Does anyone else agree with feminism?

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What happens if they're not, though? What happens if they get preferential treatment because of their colour of their skin, or because they have a vag, or because they believe in a different fairy tale book and they're incompetent with it?

No; best person for the job only. Anything else is ludicrous.

so we should just let the extant prejudices reign, with never a challenge? That's bogus; it's like the NAACP says, 'A mind is a terrible thing to waste.' It puts discriminated people on the shelf when they could be contributing to society - like professional sports before they allowed black people to play, except it's *everywhere.*

Tequila, you are overlooking something very basic. the person in the priority hiring group cannot have less than the minimum basic requirements, and has to be considered perfected suitable for the job. they don't hire unskilled people just because they fit the minority criteria.

Depends entirely on the position.

For example, a politician. A woman has no disadvantage as a politician. So if a society barred females from entering politics, would you agree with that?

I never said that, not at all.

If a black person does the job best, hire him/her.
If a woman candidate does the job best, hire her.
If someone that happens to have a disability really knows their stuff and you don't have any pressing reasons not to hire this person, hire them.

What I object to is people of a different skin colour/sex/religion being chosen purely on that basis.

Last edited by Tequila on 31 Jan 2012, 8:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Of course not!

What I am saying is that I disagree with having all-female shortlists, or discriminating against people that aren't women purely because of their gender.

I do too, *most* of the time. Such quotas or shortlists of people can be very effective in getting rid of discrimination. I would never support them being permanent, but in the short-medium term.

Not if most people - even the women on the lists - don't want them. I wouldn't want to be on one of those if I was a woman - I'd feel as though I wasn't winning fairly and squarely, that in fact I was still being treated with kid gloves.

i don't think you can really know what you would want as a woman, because you aren't one.

I agree with this also. Quotas can be highly beneficial in providing good outcomes for the disadvantaged. There could in fact, be more of them for people with disabilities. The downside of quotas is that if 500 people apply for 100 jobs and five of them are set aside for a quota, the people who miss out will inevitably attribute their being looked over to the 5 quota positions. As such, quotas can make the perception of the group being targeted worse. The problem I have with people who are against quotas is that generally they have no decent alternative strategy, other than to claim that the problem will slowly resolve itself. Even if they are right, that is cold comfort to the people who miss out.

The anti-porn movement isn't exclusive to radical fems. There is plenty of religious objection to porn, of course, as well as some of the more moderate feminists having problems with it. There are even radical feminists who advocate pornography because they think it turns men into mindless sex-zombies who are easier to control (I've only seen Valerie Solanas advocate that, but there may be others).

I'm not part of the anti-porn movement, myself because I think all porn that involves consensual adults should be legal. I am critical of the pornification of culture, however. I do think people (teenagers in particular) need educating that porn =/= sex. Humans really are that programmable in a Pavlovian way that I think there needs to be some sort of depornifying material out there.

I can say I don't want to be treated equally to men in America, where I live. I want to be treated fairly, not equally as that implies sameness and I don't know if I could face what gender roles impose on men in America. I think men and women both have a lot of constrictions due to gender roles. Gender roles are often a result of culture, biology, personal choices etc. I do want men and women both to be treated fairly but it seems neither are. I think in some areas of our history, I can't say specifically when but living in caves is a good example, gender roles may have made sense. Now due to modern society I think we're emancipated from natural conditions we're in the perfect position as a society to question gender roles and I'm glad there is any discourse on the subject at all.

I want everyone to be treated fairly but I'm not a feminist or a masculist, I don't know what a combination of the two would even be called.

I can say that I may not fully understand the male perspective in America but I am capable of observing what goes on in society. Just to start, the majority of firefighters and police officers and soldiers are men(just to name a few) the majority of homeless are male, it's perfectly acceptable in Western society to mutilate male genitals, men have shorter lifespans, men have a higher rate of suicide, men are more frequently the victims of violent crime, and men are still treated unfairly in regards to spousal support, divorce etc. and that really isn't the worst thing I see. That barely scratches the surface.

I won't pretend men have superior treatment because it's too complex a subject to make such sweeping generalizations about one gender or another, and what I REALLY want is for the perspectives of both men and women to be viewed fairly and taken into consideration before anyone decides what needs to be done. You can't fix a problem if you're only willing to consider half of said problem.

The sad thing is; the news media is in the business of marketing products. Advertising is to news as articles and papers are to professors. What that sadly means; given a choice between slow, plodding, methodical, and scientific thought from those who have truly great thoughts or common denominator junk that rivets the reader with a screaming mess - which voice will they choose to have more stories on. Just like WBB's, scandal is sexy (regardless of how noteworthy the source is or isn't), sex sells, and it all essentially goes to feed the advertisers.

I'm not anti-porn in the sense of porn as 'sex in the media,' whether it be in print or on film, but I am against a lot of the modern porn that portrays women being humiliated, abused, and used in often painful, or at least non-pleasurable ways. From what I hear, it has been getting worse and worse with time to the point that it's not unusual to see actual physical violence in porn films these days. Likewise, there's a lot of sexualized violence even in mainstream tv and movies. That, I am against.

Actually "a mind is a terrible thing to waste" is the United Negro College Fund's slogan.

I disagree with any argument against (legal, legitimate) porn because it depicts women being mistreated. There's plenty of porn where men are portrayed being humiliated, abused, and used in various unpleasant ways, I don't agree with arguments about that either. Porn is fictional, it's a portrayal of a fantasy, and BDSM or S&M or whatever the correct abbreviation is, it's a common sexual fetish. There's nothing wrong with grown ups watching fictional fantasy films, and while it often looks quite realistic, it probably isn't as bad as you think. In a lot of fictional movies, what's happening isn't reality. It's manipulated, it's fake.