Atheism
Politics
Memes
Mind
Matters
String
Random
Interact
Feedback
Links
Debate
Home
Women Priests
Women in Islam
Persecuting Minorities
Freedom is Bad for Your Health
Sex Education
The Founding Fathers
War: What is it Good For?
Vasectomy: a Survivor's Tale
Is Equality Possible?
Circumcision
Gandhi: Great Soul or Arsehole?
Family Values in The Bible
The Right to Choose
Aborting Babies
Slavery: Not a Black and White Issue
Stand clear of the doors!
Meatheads, Slobs and Pencil Necked Geeks
The future has got to acknowledge that mankind is half female and both halves matter.
There are two kinds of people in this world, feminists and fools. One of the disadvantages of living in the twenty first century is that believing in women’s rights is not seen as radical or remarkable. To me it is essential that men and women are allowed to be what they want to be and are not marked out for one particular role by virtue of their sex. I almost resent the fact that there are so few monstrous injustices about nearby so that I lack the opportunity to demonstrate the strengths of my beliefs and my feminist credentials. My great heroes of the past, especially Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, were all great spokesmen for equal treatment of women rights in an age when this was notable, controversial and shocking. I resent not being able to be appreciated as being a radical for believing in the cause of women.
Equality under the law is absolutely essential in a civilized society. No people can be free when half their number are systematically denied rights.
The future has no need for wives to be baby-making machines and that means there is no need to restrict women, deny them rights and artificially keep them down. Modern medicine and public health measures mean that families of two children are sensible. It is not necessary to aim to have a dozen children in the hope that two or three might survive long enough to keep you in your old age. It is no longer necessary to bolster the position of men in the household with legal protection and insistence on a dominant position complete with the denial of a woman’s rights to own property, make contracts, seek work against her husband’s will and indeed remove the ability of a woman to refuse to have sex with her husband and to give the husband the right to beat his wife. In the days of high infant mortality and no social provision such measures were at least defensible as perhaps necessary evils, now we can see them all as simply evil and no longer necessary.
In the bad old days wives were a capital asset, they provided a man with a supply of children which in turn were useful as labour and were his only possibility of a pension plan. When you live an impoverished existence in a land with intermittent or no effective law and justice system family is vitally important, a son can feed you when you cannot tend the flocks yourself, he can fight off your enemies, he can deter or avenge your murder. Maintaining family links was a way of ensuring the family resources were looked after. A son is good, six sons and twelve nephews is better.
In all societies women are at the heart of the home and family life but there is a strong tendency towards institutional patriarchy even when the women are making most of the small decisions and running the household. Ultimately it is the man who decides where the family lives, which goats are sold and when the flocks move on to new pastures and who his children will marry and it is always the man who will make decisions of war and peace.
In modern civilized societies sex stereotypes break down easily. It is increasingly common that women have opportunities to earn more than their husbands. The majority of new jobs require skills which do not rely on strength, hard won skill or years of experience but on general life and people skills which women are often better at than men.
Jobs which have been traditionally women’s work have tended to have low pay because women in the past were mostly working for a second household income or they were jobs that women want to do with enough fervour that wage bargaining suffers. Nursing is a classic example, it is a profession that has attracted a lot of middle class young women with romantic notions of serving humanity and marrying a handsome doctor for whom “where’s my room?” and “do I get to choose my uniform?” seem more important questions than “how much will I get paid?” If you want to make a lot of money stay clear of any jobs that you see Barbie doing, all Barbie’s favourite jobs are jobs little girls want to do, which means competition for limited places drives down and holds down the wages.
The future is going to be female to a much bigger extent than it has been in the past. Women are the way that modern civilization will be spread. Men have few reasons to change to adopt new ways of life and when you can get men to change that change does not automatically spread through the whole community.
If you take a man and teach him how to read he will be proud of his new found skill and go to the library and feel jolly pleased with himself, he may try to get a better job, wear a different kind of hat, he may ask for more money to do the job he already does and it is likely he will encourage one or two of his sons to learn to read and write. In contrast if you take a woman and teach her how to read she will teach all her whole family how to read. Do you think I am exaggerating? Ask yourself how long men have been able to read. Reading and writing have been the preserve of men, especially religious men, from the very beginning. No culture achieved universal literacy until women were allowed to read, no culture even thought universal literacy would be a good idea until women were allowed to be taught. Once some women began to read it became clear that literate women could and wanted to teach their own children to read and write. It could be argued that it was allowing women to be literate which really made the difference in launching modern liberal civilization.
Of course literacy is not a panacea but it is a help. People who can read and write can learn things that cannot be learned without literacy. Literate people have a much better chance of having their legal rights respected. Literate people can understand the directions and cautions on bags of fertilizer and pesticide. Literate people can read newspapers and books and so can be much better informed voters and politicians. Literacy is the essential first step to be able to interact with the wider world. Very few computer applications cater for illiterates.
The aim has to be to get women and girls educated. The men and boys will not be left out and will make a point of ensuring that they don't get left out or left behind because of stubborn masculine pride. In contrast if the efforts are spent in getting boys and men educated there is a fair chance the girls and women will be left behind and they won’t have the power or influence to make adequate protests. Men do take a pride in knowing more than their women, instead of bewailing this fact we should use it to our advantage. If the educational effort is aimed at girls men will ensure that their sons get that same education too but if educational authorities only educated boys men would use this as yet more evidence that women were inferior and could not be educated or could not benefit from education.
It is difficult to go wrong by empowering women and girls. In contrast giving men and boys more power can lead to more oppression of women and more suffering. There is however one way in which empowering women can lead to the oppression of men, and that is in establishing a woman’s right to lie about paternity of children.
Women need to be given legal protection to stop exploitation. Women need to have rights to their own property which stops men from stealing things from them.
Care has to be taken in the education of girls in western countries to ensure that they are not treated as second class citizens. It cannot be accepted as one of those things that girls from Pakistani families simply disappear from the radar sometime around the age of 14 and nobody at a school thinks to check to see that nothing untoward is going on. School attendance is compulsory for all, not compulsory for all except the daughters of ethnic minorities. If such girls are not going to school somebody should have a legal responsibility for finding out what is happening. Forced marriage is not acceptable. Keeping daughters at home to “protect them” against the dangers of having a life is not acceptable, at the very least enquiries should be made to ensure that are receiving some education which is their legal right.
It is intolerable that girls who are bright and happy in a modern western liberal society are regarded by their parents as being in grave danger of causing their family dishonour. There is no honour in living like barbarous savages beating your wives and daughters into submission. Quite the contrary, it shows how pathetic you are and how backward your culture is. If you think growing up in the majority culture of the country you have chosen to live in is intolerable you should ask yourself if you have made the wrong choice in where to live. If you want to live in a dynamic economy you can’t expect to be able to treat your wives and daughters like prized livestock. It’s a simple choice whether you want to live in a civilized country or a repressive Islamic country, there is no such thing as a civilized country which represses women.
A woman who is kept down and repressed by her brother, father or husband is a huge statement of shame. Shame on you for treating women as children, servants or pets. A woman does not bring shame on a man for being herself, quite the contrary, the shame comes to those men who deny a woman the options to be herself. There is a huge difference between superficially “respectable” and genuinely respected.