Reply #5 on: April 12, 2010, 05:45:04 PM »

If a wall of spoiler text is a Canadian thing I can see a new culture war a-brewing.

SCD

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Re: Culture Wars
« Reply #6 on: April 12, 2010, 05:47:23 PM »

No, it's a British thing and you've already had one of those.  Didn't go well for em
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Miss Cat Ears

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Re: Culture Wars
« Reply #7 on: April 12, 2010, 06:05:04 PM »

Ugh, feminism seems to be one of the most pointless and irritating things around.
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Büge

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Re: Culture Wars
« Reply #8 on: April 12, 2010, 06:13:05 PM »

Quote
The new feminism contends that women are wired differently from men, and not just in trivial ways. They are less aggressive and more consensus-seeking, less competitive and more collaborative, less power-obsessed and more group-oriented.

Yeah, except that it totally doesn't. Any feminist worth her salt would call that out for the essentialist BS that it is.
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Brentai

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Re: Culture Wars
« Reply #9 on: April 12, 2010, 06:16:16 PM »

Feminism is a pretty fucking huge umbrella.  Both of you are trying to stick that umbrella into a pigeonhole.

It's a bit like saying "the new programmer uses C#" and retorting with "any programmer worth his salt would use Java".
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TA

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Re: Culture Wars
« Reply #10 on: April 12, 2010, 06:36:38 PM »

Quote
The new feminism contends that women are wired differently from men, and not just in trivial ways. They are less aggressive and more consensus-seeking, less competitive and more collaborative, less power-obsessed and more group-oriented.

Yeah, except that it totally doesn't. Any feminist worth her salt would call that out for the essentialist BS that it is.

Many radical feminists or lesbian separatists would probably say it doesn't go far enough.

Now, any sane feminist, sure.
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Royal☭

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Re: Culture Wars
« Reply #11 on: April 12, 2010, 06:37:02 PM »

Current state of feminism seems to be a result of an all-out war against the movement in the 90s.  The fringe of the movement (bull dikes, the all sex is rape view, the male-less society) was pushed by ideologues, misogynists and patriarchs so successfully that feminists of all stripes began to move away from it.  In fact, for most years the bull dike lesbian became the de facto symbol in most people's minds.

This has caused a gradual shift in feminist world view over time, and has even contributed to an almost re-domestication of women.  This is evidenced in the recent health care debate, where women's right to an abortion came underfire from religious extremist, and some on the left responded with "Well, that's just the cost of politics.  So sorry, better luck next time."

To me, feminism was never about power or control, it was about pure, unadulterated equality, in all fields.  That a woman had the right to be treated how she wanted to be treated, whether at her job, in public, or in the bedroom.  And the successful vilification has come to attack that notion on all fronts.

Miss Cat Ears

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Re: Culture Wars
« Reply #12 on: April 12, 2010, 06:38:53 PM »

I hate feminists who act like women are way better than men instead of equal. Does that make me feminist?
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TA

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Re: Culture Wars
« Reply #13 on: April 12, 2010, 06:40:31 PM »

I hate feminists who act like women are way better than men instead of equal. Does that make me feminist?

I'd argue that those women aren't feminists, by any positive definition of the word.  It's a bit No True Scotsman, but that's not always fallacious.
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Royal☭

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Re: Culture Wars
« Reply #14 on: April 12, 2010, 06:42:03 PM »

Do you think women should have pay equal to men for the same job?  Do you think women shouldn't have any expectations for child raising beyond those expected of men?  Do you think men and women are born equal and that most gender constraints are purely societal constructs, and both genders are free to choose any path in life they so desire?

These are what make a feminists.  The "feminists who act like women are way better than men" is mostly a straw-man argument created by patriarchal men who fear equality of women.  It's the same argument made in countless numbers of ways against countless numbers of groups.  It's the same argument made by white supremacists looking to discredit blacks who sought equality during civil rights or even now.

Brentai

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Re: Culture Wars
« Reply #15 on: April 12, 2010, 06:45:39 PM »

pure, unadulterated equality, in all fields.

No.

Quote
That a woman had the right to be treated how she wanted to be treated, whether at her job, in public, or in the bedroom.

Yes.

The most successful attack on feminism is that feminists do not acknowledge the fact that there is a pretty fucking fundamental difference between having a penis and a vagina.  It is successful because it is so easy to spot in people who otherwise would have a valid point.

When the party line changed from "We want to be treated like we're human beings" to "We want to be treated like we're men" (nudged oh so gently by the mechanics you just described, but not entirely fabricated by it), that's when the movement broke between idealism and somewhat embarrassed rationalism.  It may be the most sexist thing I've said in the past 20 seconds or so, but women, as a group, just don't know what they want.
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Royal☭

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Re: Culture Wars
« Reply #16 on: April 12, 2010, 06:46:54 PM »

Umm, so what exactly is the difference between treating them equal and treating them like men?  Are you implying that the two are not the same?

Mongrel

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Re: Culture Wars
« Reply #17 on: April 12, 2010, 06:48:27 PM »

[bad joke about "separate, but equal" goes here]
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Catloaf

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Re: Culture Wars
« Reply #18 on: April 12, 2010, 06:59:52 PM »

Organic language definitions are irritating.
I've seen reverse-chauvinism being called feminism and then in the same article they made up some new word that I forget because it had nearly exactly the same definition of what I would call feminism.
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Miss Cat Ears

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Re: Culture Wars
« Reply #19 on: April 12, 2010, 07:01:38 PM »

I hate feminists who act like women are way better than men instead of equal. Does that make me feminist?

I'd argue that those women aren't feminists, by any positive definition of the word.  It's a bit No True Scotsman, but that's not always fallacious.

You're right, I should have put that in quotation marks.

Do you think women should have pay equal to men for the same job?  Do you think women shouldn't have any expectations for child raising beyond those expected of men?  Do you think men and women are born equal and that most gender constraints are purely societal constructs, and both genders are free to choose any path in life they so desire?

These are what make a feminists.
Okay this makes sense.  I don't have an overwhelming opinion either way so I wouldn't be a feminist but this is a much better explanation than what I usually hear.  Is there any "official" definition?

Umm, so what exactly is the difference between treating them equal and treating them like men?  Are you implying that the two are not the same?
It seems like a difference between "we should all be equal!" and a childish "I want what they have!" *childish pouting*
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