1. I think spoox made a very good point there. While the biological fact of the capacity to have children doesn't stop someone being able to do other things, the reality is that when pregnancy and childbirth happen, the employer has to pay for the employee to be away, which is as it should be from a socialist perspective but not from a margin-obsessed capitalist one. The feminist aspect is that men aren't expected to take leave around pregnancy/childbirth, perhaps if involved fatherhood becomes the norm, all potential parents would be equally discriminated against by greedy bosses (or small business owners just trying to keep afloat)
2. On a similar note, you can be sure that every effort would have been made to catch that bloke if he'd cracked your jaw while robbing a bank. Shocking story, and you're totally right about the "blame the victim" culture (unless the victim is a bank), I see it at a lower level with the grievance procedures and managerial bias people have to go through when they are being bullied at work. I'm kinda guilty of it myself a lot - I find it a difficult line between the idealism of "this is not a jungle" and the reality that there are predators out there, so isn't it tempting fate a little bit to go out in a micro-skirt and no knickers and get paralytic? It doesn't make it a victim's fault, but it makes them easy targets and loses them some public sympathy. I loved the Reclaim The Street slogan of locking up the men rather than the women, however. I got very annoyed at a message from security at work telling women to not go out alone after dark after there were a couple of muggings. The bottom line is, though, that generally speaking men are physically stronger, and authorities that can't guarantee that stronger people won't use this for evil are likely to beg the weaker people to not put themselves at risk. You'd just like to think we live somewhere too civilised for physical strength to be something you think about before walking around at night, but...
3. Yup, women share the responsibility to a large degree. As long as there are women happy to live off lettuce, walk on foot-torture devices all day, wax every last hair on their body and dance around naked for men's amusement, the rest of us will be considered men-hating hairy lesbians. The problem is, the majority of men are unapologetic about liking that kind of femininity, and the majority of women think the benefits of giving the men what they want outweigh the drawbacks. This of course is partly due to a culture and history whereby women earn more in the sex industry than in most other jobs, or have such poor self-esteem or real prospects that finding a husband to live off is paramount. And so, as there seems to be no incentive for men to stop valuing a femininity that reassures them in their masculinity by emphasising the physical differences between the sexes and keeping women busy making themselves pretty (or sick), women embrace this femininity as something that gives them "power" over said men.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2008-07-02 01:25 pm (UTC)2. On a similar note, you can be sure that every effort would have been made to catch that bloke if he'd cracked your jaw while robbing a bank. Shocking story, and you're totally right about the "blame the victim" culture (unless the victim is a bank), I see it at a lower level with the grievance procedures and managerial bias people have to go through when they are being bullied at work. I'm kinda guilty of it myself a lot - I find it a difficult line between the idealism of "this is not a jungle" and the reality that there are predators out there, so isn't it tempting fate a little bit to go out in a micro-skirt and no knickers and get paralytic? It doesn't make it a victim's fault, but it makes them easy targets and loses them some public sympathy. I loved the Reclaim The Street slogan of locking up the men rather than the women, however. I got very annoyed at a message from security at work telling women to not go out alone after dark after there were a couple of muggings. The bottom line is, though, that generally speaking men are physically stronger, and authorities that can't guarantee that stronger people won't use this for evil are likely to beg the weaker people to not put themselves at risk. You'd just like to think we live somewhere too civilised for physical strength to be something you think about before walking around at night, but...
3. Yup, women share the responsibility to a large degree. As long as there are women happy to live off lettuce, walk on foot-torture devices all day, wax every last hair on their body and dance around naked for men's amusement, the rest of us will be considered men-hating hairy lesbians. The problem is, the majority of men are unapologetic about liking that kind of femininity, and the majority of women think the benefits of giving the men what they want outweigh the drawbacks. This of course is partly due to a culture and history whereby women earn more in the sex industry than in most other jobs, or have such poor self-esteem or real prospects that finding a husband to live off is paramount. And so, as there seems to be no incentive for men to stop valuing a femininity that reassures them in their masculinity by emphasising the physical differences between the sexes and keeping women busy making themselves pretty (or sick), women embrace this femininity as something that gives them "power" over said men.