Does anyone else agree with feminism?

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I heard that a lot of Germans actually buy their DVDs from Austria as the censorship rules are far, far laxer there?

Yes, the Austrian and Swiss versions of computer games and movies are often uncensored too, but not always. I read that Fallout 3 was censored in all German-speaking countries. I always order in the UK because I prefer the English language original anyway.

Well, buying from Amazon UK should be a fairly painless process as it is for most of us (plus we have a lot of interesting DVDs that simply aren't released in Germany - being a serious horror fan in Germany must be a nightmare!).

Amazon UK ship anywhere within the EU anyway (and probably further afield).

Censorship is a plague. No matter what the rationalisation for it is, there is never a "good" reason for censorship.

If people don't want to see porn, they can stop watching porn.
If people don't want to play violent video games, they can stop buying them.
If people don't want to see gory horror movies, they can avoid them.

There is simply no excuse for censorship.

I stand corrected.

I disagree vehemently. Sometimes, there is a reason for censorship, but I realize we are on two different wavelengths.

As for porn and video games and horror movies, I am with you. But you do need to realize that whether you like to admit or not, all of these do have influences on people. Unchecked media will destroy this society if we let it.

That doesn't mean everything that is remotely offensive should be censored, only that more education is needed.

I will not respond to any further free speech arguments because it has gotten me in the trouble in the past.

You can PM me with the answer if you like, but what would a good reason for censorship be? You not agreeing with the topic? You thinking it's disturbing?

Unchecked media will NOT destroy society. Censorship will. Censorship chokes the life from society by imposing arbitrary rules on what people can say and think.

The first one I disagree with because I prefer saying that "human equality in terms of opportunities" is an ideal to strive for. In my native country for instance, the school system has been adapted to better suit women with the result being that the amount of men who are unable to graduate has gone up and the average GPA of men has dropped. In this case the reforms lead by feminists ended up recreating the same inequality only with the other side being victimized.

The second reason I disagree with it is that it strikes me as being ambiguous. We are the product of between 100.000 years (Francis Collins) and 200.000 years (Richard Dawkins) of evolution where the gender roles have been based around what was the most practical/reasonable it follows that the genders have biological differences that will have an effect on any attempts to make the genders equal in any respect other than purely related to society.

You can give women the right to study engineering, but you can't make women apply to study engineering. In my country where women and men have an equal right to education, can freely pick what they want to study (the government pays) and women on average graduate with higher GPAs they are still in the minority among applicants to engineering studies, whereas men are in the minority among nursing students.

My position isn't set in stone but, in order to make me truly agree or disagree you need to come up with a much better formulation and definition for what you consider "gender equality".

On the second premise I have to ask for a much more concrete proposition, are we speaking about the whole world, are we speaking of specific continents, countries or regions?

One argument that came up in my country recently that is closely related to this was a woman who had recently come back from maternity leave and was applying for a new job with a different company where the interviewer asked her if she planned on having more children. This became an issue because employers are less likely to hire a woman if she is pregnant or planning to have children since the long maternity leave in my country and the additional costs incurred from among others; extra sick-days during pregnancy, the need to hire a substitute during her maternity leave, the need to retrain the employee when they return from leave and so on.

Now, arguably this is discrimination, however if you generalize and say a potential employee regardless of gender who tells you that he or she is intending to take a years worth of time off from working, within the next 2 years during the interview, the odds of that person getting the job would be minimal. There is a law in my country that says that an interviewer is not allowed to ask an employee this question, which means that in effect there is legislation that literally give women an advantage since they are the only gender who can keep such plans hidden from an employer without giving the employer grounds for dismissal.

Data, please? Most often the claims about this end up actually being 'girls are performing better, and boys are performing the same.' In other words, it hasn't gotten worse for boys, but it has gotten so much better for girls that they now surpass the boys.


Given that the majority of human adaptation takes place on a cultural level, it is extremely difficult to determine how much of our gender roles are hardwired(built-in by evolution) and how much are software (culture). The vast, vast majority of 'evolutionary biology' studies out there are absolute junk - there was one, for example, which purported to 'prove' that female marmoset babies liked dolls better and male marmoset babies liked toy trucks better (note that a marmoset is a furry mammal smaller than a cat). It was not well-received by scientists, but the popular press jumped all over it.


Many women who get into STEM studies drop out because they get tired of being the only woman in the department and are not encouraged by (male) professors; many men avoid going into nursing because it's 'for women,' and heaven forbid a man do anything that can be construed as womanly. In case you didn't notice, those are about social pressures, not about hardwiring.


Sooo, you end up with situations like Japan's, where having a kid is so damaging to one's career and one's ability to have a life that they can't even reproduce at a sustainable level. Women just don't want the burden of it. When having children becomes such a burden that people don't want to do it, then arguably there's something wrong with the culture.

Yes I totally agree with feminism as it represents the rights of women and girls because in the past our rights were denied and us ladies need to take appropriate steps to ensure that the rights of women and girls are upheld at all times.

However I do not agree with those who are extremist in their views or have an "I hate men" mentality because that defeats the purpose of gender equality.

S

I believe there ARE inborn personality differences between boys and girls. I believe these personality differences lead to more women wanting to be nurses and teachers, and more men wanting to be cops and firemen.
That said, someone of either gender should be able to be whatever they want, and not get cr@p about it from anyone. With equal pay, of course.

http://www.ssb.no/utuvh/arkiv/art-2009-06-15-01.html
http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/bld/do ... ?id=625696

http://www.ssb.no/vgogjen/tab-2011-06-01-01.html

Please excuse that the statistics are in Norwegian. The first two show the increase for each gender in the number of students at Universities. The second shows statistics for completing the rough equivalent of high school.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing–systemizing_theory






Norway is the second most gender equal country in the world, just behind Iceland with a score of 85% according to http://www.weforum.org/issues/global-gender-gap and we're actually seeing the genders get more traditional in their choice of education.






Having to inform your potential employer that you are planning to have another child in the near future, thus causing them having to hire and train another person before they have gotten much value out of you at all despite having paid you a while. After a while employers just stop calling women in at all because its just better to just call in the men since they won't have to deal with maternity leave, at which point the government mandates that all female candidates must be called into an interview but this just leads to all females called into interviews but none hired. So the government mandates that all females must be hired, this means that all companies end up with a workforce that they can't afford to pay and who are all on maternity leave. Causing the company to go bankrupt due to salary costs and no productivity, which means the state gets no taxes, which means the women don't get their maternity leave, which means the state collapses and ends up like North Korea with people scrounging on the ground for sticks to make into soup.

And yes, I know I just made a slippery slope fallacy, but he started it.

Can't read any of it, but you might note that the chart on the upper right seems to support what I said: Men are doing better than they were at the beginning, but women have gained so much that they now surpass them quite a bit (If my understanding of 'mens' and 'kanner' is correct).

see above. Men have gained; women have gained more.

meaningless to me, sorry.

relevant:
Mill's commentary, still appallingly relevant to the present understanding of gender differences:
"Neither does it avail anything to say that the nature of the two sexes adapts them to their present functions and position, and renders these appropriate to them. Standing on the ground of common sense and the constitution of the human mind, I deny that anyone knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. If men had ever been found in society without women, or women without men, or if there had been a society of men and women in which the women were not under the control of the men, something might have been positively known about the mental and moral differences which may be inherent in the nature of each. What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing -- the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others. It may be asserted without scruple, that no other class of dependents have had their character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their relation with their masters; for, if conquered and slave races have been, in some respects, more forcibly repressed, whatever in them has not been crushed down by an iron heel has generally been let alone, and if left with any liberty of development, it has developed itself according to its own laws; but in the case of women, a hot-house and stove cultivation has always been carried on of some of the capabilities of their nature, for the benefit and pleasure of their masters Then, because certain products of the general vital force sprout luxuriantly and reach a great development in this heated atmosphere and under this active nurture and watering, while other shoots from the same root, which are left outside in the wintry air, with ice purposely heaped all round them, have a stunted growth, and some are burnt off with fire and disappear; men, with that inability to recognise their own work which distinguishes the unanalytic mind, indolently believe that the tree grows of itself in the way they have made it grow, and that it would die if one half of it were not kept in a vapour bath and the other half in the snow."

Please note that 'empathy' and 'systematizing' scores are calculated either by questionairre, in which the participant is not blinded to either their own gender or to societal expectations of their gender, or by psychologists observing the participants in experiments where the psychologist is aware of both as well. Women know that they're not supposed to be clinical, and know that clinical outlooks are required of scientists, and therefore know that society will perceive of them as less feminine if they go into science. And vice-versa for men and, say, nursing.
see also:
http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscienc ... r.php#more
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notro ... al-muzzle/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notro ... -at-maths/
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_an ... evers.html

One thing that does seem to be different, in general, between women and men in western culture is that women both exert more social pressure to conform and are influenced more by social pressure to conform. That's based entirely on my own un-scientific observation.


advancingwomen.org/files/7/127.pdf
I suggest that you read the whole thing; it's quite relevant. Note that the study occurred in Sweden.


?
Is that you just setting up a bogus slippery-slope argument, or is that an acutal policy somewhere? If an actual policy, yeah: that's really stupid.

Ok, it was a slippery-slope argument. The vast majority of women at my hospital have had children. None are currently on maternity leave. Maternity leave (and, btw, I absolutely support the right of fathers to congruent paternity leave as well - which sort of takes the air out of your argument, eh?) takes up a very small proportion of a woman's productive life, except in extremely patriarchal countries like Romania under Ceausescu, who outlawed all birth control.


Hahahahahah!
Feminism will turn us all into a paranoid, paternalistic Asian dictatorship that worships its leader! Oh, Noes!

he who?
finally, XKCD for the win:

I think the point is that there's still a gender gap, regardless of absolute gains. Why is that? And don't tell me it's because girls naturally smarter because there's no evidence to support that.

That's a good question. The medicalization of normal childhood seems to be hitting boys harder than girls, too.

^True and true. But what I don't appreciate is when women try and act "masculine"*, "tough", and hit me if I open a door for them to prove their equality, instead of focusing on the things that matter like proving they can hold the same jobs as a man.

*That's probably not the right word, since it is the the opposite of feminine. But I hope you get what I mean.