| JWeinCom said: Ideally, yes. But until we live in an ideal world, we have to take power structures into account. If a three year old said to a 20 year old man "I'm going to beat the shit out of you" they'd get a scolding, and you'd probably find it funny. If the situation was reversed, you'd probably get child services or the police involved. Power makes things different. |
Yeah, the problem is that people like you think in terms of groups, not individuals. The fact that 0,1% of all men have real power does not help the 99,9% who don't. A random woman has no less power than a random man, so there is no power imbalance and there is no reason to treat them inequally.
| JWeinCom said: But people want to oversimplify things to laughable extremes. Let's ignore the centuries of slavery, the fact that women gained the right to participate in government less than a century ago, and that within about a half century homosexuality was punishable by imprisonment or castration in some places (and still is in some places). I'm not saying that straight white males have to go around with their heads hanging down apologizing to everyone, but we do have to accept that our actions have created a situation where the words all insults are not equal. |
... and that men have no right to bodily integrity, don't have universal right to vote (requires registration for the military), don't have reproductive rights...
Don't get me wrong, I live in a country where most of these are not an issue anymore and absolute gender equality has already been achieved, so I don't care THAT much... but I can quite understand that American and British men get a bit pissy about this... I would.
Yeah, as you said, people like to oversimplify things. Including you, apparently.
| JWeinCom said: I'm not saying that straight white males have to go around with their heads hanging down apologizing to everyone, but we do have to accept that our actions have created a situation where the words all insults are not equal. |
So because everyone should be equal, we should treat accept them being treated unequally in some cases. Got it. Makes sense.
