according to this quiz, which pretty clearly focuses on what some call "equity feminism."
The 5% that is counted against me was on the question, "Women should accept their bodies as they are. Women should not have to conform to wacky beauty ideals." I answered "not sure," because even setting aside health issues (women and men shouldn't accept unhealthy bodies if they can make them healthy) the fact is that men care about women's beauty, as best I can tell likely for biological reasons and not just social ones, and women ignore that at their peril.
Of course, by definition women shouldn't have to conform to wacky beauty ideals. And in a better world inhabited by people who are biologically and genetically different from humans women wouldn't have to conform to any beauty ideals.
In today's world, though, I don't think it's quite accurate to say that "Women should accept their bodies as they are." Some attempts to change one's body are likely counterproductive or on balance harmful. But others (whether dying graying hair, removing hair from certain places, using effective makeup under certain circumstances, mild dieting or exercise for esthetic reasons and not just health reasons, and so on) are probably wise ideas for many women who care about the things that many women understandably care about.
The quiz has some of the usual problems with such quizzes, for instance in the question "A woman should be able to marry and have kids with anyone she wants -- including another woman"; that's a measure of commitment to equal rights without regard to sexual orientation, which strikes me as pretty conceptually different from feminism. And of course calling this an "Are You a Feminist?" quiz deliberately obscures the fact that there are many different kinds of feminist. But as a measure of one's agreement with equity feminism, the quiz is probably fairly decent.
Separately, I want to add to what EV rightly says about the same-sex marriage question being a separate issue from pure gender issues. I think the same applies to the birth control question, since it adds the line about the morning-after pill. Whether people agree with this or not, there are sincere pro-lifers who believe that the morning-after pill amounts to very early abortion. And in general, being pro-life is not anti-feminist, NOW's howls nothwithstanding. The "Feminists for Life" angle is a legitimate position, and in my view that extends to the morning-after pill concerns. Again, you don't have to agree with the view to agree that it's not inherently part of equity feminism.
One can be reductive about it, since in the end doesn't all that humans do come down to "biology," or "sociobiology" if you and Edmund Wilson will? Who would dispute that few males are oblivious to a female's physical appearance, but I don't know about parsing that between "biologic reasons" and "social ones." (The so-called "trophy wife" is a "biologic" or "social" phenomenon?)
BTW, in the past when summarizing a patient's medical history, doctors would usually refer to them as "male" or "female." In more recent years, students have been taught not to "oject-ifying" other human beings in that way, and instead to refer to them as "men" and "women," "boys" and "girls," etc., reserving "male" and "female" for non-human life (e.g., it is the female mosquito which transmits malaria). I chose "male" and "female" above because we are not focusing here on individuals, but rather on gender differences.
Is there a male counterpart to "feminism," perhaps "masculinism"? If so, and we turned this question of how important is physical appearance to the opposite gender, what would women say about the importance of a man's appearance to them, and is it a "biologic" or "social" thing where they are concerned?
And to drift just a bit more OT, but not entirely...what about this week's Flight of the Concords (HBO) with that girl taking sexual advantage of passive Brett, telling him that it had to be then since it was her last night before deploying to Iraq as a Delta Force member? (How is this not completely OT - well the humor, and I did think it funny, was in the sexual role reversal.)
Men vs Women: vive la difference!
I think there are mens jobs, e.g. gay (male on male) porn star, or scientist. No woman can do that. So I strongly disagree there.
I strongly disagree that women should accept their bodies as they are. To quote Perry Cox from Scrubs:
"I hate my body. The minute you look in the mirror and like what you see, the battle [against being unfit] is lost."
Of course, this applies equally well to guys.
I have no opinion on gay marriage.
I don't think women (or men) should be encouraged to pursue education, since I think most education should be replaced by on-the-job training.
I answered "not sure" to the dating question, mostly because (in my experience) men who pay are the ones who are really interested. As much as my feminist ideals make me want to split the check, I realise that a man who does not want to pay is not going to stick around. (Prepares to get flamed.....)
The "women should accept their bodies as they are/not conform to wacky ideals" is a compound question. I believe the latter but not the former, being a health nut and all.
I concur with NotFeministEnough re: the morning after pill. There is a fundamental difference between preventing conception and preventing birth.
Fully agree. It's not even a feminism issue, it's just human nature. Men are judged by their looks as well, though not as much as women and that's unfair. But it's rather naive to think we will become so "enlightened" as to disregard all the preliminary input we get from other people by the way they look. Or that we can ignore our hardwired attraction to healthy bodies. "At their peril" is correct.
Also the inverse is harmful. Women participating in unhealthy diets and exercise regiments to achieve that ultra-thin, computer enhanced image on the magazine covers (Which by the way ladies, men do NOT find attractive).
Women need to be careful of this. You don't need anyone to tell you whether you are comfortable with the way you look or not. And that should be your only standard. The cosmetics and fashion industry thrives and invests a lot of money into making women feel unfit, but that's for another topic.
To some extent, a biological reason (or rather, standard of beauty) would be consistent across cultures and times, while social standards of beauty fluctuate. The classic reproductive trait that men really like is a waist-hip ratio of approximately 1:1.5, which also corresponds to high levels of fertility. (Nevertheless, I've never heard of men checking out women's hands to determine relative ring finger and index finger length.)
If a woman gives birth at age 40 to your kid, you better hope that she's healthy and vital after menopause to help mother said child. ;) Apparently, there is also a biological incentive for women to be alive to help raise the grandkids. It isn't enough, biologically, to give birth; you want those kids to survive and reproduce for generations to come. So I would presume that skin tone, muscle tone, and other indicia of health and good nutrition would make an older woman attractive to you.
There's several strains of thought/action that go by the name "masculism"/"masculinism". The three I know of don't agree with each other at all:
1, a direct opposition to feminism - probably men Faludi was writing about in Backlash, but I'd have to read that book to know.
2, basically the Mythopoetic movement crossed with the father's rights movement as far as I can tell.
3, essentially 2nd and 3rd wave feminism, but done by men who reject the feminist or pro-feminist label
And you see lots of accusations from people in group 3 that group 2 is functionally or ideologically equivalent to group 1, or that people claiming to be part of group 3 are really parts of group 2 or group 1, or you'll see people in group 2 claiming that group 3 isn't any different from group 2, or blah blah blah and so on.
also allows for other things like incest, child marraige, and polygamy.
I think some jobs, mainly ones that require intensive physical labor and violence, should be given to men first.
"Women should accept their bodies as they are. Women should not have to conform to wacky beauty ideals." By wacky beauty ideas are we talking about the wacky idea wearing a live squirell around your neck (no women should not have to do that) or the wacky idea that you should shower regularly (yes they should).
Like on most of these quizzes, these questions are very poorly phrased. I scored a 59%, but I do not consider myself a feminist. The less serious ones are often better phrased.
Remind me again how a woman can have kids with another woman, without the participation (even if remote) of a man? Should she be able to do this even without a willing and knowing sperm donor? Of course, the fact that men are willing to sell their sperm knowingly (for procreation) for a pittance, or donate it (willingly, if unknowingly for that purpose) speaks volumes about how far men have to go.
I disagreed on gay marriage and body types.
I replied "not sure" to easy access to all types of contraception because it's too vague. Does this include abortion? School girls?
But I strongly agreed to women CEOs and highly educated, because this is a long-time battle of mine. Overachieving women are a blessing for society and we need more of them.
Also, I seriously doubt anyone would vote against any candidate of any color with whom they agreed politically because she's a woman, or a race or religion.
Probably a better question than the one about women accepting their bodies as they are would be whether women should be held to different standards of beauty than should men. If women are expected to devote an hour every day to keeping themselves pretty, while men can use that time on work, education, intellectual improvement, etc., it's hard to see them competing equally at the highest levels. My impression is that heavy women have a much harder time of it than do heavy men.
Take firefighting. They have to carry lots of very heavy equipment, wear very heavy protective clothing, and most importantly, are sometimes called on to carry unconscious victims out of a burning building. A victim who may well be a 200lb man.
Now, I am sure there are a handful of women who can carry a 200lb man out of a burning building. But not very many. And is it worth having separate showers, separate bunkrooms, and separate bathrooms in firehouses for the 1 or 2% of women who can do the job as well as a physically-fit man? No, in my opinion.
So I guess am a neanderthal.
If you are a neanderthal than you are almost certainly strong enough to be a firefighter.
More seriously, the problem is more severe than having to have unisex rest rooms at fire stations. The problem is that in practice the strength you must demonstrate to obtain such a job is decreased to less than the job requirements in order to hire the required number of women.
I have an anecdote I found a bit upsetting. Firefighters don't just hang around the station waiting for the next fire. They spend a decent amount of time practicing the physical craft. On one of my lunchtime runs I saw one of these practices. They took turns where the task was to hook a hydrant to the inlet of a pumper, hook one end of a second 100' hose to the outlet of that pumper, and drag the other end to a mark they had made on the sidewalk and spray water into a convenient river. The runs were timed. I tend to stop and watch unusual things that I see on my rounds, so I watched for a while.
When an average-looking women's turn came she needed -- and received -- help. I didn't drill down because I didn't have a reasonable expectation of an honest answer, but I was not pleased. They probably needed to write a decent number in their little training log.
I strongly agree that a question on the draft should have been included in this quiz to disambiguate privilege feninism from equality feminism. In the seventies, when the Equal Rights Amendment was being debated in the various states, womens' rights organizations answered the question "If we pass the Equal Rights Amendment, will women be drafted?" with "If women had more say in the way the country is run there won't be a draft.". Yeah, right. Pearl Harbor occasionally gets bombed. This struck me as fundamentally dishonest at the time. I believe that if they had answered "You bet your [army] boots they will be, if there is a draft for men.", the amendment would have been ratified.
-dk
However, the questions were terrible. I was unsure whether I would vote for a female candidate who shared my politics because it is possible that two female candidates who share my politics are running or that an incumbent I have previously voted for is the other candidate or that the other candidate has more experience or that the female is a failed incumbent I do not wish to vote for again.
I also did not like much of the "rights talk" of the questions. I do not think women have an abstract right to be a CEO. No one has a right to be a CEO. That is not a right. But I answered this "strongly agree" in any event, because I don't support discrimination, which is what I took to be the point of the question.
There were also undefined terms. Equal encouragement to obtain education? What is "education"? Is this question getting at denying women in the Third World education and making them work in the fields or is it aimed at some pointless numerical equality, e.g., "We need more women with doctoral degrees in every field for no apparent reason and the government must pay for it." I answered strongly agree because I assumed the questioner was reasonable and referred to basic education for all women on the globe. But that's a huge assumption, given the bias and indeterminacy of the questions.
I gave a number of "Not sure" answers. It was due to the wording of the questions.
I disagreed as to birth control. I don't think any technology that alters biology or reproduction is such a simple ethical matter as to just say any person has an absolute right to take drugs or whatever. That has less to do with gender politics than it does with bioethics in general. Yet it was counted on the "gender politics" scale.
I strongly disagreed as to the gay marriage question, because it's not really a gay marriage question. It's a crazy question that, as others pointed out, permits a tyrant to command thousands of helpless others to bear her children at the snap of her fingers. This question, like others in the quiz, needs to be broken down into many subsidiary questions that are better worded and define their terms.
I also think that
1. jurors don't give women the death penalty enough;
2. that if a draft is ever instituted again women should be the only ones drafted to remedy the historical inequity of male-only drafts; and
3. that female-only colleges should be abolished;
Don't underestimate the true-believers out there willing to take extreme measures against those they see no reason to tolerate. Look what trouble Salman Rushdie bought himself with a work of fiction that was no blockbuster.
As for "biologic reasons" (more than one, that is attractiveness to potential fathers of their children?) vs "social ones," I think EV's use of these terms is sufficiently ambiguous that different understandings are possible.
Reubens for one does not seem to have regarded that "waist-hip ratio of approximately 1:1.5" as the feminine ideal. (Do you think he favored ectomorphs for "fun," but for marriage and having children he would have gone for a mesomorph, or even an endomorph? I suppose without a picture of his wife, we don't know.) Perhaps Venus de Milo approximates that 1:1.5 feminine ideal, but does the rather zaftig Venus of Willendorf, a fertility figure, come in at anything like 1:1.5? (And if 1:1.5 is biologically optimal as well as appealing to males, why the folk wisdom "big hips, strong, bear many children and plow many fields"?)
[theo, no VA law school is as much as 650 miles south of Boston, according to Google and Mapquest.]
When my kids were in elementary school, they had third and fifth grade science texts from the same series. My kids had a difficult time on the tests, so I took them. The tests were supplied with the books and were extremely poorly done. I told a teacher that the more you knew the material, the tougher it was to answer the question.
"I'd noticed that the better students were struggling," she said with a bright smile and the obvious, adamantine purpose of doing nothing about it.
I've been suspicious of "tests" since then, although possibly I began to wonder when studying psychology.
And so I didn't answer any of the questions. I know the supposed advantage of the forced-choice question, but it's overrated.
This was nonsense.
As for your child's teacher, it would appear that she was determinedly egalitarian.
Let's look at history. There have been few groups in American history as discriminated against as blacks. They were brought to America unwillingly, chained, and enslaved. It took a bloody war to free them. They were denied the vote until after the war was settled.
Women, even at this point, still didn't have the vote. What does that say about white men's attitudes when they gave the vote to black men before white women? (Perhaps black men thougt the same way as white men, too!)
Women had to wait another 60 years or so for the right to vote. Today, I hardly think there is any man who thinks women should not have the right to vote. So any man today is far more a feminist than most any man was 100 years ago.
Up to 72 hours after birth in most states, the mother can leave the child at a local fire station or hospital with no legal consequences what-so-ever. Laws that allow this are facially gender-neutral, but it is an unavoidable fact that the mother ends up with physical posession of the baby at birth, so she's the only one who can do this.
If the mother chooses to keep the baby, however, the father can be assessed 17%-20% of his income as child support until the child reaches 18 or graduates from high school [college, in some states]. The mother can choose to wait to notify the father. That has the disadvantage that she loses some years of child support [which cannot be assessed retroactively], but it has the advantage that the father has become a stranger to this toddler and courts are unlikely to require that the mother offer the father any meaningful fatherhood, thus keeping the child support maximal and avoiding unwanted entanglements.
I propose that the mother be able to deliver the father formal notice of the child at a time of her choosing, any time from the time pregnancy is confirmed until the child reaches maturity. Then the father has the same 72 hours [or whatever -- some jurisdictions allow 30 days] as the mother has to disengage from the child. If he chooses not to, it's his child, with all the rights and responsibilities that implies. If he instead chooses to file a certificate of disengagement then he has neither rights nor responsibilities; this is the moral equivalent for men of having delivered the baby anonymously to a hospital. [When a couple is married and living together, perhaps notice is considered to be delivered when the pregnancy is confirmed.]
Mothers have incentives to deliver notice early. She gets to find out whether the father will engage with the baby when there's still time to either have an abortion or leave the baby at the hospital if he chooses not to. Furthermore, the father is a lot more likely to step into a newborn's life than he is to support a 6-year-old whom he's never met and with whom he's unlikely to establish a relationship.
-dk
I don't quite understand your indigestion with the "wacky beauty ideals" question. Given the tone of the rest of the questions, the quiz was obviously asking whether women should be, in some sense relative to men, concerned with conforming to a dominant aesthetic. I would imagine that, if you answered the rest of the questions as a 95% score would indicate that you did, you would have little problem with the idea that whatever the question means, the answer to the question about whether women should be more concerned with a platonic sexual ideal than are men is a no.
We're not all "feminists today" because we believe in women's suffrage anymore than we're all racially tolerant because we don't dig slavery.
Dudes, do you think the wimmins should get jobs of their own, ask you out, pay half (or more) on dates, sleep around like they were dudes, take your place if there's a big war and the draft is reinstated, have easy access to abortifacients so you don't get stuck with child support payments, and stop bitching about alleged wage disparities that are actually the result of wimmins' life choices?
Then congratulations, you're a super-duper feminist! ROCK ON!!
I guess I don't understand how one's right to marry and have kids with anyone else trenches on the rights of the "other person." Surely the question assumes that those activities that require cooperation (marriage, procreation), involve the willing participation of the spouse/partner. I don't think the question is asking whether the right is so extreme that the right contemplated includes some sort of coercion targeted at the other party.
More important test results show that:
(1) I AM AN IT GIRL - You're outgoing, friendly, and charismatic. You are aware of your image, and you are constantly improving yourself.You're definitely the type of girl people love to be around! (i am a boy though)
(2) MY MONSTER PROFILE IS EVIL CLAW - Evil Claw
You Feast On: Peanut Butter
You Lurk Around In: Flocks of Freshmen
You Especially Like to Torment: Emo Kids (right-on)
(3) MY DRIVING IS: 47% MALE, 53% FEMALE - According to studies, you drive both like a guy and a girl.This means you're a pretty average driver, with typical quirks. Occasionally you're frustrated and or a little reckless, but that's the exception - not the norm. I drive a '98 chevy prizm, cut me some slack.
finally, (4) I APPEAR TO BE A RETRO BIKINI:
You prefer a bikini that's flirty and feminine, not flashy. You look sweet and sexy - a rarity on the beach these days! Let me assure all readers that the prior sentence does not accurately descrbe Lee-Bikini equilibrium.
No, we're not. I scored a 39%: "No one would consider you a feminist." I believe that there is such a thing as a man's job (e.g., combat soldier, firefighter, Catholic priest, etc.) so I had to disagree on questions 2 &7 about women having the right to pursue any job/path. Nor do I see anything wrong with a woman being economically dependent on her husband. The question about double standards regarding sex is typical feminist defining deviancy down: women should be able to be sluts too (just be sure to give them a Costco sized bottle of morning after pills).
I missed on the "gay marriage," question, simply because women can't have babies with each other -- at least not yet. There's always a male involved who's been cut out of the equation one way or the other.
As far as the question on whether women should support themselves, I'm in the "hell yeah" camp. One of the roots of feminism was this dependency -- women feeling they couldn't leave a marriage, for example, because of the economic cost. Not only that, but non-working married women back in the day were dependent on the generosity of their husbands, which would vary. It also gave men an unreasonable source of power in the relationship, which encourages passive-aggressive behavior and dishonesty. I've heard stories of the previous generation where wives would skim from the grocery fund. But, at least in my circles, all that stuff is a full generation away.
What I object to is women who seem to want it both ways -- women who sprint at work in their 20s and early 30s, and then decide one day, "Gee, that was fun, now I want to stay home." I once made a joke to my girlfriend at the time, not remotely taking it seriously, where I played on old sexual stereotypes and fantasies.
I said I'd support her, as long as she met me at the door when I came home, with dinner made, in full make-up and a dress, handed me a martini, and gave me a BJ as I enjoyed the martini. She said, "That's all I have to do to get out of going to work? One meal, one drink, get dressed, one BJ? Deal." And she meant it. How things change with the generations, eh? That's because many of the current generation didn't see the negative aspects of dependence, and only saw that work can be a big pain.
Equity feminism is certainly reasonable, but I still see differences between the sexes and they are a good thing. Don't the French have a phrase for it?
Men should be men and women should be women, but that doesn't necessarily mean trading in old stereotypes or going back to exploitative situations. Or limiting what men and women can accomplish for themselves as men and women.
I don't mean to bash the older generation of women, either. I've also seen women who are so focused on their career and getting ahead that they don't have the slightest idea how to behave toward their children. They seem as remote as the old male stereotype. In fact, I know one woman who gave up a six-figure career to have a child, then decided after a couple of months that she wanted her career back. She went back to work, but at home, off-site, and put the kid in daycare. Talk about trying to have it both ways. Fortunately, the woman who runs the daycare actually knows how to be a mother. So there are tradeoffs.
The Venus of Willendorf is presumed,with no evidence, to be the ideal. There is no evidence it wasn't the work of some sicko. I understand that one of Bach's masses has been lost, while Bacharach will probably be permanent, through no fault of the material.
More seriously, exaggeration in order to make the gods or the forces of nature see things your way is not necessarily the same as the ideal.
This made my day, lol.
That's an unfortunately phrased question...
If you start making judgment calls about what the pollster wants you assume, it ceases to become a poll about feminism and instead becomes a test to see how good people are at reading the minds of pollsters.
Well, that's a good point. However, there are in fact some people who still argue for slavery, actually. A tiny minority, perhaps, but nonetheless more than people who think women should not vote.
Perhaps I overstated the case when I said we are all feminists, but what I meant by my post is that 100 years ago, it was laughable to think a woman could actually have enough brains to consider a political issue and vote on it. (This at a time when one of Britain's most capable leaders and monarchs was a woman!). Today, there is no such debate.
In fact, the debate on this thread has everything to do with whether the female BODY is somehow equal to men. Can a woman lift a fire ladder as quickly as a man? Can she play tennis as well? Does she have the sexual stamina to sleep with a lot of men? These are all issues of biology, not mental or intellectual issues.
So the fact that we all agree that women are our intellectual equals, can lead a country as effectively as any man, and so on, means that we have come a long, long way, baby, and by the standards of the 19th century, we are without question all feminists. Whether by today's standards we are is, of course, open to debate.
And how is this different from men? Most men I know want to sprint to work in their 20s and 30s, and then they realize they hate their job, or hate being a lawyer (Count me as one of them!) and say, Gee, I'd rather stay home and learning how to cook Indian.
Many men DO change jobs, even careers. So I guess they want it both ways, too, right? They want the ability to have a job, but the right to quit it for something easier and better if it comes along. And there is nothing wrong with a man quiting his job and staying at home to take care of the kids and meeting his wife with a martini in a full suit, and then going down on her as she sips it.
Oh, it's not done? Well, I do know some men who actually DO take care of the kids while the wife works. (My best friend, for instance).
What I am really hearing, IB Bill, is the resentment that women have the freedeom to be in the workplace or not, as long as they are married, whereas the man must always be in the workpalce, married or not. But that's a false choice -- no one says those are the only options.
As for single women, well, they have to work regardless, and they DON"T have that option of staying home with the kids. Perhaps that's why some marry men just for the sake of getting married, and love has nothing to do with it.
"Mikey, I am of the opinion that the "for the children" crap only started to be used in politics subsequent to the 19th Amendment. Before women were allowed to vote, I'll betcha nobody ever said a word about "protecting the children." I have never heard of an abolitionist saying a word about "the slave children." No, this is a modern thing, and it's the femininization of our society. Allowing women to vote completely ruined politics by forcing 50% of the population to vote solely based on the maternal instinct (as dictated by politicians).
Am I saying women should not be allowed to vote? No, too late for that. You can't take that away now. But knowing what I know now, if I could go back in time and fight against women's suffrage I would unhappily do so."
Well... he graciously concedes that the right to vote exists for women, but he wishes it didn't. Does he count?
Are these folks related to the gangs of angry, gun-wielding lesbians that were making people convert to homosexuality that Bill O'Reilly was ranting about recently?
Polls are seldom set up to be taken by people with a college education.
I sure hope the kids are out of the house first :)
Scoundrels and cads -- how old-fashioned is that? But they're still around, even if we decline to call them that.
Wow -- I bet he's tons of fun on a date!
And of course, he is absolutely wrong. In fact, throughout the 19th century, the reason given for NOT allowing women the right to vote was precisely because they held a 'special' place in society that protected and raised children.
So even back then, Michael B would have been upset.
That's interesting, given that some of the self-described feminists who attended Harvard Law School with me loathed me (for heretical acts such as criticizing their patron saint, Catharine MacKinnon, on campus and in the Boston Globe; and for publicly criticizing many of their preferred government restrictions as violations of the First Amendment; they deemed criticism of feminist leaders or policies to be "emotional, verbal, and visual attacks on women").
They wouldn't have gotten a 100% score either, judging by the correct answers to the quiz.
There seem to be different definitions of feminism -- one among the public at large (reflected in the quiz) and another quite different one for lawyers and academics (sometimes at odds with the quiz, especially with respect to the notion that women should take some financial responsibility for themselves -- an idea supported by the quiz, but at odds with many divorce court rulings lauded by self-described feminist law professors).
My wife gets a higher score than I do, and thinks of herself as being generally feminist, but then, she comes from France, where political correctness has not made the kind of inroads it has in North America or parts of northern Europe, and where man-hating is not as prevalent.
Do people think women have too much sex?
Do people think women should be wives first, and 'career gals' second?
It's interesting to see what upsets people the most by gender roles and those who don't conform to them.
As for post-menopause survival... in the '90s, a few University of Utah researchers proposed the "grandmother hypothesis," whereby healthy older women were able to contribute significantly to the communities they lived in and thus help their grandchildren to live. Baboon studies contradict that, although baboons don't live much beyond menopause.
Ditto that. The quiz presumes that we should expect women to sleep around instead of expecting men to act better.
Soneone committed to sexual equality would tell your feminist side to sleep on the couch...
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You know, don't you, that King Solomon wasn't really going to cut the baby in half, no matter what the women said. But you're modest proposal was just a satire of what you imagine extreme "libertarianism"(?) to be, right?
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If they are related, then that Andrea Dworkin led crew you allude to must represent the really bad ass side of the family.
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theobromophile, Wahoo! (As a senior, my father lived on the Range, and for the first 3 years of my life, we lived on Madison Lane.)
OK, now how about your favorite song..."The Elements," by Tom Lehr?
# There is no such thing as a "man's job." It is wrong for men to be given preference for any job position, even if women traditionally aren't in that field.
Because I think it's okay for men to get preference for playing linebacker for the 49ers. Unless we set up football leagues for women.
Doc, please explain to me why it's equal protection to allow women nine months plus three days to decide to be free from all entanglements to their children, no matter what the wishes of the father, but men get no options whatsoever?
Men have no opportunities to disclaim responsibility for children they father, but women, even those who choose not to abort, have such an opportunity.
And spare me the sentimental nonsense about "she carried the baby inside her for nine months". That doesn't justify 18 years of servitude.
-dk
So close, but yet so far. Move 70.7 (plus minus 2.71) miles west.
Obviously not NeuroDoc, but there is no equal protection issue with pregnancy. (I won't defend the three days afterwards.) Equal protection only attaches when the parties are similarly situated. One is pregnant; the other is not. Her intention is not to avoid being a parent, but to avoid being pregnant, which has the secondary effect of making her not a parent. (FWIW: I'm anti-abortion.)
Lehrer or Lehr? Actually, I was so dorky as to once name a bunch of fish after elements... the fat, sluggish one was Argon, the little one was Hydrogen (but got upgraded to Deuterium when he grew), and a bunch of others got named based on their colours and flame tests.
And, of course, I meant Tom Lehrer (not Lehr), who cruelly chose to stop performing, thereby depriving us of his incredibly witty output. (Tom Foolery, a musical review, was one of the most enjoyable nights of theater I have ever experienced.)
I'm going to take this quiz because it's Sunday morning here in Blighty and I am feeling lazy. And I am apparently 84% feminist, which is as reliable as any internet quiz result.
What I do think is interesting about this thread, however, is how many male anxieties about and resentment towards women seem to have been dredged up, all because of ten questions in what is a pretty silly quiz. Perhaps that may tell us something about how far we still have to go to ensure gender equity.