Dating Macedonian Women

[Vangelovski]

'Separate but equal' isn't really equality. We're all human beings who should have equal access to human rights. In that sense, we're the same.

Separate but equal was what they said when implementing racial segregation in the US, which was not in fact equal:

Who said anything about human rights or that men and women should not be equal in their rights? How did you possibly infer that from what I posted, particularly when I was specifically referring to roles and not rights? And where have you seen segregation like the example you provided between men and women in the west?

I'm still waiting to see how 'complementary' means 'segregation'. Complementary, by definition, requires joint effort of two or more units in completing different but equally essential functions. Segregation requires separation and a breakdown of joint effort. The two concepts are mutually exclusive. Maybe the confusion was self-created when you replaced the word 'complementary' (which I used) with the word 'separate'.

I don't think you should allow your views on gender to colour your understanding of the English language and basic concepts. It forces you to make far too many assumptions about what was actually posted and take great leaps in reinterpreting the well-established meaning of words and ideas. Or maybe it was purposeful distraction - setting up a little straw man to knock down?

My school didn't have gender studies. The notion that gender shouldn't determine who can do what with their life and such is just common sense. People aren't meant to be shoved in such narrow boxes and then ridiculed or ostracized if they don't fit.

Gender does determine what people can do with their lives (for example, only women can give birth and only men can provide half of the necessary material to create life). Whether gender should or should not determine what one can do with their lives is probably a separate and more nuanced question, but I'd err on the side of supporting the idea that it should, particularly given the undeniable force of human nature and the basic biological fact of genetics.

While each generation likes to think that they are some sort of pioneers in changing the world, there really is nothing new on this earth. A while back, the Soviet Union decided it would change society and human nature itself by creating a 'new Soviet man' (and woman - it was implied). They were mean't to look something like this:



They ended up looking more like this:



They were also mean't to have a whole list of social, intellectual and emotional characteristics. That also went the opposite way (I'm sure anyone even remotely familiar with post-communist societies can attest to that). I'm pretty confident that will be the end result of most progressive attempts to reshape human nature and create a new "progressive" man (and woman - its implied).

[Starling]

Who said anything about human rights or that men and women should not be equal in their rights? How did you possibly infer that from what I posted, particularly when I was specifically referring to roles and not rights? And where have you seen segregation like the example you provided between men and women in the west?

I'm still waiting to see how 'complementary' means 'segregation'. Complementary, by definition, requires joint effort of two or more units in completing different but equally essential functions. Segregation requires separation and a breakdown of joint effort. The two concepts are mutually exclusive. Maybe the confusion was self-created when you replaced the word 'complementary' (which I used) with the word 'separate'.

What you said was basically how they defined 'separate but equal', so the issues with that are entirely relevant. The allegedly 'complementary' roles are basically castes you get forced into from birth. Given the varying philosophies about such things, deciding that men and women have to do specific things is pretty arbitrary. Who decided that dresses couldn't be worn by boys anymore? Who decided eye liner was girly? Who decided that men should be discouraged from wearing pink? Who decided that men had to suppress their emotions and 'act tough'?

Women have had less rights than chairs at times. There's plenty of discrimination and depending on what country you're talking about, there are still some with truly abysmal conditions. Just because it's not as bad in other countries doesn't mean some of those double standard don't involve unequal application of rights.

In any case, the whole notion of roles in society contributes to that kind of problem. There was a time when women weren't allowed to vote, couldn't be athletes, couldn't have jobs and were barred from certain places they aren't anymore simply because it wasn't part of their "role". Really, the gender of the person who does whatever complements the other person doesn't actually matter. It's just something to have done because you genuinely want to rather than because you happen to have been born in a group expected to do it. That's why we did away with caste systems too.

I don't think you should allow your views on gender to colour your understanding of the English language and basic concepts. It forces you to make far too many assumptions about what was actually posted and take great leaps in reinterpreting the well-established meaning of words and ideas. Or maybe it was purposeful distraction - setting up a little straw man to knock down?

Seems like you're making a number of assumptions yourself. "separate but equal", "different but equally important roles", the general implication is that the different roles are separate but equal. If they're truly separate based on gender, then the expectation is that one can't do the other's "role". If they did then there would be no point in claiming men and women have different roles to begin with. It doesn't really matter whether or not you consider the separation complementary when my response is about how that separation should exist to begin with. The actual gender of the people doing those things doesn't matter.

Gender does determine what people can do with their lives (for example, only women can give birth and only men can provide half of the necessary material to create life). Whether gender should or should not determine what one can do with their lives is probably a separate and more nuanced question, but I'd err on the side of supporting the idea that it should, particularly given the undeniable force of human nature and the basic biological fact of genetics.

I was talking about day to day life. Given the options of adoption, sperm donors and surrogates, there are other ways to have children if you want any to begin with.

Are you familiar with intersex people? Even if you leave out trans and nonbinary people it's not a clear cut matter. You have men with vaginas capable of giving birth, women with penises who can impregnate people with compatible anatomy, you have people with just about everything in between and then there's how sometimes people with y chromosomes never actually express the genes attached to it.

Then comes the issue of infertility and what that's supposed to mean if your role in society is based on your ability to have children and how. Gender and sex aren't the same thing and neither should have weight in what you do in everyday life.

While each generation likes to think that they are some sort of pioneers in changing the world, there really is nothing new on this earth. A while back, the Soviet Union decided it would change society and human nature itself by creating a 'new Soviet man' (and woman - it was implied). They were mean't to look something like this:



They ended up looking more like this:



They were also mean't to have a whole list of social, intellectual and emotional characteristics. That also went the opposite way (I'm sure anyone even remotely familiar with post-communist societies can attest to that). I'm pretty confident that will be the end result of most progressive attempts to reshape human nature and create a new "progressive" man (and woman - its implied).

The main reason what communism was supposed to be and what it became are so different is because Stalin killed the guy who came up with it, kept the name and twisted it into something different as a tool for oppression. That image was nothing more than propaganda afterwards. It wasn't an accidental failure so much as deliberate sabotage. The original philosophies are entirely capable of functioning as intended and quite frankly comparing addressing discrimination with what Stalin did is both fallacious and downright insulting. Animal Farm's a good book that sums up what happened through animal metaphors.

Different cultures and societies have different philosophies on life and how to live it. It doesn't actually change human nature and one society isn't inherently more correct on what that even means than the other. In some cultures, women with facial hair and unibrows and men with no facial hair and soft features is attractive. In others it's large bodies with a decent amount of fat. In some places women cover up so as not to make their appearance something that belongs solely to them and deny others the ability to judge them for it. In others showing skin is a way to take pride in their appearance. In some places breasts aren't sexualized and women are entirely capable of walking around topless.

There are plenty of different ways of living life that aren't inherently better than eachother. As long as mutual respect and rights are present, pretty much everything else can vary.

[Vangelovski]

Starling, you've just demonstrated why some people (men or women) will never be taken seriously. I think we're all pretty well aware of the latest gender studies theories - they're floating around like a bad smell, but thanks for the run down anyway. I also note that you threw in the usual "that wasn't real communism" spiel too. Perhaps you should refresh yourself with Marx.

Given you can't (or won't) differentiate between complementary roles and separate roles, there's really nothing further to discuss with you. This conversation requires much more nuance and sophistication than you are capable of (or willing) mustering. Maybe when you move onto the next gender studies textbook you'll have something new to discuss, but I foresee much disillusionment for you with this current fad. 'Fluid on'

[Karposh]

Who decided that dresses couldn't be worn by boys anymore? Who decided eye liner was girly? Who decided that men should be discouraged from wearing pink?

Answer: GOD.

I had a feeling this discussion would eventually steer into this topic. It's no secret, this is not my favourite topic in the world, especially knowing what many people's views on Christianity are on this forum, as indeed in the world today. But as one of the few around who is still not ashamed to identify as a Christians, a quick Google search reveals God's view on the matter:

Deuteronomy 22:5 deals with the issue of cross-dressing / transvestism (men dressing in women’s clothing and vice versa). In this passage God commands that a woman is not to wear that which pertains to a man and a man is not to wear that which pertains to a woman, for all that do so are an “abomination.” The Hebrew word translated “abomination” means "a disgusting thing, abominable, in the ritual sense (of unclean food, idols, mixed marriages), in the ethical sense of wickedness." Therefore, this is not simply God addressing the fact that a woman might put on a man’s garment or vice versa. Also, this is not a command that a woman should not wear pants/slacks as some use this passage to teach. The meaning here is that this “cross-dressing” and transvestism is done in order to deceive, or to present oneself as something that he/she is not. In other words, this speaks to a woman changing her dress and appearance so as to appear to be a man and a man changing his dress and appearance so as to appear to be a woman. This is the definition of cross-dressing or a transvestism.

We can also reason that the dynamic behind this is the leaving of what is natural and taking on that which is in God’s Word called unnatural Romans 1:24-27.

Romans 1:24-27:
24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonouring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
26 For this reason God gave them up to dishonourable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; 27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

And this from the same web site. A really eloquently put few paragraphs discussing today's LGBTQI agenda and gay marriage in general:

So, if the Bible, history, psychology, and nature all argue for marriage being between a man and a woman—why is there such a controversy today? Why are those who are opposed to gay marriage/same-sex marriage labelled as hateful, intolerant bigots, no matter how respectfully the opposition is presented? Why is the gay rights movement so aggressively pushing for gay marriage/same-sex marriage when most people, religious and non-religious, are supportive of—or at least far less opposed to—gay couples having all the same legal rights as married couples with some form of civil union?

The answer, according to the Bible, is that everyone inherently knows that homosexuality is immoral and unnatural, and the only way to suppress this inherent knowledge is by normalising homosexuality and attacking any and all opposition to it. The best way to normalise homosexuality is by placing gay marriage/same-sex marriage on an equal plane with traditional opposite-gender marriage. Romans 1:18-32 illustrates this. The truth is known because God has made it plain. The truth is rejected and replaced with a lie. The lie is then promoted and the truth suppressed and attacked. The vehemence and anger expressed by many in the gay rights movement to any who oppose them is, in fact, an indication that they know their position is indefensible. Trying to overcome a weak position by raising your voice is the oldest trick in the debating book. There is perhaps no more accurate description of the modern gay rights agenda than Romans 1:31, “they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.”

To give sanction to gay marriage/same-sex marriage would be to give approval to the homosexual lifestyle, which the Bible clearly and consistently condemns as sinful. Christians should stand firmly against the idea of gay marriage/same-sex marriage. Further, there are strong and logical arguments against gay marriage/same-sex marriage from contexts completely separated from the Bible. One does not have to be an evangelical Christian to recognise that marriage is between a man and a woman.

[Starling]

Starling, you've just demonstrated why some people (men or women) will never be taken seriously. I think we're all pretty well aware of the latest gender studies theories - they're floating around like a bad smell, but thanks for the run down anyway. I also note that you threw in the usual "that wasn't real communism" spiel too. Perhaps you should refresh yourself with Marx.

Just because you don't like it or think it's ridiculous doesn't mean it isn't true. That's not really a valid argument against it.

For the record, there are several forms of communism and none of them are any more "real" than the other. I was specifically talking about what the Russian revolutionaries actually wanted vs what Stalin put in place. The thing is, the basic philosophy when you strip it down to the core values is the redistribution of wealth to the people, as opposed to Capitalism's distribution of wealth to corporations. That's why it was called communism.

Given you can't (or won't) differentiate between complementary roles and separate roles, there's really nothing further to discuss with you. This conversation requires much more nuance and sophistication than you are capable of (or willing) mustering. Maybe when you move onto the next gender studies textbook you'll have something new to discuss, but I foresee much disillusionment for you with this current fad. 'Fluid on'

How patronizing of you. Again, you haven't actually provided a valid argument against what I said. Or do I have to crack open a book on fallacies for you? Explain to me how exactly women have to be house wives or how men have to be the primary source of income. How about how same sex relationships function within your narrow view of societal roles or why entire fields of work should be restricted to men or women. How about where people who don't fit into the notion of "man" and "woman" fall into this? Both men and women can be stay at home parents, the main cook, work jobs typically associated with eachother and so on. Your gender doesn't determine which of those things you can or can't do. You use complementary roles the same way as separate ones as you specifically ascribe a specific gender to them. You don't have to be different genders to complement each other in that manner, as evidenced with same sex relationships.

[Vangelovski]

How patronizing of you.

I get that way when the person I'm conversing with goes into stupidity hyper-drive.

Or do I have to crack open a book on fallacies for you?

You should, you need to brush up on logical fallacies. Have you heard of the Strawman fallacy? Or the special pleading fallacy? Black or white? Red herrings? Any of those ring a bell? Are they in your 'how do deal with misogynists' textbook?

Explain to me how exactly women have to be house wives or how men have to be the primary source of income.

I'll respond to that when you can show me where I said that.

As for the rest of your nonsense, one step at a time. But I don't think this discussion will make it to that.

[Risto the Great]

The men are dumb stereotype is specifically about being clueless about stuff like cooking and other things women are expected to do around the house. In contrast, cooking as a profession is full of men and women have a harder time getting into the profession because the stereotype was never about cooking to begin with. It's an attempt at justifying the expectation that women tend to the household first and foremost.

Nope. As finely tuned as you are to women's issues, you have missed what is happening with men's issues. It's not about cooking in commercials. It's about men being happy with simple uncomplicated things like being rewarded with a new little toy if they follow their (female) partner's wise demands. Quite common and a recurring theme.

Well that's not what women are asking for. They just want to be treated like equals. As equals neither of you would be forcing the other to comply. I've seen a lot of unhealthy relationships where the husband would pretty much demand his way and everyone else just had to deal with it. He'd then claim it was a mutually agreed decision when he didn't really let them go against it. A lot of women have to deal with stuff like that and yet still manage to be spirited.

I have seen a lot of unhealthy relationships where women are forcing husbands to comply with their demands no matter how demeaning to the man in the eyes of other men and women. A lot of men are being painted into a corner and I doubt the future on HUMANkind will be healthier as a result.

You mentioned men with vaginas and women with penises in a kind of scientologist kind of mind-meld. You were assuming we must accept this as fact and therefore must accept the logic that ensued. We are not talking about statistical abnormalities or freaks here. We are talking about the 99.9999999999999999999% that are men with penises and women with vaginas. You have completely avoided the notion of natural dispositions relating to genetics. If your "man with a vagina" begins to take testosterone, the chemicals that begin to run around "his" brain will absolutely and without fail affect "his" mental processes and decision making conclusions. If you doubt these hormones are part of the chemical reaction that affect decisions in a person's brain, then it is safe to assume you are ignoring a very important part of what defines men and women.

You can still have a garage and stuff but you also have to consider how much time you're spending on that and whether or not it comes at the expense of other things. While some people are fine with long spans of time apart, others will be exasperated if you always go off and do whatever without a word and never really do anything with them. There has to be moderation to it. Communication and mutual consideration is part of a healthy relationship.

You also have to consider how much space your stuff takes up in relation to how much is available and whether your spouse has a space like that too. If the garage is filled with your stuff and there's no space for what your spouse might want that needs to go there too, then that's a potential problem you'd have to discuss.

If you feel the constant need to be away from your spouse then it probably isn't a healthy relationship.

A woman's perspective on the matter, no doubt. Me and my 34 guitars and 19 amplifiers are utterly offended.

In fact, increased longevity across many cultures sees men getting together socially very regularly and just having blokey chats and drinks. I fear you won't accept this fact.

You don't have to. The whole notion of dominance and submissiveness are complete bullshit. In terms of sex, just figure out whatever it is you find mutually pleasurable and it doesn't really matter what position or methods are involved so long as you have a good time. There's never going to be a consistent expectation of anything in particular in that regard as people have a wide variety of different tastes.

If you're going to live together, the ability to do so is a bigger priority than sex. You're going to be managing finances, property and mutual possessions together for quite some time on top of being able to deal with each other in the same house and making important decisions together. To an extent being each other's close friend is part of a romantic relationship. You have to be able to spend time together, rely on each other and be there for support when your spouse needs it.

With all respect due. There is an aspect of dominance associated with having a penis. It tends to get poked about in places and its mere use is aggressive/dominant in nature. I am sure you can bring up dildos or whatever.

Without sex, I guess we may as well live with our mothers.

Chinese women had to develop their own secret writing system passed down from mother to daughter.

Well, it's 1970 still in China. That nation has a lot of progress to make for women's rights. But, curiously enough, I would expect an instant decline in it's path to being the world's number 1 superpower if this was the case.

The whole separate but equal thing doesn't work and is basically segregation. Those gender roles may have started out that way but they cause far more harm than good now. Better to just be fluid about societal roles and expect everyone to be capable of the basic stuff as a matter of self-sufficiency.

You still assume there are no fundamental differences between men and women and therefore suggest being fluid. I am less than sure about that but won't go out of my way to offend anyone if that is your hope.

Happy new year.

[Soldier of Macedon]

Our hallowed Goce Delcev stated: "I understand the world solely as a field for cultural competition among the peoples."

I think about this quote everyday, it is as relevant today as it was back then.

Capitalism is a cruel and unsustainable system that's going to need to change or be replaced......

With what?

Not that long ago a disappointingly large amount of american women voted for a known pedophile because heaven forbid a liberal take his place.

That so-called "liberal" laughed at how her rapist client was able to pass a polygraph test. Do you think such examples could've swayed the opinion of these women you're now degrading? Her performance was also recorded. Does the same compelling evidence exist to support your assertion that Trump is a pedophile?

Also you shouldn't be legally capable of offering consent when intoxicated due to your altered mental state....

How intoxicated? At what blood alcohol level? How will it be enforced? A breathalyzer at the front door of everybody's house? Be specific.

.....impersonating someone else or otherwise withholding relevant information about the whole thing can also make it rape.

Withholding information like having some disease which can be transmitted then having unprotected sex with another individual should be criminalised. That is not the same as a man pretending to be a lawyer or a woman pretending to be a model for the purpose of appearing more attractive before having sex. There are nuances in what you're referring to above, which is why you need to be specific. You seem to generalise way too much.

Pink used to be a manly colour and then got shunned as girly because it became associated with women. High heels used to be perfectly normal for men until women started wearing them.

Lol, and these are pressing issues which need to be addressed? Please....

Then there's inequality in pay for the same work....

Can you give some specific examples of this? If the PM of Canada was a woman would she be getting paid less than the current clown in office? Does the girl cashier at McDonald's get paid less than the boy cashier? Does a female taxi driver get paid less than her male counterpart? Are you factoring in years worked and experience? If women can do the same jobs for less money, why aren't all workplaces full of women? Do you really think sexism is more important to employers than increasing their profit margins?

Mansplaining: It's a thing.

If it is, then so is womansplaining. Some people, both men and women, speak in a condescending nature. They do it to both their own and the opposite sex.

Who decided that dresses couldn't be worn by boys anymore?

Why is it so important to you that boys wear dresses? Why is it so important for you to blur the distinction between boys and girls?

[Gocka]

Wow this thing went into hyper drive real fast.

Happy New years everyone.

This gender fluidity crap is starting to be a thing in the US as well.

I watched a documentary a couple months ago about a family, with a little boy about 4 who was apparently trans-gendered. Apparently when the kid was a toddler he grabbed a doll or two to play with, and that was a sign that he felt like he was a girl. So his parents started buying him dresses and the like and now he goes to school and gets bullied. They originally name him Michael but now he wants people to call him Michelle.

The whole thing is a crock full of fallacies like Vangeloski said. If everything around us is just gender biased on not gender defining then why did the parents think playing with dolls was an indication that the boy wanted to be a girl? The kid wasn't old enough to understand gender roles, so if playing with dolls is not just for girls (fluid) then why did they automatically assume he wants to be a girl? If boys can wear dresses too then why did they change his name to a female name? Why did they start calling him a she? So instead of just telling the kid, dolls are for girls, they told him hes a girl, bought him girls clothes, and changed his name? WTF? Now the poor kid is confused as ever, he is going to get tormented his entire adolescent life, all because the yuppy parents believed in "Fluid" but technically not fluid gender identities. On top of that why is it overwhelmingly boys who are the center of this mess? This touches on what RTG is getting at, that there is a systematic attack on men, now young boys are the targets because children are easier to manipulate.

Comparing separate but equal genders to racial segregation is absurd.

Also Starling you never answer my post which addressed many of the topics that you got into with other members afterwards.

I touched on hiring and pay of women, the home situation, and a few points on biology and psychology.

Finally, capitalism is a flawed system, so is democracy, but the alternatives are many times worse. Together they are by far the best systems that have been implemented in society to date. They need vigilance and upkeep to stay strong but I certainly wouldn't give them up for? Communism? All the shit holes left in the world are either still communist, or were previously.

[Pelagonija]

This topic pisses me off hard. That 4 year old boy is the product of a godless morally bankrupt society, capatilism = greed, democracy = void of reality.

In Australia they implemented the safe schools program under the guise of promoting anti-bullying. It turned out to be a promotion of homosexuality, gender concepts and even gender reverse role playing. Luckily it hasn't been rolled out to all schools yet though they keep trying to sneak it in. It will only be a matter of time before they make it compulsory for all schools, they are getting them young now..

FFS In Australia some are hailing same sex marriage as one of Australia's greatest historical achievements. We are constantly bombarded with feminist, gay and gender topics in the media which is brainwashing the people. It's one thing taking someones money, but now they want to take our souls.. this is bloody scary..

[Soldier of Macedon]

I watched a documentary a couple months ago about a family, with a little boy about 4 who was apparently trans-gendered. Apparently when the kid was a toddler he grabbed a doll or two to play with, and that was a sign that he felt like he was a girl. So his parents started buying him dresses and the like and now he goes to school and gets bullied. They originally name him Michael but now he wants people to call him Michelle.

Децата ќе ги запустат пред да пораснат. Disgraceful. Just like the below, where the 'trans' parent projects their own personal issues on the baby:

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/04/he...ion/index.html

Canadian baby given health card without sex designation

July 5, 2017 - A Canadian baby has been issued a health document that doesn't specify male or female, in what campaigners are claiming is a possible "world first." Searyl Atli Doty was born in British Columbia, "outside the medical system," and did not undergo a genital inspection after birth, campaign group Gender Free I.D. Coalition said in a statement....Parent Kori Doty wants to avoid assigning gender to the child. Doty identifies as non-binary trans.......Despite difficulties in obtaining a birth certificate, a health card for the baby with the sex listed as "U" has been issued, with the coalition saying it arrived one day "without explanation." An image of the card shared by the parent includes the "U" designation and the child's name; it says the child was born in November and the card was issued in April.......The desire to omit a designated gender on the card was partly motivated through Doty's personal experiences.

[Gocka]

Its disgusting to drag kids into this mess. When you turn 18, do what ever the hell you want, gay bi trans, animals, I dont give a shit, but to ruin some poor child's life because you want to conduct social experiments is criminal. Wtf does a child know or understand about sexual orientation at 4. I here nonsense about letting the child chose their gender??? A child would chose to be a hypo or a dinosaur if it was being offered.

I can be fairly liberal when it comes to certain things, but this shit is down right insanity.

Децата ќе ги запустат пред да пораснат. Disgraceful. Just like the below, where the 'trans' parent projects their own personal issues on the baby:

[Starling]

Who decided that dresses couldn't be worn by boys anymore? Who decided eye liner was girly? Who decided that men should be discouraged from wearing pink?

Answer: GOD.

First of all, not everyone follows the same religion and the church has had a lengthy history of corruption, abuse and persecuting others.

Second, boys wearing dresses was the norm in the recent past. I was actually asking who arbitrarily decided that wasn't the norm anymore.

Franklin Roosevelt, 1884:



1901:





You know, people who try to use the bible to justify mysoginy and homophobia seem to conveniently forget that part of the whole Jesus died for your sins thing involves no longer being held to anything within the old testament. They also seem to forget that such mistreatment of others violates one of the main tenets or why separation of church and state exists.

In any case, people shouldn't he held to millennia old rules that have been prone to distortions over the years and date back to a time when stuff like slavery was still commonly accepted. While things like caring about others are timeless, other parts of the texts within the bible simply haven't aged well and no longer hold the meaning and purpose they once did.

We should also sit down and examine the context and reasoning behind such things instead of declaring it law because someone put it in a holy book that's part of a religion no one is obligated to follow. For example, the Islamic law on not eating pork was because pigs were susceptible to certain parasites that were harder to keep out of food. Sheep and goats likewise have a high incidence of zoonotic illnesses that cause miscarriage. As such using a different animal for meat made sense but is now unnecessary. Likewise living conditions, societal standards and available knowledge and resources were different back then so the lack of adaptation to that is going to cause problems. There's a reason a country's laws can change and adapt over time.

Deuteronomy is referring to impersonation for seduction and Canaanite rituals. His book is also from the old testament so christian religions aren't held to them.

Here are some other rules he states:

When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof, that you may not bring the guilt of blood upon your house, if anyone should fall from it.

You shall not sow your vineyard with two kinds of seed, lest the whole yield be forfeited, a the crop that you have sown and the yield of the vineyard.

You shall not plow with an ox and a donkey together.

You shall not wear cloth of wool and linen mixed together.

You shall make yourself tassels on the four corners of the garment with which you cover yourself.

No one's actually expected to do any of this anymore and they're clearly outdated.

Romans 1.24-27 is condemning pleasure of the flesh before worship of god. Paul also believed that such things were generally unnecessary at that time since the world was probably going to end soon.

Opposing same sex marriage means denying people the same rights everyone else has based on sexuality, which is discrimination. I've already been over this in the other thread specifically about that. How would you feel if you were denied the right to marry because someone arbitrarily decided that didn't apply based on a religion you might not even practice? This despite laws about separation of church and state. You don't even need to go to a church to marry because it's fundamentally a legal contract that affects how yo can manage your finances, your ability to access certain services and so on. Without being married you can be denied the ability to visit your spouse at the hospital or a part in sorting out funeral arrangements should it be necessary, which one of you eventually will.

How do you think a child feels if their own parents call them an abomination over something that's just part of who they are? How do you justify all the things people have done to LGBT people based on this reasoning?

Your claims so far rest on 2 misleading quotes from thousand year old texts and an opinion piece from someone else. Additionally why preach discrimination from something whose main message is peace and tolerance?

Regarding the claim that gay rights activists are spreading hate, it's another example of what I've mentioned further back in this thread about people trying to play the victim to discredit the people they're persecuting. People get killed, denied jobs, raped etc. purely because they're different. I'm sure you heard about the shooting in Orlando back in 2016. Gay people just want to exist and yet get called hateful when other people are the ones constantly committing hate crimes against them.

Some quotes to remember from the New Testament (English Standard Version)

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’

But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.

And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into he

Jesus wasn't literally telling people to go around dismembering themselves but rather teaching them to take responsibility for their actions rather than blaming their body parts, as some still do at times. It's basically like if someone said their hand just groped someone on its own and then you responded with "well if your hand is so sinful then why don't you get rid of it?"

So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

Woe to the world for temptations to sin! For it is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the one by whom the temptation comes!

And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire.

And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire.

And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?”

Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.

And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’

The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

And the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher. You have truly said that he is one, and there is no other besides him.

And to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And after that no one dared to ask him any more questions.

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.

If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well.

But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.

For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.

For he who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law.

So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty.

For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.

Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands—

remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility

by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace,

and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.

And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near.

For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God,

built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone,

in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord.

In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God bye the Spirit.

The bible preaches a message of love, peace and mercy. It's pretty firmly against discrimination, as it would violate the second most important tenet of Christianity.


To help illustrate my point about laws and regulations not always being worth enforcing as well are the importance of context:

A bunch of weird Canadian laws with citations at the end

Some of them obviously have a story behind them or make more sense with added context. The one about pretending to practice witchcraft seems to be to keep mediums from exploiting people's grief for money while the one about painting wooden ladders is because the paint makes it harder to gauge the condition of the wood so it was deemed hazardous.

I remember one about Chateau Laurier being legally obligated to provide hay to a guest's horse and something similar for downtown in general but those may have been repealed.

A general list of 14 laws from various countries that also provides citations

I find it strange that there was a law against naming a pig Napoleon in France seeing as he was such a disappointment they exiled him and started a whole genre of stories where the hero ultimately fails to live up to their hype.

There's also a Danish law that entitles its citizens to beat Swedes with sticks if they ever cross the ocean when it's frozen. It was made after the Swedish army marched across the ocean and invaded in 1958.

I get that way when the person I'm conversing with goes into stupidity hyper-drive.

So basically you're justifying your patronizing behaviour based on an ad hominem argument. Totally not fallacious there.

You should, you need to brush up on logical fallacies. Have you heard of the Strawman fallacy? Or the special pleading fallacy? Black or white? Red herrings? Any of those ring a bell? Are they in your 'how do deal with misogynists' textbook?

Do tell in what way what I've said so far qualifies as those. You do have the burden of proof on that so I'm putting more work into this than I'm actually required to in this response.


About your accusation of the Strawman fallacy:

Did I not explain why "different but equally important" is the same as "separate but equal"? Did I not explain why what you're qualifying as complementary doesn't need to involve a particular gender? Or that two men and two women can be just as complementary as a man and a woman? When someone has to get something done the gender of the person doing it is ultimately irrelevant.


About your accusation of the Special Pleading fallacy:

I've addressed the stuff you've all presented. Meanwhile, I keep getting ad hominem arguments whenever I point out examples of how conventionally male or female characteristics aren't exclusive to men or women.


About your accusation of the False Dilemma fallacy (what's referred to as black and white fallacy):

This fallacy is about artificially limiting available options. Ex: You're either X or Y. There is no Z.

It's more descriptive of your rigid ideas on gender and the patronizing dismissal of the people who don't fit into them.


About your accusation of the Red Herring fallacy:

Red Herring fallacies are a large group of multiple other fallacies that ultimately draw attention away from the original topic. In terms of deviation from the topic, you're the one who generally initiated those deviations such as comparing feminists to communists in the manner known during the USSR and your fixation on gender studies as a means of demeaning what I'm saying.

The former is a false analogy given your comparison was tenuous at best and fails to support your claim that feminism will lead to the kind of destitution seen with communism. You completely ignored that Stalin deliberately made it into what it became regardless of what was originally intended, while you're claiming that feminism will just naturally do the same by design. That comparison just isn't valid and ultimately takes the focus away from the actual topic.

The latter was basically pure ad hominem all the way up to the above case I pointed out. You latched on to the idea that what I'm saying = gender studies = gender studies are stupid, therefore so is what I'm saying. At no point did you attempt to address what's so terrible about gender studies or present any valid argument about what I said before you started insulting me about it. The part of what I said that you referred to as gender studies was about societal roles, as in things like house cleaning and cooking are considered feminine and doing sports are considered masculine but they can be done by pretty much anyone could do them regardless of social expectations. I even stated as much and told you it was something I just got from living life, yet you insisted that it was gender studies and started making patronizing comments about it and outright insulting me. Not only did you make assumptions on what I said and ignore my attempts to correct them but you're also basically trying to ridicule an entire topic and field of study for no good reason.

Here's a recap of our exchange with the images removed, colour coded to keep track of the progression of the topic.

1

I think that, at the end of the day, anyone who does not respect the fact that men and women have different but equally important and complementary roles is in for a lot of disillusionment. That's not to say that we can't do a lot of the same things, but there are clear fundamental differences - none of which are any better or worse than each other.

2

The whole separate but equal thing doesn't work and is basically segregation. Those gender roles may have started out that way but they cause far more harm than good now. Better to just be fluid about societal roles and expect everyone to be capable of the basic stuff as a matter of self-sufficiency.

3

Being complementary now equals segregation? I have yet to see that work in theory or practice.

But there are areas in which I do support gender segregation - such as bathrooms.

Sounds like the latest gender studies theory from a liberal college...oh, it is.

4

'Separate but equal' isn't really equality. We're all human beings who should have equal access to human rights. In that sense, we're the same. Gendered bathrooms are more because of issues with sexual harassment. You can't have urinals in a public bathroom both men and women use and the bathroom is an easily accessible form of shelter from people who can't follow you in. They're more comparable to accommodations and services like how you have parking spaces for pregnant women and people with disabilities, accommodations for children and so on.

Separate but equal was what they said when implementing racial segregation in the US, which was not in fact equal:



My school didn't have gender studies. The notion that gender shouldn't determine who can do what with their life and such is just common sense. People aren't meant to be shoved in such narrow boxes and then ridiculed or ostracized if they don't fit.

5

Who said anything about human rights or that men and women should not be equal in their rights? How did you possibly infer that from what I posted, particularly when I was specifically referring to roles and not rights? And where have you seen segregation like the example you provided between men and women in the west?

I'm still waiting to see how 'complementary' means 'segregation'. Complementary, by definition, requires joint effort of two or more units in completing different but equally essential functions. Segregation requires separation and a breakdown of joint effort. The two concepts are mutually exclusive. Maybe the confusion was self-created when you replaced the word 'complementary' (which I used) with the word 'separate'.

I don't think you should allow your views on gender to colour your understanding of the English language and basic concepts. It forces you to make far too many assumptions about what was actually posted and take great leaps in reinterpreting the well-established meaning of words and ideas. Or maybe it was purposeful distraction - setting up a little straw man to knock down?

Gender does determine what people can do with their lives (for example, only women can give birth and only men can provide half of the necessary material to create life). Whether gender should or should not determine what one can do with their lives is probably a separate and more nuanced question, but I'd err on the side of supporting the idea that it should, particularly given the undeniable force of human nature and the basic biological fact of genetics.

While each generation likes to think that they are some sort of pioneers in changing the world, there really is nothing new on this earth. A while back, the Soviet Union decided it would change society and human nature itself by creating a 'new Soviet man' (and woman - it was implied). They were mean't to look something like this:



They ended up looking more like this:


They were also mean't to have a whole list of social, intellectual and emotional characteristics. That also went the opposite way (I'm sure anyone even remotely familiar with post-communist societies can attest to that). I'm pretty confident that will be the end result of most progressive attempts to reshape human nature and create a new "progressive" man (and woman - its implied).

6

What you said was basically how they defined 'separate but equal', so the issues with that are entirely relevant. The allegedly 'complementary' roles are basically castes you get forced into from birth. Given the varying philosophies about such things, deciding that men and women have to do specific things is pretty arbitrary. Who decided that dresses couldn't be worn by boys anymore? Who decided eye liner was girly? Who decided that men should be discouraged from wearing pink? Who decided that men had to suppress their emotions and 'act tough'?

Women have had less rights than chairs at times. There's plenty of discrimination and depending on what country you're talking about, there are still some with truly abysmal conditions. Just because it's not as bad in other countries doesn't mean some of those double standard don't involve unequal application of rights.

In any case, the whole notion of roles in society contributes to that kind of problem. There was a time when women weren't allowed to vote, couldn't be athletes, couldn't have jobs and were barred from certain places they aren't anymore simply because it wasn't part of their "role". Really, the gender of the person who does whatever complements the other person doesn't actually matter. It's just something to have done because you genuinely want to rather than because you happen to have been born in a group expected to do it. That's why we did away with caste systems too.

Seems like you're making a number of assumptions yourself. "separate but equal", "different but equally important roles", the general implication is that the different roles are separate but equal. If they're truly separate based on gender, then the expectation is that one can't do the other's "role". If they did then there would be no point in claiming men and women have different roles to begin with. It doesn't really matter whether or not you consider the separation complementary when my response is about how that separation should exist to begin with. The actual gender of the people doing those things doesn't matter..


I was talking about day to day life. Given the options of adoption, sperm donors and surrogates, there are other ways to have children if you want any to begin with.

Are you familiar with intersex people? Even if you leave out trans and nonbinary people it's not a clear cut matter. You have men with vaginas capable of giving birth, women with penises who can impregnate people with compatible anatomy, you have people with just about everything in between and then there's how sometimes people with y chromosomes never actually express the genes attached to it.

Then comes the issue of infertility and what that's supposed to mean if your role in society is based on your ability to have children and how. Gender and sex aren't the same thing and neither should have weight in what you do in everyday life.

The main reason what communism was supposed to be and what it became are so different is because Stalin killed the guy who came up with it, kept the name and twisted it into something different as a tool for oppression. That image was nothing more than propaganda afterwards. It wasn't an accidental failure so much as deliberate sabotage. The original philosophies are entirely capable of functioning as intended and quite frankly comparing addressing discrimination with what Stalin did is both fallacious and downright insulting. Animal Farm's a good book that sums up what happened through animal metaphors.

Different cultures and societies have different philosophies on life and how to live it. It doesn't actually change human nature and one society isn't inherently more correct on what that even means than the other. In some cultures, women with facial hair and unibrows and men with no facial hair and soft features is attractive. In others it's large bodies with a decent amount of fat. In some places women cover up so as not to make their appearance something that belongs solely to them and deny others the ability to judge them for it. In others showing skin is a way to take pride in their appearance. In some places breasts aren't sexualized and women are entirely capable of walking around topless.

There are plenty of different ways of living life that aren't inherently better than eachother. As long as mutual respect and rights are present, pretty much everything else can vary.

7

Starling, you've just demonstrated why some people (men or women) will never be taken seriously. I think we're all pretty well aware of the latest gender studies theories - they're floating around like a bad smell, but thanks for the run down anyway. I also note that you threw in the usual "that wasn't real communism" spiel too. Perhaps you should refresh yourself with Marx.

Given you can't (or won't) differentiate between complementary roles and separate roles, there's really nothing further to discuss with you. This conversation requires much more nuance and sophistication than you are capable of (or willing) mustering. Maybe when you move onto the next gender studies textbook you'll have something new to discuss, but I foresee much disillusionment for you with this current fad. 'Fluid on'

8

Just because you don't like it or think it's ridiculous doesn't mean it isn't true. That's not really a valid argument against it.

For the record, there are several forms of communism and none of them are any more "real" than the other. I was specifically talking about what the Russian revolutionaries actually wanted vs what Stalin put in place. The thing is, the basic philosophy when you strip it down to the core values is the redistribution of wealth to the people, as opposed to Capitalism's distribution of wealth to corporations. That's why it was called communism.

How patronizing of you. Again, you haven't actually provided a valid argument against what I said. Or do I have to crack open a book on fallacies for you? Explain to me how exactly women have to be house wives or how men have to be the primary source of income. How about how same sex relationships function within your narrow view of societal roles or why entire fields of work should be restricted to men or women. How about where people who don't fit into the notion of "man" and "woman" fall into this? Both men and women can be stay at home parents, the main cook, work jobs typically associated with eachother and so on. Your gender doesn't determine which of those things you can or can't do. You use complementary roles the same way as separate ones as you specifically ascribe a specific gender to them. You don't have to be different genders to complement each other in that manner, as evidenced with same sex relationships.

I'll respond to that when you can show me where I said that.

Your view on gender roles involves rigidity in the roles men and women fulfill. Otherwise we'd be on the same page about what I said about men and women having the same options in society. Due to your disagreement, I put forth an example of what that kind of reasoning has done with other marginalized groups. By the way, that's not a valid reason for refusing to respond to someone else's argument.

As for the rest of your nonsense, one step at a time. But I don't think this discussion will make it to that.

Again with ad hominem dismissal of what I'm saying. You can't just patronize and insult people and then use that to justify ignoring most of what they say. If you fail to put forth a valid argument then you've failed to actually refute any of it. I've specifically explained to you why what you were referring to as "different but equally important" is the same reasoning put forth by "separate but equal" and why what you said were "complementary roles" doesn't actually apply to gender so much as people who choose to do those things regardless of gender. Now cut the condescension and actually address what I've said.

Nope. As finely tuned as you are to women's issues, you have missed what is happening with men's issues. It's not about cooking in commercials. It's about men being happy with simple uncomplicated things like being rewarded with a new little toy if they follow their (female) partner's wise demands. Quite common and a recurring theme.

I have seen a lot of unhealthy relationships where women are forcing husbands to comply with their demands no matter how demeaning to the man in the eyes of other men and women. A lot of men are being painted into a corner and I doubt the future on HUMANkind will be healthier as a result.

If we were having a general discussion about the incidence of abuse in relationships, then pointing out that women are among the people who do such things would be relevant. However, you're responding to issues specifically concerning discrimination against women, so that's actually a red herring argument. I wholeheartedly agree that there are men who are victims of abuse, that women can and do perpetuate such abuse and that services should be available to address that. While not the majority demographic, any abuse is still too much and everyone deserves to have services available for that. Equal rights would mean addressing both male and female abuse and discussing issues specifically concerning one doesn't take away from the other. Here are some statistics:

Ontario Ministry of Domestic Violence

Iris Domestic Violence Center

http://www.thehotline.org/resources/statistics/

Not really. The stuff about discrimination against women spawned from explaining the biases against women that push them to avoid men showing signs of holding biases that keep them from being respected as equals. Treating women like some overcomplicated beings who strip you of the simplicity you were content with is another stereotype that was typically used to belittle them. Stuff like "the old ball and chain" to make having a wife seem like some chore to put up with rather than a genuinely fulfilling and pleasant relationship. Not exactly the recipe for a healthy relationship, so issues are to be expected when someone regards their spouse in such a way.

The whole "simple and uncomplicated things" part is kinda vague. I already brought up finding someone you can live with, hobbies, habits and all. You also have to understand that sometimes "simple and uncomplicated" simply isn't an option if it's referring to some necessary part of maintaining a healthy relationship. In that case it's more your unwillingness to do that necessary task than anything your spouse is doing. Mutual respect is a key component. If you feel that way about your spouse, then maybe you shouldn't be in a relationship. Just like you're free to leave a relationship you find unhealthy and unsatisfying, so are they. This also goes for refusing to enter a relationship you can tell lacks the kind of respect required to make it work.

However, you do have to consider whether those "demands" are actually unreasonable or just something you don't want to deal with. I've heard plenty enough patronizing comments about women that treated entirely reasonable requests in that manner, so the perception isn't always reflective of the reality. Relationships don't work without communication and collaboration. You need to talk and listen to each other. If you fail to meet your end of the requirements for maintaining a healthy relationship, that's on you.

You mentioned men with vaginas and women with penises in a kind of scientologist kind of mind-meld. You were assuming we must accept this as fact and therefore must accept the logic that ensued. We are not talking about statistical abnormalities or freaks here. We are talking about the 99.9999999999999999999% that are men with penises and women with vaginas. You have completely avoided the notion of natural dispositions relating to genetics.

Ad hominem arguments. Trans and intersex people aren't freaks and being different from what's considered the "default" doesn't warrant discrimination or exclusion from society. They have every right to be treated like any other human being. That kind of mentality is why they have to deal with grossly disproportionate homicide and suicide rates on top of getting assaulted, raped, murdered and discriminated against a lot.

That percentage is obviously over-exaggerated and ultimately meaningless. The world population is currently around 7.6 billion. 0.1% of that would still be 7 600 000. That's over 3 times the population of Macedonia.

One study in 1998-2008 estimated around 1:2000 to 1:500 where genitalia is atypical enough to call in a sex-differentiation specialist but added that there are a number of less visible forms of intersex and some that only become apparent later in life. The world population in 2008 was 6.7 billion. The base statistics give 3 350 000 - 13 400 000 people. Here are the other stats:

Not XX and not XY 1:1 666 | 4 021 608.6

Klinefelter (XXY) 1:1 000 | 6 700 000

Androgen insensitivity syndrome 1:13 000 | 515 384.6

Partial androgen insensitivity syndrome 1: 130 000 | 51 538.5

Classical congenital adrenal hyperplasia 1:13 000 | 515 384.4

Late onset adrenal hyperplasia 1:66 | 101 515 151.5

Vaginal agenesis 1:6 000 | 1 116 666.7

Ovotestes 1:83 000 | 80 722.9

Idiopathic (no discernable medical cause) 1:110 000 | 60 909.1

Complete gonadal dysgenesis 1:150 000 | 44 666.7

Hypospadias (urethral opening in perineum or along penile shaft) 1:2 000 | 3 350 000

Hypospadias (urethral opening between corona and tip of glans penis) 1:770 | 8 701 298.7

Total of the above: 127 188 716.3

Total number of people whose bodies differ from standard male or female 1:100 | 67 000 000

Total number of people receiving surgery to “normalize” genital appearance 1:1000/2:1000 | 6 700 00/13 400 000

Another study from 2000 claims it could be as high as 2% and that intersex individuals who receive "corrective surgery" are estimated around 1:1000 to 2:1000 births. The world population in 2000 was around 6.1 billion, so 6 100 000 to 12 200 000 for "corrective surgery" and up to 122 000 000 total.

There's too much stuff going on with trans statistics to get anything definite so the best I've found was 1:1000 - 1:100, which would be 7 600 00 - 76 000 000.

That's a lot of people to just brush aside like that.

In the end, the exact numbers don't really matter as the fact that they exist at all is telling in itself.

You don't choose to be trans or intersex, you just are. Just because western culture has rigid ideas on the existence of only two genders and what roles they serve doesn't mean that's universal.

Native Americans have two spirit, which encompasses a number of gender identities and sexualities. Samoans have Fa'afafine, which is effectively a third gender. There's the Indian Hijra, which includes trans and intersex people and were considered holy before the English colonists westernized stuff. Thailand also have Kathoey, which is also considered a third gender.

In Iran, beauty standards used to be such that men mostly had soft features and no beard while women often had thick, possibly joined eyebrows and at times facial hair. It could be incredibly difficult to identify them in depictions of that period.

If your "man with a vagina" begins to take testosterone, the chemicals that begin to run around "his" brain will absolutely and without fail affect "his" mental processes and decision making conclusions. If you doubt these hormones are part of the chemical reaction that affect decisions in a person's brain, then it is safe to assume you are ignoring a very important part of what defines men and women.

You don't have to take hormones to be trans or nonbinary and the effects of such things are vastly overstated. You don't seem to have taken into consideration that they have their gender identity figured out before they even consider hormones and some either choose not to take them for various reasons or are denied the opportunity. Non binary people also sometimes take hormones despite not considering themselves male or female.

There was a time when gay men were forced to take estrogen and that didn't change that they were men.

How about you actually talk to trans people and take the time to familiarize yourself with what they have to deal with. They're human beings same as anyone else and you could very well meet one without knowing it. I met at least one.

Do women stop being women when they go through menopause? How about men with their equivalent? As you age your body produces less hormones and may stop producing estrogen and testosterone altogether. How about women who have to get a hysterectomy for medical reasons? Do they cease to be women simply because they no longer have a uterus and ovaries? Men who've been castrated or were born without testicles? Everyone whose relevant glands and organs are properly functional produces testosterone and estrogen. Neither are exclusive to anyone.

How do you explain non binary people?

A woman's perspective on the matter, no doubt. Me and my 34 guitars and 19 amplifiers are utterly offended.

If that's a serious statement then maybe you should ask yourself why you need so many and what the money could've been used for.

I literally just expressed the need for moderation with stuff like that and you dismiss what I say as if it doesn't matter.

In fact, increased longevity across many cultures sees men getting together socially very regularly and just having blokey chats and drinks. I fear you won't accept this fact.

Women need that too. I never said you had to neglect your respective friend groups or give up your hobbies. The thing is a healthy relationship requires actually doing things together and talking to each other, so you need to find balance there.

With all respect due. There is an aspect of dominance associated with having a penis. It tends to get poked about in places and its mere use is aggressive/dominant in nature. I am sure you can bring up dildos or whatever.

Without sex, I guess we may as well live with our mothers.

More like toxic masculinity. I've already gone at length about how harmful this kind of thing is to everyone, including men.

Additionally matriarchal societies exist and macho men are capable of having their asses handed to them by women in a fight.

The whole notion of dominance is fundamentally flawed and comes from sexist attempts at justifying rigid gender roles where the man has to be in charge and women weren't respected.

Maybe to you but plenty of people don't consider having sex to be as big a deal.

Well, it's 1970 still in China. That nation has a lot of progress to make for women's rights.

It was a historical example. Women are allowed to be literate there now, though they're having issues because of all the infanticide and abandonment of female children leaving them with a mostly male population.

But, curiously enough, I would expect an instant decline in it's path to being the world's number 1 superpower if this was the case.

Because implying that equal rights is bad for a country's prosperity totally isn't sexist.

You still assume there are no fundamental differences between men and women and therefore suggest being fluid.

You still assume the existence of people who don't fit the conventional notion of "man" and "woman" doesn't illustrate said fluidity.

I am less than sure about that but won't go out of my way to offend anyone if that is your hope.

Happy new year.

Just because you say aren't trying to doesn't mean you don't anyway. You've made some comments that generally aren't particularly respectful of women and made discriminatory remarks about trans, non binary and intersex people simply for how they are.

With what?

Socialism. The issue with capitalism is that it funnels wealth up when money already naturally flows upwards. You need to return money to the base or else they're just going to get poorer and poorer as all the money gets horded by the by the people who run everything. An economy prospers by keeping the money in circulation.

Taxes are paid to the government so it can pay for things that benefit the people. Investing in those services and ensuring that corporations can't exploit them is pretty important. Right now cost of living and houses are rising while pay stays the same. Minimum wage pre-inflation was worth about 18$ per hour today.

Historically, a number of rebellions/revolutions occurred largely due to authority figures abusing their power and leaving the people in destitution, mostly through over taxing without regard for the welfare of the population.

What I said to Gocka at the end of my post is also relevant.

That so-called "liberal" laughed at how her rapist client was able to pass a polygraph test. Do you think such examples could've swayed the opinion of these women you're now degrading? Her performance was also recorded. Does the same compelling evidence exist to support your assertion that Trump is a pedophile?

Roy Moore is the pedophile. Trump seems to prefer sexually harassing adult women. I'm not talking about the presidential election.

Polygraph tests aren't actually reliable. It's not that hard to get inaccurate results from them and people can learn how to reliably cheat them.

Additionally, she was assigned that client and legally obligated to do her job. Doesn't mean most people like defending a rapist and possibly keeping them from being jailed for their crimes. It's a job someone's going to have to do.

My disappointment is that you'd think they'd have issues with electing a pedophile simply because of party lines. That's simply an expression that the voting results failed to meet my hopes that less women would've voted for him, nothing more.

How intoxicated? At what blood alcohol level? How will it be enforced? A breathalyzer at the front door of everybody's house? Be specific.

Use your common sense. If the person you're dealing with clearly has an altered mental state, don't have sex with them. No one's around to constantly run blood tests for roofies either and yet you should still be able to tell something's off even if you may not know what it is in the moment.

Withholding information like having some disease which can be transmitted then having unprotected sex with another individual should be criminalised. That is not the same as a man pretending to be a lawyer or a woman pretending to be a model for the purpose of appearing more attractive before having sex. There are nuances in what you're referring to above, which is why you need to be specific. You seem to generalise way too much.

Stuff like secretly removing a condom while having sex, impersonating someone else or otherwise withholding relevant information about the whole thing can also make it rape.

I specifically referenced impersonating people and withholding information a sex partner would need to know. By the way impersonating professions you aren't in can be illegal due to fraud.

Lol, and these are pressing issues which need to be addressed? Please....

Fallacy of relative privation and missing the point. It was an example of how things change over time and how things tend to get demeaned as lesser once associated with women when it wasn't always like that. Any particular reason you feel the need to ridicule that? The scale of a problem in relation to another doesn't justify ignoring it. It's all part of a greater problem of seeing women and things associated with them as inferior.

Can you give some specific examples of this? If the PM of Canada was a woman would she be getting paid less than the current clown in office? Does the girl cashier at McDonald's get paid less than the boy cashier? Does a female taxi driver get paid less than her male counterpart? Are you factoring in years worked and experience? If women can do the same jobs for less money, why aren't all workplaces full of women? Do you really think sexism is more important to employers than increasing their profit margins?

Parliament wages get adjusted every April first, are regulated differently, people are elected into their positions rather than hired and there's only one PM. Not really representative of your average job. I already linked statistics that included stuff about the wag gap, as well as other general information about gender equality. In Australia 2014 statistics give an average of 82 cents for every dollar earned by men and an average difference of 283.20$ less or 18,2% in weekly wages. It mentions the pay gap's consistently stayed between 15% and 18% for about 20 years. Superannuation payouts in 2009-2010 averaged 198 000$ for men and 112 600$ for women with a difference of 57%. It also mentions that Australia was ranked 15th in the global index for gender equality in 2006 but slipped to 24th in 2013.

Another source from 2010 also mentions 83 cents to a dollar but adds that in some industries the wage gap is as high as 35%.

In terms of monetary value, the pay difference gets wider the more money is involved, both in base pay and in earning over a longer period of time. Say, the difference is one dollar, giving one person 5$ an hour and the other person 6$ an hour. If everyone works an average of 2 087 hours a year, that becomes yearly salary of 10 435$ and 12 522$, about 18% difference like the average wage gap given. Say a promotion nets a raise with an additional 4$ an hour regardless of gender but despite equal output the male example gets his promotion in 2 years while the female example gets it in 3. After 5 years worked, the woman would earn a total of 68 871$ while the man would earn 87 654$ for a difference of 18 783$. The percentage difference for total earnings in that time is 24%. By the end of their careers that wage gap is going to make a significant difference in their lifetime earnings.

Also relevant are the links I provided to Gocka about stuff that affect which industries women are going to work in and the mention of women being offered less opportunities for promotion or things necessary to getting one.

If it is, then so is womansplaining. Some people, both men and women, speak in a condescending nature. They do it to both their own and the opposite sex.

False equivalence.

The term mansplaining was coined specifically in relation to the tendency for men to interrupt women and explain things they already know in a patronizing manner. That type of behaviour comes from lack of respect for women as equals, giving less or no consideration to what they have to say, what they know or their credentials when interacting with them.

That's why "womansplaining" isn't really a thing. Society has a long history of men discriminating against women, not the other way around. Yes, I know women can make patronizing remarks to men. Thing is, that's not attached to institutional discrimination of your entire gender.

Why is it so important to you that boys wear dresses? Why is it so important for you to blur the distinction between boys and girls?

Again, I'm referring to things that used to be the norm but stopped once they became associated with women and therefore treated as inferior. See above for pictures of a time when boys wearing dresses were perfectly normal. I could ask you why you're so attached to rigid gender roles in a time when such things are no longer acceptable reasons to deny someone a job, who you can marry and just generally how you live your life.

Starling,

If I may jump in here.

The word equality gets thrown around a lot, and I feel like it starts to lose its value. I am curious, can you highlight for me, in your opinion, what real world issues does the feminism movement view as most important. What are maybe the top 3 or 5 problems that feminism wants to fix and how?

TBH the more accurate word is equity but people tend to say equality out of habit or because they aren't familiar with that word. You should be able to use words like equality and human rights as often as you want without it losing value. Those things will always matter and we still have a long way to go before addressing all the problems that prompt use of those terms.

I don't usually rank these sorts of things. They're all basically facets of one massive problem and addressing the entirety of it is necessary in order to truly make progress. In no particular order:

1. Raising awareness on and providing support for victims of various forms gender based discrimination and keeping people up to date on current events regarding that.

2. Support trans women and the LGBT+ community, as the discrimination they face relates to the root problem.

3. Addressing matters of rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment and domestic abuse, such as providing adequate services and addressing double standards as they apply to both men and women.

4. Support women who deal with racial discrimination on top of gender discrimination. This also extends to supporting women in other countries, as they face additional challenges from the overlap of differing forms of discrimination they face.

5. Stuff about discrimination in general, promoting other groups and services that relate to that, etc.


A lot of the discrimination towards LGBT people and double standards applied to men and women come from the same mentality regarding what is "male", what is "female" and the rejection of anyone who doesn't fit into that, whether because they refuse to be confined to what's expected of them in relation to their gender, because they aren't the gender people perceive them to be or because of rigid views on sexuality stemming from the social expectations regarding genders and the conflation between it and sex. To seek gender equality means helping address all of that. Regarding things like racial discrimination, people who fall under multiple marginalized groups have to deal with a combination of problems not present in others of one of the demographics they're part of. Discrimination in general also comes from an even broader mentality of people mistreating those they deem as "other" and therefore have more difficulty empathizing with. Addressing that broader mentality is important too so on top of demographic overlap, those are reasons why groups addressing different forms of discrimination tend to work together.

Feminism is ultimately the ideology that we should have gender equality, so anyone who more broadly believes that people should be treated equitably is basically a feminist as well. If you discriminate on those grounds then you aren't no matter how much you insist otherwise.

You have groups that do specific things, such as Distributing Dignity, which provides bras, pads and tampons to homeless women.

I sometimes struggle to understand the feminism movement in today's context. Historically there were blatant inequalities. Women couldn't own land, couldn't vote, couldn't work, couldn't go to court. Slowly but surely women gained all these rights. From my perspective it seems the last frontier seems to be pay equality, and possibly some issues around pregnancy and the workplace? More than that, I can't say that I see any other systemic or social inequality towards women.

Feminism works on an international scale. Just because one country has better rights on the matter doesn't mean the problems in another aren't worth acknowledging and working towards addressing. There's only so much you can do from outside that particular country but raising awareness is still important.

Additionally, just because things have improved in one doesn't mean it's fully resolved. There's still a lot of discrimination and it's ingrained in society rather than isolated to the things people notice. It's all basically symptomatic of women still being valued less in some ways. I gave an example earlier about how in media such as books the male perspective is considered the default while the female one is treated as niche/girls only. No one bats an eye if a girl has a male role model but boys tend to be discouraged from having female ones. Basically you need to address both overt discrimination and all the little biases that encourage that kind of behaviour.

It's dangerous to overstate the progress made or understate how recent that progress is. People were suitably horrified by the holocaust and yet antisemitism is still around as well as neo nazis.

Sometimes you hear arguments made with statistics, arguing that women are disproportionately represented in government, positions of power in business and academia, and many other fields. Yes these are statistical facts that women despite being 51% of the population make up much less than that in many aspects of life, but is that because men, or society dont want them to be, or are there other factors at play. Every inequality, doesn't necessarily mean that an injustice is being perpetrated.

Are you sure? There's a veritable mountain of information about the various forms of discrimination and double standards women have to deal with, including ways in which women just generally aren't respected as authority figures a lot of the time. Why wouldn't that be involved in their under representation in such places? Women haven't even had full voting rights for a full century in most places. I've only found 4 countries that allowed it in the 1800s and 8 from 1900 to 1917. Australia would be included but wouldn't allow indigenous Australians to vote until 1962. The rights women have gained are a recent phenomenon within living memory.

As Vangeloski touched on, Men and Women, are that, at the most basic level we are different. This not to say that when it comes to most things in life that we cant be treated the same, but we can't run away from the fact that we can never be 100% the same. For example, Serena Williams is a phenomenal athlete who dominates her sport, but could she realistically beat the best of the men in the same sport? Yes its just a sport, but I am just trying to make the point that as hard as women can try at least at certain things, nature still made them at least slightly different than men. At least form a physical perspective, there can never be equality. Given the same circumstances, men are on average bigger, faster and stronger. Okay so maybe that's meaningless in most aspects of modern life, but not necessarily in the workplace.

First, you need to remember that there's a difference between gender and sex. Gender deals with identity while sex is what deals with genetics. When you account for gender, you get the same range of possible sexual characteristics but in different ratios. Accommodating for specific issues with sexual characteristics isn't the same as boxing people into the same groups based solely on the content of their pants.

Second, sexual characteristics are irrelevant to day to day stuff, which was the original context of what I was talking about. It shouldn't determine how you can or can't live your life.

For example, I own a construction company, and I hire exactly 0 female workers. I honestly don't care if my workers are men or women, as a business owner, I have jobs that need to be done, and all I care about is that they are done correctly and efficiently. If a woman can do the work physically at the same pace and skill level, then I will gladly hire them and pay them just as much as their male counterparts. If women could do those jobs better and faster than men, then why wouldn't I hire women exclusively or pay them more than men? It would be in my interests, I gain nothing by discriminating. Okay so women might be at a physical disadvantage so again this example just lays the groundwork.

The constant reminder of how sexual dimorphism relates to physical performance actively discourages women from pursuing those fields even though most people won't actually be at their full potential of body mass. Additionally chances are most people hiring will either knowingly or unknowingly favour men.

In practice the variation in muscle mass among individuals would be capable of providing a more balanced workforce if you eliminated the biases that make women less common in the field.

Lets take the same logic though, to the corporate setting. A business, at its core exists to make money. I've also worked in the corporate setting, and from what I witnessed personally, women never seemed to be ignored or looked over because they were women. Pretty much every corporation I worked in, would gladly hire men, women, or baboons, if it meant productivity and profits went up. Its not in a capitalist DNA to make irrational decisions that would compromise profitability. Just as in my construction company, I have no doubt that if Apple thought it could design or build better more profitable products by hiring women exclusively, that they would do that. In the accounting field, especially auditing, there were more female than male auditors, both as field employees and management. Why? For what ever reason they are better at it, Why? Because women tend to have better attention to detail, which helps you excel in auditing. It comes back full circle that God/Nature did make slight differences both physical and psychological between men and women. Like everything else in the world since men and women or two sides of the same coin they inherently balance each other out. We tend to have traits that help us as pairs, function and excel.

Just because you haven't personally seen the discrimination doesn't mean it isn't there. The whole Weinstein thing for one illustrates how widespread sexual harassment is and it's not like they just do that stuff in front of everyone. There's a lot that goes on where people aren't looking. Threats, NDAs, blackmail and other forms of coercion tend to be involved.

Corporations have been known to do stupid things for no discernible reason. Greed doesn't always pay off. Some would actively sabotage themselves out of pure bigotry or poorly thought out greed.

Additionally, a number of them continue to exploit people in other countries for profit despite the bad press, especially via sweatshops. Some also exploit their employees in a number of ways, so there are a number of less than moral reasons behind some of their hiring decisions.

There's a difference between how the gender ratio turns out after selecting the most suitable candidate and qualifying the best candidate based on gender. Given all the discrimination and exploitation that goes on in corporations this fails to illustrate why their alleged claims of practicality "just ending up that way" should be taken at face value. They tend to keep their biases and discrimination under wraps and at times use NDAs to prevent people from talking about that exploitation afterwards. A lot of them shamelessly lie to people just to avoid being held accountable.

Actually no, attention to detail isn't some innate trait divinely gifted to any particular gender. Stuff like that tends to be skills you develop based on your environment so a higher incidence in women is likely to be due to their living conditions training it up more often than with men rather than anything genetic.

Additionally, there are studies verifying various forms of biases that affect the gender ratio in different fields on several levels, including but not limited to hiring practices. It's likely that assumptions about women being better at such things is a large part of why the demographics are that way. Societally enforced perceptions can shape things to match it.

Some info on stuff affecting what fields women are more likely to end up in:

https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/newsroom/newsn/2700/new-research-proves-gender-bias-extraordinarily-prevalent-in-stem-careers

https://qz.com/823162/a-new-study-shows-how-star-trek-jokes-and-geek-culture-make-women-feel-unwelcome-in-computer-science/

https://www.wired.com/2013/03/hiring-women/

This idea that somehow we can eliminate difference in any and every aspect, is just down right unrealistic, and even dare I say unhealthy in some ways.

That's because you're not distinguishing between sex and gender or applying what I've said in the original context of how society treats men and women. What's unhealthy is forcing entire groups of people into specific roles they're born into and can't deviate from, which is why people shouldn't be so uptight about what people can or can't do with their lives. That's the aspect of life where distinctions between men and women are irrelevant if you intend to give them the same rights and ability to live freely.

Men and women should be equal in the sense that, we should all have access to the same opportunities. If one sex or the other can do something better, then their gender should not prohibit them from doing it.

Which is the point I was trying to make before everyone derailed with "but sexual dimorphism and gender roles!"

Once you start getting into statistics and quotas though; I honestly dont think you are helping either gender.

You mean the statistics about sexual characteristics that aren't relevant to gender and discrimination based on it? The quotas that use claims that "it's just more efficient" to discriminate against people? Height is a big deal in basketball and yet there're short basketball players that perform well. A girl who lost her hearing relearned how to sing and she's pretty great. Just because you're physically or socially disadvantaged doesn't mean you can't get the damn job done if someone would just give you a chance. It's a verified fact that this kind of bias keeps women from being hired as often as they should for certain jobs even if they're more qualified than the male candidates.

One thing I find fascinating was, studies conducted on the male and female brains. Its always been said anecdotally that men are logical and women emotional but recent studies have really dove into more intricate details about the brain and its function. Here are some highlights of various large scale studies.

Men on average have larger brains by mass. The various portions of the brain especially those for cognitive function, and memory. Cognitive function is probably after physical size, the most important trait for an athlete. This would explain why even in sports where size and strength are not a real factor, men still seem to have an edge on women. Memory is very important in logical studies like math.

The size difference is due to differences in body size. People have historically tried to use this as an excuse to pass women off as less intelligent when it's just a matter of proportions.

Women used more parts of their brains when solving a problem. Also the cortices that link different parts of the brain are thicker in women than in men. So women seem to have a better ability to think more creatively than men.

Men had a much larger variation in brain and cortices size than women. Suggesting that intelligence in men varies more widely than in women.

When approached with the same problem, men used not only fewer parts of their brains to solve them, they also used different parts of the brain. This lends itself to the old logical vs emotional argument.

One funny finding that goes against a common generalization; the portion of the brain that controls emotion is larger in men than women, but a caveat, women use this portion more often than men. So you could say, men feel emotions more deeply but less often than women.

On sheer intelligence. they are pretty much the same, just that the variation in intelligence is higher in men.

Instead of looking at all that as a competition, in my opinion its a beautiful thing. If men and women were exactly the same, life would be so boring, love, probably wouldn't be what it is. There is this inherent balance between the sexes that, at least it seems, society wants to destroy, to what end I still don't understand.

The logical vs emotional anecdote is based in stereotypes that likely tied into what I mentioned about women having been stereotyped as dumber and less capable of decision-making in the past. You know the word hysteria? The root hyster refers to the uterus. They used to use it to refer to PTSD symptoms in abused women before they started to see the same symptoms in men returning to war. Those stereotype then shapes societal perceptions and expectations on how people were meant to behave, creating an environment where women seem more emotional than men.

People have a hard time reaching a consensus about how much of what we are comes from genetics and how much is from the environment. Your genetics could say 6'5" and that'd be as high as you can get but that doesn't mean you'll actually get there. A large part of why average height has gotten higher over the years is from having better access to the nutrients we need to get taller.

You can actually analyze where people have lived and what they've eaten by analyzing their bones. It's reminiscent of studying rings on trees and being able to learn about periods of its life as well as dating the sections.

Your environment, experiences and even some substances you've been exposed to can alter your brain chemistry. For example mobile games exploit your brain's endorphin production to basically get you addicted to them. Lootboxes have a similar problem and investigations have found them to be a form of gambling. Since it's a psychological addiction rather than a physical one, you're going to have to deal with it the rest of your life. Likewise things like PTSD alter your brain chemistry and you'll have to deal with that too. In regards to depression, the issue is that you're not producing enough of the chemicals that make you feel happy, leaving you apathetic and unable to enjoy things you usually like despite your best efforts. I came across something once about a man who interpreted natural sounds like singing birds as language and it was shown to be processed that way by his brain.

Left-handed people tend to develop certain skills more due to constantly having to translate right handed directions to left handed ones. They're also more likely to die in car crashes due to reflex turning the wheel left and most countries driving on the right side.

The middle child is also more likely to develop certain skills due to the way parents treat them in relation to the older and younger. They basically get the downside of both without the benefits and basically lost what they had as the youngest. They tend to end up more self-reliant by necessity.

Regarding men vs women, the differing ways in which they're treated in society is likely to be responsible for a number of psychological differences between the two. After all, different experiences will foster different skills and behaviours. Presumably victims of discrimination are going to learn to be more perceptive than people who don't have to worry about those things.

That's not to say there aren't physiological differences relating to the brain based on sexual dimorphism, which as I've stated relates to sex rather than gender. It's worth noting that trans people's brains seem to react to hormones along the same patterns as the gender they identify as, so whatever psychological component determines gender doesn't need to come attached to a particular set of sexual characteristics.

I know that sexual dimorphism plays a role in a person's physical characteristics. Sex and gender still aren't the same thing, and there are a myriad different ways in which those sexual characteristics get mixed up to the point where a number of people could qualify as intersex and never notice until it gets picked up in a test. It's not unusual for people to find out during fertility testing when trying to have a child.

When you factor in both that and how people with a particular gender identity will have various combinations of those sexual characteristics, it's not really as unambiguous as presented, especially in relation to gender.

This all distracts from the original issue of the discrimination women face in society and the kinds of behaviours they'll avoid when dating.

Don't get me wrong. There are many areas in need of improvement. Sexual harassment is a real problem. More encouragement for girls to get into science and math is needed. Certain stereotypes are unfair.

Maybe I will never understand because, I've only ever had the male perspective. Is still have to ask once more, what are the key issues of feminism, what are the solutions, and is society better off for it?

A natural consequence of the different experiences people have is that they'll miss things relating to experiences they don't have. It's why talking to each other about differing experiences and trying to understand each other is important. I find understanding the common ground or how different experiences can come from the same things helps with that. It's good to emphasize the similarities since that's how our empathy works and focusing too much on differences can impede that. See the start of my reply for the rest.

I hope this doesn't come off as sexist, but here I go anyway.

Having kids is obviously essential to the survival of our species. Women obviously give birth so there is no dodging that one. After that though, what do we do with our children? Are our children, and our future, really better off with all our kids in daycare? I'm not even suggesting that women have to be the ones to fulfill that role, but shouldn't at least one parent fulfill that role? This is a huge thing for me, I feel like so many societal problems can be linked straight back to kids growing up with out parents essentially. I bring this up, only because it ties in with the theme of, to what end? We seem so fixated on solving certain "problems" that we don't see the glaring other problems that we are creating. So much of the battle has been focused on workplace equality that, child rearing has fallen to the wayside as both sexes are competing for who can get the better career.

If a man has a functional uterus, he can give birth too. There are also plenty of women who can't or wouldn't be able to do so safely. Incidentally survival is about more than just propagation and as a social species we've developed societies that have plenty of things that people can contribute to for our collective prosperity aside from procreation.

You said it yourself that a woman doesn't have to fill that role. At the end of the day things that need to be done just need to be done and societal expectations on who gets it done and how don't matter. If a man wants to teach a kid how to sew or a woman how to play sports, then it doesn't matter that our society expects the reverse as they don't need to be tied to a particular gender.

Throw in non-nuclear families and you have people outside the biological parents taking up various parental tasks too.

Daycare allows kids to socialize with their peers, which is an important part of their development. Parents also can't leave their children unattended and daycare has specific hours. It's mostly a place for your kids to socialize for the time between the end of school and when their parents are done with their work hours, which is usually around 1-3 hours. They're not actually raising the kids so much as babysiting them and providing an enriching environment. We live in a society where work hours aren't necessarily going to allow you to be there as soon as your kids are done from school.

The existence of other problems even larger ones, doesn't mean the other problem should be ignored. That's the fallacy of relative privation. A relevant societal problem would be inadequate education. I hear a lot of Americans complain about that one and it's a pressing issue given how much impact education has on your life.

Just as men and women solve problems in different ways, I find it hard to believe that men and women can raise a child, independently, in exactly the same way, and achieve the same result. Studies have already found that kids who grow up with one parent of either sex, tend to turn out quite differently. Is either sex better equipped to take on the day to day responsibilities of child care? I have no idea. I think its safe to say that a balance of both parents is needed. If though, we subscribe to the idea that at least one parent should be actively present in the upbringing of a child, which one should it be? In infancy, obviously because of breast feeding, its only logical to say it should be women. After that stage though, we would only be relying on an ingrained prejudice, that tells us it should be women who take care of the kids.

It is something to think about and consider, and in my opinion much more important of a problem to solve, than who gets a bigger pay raise.

Different parenting setups can still get the job done. Something to remember is that single parents are going to be under additional stress from having no spouse to see to their child's needs when they're working, or to provide additional income. With two working parents you're less likely to need to work as many hours to afford stuff or will have a better time saving up funds for later use. You also have more time between each other to dedicate to your kid. Society isn't really structured in a way that favours raising a child on your own so a lot of the difference is going to come from there.

Ideally the couple would find a way to balance the time spent with their child so they'd both be present as much as possible. Having a relative help with parenting can help too, especially in living situations where income or general living conditions are making things difficult.

Wow this thing went into hyper drive real fast.

Happy New years everyone.

This gender fluidity crap is starting to be a thing in the US as well.

I watched a documentary a couple months ago about a family, with a little boy about 4 who was apparently trans-gendered. Apparently when the kid was a toddler he grabbed a doll or two to play with, and that was a sign that he felt like he was a girl. So his parents started buying him dresses and the like and now he goes to school and gets bullied. They originally name him Michael but now he wants people to call him Michelle.

You're definitely oversimplifying. While favouring dolls is a potential sign of the kid being transgender there's more to it than that. Try hearing what trans people have to say about how they came to realize they were trans.

The whole thing is a crock full of fallacies like Vangeloski said.

If you haven't read my above reply to Vangelovski by the time you read this then I recommend you do.

If everything around us is just gender biased on not gender defining then why did the parents think playing with dolls was an indication that the boy wanted to be a girl?

Because there was definitely more to it than that and the parents have the advantage of actually being there with the full context rather than having it filtered through a news story. If a kid voices desire to play with dolls in the context of considering themselves female, then it's not really about the dolls.

Society also pressures trans people to conform to the image of their gender in order to be accepted as "real" men/women.

The kid wasn't old enough to understand gender roles, so if playing with dolls is not just for girls (fluid) then why did they automatically assume he wants to be a girl? If boys can wear dresses too then why did they change his name to a female name? Why did they start calling him a she? So instead of just telling the kid, dolls are for girls, they told him hes a girl, bought him girls clothes, and changed his name? WTF? Now the poor kid is confused as ever, he is going to get tormented his entire adolescent life, all because the yuppy parents believed in "Fluid" but technically not fluid gender identities.

You underestimate how early on children are capable of voicing their gender identity, though they're not necessarily be able to describe it in conventional ways. I'm also reasonably sure you're either misrepresenting the example or overlooking the ones where kids outright state that they're a boy or a girl regardless of what others say.

There was a time when someone sought to prove that someone's gender identity was the result of how they were raised. He found a family who'd just had twins where one of them had his penis burned off in a botched circumcision and convinced them to raise him as a girl. Despite the kid clearly being unhappy with being forced to act like a girl, the doctor lied about it being a success. In the end he found out, opted to live as a man, the doctor wasn't held accountable for any of it but they did get to sue the hospital for the botched circumcision. If the kid is a boy, calling him a girl and putting him in dresses isn't going to change that, so that kid was entirely happy being a girl.

Discrimination doesn't justify preventing trans people from expressing their gender identities.

On top of that why is it overwhelmingly boys who are the center of this mess? This touches on what RTG is getting at, that there is a systematic attack on men, now young boys are the targets because children are easier to manipulate.

People were complaining about their difficulties dating Macedonian women. In examining what people were concerned with when voicing their complaints, I pointed out that:

1. The complaints seem to stem from concerns that most Macedonians are dating non-Macedonians, which is something that would need to be addressed in the community in general.

2. We don't actually have statistics to verify varying experiences on the ratio of who does what more often, so there's no means of verifying that the subjective, mostly male perspective on this forum is an accurate representation of the problem within the Macedonian community as a whole. This ties into the above about why this should be about Macedonians dating non-Macedonians/Macedonians not being able to find other Macedonians to date.

3. The core concern is about keeping the Macedonian ethnic and cultural identity alive, so advice regarding this is relevant.

4. That globalization and living in multi ethnic and multi cultural communities makes marrying out of your ethnic group and everyone eventually having multi ethnic background a statistical inevitability, pointing out that this happens in other ethnic groups as well. Macedonians who date non-Macedonians don't necessarily do it out of any desire to avoid their own community or culture, so blanket statements of entitlement aren't helpful. I also pointed out that adapting to this by welcoming in-laws to learn and participate in Macedonian culture and making sure that your children value their Macedonian heritage is a way to address this. Don't consider them any less Macedonian for having mixed parentage. That's not a viable approach if you want to preserve the Macedonian identity.

5. Taking the face-value complaint of Macedonian women specifically, I pointed out that respecting them as equals was key to a healthy relationship and that some of the comments made are red flags women tend to avoid in a potential partner. This is what you've all been trying to respond to with "but men get abused too/it's not always about women." You made a thread complaining about why Macedonian women don't want to date you and one of the causes I identified were patronizing remarks and assumptions made about them and how they tie back to the things women avoid due to their ties to discriminatory behaviour.

The problems with those comments and how they relate to women's unwillingness to date someone who treats them that way needed to be addressed. Pointing out the discrimination women face and the way men are conditioned to perpetuate them isn't an attack on men but rather the misogyny inherent in how people are socialized in society and the need to acknowledge and address the biases involved. If you respond to how discrimination towards women relates to the behaviours they avoid in men with complaints about how discrimination affects everyone and how targeted you feel by the topic, then you're both missing the point and making a red herring argument. I even addressed the tendency for this kind of thing is a conditioned response rooted in the very same bias being addressed and how people aren't always consciously aware that they're perpetuating that kind of thing. If you can't have a frank discussion about this then you have no right to complain about women not wanting a partner who doesn't acknowledge the biases they have from a society that inherently views her as inferior.

And for the record, I've also included general advice on the basics of a healthy relationship and emphasized collaboration and communication, acknowledging the mutual aspect of this and that men within a relationship have just as much right to this as women and that people involved in a relationship need to contribute to it as equals. You have the most control over your own actions so you have an obligation to ensure that you put as much into it as your partner does.

Comparing separate but equal genders to racial segregation is absurd.

Appeal to absurdity. Just because you think it's absurd doesn't mean that it is and this fails to present a valid argument. I already explained how separate but equal is exactly what segregation is. The word segregation is synonymous with separation.

It's only in the post after that I referenced racial segregation and that was in the context of examples of how segregation tends to be born of discrimination as well as what popularized that specific term. Historical precedence makes it clear that while they justify the separation while insisting that they'll be treated equally anyway, in practice it fails to be the case because the motive behind that separation was discriminatory.

As such, the separation of men and women, combined with the discrimination based on that separation is indeed comparable to racial segregation. Both are marginalized groups who've been mistreated in those ways. Women have historically been segregated from men in that only men could hold jobs, own property, etc. This was justified on the grounds of the "roles" they were assigned in society. Both demographics have overlap in the problems they continue to face due to the the mentalities behind that discrimination still being present in society.

Also Starling you never answer my post which addressed many of the topics that you got into with other members afterwards.

I touched on hiring and pay of women, the home situation, and a few points on biology and psychology.

I was actually in the middle of working on a reply to that when you made this one. I probably would've finished yesterday had I not had another post to reply to. I've been having issues with the forum not flagging certain posts I didn't see as new so when I went to look at the first unread post it must've skipped over it. Another thing to remember is that I'm talking to like 5 different people at once, most of which are lengthy posts. I only have so much time to spare for this so expect delays or some missed details. Working on posts this long takes a while.

Abridged version on those specific points is that sex and gender are not the same and that it doesn't justify confining genders to specific societal roles based on preconceptions on gender or what sexual characteristics they're primarily associated with.

Finally, capitalism is a flawed system, so is democracy, but the alternatives are many times worse. Together they are by far the best systems that have been implemented in society to date. They need vigilance and upkeep to stay strong but I certainly wouldn't give them up for? Communism? All the shit holes left in the world are either still communist, or were previously.

I'm going to have to disagree. The current problem with democracy is that while it's called democracy, that system is meant to allow everyone to have equal say through voting. If something prevents it from doing that then the problem needs to be addressed so it'll function properly. When people noticed that holding votes publicly could lead to people being intimidated or bandwagoned into voting for someone they wouldn't have, they addressed it by creating a system where votes were made anonymously. The thing is, there are still anti-democratic systems like the electoral college or all the ways people try to hinder marginalized groups from voting. In the US you need to register, lack a standardized ID every citizen can use for voting and have little to no accommodations and protections against things various forms of vote suppression. Ways to address this would be to provide some form of citizenship ID, abolish the electoral college and pass a bill about protection of voting rights. Basically it's the application of democracy that's the problem, not democracy as a concept. Right now a number of democracies function more like oligarchies, where a small group of people hold most of the power. Incidentally, the "birthplace" of democracy as people at times call the city-states were oligarchies rather than true democracies. Can't have that with a 60% slave population. Rome likewise mostly functioned as an oligarchy.

Capitalism is a system that prioritizes privatization of organizations and the pursuit of profit. In the interest of profit, corporations will do everything legally available to them and sometimes not to cut corners and exploit people for money. They also strive to remove regulations that inconvenience them by protecting consumers, as seen with their part in the repealing of net neutrality, how their exploitation of consumers is why net neutrality was put in place to begin with and how most of them have violated it while it was in place.

They're also the people supporting things like those tax cuts to the rich and just generally screwing over the rest of the population. Some have lobbied against the ability for people in certain professions to form unions, which exist to protect those workers against being exploited and denied fair pay or sustainable working conditions.

They're the ones who do everything they can to pay people as little as possible and to charge as much as they can to make a profit. This has led to jobs whose services are demanded by society but fail to offer enough pay and work benefits to live off of. They also have a habit of choking out competition by making smaller, local businesses incapable of competing with large franchises that offer a broad range of services. Wallmart in particular is known for these things.

Capitalism is why we have sweat shops and banana republics. Aggressive western marketing in other countries has been known to collapse their economies, cripple local industries and leave them dependent on foreign capital. Capitalism is also why a number of crops are only sold sterile so farmers have to buy more seeds even though entire varieties of plants have nearly gone extinct from the practice. The emphasis on profit over all else has prevented adequate measures of preserving the environment from being put in place before we got to the point we're at now, where a lot of the damage is irreversible and further exploitation will leave entire regions completely uninhabitable.

People are having a harder and harder time affording basic things because the money flows up but not back down to them. Since they don't magically generate more money, leaving that as it is is eventually going to reach a critical point where too many people will be unable to afford anything and the economy will collapse.

Ways to fix this is to tax people proportionately to how much money they have. Rich people can pay more in taxes, especially since they own so much stuff that's generating profit for them it would barely make a dent in all the money they'll never actually spend in their lifetime. That money can then be invested in services like better education, free healthcare and so on so you don't have to deal with stuff like entire generations crippled by student loan debts and people with life threatening injuries trying to walk themselves to the hospital because they're barely going to be able to afford the medical expenses without having to worry about the ambulance.

Capitalism just isn't sustainable and is the root cause of a lot of societal problems. Getting taxed to starvation has historically been one of the main motives to a lot of rebellions and revolutions. The exploitation of the general population in the broader sense encompasses most of the rest.

[Risto the Great]

I enjoy your detailed responses. Thanks for your persistence Starling.

If we were having a general discussion about the incidence of abuse in relationships, then pointing out that women are among the people who do such things would be relevant. However, you're responding to issues specifically concerning discrimination against women, so that's actually a red herring argument. I wholeheartedly agree that there are men who are victims of abuse, that women can and do perpetuate such abuse and that services should be available to address that. While not the majority demographic, any abuse is still too much and everyone deserves to have services available for that. Equal rights would mean addressing both male and female abuse and discussing issues specifically concerning one doesn't take away from the other.

I am not entirely sure it would be a red herring argument when I replied to your statement of the following:

I've seen a lot of unhealthy relationships where the husband would pretty much demand his way and everyone else just had to deal with it. He'd then claim it was a mutually agreed decision when he didn't really let them go against it. A lot of women have to deal with stuff like that and yet still manage to be spirited.

Is it really a red herring when providing examples of men receiving similar abuse? Does it not help equalise some of the single sided discussions here that portray women as the sole victims? Anyway, we both agree that men would deserve rights in these instances also. Excellent.

While we are on it though, men do tend to suicide at an alarmingly high rate as compared to women. And let's not forget that men do not readily communicate how much abuse they receive for the following reasons:

Male victims of family violence and abuse - like women - often face many barriers to disclosing their abuse:

They are likely to be told that there must be something they did to provoke the perpetrator’s abuse.
They can suffer shame, embarrassment and the social stigma of not being able to protect themselves.
They can fear that if they disclose the abuse there will be nowhere for them and their children to escape to.
In cases of intimate partner violence, they can fear that if they disclose the abuse or end the relationship, their partner might become more abusive and/or take the children.
They can feel uncertain about where to seek help, or how to seek help
Services are less likely to ask whether a man is a victim of family violence, and when they do ask, they are less likely to believe him (indeed many health departments have mandatory domestic violence screening for young women, but no such screening for young men).
Male victims can be falsely arrested and removed from their homes because of the assumption that because they are male, they must be a perpetrator and not a victim. When this happens, children can be left unprotected from the perpetrator of the violence, leading many men to suffer the abuse in silence in an attempt to protect their children.
Because of these barriers, men are much less likely to report being a victim of family violence than are women (and women also frequently don’t report violence against them).

So, perhaps all statistics about domestic violence should contain a very important proviso about MEN not being honest about the abuse they suffer at the hands of women and therefore under-represented in the statistics. I am sure you would agree in the interest of equity.

Anyway, this was about domestic violence and the following article provides some excellent information on the matter:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/domestic-violence-data-shows-women-are-not-the-only-victims/news-story/2749c4517a57c33aca8bc2da9a40e2f9?nk=c907bb6267c9cb6cd0d75c91a746fecc-1515040284

Eva Solberg is a Swedish politician, a proud feminist who holds an important post as chairwoman of the party Moderate Women. Last year she was presented with her government’s latest strategy for combating domestic violence. Like similar reports across the world, this strategy assumes the only way to tackle domestic violence is through teaching misogynist men (and boys) to behave themselves.

The Swedish politician spat the dummy. Writing on the news site Nyheter24, Solberg took issue with her government’s “tired gendered analysis”, which argued that eradicating sexism was the solution to the problem of domestic violence. She explained her reasoning: “We know through extensive practice and experience that attempts to solve the issue through this kind of analysis have failed. And they failed precisely because violence is not and never has been a gender issue.”

Solberg challenged the government report’s assumption that there was a guilty sex and an innocent one. “Thanks to extensive research in the field, both at the national and international level, we now know with great certainty that this breakdown by sex is simply not true.”

She made reference to the world’s largest research database on intimate partner violence, the Partner Abuse State of Knowledge project, which summarises more than 1700 scientific papers on the topic.

She concluded that her government’s report was based on misinformation about family violence and that, contrary to the report’s one-sided view of men as the only perpetrators, many children were experiencing a very different reality: “We must recognise the fact that domestic violence, in at least half of its occurrence, is carried out by female perpetrators.”

One of the key patterns that emerged from PASK, Solberg said, was that violence in the family was an inherited problem and children learned from watching the violence of both their parents. “To know this and then continue to ignore the damage done to the children who are today subjected to violence is a huge social betrayal,” she concluded. “The road to a solution for this social problem is hardly to stubbornly continue to feed the patient with more of the same medicine that has already been tried for decades.”

There’s a certain irony that this happened in Sweden, the utopia for gender equality and the last place you would expect misogyny to be blamed for a major social evil. But despite Scandinavian countries being world leaders in gender equality (as shown by the 2014 World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index), Nordic women experience the worst physical or sexual violence in the EU. Given this inconvenient truth it seems extraordinary that for decades the gendered analysis of domestic violence has retained its grip on Sweden — as it has in other Western countries, including Australia.

No one would deny that it was a great achievement to have men’s violence against women fully acknowledged and to take critical steps to protect vulnerable women and ensure their safety.

But it has been shocking to watch this morph into a worldwide domestic violence industry determined to ignore evidence showing the complexities of violence in the home and avoid prevention strategies that would tackle the real risk factors underpinning this vital social issue.

Here, too, we are witnessing Solberg’s “huge social betrayal” by denying the reality of the violence being witnessed by many Australian children.

Just look at the bizarre $30 million television campaign the federal government ran a few months ago, which started with a little boy slamming a door in a little girl’s face. A series of vignettes followed, all about innocent females cowering from nasty males.

The whole thing is based on the erroneous notion that domestic violence is caused by disrespect for women, precisely the type of “tired gender analysis” that Solberg has so thoroughly discredited.

Yet our government spent at least $700,000 in funding for research and production of this campaign — just one example of the shocking misuse of the hundreds of millions of dollars that Malcolm Turnbull boasts our government is spending on domestic violence.

Our key organisations all sing from the same songbook, regularly distorting statistics to present only one part of this complex story.

There is a history of this in Australia. “Up to one quarter of young people in Australia have witnessed an incident of physical or domestic violence against their mother or stepmother,” Adam Graycar, a former director of the Australian Institute of Criminology, wrote in an introduction to a 2001 paper, Young Australians and Domestic Violence, a brief overview of the much larger Young People and Domestic Violence study.

Somehow Graycar failed to mention that while 23 per cent of young people were aware of domestic violence against their mothers or stepmothers, an almost identical proportion (22 per cent) of young people were aware of domestic violence against their fathers or stepfathers by their mothers or stepmothers — as shown in the same study.

This type of omission is everywhere today, with most of our bureaucracies downplaying statistics that demonstrate the role of women in family violence and beating up evidence of male aggression.

How often have we been told we face an epidemic of domestic violence? It’s simply not true. Most Australian women are lucky enough to live in a peaceful society where the men in their lives treat them well.

The official data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows violence against women has decreased across the 20-year period it has been studied, with the proportion of adult women experiencing physical violence from their male partner in the preceding year down from 2.6 per cent in 1996 to 0.8 per cent in 2012. (Violence from ex-partners dropped from 3.3 per cent to 0.7 per cent.)

“There’s no evidence that we’re in the middle of an epidemic of domestic violence,” says Don Weatherburn, the respected director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, confirming that these figures from national surveys carried out by the ABS provide the best data on domestic violence in the country.

He adds that in NSW “serious forms of domestic assault, such as assault inflicting grievous bodily harm, have actually come down by 11 per cent over the last 10 years”.

The most recent statistics from the ABS Personal Safety Survey show 1.06 per cent of women are physically assaulted by their partner or ex-partner each year in Australia. This figure is derived from the 2012 PSS and published in its Horizons report by Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety, available at http://bit.ly/1ZYSyEj. The rate is obtained by dividing cell B9 in Table 19 (93,400) by the total female residential population aged 18 and older (8,735,400).

One in 100 women experiencing this physical violence from their partners is obviously a matter of great concern. But this percentage is very different from the usual figures being trotted out. You’ll never find the figure of 1.06 per cent mentioned by any of the domestic violence organisations in this country. Their goal is to fuel the flames, to promote an alarmist reaction with the hope of attracting ever greater funding for the cause.

What we hear from them is that one in three women are victims of violence. But that’s utterly misleading because it doesn’t just refer to domestic violence. These statistics are also taken from the Personal Safety Survey but refer to the proportion of adult women who have experienced any type of physical violence at all (or threat of violence.) So we’re not just talking about violence by a partner or violence in the home but any aggressive incident, even involving a perfect stranger — such as an altercation with an aggressive shopping trolley driver or an incident of road rage.

That’s partly how the figure inflates to one in three, but it also doesn’t even refer to what’s happening now because these figures include lifetime incidents for adult women — so with our 70-year-olds the violence could have taken place more than 50 years ago. And the equivalent figure for men is worse — one in two.

As for the most horrific crimes, where domestic violence ends in homicide, we are constantly told that domestic violence kills one woman every week. That’s roughly true.

According to AIC figures, one woman is killed by an intimate partner or ex-partner every nine days. One man is killed by his partner about every 30 days. So it is important to acknowledge that male violence is likelier to result in injury or death than female violence towards a partner.

The fact remains that almost a quarter (23.1 per cent) of victims of intimate partner homicide are male — and we hardly ever hear about these deaths.

It is not serving our society well to downplay the fact female violence can also be lethal, towards men and towards children: women account for more than half of all murders of children (52 per cent).

These are all still alarming statistics but here, too, there is good news. Domestic homicides are *de*creasing. The number of victims of intimate partner homicide drop*ped by almost a third (28 per cent) between 1989-90 and 2010-12, according to data supplied by the AIC (http://bit.ly/2bxn1GO).

Chris Lloyd is one of a growing number of Australian academics concerned at the misrepresentation of domestic violence statistics in this country. An expert in statistics and data management at the Melbourne Business School, Lloyd confirms our best source of data, the ABS’s Personal Safety Survey, clearly demonstrates domestic violence is decreasing.

He, too, says it’s wrong to suggest there’s an epidemic of domestic violence in this country. “Many of the quoted statistics around domestic violence are exaggerated or incorrect,” says Lloyd. “Contrary to popular belief and commentary, rates of intimate partner violence are not increasing.” He adds that while he understands the emotional reaction people have to this crime, “emotion is no basis for public policy”.

He’s concerned that Australian media so often publishes misinformation — such as a recent editorial in The Age that repeated the falsehood that domestic violence was the leading cause of death or illness for adult women in Victoria.

As I explained in my Inquirer article “Silent victims” last year (http://bit.ly/29CV5zD), it doesn’t even make the list of the top 10 such causes. The Age ignored Lloyd’s efforts to correct its mistake, ditto his concern about erroneous media reports that inflated domestic violence figures by using police crime statistics — a notoriously unreliable source.

As Weatherburn points out, it’s very difficult to determine whether swelling numbers of incidents reported to police reflects an increase in actual crime. “It may simply be a tribute to the excellent job that has been done to raise awareness of DV, encouraging women to report, and efforts to get the police to respond properly,” he points out.

Weatherburn believes that the slight (5.7 per cent) increase in reports of domestic assault in NSW during the past 10 years could be due to an increase in victims’ willingness to report domestic assault; he points to the 11 per cent drop across that time in serious forms of domestic assault, such as assault inflicting grievous bodily harm, as a more reliable picture of the trend in domestic violence.

Weatherburn adds that valid comparisons of state police figures on assault are impossible because each police force has a different approach to recording assault. But in many states the goalposts have also shifted.

The explosion in police records is due in part to recent expansions in the definition of family violence to include not just physical abuse but also threats of violence, psychological, emotional, economic and social abuse. Look at Western Australia, where this changed definition was introduced in 2004. That year West Australian police recorded 17,000 incidents of violence, but by 2012 this had almost tripled to 45,000.

Other states report similar trends because of these expanded definitions.

“If a woman turns up to a police station claiming her man has yelled at her, the chances are that she’ll end up with a police report and well on her way to obtaining an apprehended violence order, which puts her in a very powerful position,” says Augusto Zimmermann, a commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia, who explains that AVOs can be used to force men to leave their homes and deny them contact with their children.

Often men are caught in police proceedings and evicted from their homes by orders that are issued without any evidence of legal wrongdoing. “It is a frightening reality that here in Australia a perfectly innocent citizen stands to lose his home, his family, his reputation, as a result of unfounded allegations. This is happening to men every day (as a consequence) of domestic violence laws which fail to require the normal standards of proof and presumptions of innocence,” Zimmermann says, adding that he’s not talking about genuine cases of violent men who seriously abuse their wives and children but “law-abiding people who have lost their parental and property rights without the most basic requirements of the rule of law”.

The growing trend for AVOs to be used for tactical purposes in family law disputes is also pushing up police records of domestic violence. “Rather than being motivated by legitimate concerns about feeling safe, a woman can make an application to AVO simply because she was advised by lawyers to look for any reason to apply for such an order when facing a family law dispute,” says Zimmermann, who served on a recent government inquiry into legal issues and domestic violence.

A survey of NSW magistrates found 90 per cent agreed that AVOs were being used as a divorce tactic. Research by family law professor Patrick Parkinson and colleagues from the University of Sydney revealed that lawyers were suggesting that clients obtain AVOs, explaining to them that verbal and emotional abuse were enough to do the trick

The bottom line is that police reports tell us little and the ABS Personal Safety Survey remains our best source of data, showing the true picture of domestic violence. But there’s one more vital fact revealed by that survey that rarely surfaces: men account for one in three victims of partner violence.

You’ll never find this figure mentioned on Our Watch, one of our leading domestic violence organisations, annually attracting government grants of up to $2 million. In May, when Lucy Turnbull became an ambassador for Our Watch, she was welcomed by its chief executive, Mary Barry, who thanked the ambassadors for “engaging Australians to call out disrespect and violence towards women and advocating for gender equality”, which was “exactly what the evidence says is needed to end the epidemic”.

Our Watch staff spend their time writing policy documents and running conferences all firmly locked into the gender equity framework. The site’s facts-and-figures pages include lists of cherry-picked statistics about violence against women but male victims are dismissed by simply stating that the “overwhelming majority of acts of domestic violence are perpetrated by men against women”.

There’s an interesting parallel here. As it happens, this one-in-three ratio is similar to the proportions of suicides among men and women. Among males, 2.8 per cent of all deaths in 2014 were attributed to suicide, while the rate for females was 0.9 per cent. Imagine the public outcry if the smaller number of female suicides were used to justify committing the entire suicide prevention budget to men. So why is it that all our government organisations are getting away with doing just that with the hundreds of millions being spent on domestic violence?

According to one of Australia’s leading experts on couple relationships, Kim Halford, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Queensland, most family violence does not fit the picture most of us have when we imagine domestic violence — a violent man severely beating up his partner to control her. Such violence makes up less than 1 per cent of family *violence.

Most family violence is two-way aggression, with international research showing about a third of couples have a go at each other — pushing, slapping, shoving or worse. Given the shame and stigma associated with being a male victim of family violence it is not surprising that men downplay these experiences in victim surveys such as Australia’s Personal Safety Survey. It’s only when men and women are asked about perpetrating violence that the two-way violence emerges, with women readily admitting to researchers that they are very actively involved and often instigate this type of “couple violence”.

“Thirty years of international research consistently shows that women and men are violent towards each other at about the same rate,” Halford tells Inquirer.

As one example, two major meta-analysis studies conducted by psychology professor John Archer from Britain’s University of Central Lancashire in 2000 and 2002 found that women were likelier than men to report acts such as pushing, slapping or throwing something at their partner. Archer pointed out that women were likelier to be injured as a result of the couple violence, although there was still a substantial minority of injured male victims.

This two-way violence wasn’t what most researchers expected to find, admits a leading researcher in this area, Terrie Moffitt from Duke University in the US. “We asked the girls questions like, ‘Have you hit your partner?’ ‘Have you thrown your partner across the room?’ ‘Have you used a knife on your partner?’ I thought we were wasting our time asking these questions but they said yes, and they said yes in just the same numbers as the boys did.” Moffitt’s work with young people was part of the world-*renowned Dunedin longitudinal study back in the 1990s that *recently featured on the SBS series Predict My Future (http://bit.ly/29NEDwQ).

It is telling that Australia has not conducted any of the large-scale surveys focusing on perpetrating violence likely to reveal the two-way pattern shown elsewhere. But gender symmetry did emerge in violence studies published in 2010-11 by Halford that focused on couples at the start of their relationships, newlywed couples and couples expecting a child together. Even with these early relationships, about a quarter of the women admit they have been violent towards their partners — just as many as the men.

Halford suggests that perhaps three-quarters of a million children every year in Australia are witnessing both parents engaged in domestic violence. Only small numbers see the severe violence we hear so much about, what the feminists call “intimate terrorism”, where a perpetrator uses violence in combination with a variety of other coercive tactics to take control over their partner, but as Halford points out, even less severe couple violence is not trivial.

“Children witnessing any form of family violence, including couple violence, suffer high rates of mental health problems and the children are more likely to be violent themselves. Couple violence is also a very strong predictor of relationship break-up, which has profound effects on adults and their children,” he says.

The 2001 Young People and Domestic Violence study mentioned earlier was based on national research involving 5000 young Australians aged 12 to 20. This found ample evidence that children were witnessing this two-way parental couple violence, with 14.4 per cent witnessing “couple violence”, 9 per cent witnessing male to female violence only and 7.8 per cent witnessing female to male violence only — which means about one in four young Australians have this detrimental start to their lives. The report found the most damage to children occurred when they witnessed both parents involved in violence.

It is often claimed that women hit only in self-defence, but Halford points out the evidence shows this is not true. “In fact, one of the strongest risk factors for a woman being hit by a male partner is her hitting that male partner. It’s absolutely critical that we tackle couple violence if we really want to stop this escalation into levels of violence which cause women serious injury,” he says. Of course, the impact on children is the other important reason to make couple violence a significant focus.

Naturally, none of this rates a mention in the section on “what drives violence against women” in the official government framework (http://bit.ly/2a3sVOQ) promoted by all our key domestic violence bodies. Nor is there any proper attention paid to other proven, evidence-based risk factors such as alcohol and drug abuse, poverty and mental illness.

The only officially sanctioned risk factor for domestic violence in this country is gender inequality. “Other factors interact with or reinforce gender inequality to contribute to increased frequency and severity of violence against women, but do not drive violence in and of themselves” is the only grudging acknowledgment in the framework that other factors may be at play.

At the recent hearings of Victoria’s Royal Commission into Family Violence, experts in alcohol abuse and mental illness spoke out about this blatant disregard of the 40 years of research that addresses these complexities. “It is simplistic and misleading to say that domestic violence is caused by patriarchal attitudes,” said James Ogloff, a world-renowned mental health expert.

“A sole focus on the gendered nature of family violence, which labels men as the perpetrators and women as the victims and which identifies gender inequity as the principal cause of family violence, is problematic on a number of levels,” said Peter Miller, principal research fellow and co-director of the violence prevention group at Deakin University.

Miller was involved in a comprehensive recent review of longitudinal studies involving pre*dictors of family violence that identified childhood experiences with abuse and violence, particularly in families with problem *alcohol use, as key predictors of adult involvement in domestic *violence. He has encountered obstruction in conducting and pub*lishing research into the role of drugs and alcohol in family *violence.

The evidence is there about the complexities of domestic violence, but on an official level no one is listening. The reason is simple. The deliberate distortion of this important social issue is all about feminists refusing to give up hard-won turf. Ogloff spelled this out to the royal commission when he explained that the Victorian family violence sector feared that “recognising other potential causes of violence could cause a shift in funding away from programs directed at gender inequity”.

Forty years ago an important feminist figure was invited to Australia to visit our newly established women’s refuges. Erin Pizzey was the founder of Britain’s first refuge, a woman praised around the world for her pioneering work helping women escape from violence. On the way to Australia Pizzey travelled to New Zealand, where she spoke out about her changing views. She had learned through dealing with violent women in her refuge that violence was not a gender issue and that it was important to tackle the complexities of violence to properly address the issue.

Pizzey quickly attracted the wrath of the women’s movement in Britain, attracting death threats that forced her for a time to leave the country. She tells Inquirer from London: “The feminists seized upon domestic violence as the cause they needed to attract more money and supporters at a time when the first flush of enthusiasm for their movement was starting to wane. Domestic violence was perfect for them — the just cause that no one dared challenge. It led to a worldwide million-dollar industry, a huge cash cow supporting legions of bureaucrats and policymakers.”

In Pizzey’s New Zealand press interviews she challenged the gender inequality view of violence, suggesting tackling violence in the home required dealing with the real roots of violence, such as intergenerational exposure to male and female aggression.

News travelled fast. By the time Pizzey was set to leave for the Australian leg of the trip she was persona non grata with the feminists running our refuges. Her visit to this country was cancelled.

That was 1976. Since then the gendered view of domestic violence has held sway, dissenters are silenced and evidence about the true issues underlying this complex issue is ignored. And the huge cash cow supporting our blinkered domestic violence industry becomes ever more bloated.

Bettina Arndt is a Sydney-based social commentator.

bettinaarndt.com.au

I love the smell of equality in the morning. Don't you?

Another good one is rape allegations. Here is the most recent one to hit the news:
Rape conviction overturned after deleted Facebook messages found as fears over evidence disclosure mount

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/rape-conviction-overturn-evidence-disclosure-facebook-messages-danny-kay-failure-met-police-a8124241.html

4 years in jail!!!
She lied and was believed entirely. Clever woman!!!
I hope she gets more than 4 years jail for this.

Not really. The stuff about discrimination against women spawned from explaining the biases against women that push them to avoid men showing signs of holding biases that keep them from being respected as equals. Treating women like some overcomplicated beings who strip you of the simplicity you were content with is another stereotype that was typically used to belittle them. Stuff like "the old ball and chain" to make having a wife seem like some chore to put up with rather than a genuinely fulfilling and pleasant relationship. Not exactly the recipe for a healthy relationship, so issues are to be expected when someone regards their spouse in such a way.

The whole "simple and uncomplicated things" part is kinda vague. I already brought up finding someone you can live with, hobbies, habits and all. You also have to understand that sometimes "simple and uncomplicated" simply isn't an option if it's referring to some necessary part of maintaining a healthy relationship. In that case it's more your unwillingness to do that necessary task than anything your spouse is doing. Mutual respect is a key component. If you feel that way about your spouse, then maybe you shouldn't be in a relationship. Just like you're free to leave a relationship you find unhealthy and unsatisfying, so are they. This also goes for refusing to enter a relationship you can tell lacks the kind of respect required to make it work.

Not sure how you managed to completely spin this one around. I was saying men in commercials are portrayed as simple and uncomplicated creatures of no real use other than for manual work (under the watchful eye of women).

Ad hominem arguments. Trans and intersex people aren't freaks and being different from what's considered the "default" doesn't warrant discrimination or exclusion from society. They have every right to be treated like any other human being. That kind of mentality is why they have to deal with grossly disproportionate homicide and suicide rates on top of getting assaulted, raped, murdered and discriminated against a lot.

That percentage is obviously over-exaggerated and ultimately meaningless. The world population is currently around 7.6 billion. 0.1% of that would still be 7 600 000. That's over 3 times the population of Macedonia.

They are a departure from normal. Freak was the word I used. Queer is word homosexuals have embraced in recent times. Perhaps "outside the bell curve" is better terminology. Must we change the width of all corrals if a cow is born with 2 heads?

Thailand also have Kathoey, which is also considered a third gender.

I have been to Thailand more times than I can even recall.I would say the Kathoey are mostly homosexual men who revert to being men after they are no longer attractive enough to sell their arses. Some feel they are women and really do come across as such. Most (sadly) don't live very long notwithstanding any of this and they live in arguably the most accepting culture in the world in relation to this issue. Clearly they are troubled deeply within themselves and I must assume society is not as much to blame as you suggest.

In Iran, beauty standards used to be such that men mostly had soft features and no beard while women often had thick, possibly joined eyebrows and at times facial hair. It could be incredibly difficult to identify them in depictions of that period.

Well, in the current period I am sure I have met an Iranian who has had facial hair growing from his facial hair. Things must have been very different back then.

You don't have to take hormones to be trans or nonbinary and the effects of such things are vastly overstated. You don't seem to have taken into consideration that they have their gender identity figured out before they even consider hormones and some either choose not to take them for various reasons or are denied the opportunity. Non binary people also sometimes take hormones despite not considering themselves male or female.

There was a time when gay men were forced to take estrogen and that didn't change that they were men.

How about you actually talk to trans people and take the time to familiarize yourself with what they have to deal with. They're human beings same as anyone else and you could very well meet one without knowing it. I met at least one.

I think the effects of taking hormones are amazing. Men grow tits and women get deep voices and lots of hair. It makes it easy to become fluid! I have talked to many trans people. One even wanted to show me her sex change operation. I declined. But I now know it costs about AUD$6000 to have a sex change in Thailand if I ever get the inclination. The things we learn.

How do you explain non binary people?

You mean Genderqueer? I don't know, maybe "outside the bell curve". I wouldn't hate on them or base mainstream political issues with them as my foremost thought either.

If that's a serious statement then maybe you should ask yourself why you need so many and what the money could've been used for.

I literally just expressed the need for moderation with stuff like that and you dismiss what I say as if it doesn't matter.

No big deal. My wife has many shoes. I usually make a profit when I sell any of my guitars. Whatever. I am not sure you should be so judgemental about "moderation" when so many other issues you adhere to remain fluid.

More like toxic masculinity. I've already gone at length about how harmful this kind of thing is to everyone, including men.

Even male homosexuals use terminology like "active" and "passive". It isn't toxic for men to think about it this way. I can understand why it might be for women.

Additionally matriarchal societies exist and macho men are capable of having their asses handed to them by women in a fight.

Back to that bell curve. I have seen some strong women in my life. But let's not kid ourselves about this please.

Maybe to you but plenty of people don't consider having sex to be as big a deal.

Unfortunately, most men are afflicted with this preponderance of sex related thoughts/deeds. It most likely has something to with the fundamental differences between men and women that you fluidly deny.

Because implying that equal rights is bad for a country's prosperity totally isn't sexist.

Are you being sarcastic here? I was stating a fact. Women are underpaid in China. If all the manufacturing firms over there started increasing the women's wages, then China would not be competitive and manufacturing would go elsewhere. Do you doubt it? Why? Perhaps it just makes you feel good to call out sexism at the drop of a dumpling. Personally, I don't like China's increasing economic grasp on the world and would much prefer other nations play catch up. So I am all for an increase in women's wages over there. Aren't I wonderful?

You still assume the existence of people who don't fit the conventional notion of "man" and "woman" doesn't illustrate said fluidity.

They do. Many of those "outside the bell curve" are often fluid.

You've made some comments that generally aren't particularly respectful of women and made discriminatory remarks about trans, non binary and intersex people simply for how they are.

You have made some comments that aren't particularly respectful of men and tar all of them (us) with pretty much the same brush. I hope you can embrace the other side of these discussions because I have provided clear evidence of how the modern world is actively ignoring men's perspectives on these issues.

I really enjoy this show if that helps:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssTZtRQmhxY

I might even start calling myself "them" if I can get a tax benefit.

[Vangelovski]

RtG, you're far too generous.

How someone (Starling, for example) can argue that complementary relationships are equal to segregation of the scale experienced by African Americans in the south up to the 1960s without even been slightly embarrassed is beyond me. I think only a dedicated Marxist could pull this off without feeling the subtle tug of intellectual dishonesty in the dark recesses of their mind.

If it were a business relationship where two partners equally owned the firm but brought different skills to the company it would be called a perfect match where each complements the other in the sense that they contribute knowledge and/or skills that the other lacks. But if the two got married its supposedly the equivalent of the husband shoving his wife's head down the toilet, whipping her back and sending her off to live in a separate, but parallel, existence where they are never to use the same facilities or visit the same establishments. This, according to the Neo-Marxist mind warp, is now what marriage is supposedly like. My only questions is, 'who the fuck are you idiots married to, the local Taliban chief?'