I also believe that everybody is different. That doesn’t mean anyone is Better. But that everyone is different.
Men and women should have different roles. Feminism is encouraging women to become like Traditional men. As a result, women are less depend on men. And men are encouraged to take up the Traditional women’s role, which made them less dependant on the women.
The errosion of dependancy is a major factor in today’s marriage break ups. The bond between men and women are weakening. Everyone is self-sufficient. No one need anyone else.
I am in no ways advocating the slavery of women. Rather I am saying, people should stick to their respective roles.
Although I haven’t read a range of debates/arguments/defense of feminism, this “erosion of dependency†conjecture is something I haven’t fully appreciated. And I think a good argument could be made on this. And I think I would agree to a certain degree—i.e. “it depends‗ with your point. This bond grounded in dependency is a very strong one and a very real one. But I can imagine right now, a bunch of feminists would like to slaughter you to pieces by mere utterance of what you are saying here in this thread. I am not a feminist. So, we’re okay.
Marriage is neither a democratic nor an egalitarian institution. And I think it would do us some good if those concern would pause for a moment and try to intuit the essence of marriage. Because, I think there has been, for a long time now, a movement towards re-writing the concept of marriage. Well, I say in response to this, if we could re-conceptualize the so-called traditional marriage, then maybe what we are inadvertently doing, is really dissolving the traditional marriage and coming up with a new conception of union between two individuals, that resembles remotely what we ordinarily or traditionally think when we think of marriage. And then, we wonder and complain why it is wrecking havoc (I hope this is not an exaggeration) in our society.
“But it’s suppose to work, these new ideas, concepts, etc†Well, not if what we expect is still the workings of a traditional marriage.
feminism should be more about giving women the logical space to form their own understandings of marriage… for them to get semantic authority over their own identities.
there is little more a male, I think, can say about it than that… and then just let them get on with it and see what comes out of it.
I agree that women should have their own identity, Everyone should be able to formulate their own thoughts. I support education for everyone.
The problem with feminism is that it wants to make women aggressive. I was in the library yesterday, just hanging out. I saw the feminist section and flipped through two books. What I found inside is absolute SEXIST garbage.
To all the feminists out there, men and women are different. There is no need to pretend everyone is the same!
Women generally speaking are not as physically strong as men. It is the men’s duty to physically protect women.
What is the point of marriage if you can do everything on your own?
Pinnacle, do you have a source that backs up this claims? I have never seen or heard any data that backs up your claims.
The following is taken from an essay by Dennis J. Preato, Master of Divinity, magna cum laude graduate of Bethel Seminary San Diego entitled “Empirical Data in Support of Egalitarian Marriages: A Theological Response.”
Here is the site address: God’s Word to Women website
I encourage you to read this whole page, it presents a much more in depth discussion of egalitarian vs. dependant marriages than these two paragraphs provide, as well as citations from specific studies that found that egalitarian marriages create a more stable environment and have happier participants.
Marie wrote:
Actually, Marie, sociologists, anthropologists, and other professionals who study marriage do classify marriages into types, and one of the types is egalitarian. Another type is called patriarchal or sometimes traditional. Marriage can be egalitarian if the couple involved choose for it to be egalitarian.
Marie also wrote:
Marie, you have hit the nail on the head. I actually wrote a paper on the ideology of wifehood a while back. While people’s ideas of what the duties of a wife should be are changing, there is not yet a solid social definition of how husbands and wives are supposed to interact and share the work of living together. IMHO, the best thing people can do right now is discuss expectations and workload with potential partners before they are married, so they don’t end up on the brink of divorce because each one thinks the other one is not doing what he or she is supposed to be doing. Communication is the key to a successful marriage. If two people have different ideas of what marriage should be there will be anger caused by each of them thinking the other one is not doing thier part if they don’t discuss what their ideas are.
Yes, Pinnacle, there is a lot of sexist garbage floating around from both men and women. What particular books did you pick up? I would recommend you read “The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Freiden. It is an old book, published in 1961, if I remember correctly, but may give you an insight into how things were when people actually did, as you so delicately put it, “stick to their respective roles.”
Ooops. You are right. I agree. I was typing it so fast, I was actually thinking of “family” institution—in which children do not have the same status as the parents-- financially and when it comes to rights (if minor). It is supposed to be about marriage. I stand corrected.
I think feminism should be about being who you really are as a woman. You want to be a scientist? Do it. You want to be a fire fighter? Go ahead. You want to have a traditional marriage where you stay at home and watch the kids and the husband works, why not? I hate it when some woman look down on the domestic house wife. If thats what makes her happy, then she should do it.
I find myself agreeing with Pinnacle on several points (wow…didnt think Id say that ). We are different, not in a bad way, but a positive way. Us woman are to preoccupied with existing in a ‘mans’ world that we tend to look down on some traditional roles.
But, here is where I disagree with him…if the woman working and the father staying at home is how that family works, how is this bad? Also, lack of ‘dependency’ has never been a proven factor for the increase in divorce. In anything, it kept two people in a marriage that is unhealthy for both of them.
feminism in it’s total core goes to far as to demasculate men. while women gaining freedoms, and rights is a good thing, it doesn’t and shouldn’t come at the cost of demasculating men. male and female are like yin and yang and would do well to keep that balanced, with neither part trying to overpower the other.
at the same time, I think if you women want to have kids and have careers you’ve got to step back and realize that’s not gonna happen you can’t raise a succesful family from the office. If you are in an open relationship and you make more money than your husband, then by all means by non traditional. what is tradition but that, which has been done.
Definition from Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, 2003
Feminism, at its core, has nothing to do with the masculinity of men. I never thought of myself as a feminist until a professor asked this question of the class: Do you believe that women should be paid the same amount for doing the same job as a man? If you think she should, then you are a feminist. Certainly, there are extremists in feminism. There are also extremists in Christianity. That doesn’t mean all who call themselves Christians agree with them.
ShadowandLight, you are so right about not looking down on women who are housewives. I personally am amazed at my friends who are full-time homemakers. I can barely feed and clean up after myself! They amaze me with the alacrity with which they handle the mountain of work it takes to run a household. And niether should men be ashamed of choosing this noble profession. I would go nuts. Thank IPU that I live in a time and place where I can choose not to do it, because I would not be good at it.
Marie, merely a technicality. You are spot on about the definition of marriage changing and people not being sure what it is exactly anymore.
we don’t really know what women even are though… hence the giving them space to create their own semantic authority over thier own NEW identities…
your looking at it in terms of the way things are or have been… past roles… let progress happen… let new identities emerge… if some womens identities are being formed around “SEXIST garbage”… well hey so have all our identities…
i tend to admire less aggresive and more caring ways of speaking and acting… and I value those in both men and women… but that isnt me letting someone else fasion an identity… that is me valuing certain identities and wishing for more occurences of them in my communities…
as for it being mens duties to physicaly protect women… I find this very unconvincing… as a fact before even being a reason for anything…
im a male and I need protection from violence… only the largest, most ruthless and best armed and trained individuals in society don’t need protection IF the right people want to hurt them…
it’s rarely a strict gender issue. yes on average women are less physicaly strong than men… but anyone can harm anyone with violence… the fact women are more often the victims of certain particular forms of violence has a lot more to do with men attacking women than it does with men NOT protecting them…
I like to think that ove the comming centuries, as in those past, we will all fasion new identities for ourselves… feminism at its best, i think, is devoted to this task from the perspective of a current complex of womens identities… and again: who knows what they will come up with.
to use someone elses analogy, it is just like galliliean (spells!) scientists and romantic poets… certain communities seeking to fasion new ways of thinking speaking and acting which eventualy became small parts of the ways that everyone speaks and thinks and acts.
let the feminists get on with it… and let the men do it as well… create your own autonomies and moral vocabularies… go for it…
lmao. I can’t believe people of today can still believe in democracy. What do people mean by egalitarian? Yes, everyone should get paid the same if they do the same type of work and the same amount of work.
Healthy dependency is critical. I never advocates master/slave relationship. But men and women must provide each other with something the others can’t get. Sure, men can stay at home. It’s ok.
why do men and women have to provide each other with something the others can’t get? is that what anyone thinks when they put their head down on the pillow next to their partner… “wow I’m glad that s/he provides me with something I can’t get…”
or is there perhaps some more overidingly sentimental content?
quite why people ahve such a burning need to make proclomations as to what men and women require of each other I don’t know… if you want to get “rational” about it, then sperm and eggs, for now… or we’ll die out… as a species… but who honestly considers that a reason for sharing two lives?
“healthy dependency is critical”
how so? you may like it… does that make it ciritical? critical to WHAT? critical to keeping your girl lol ? really I don’t know what you mean?
I suppose there is this unwritten “contract” ( I hate this word ) between a married couple. It is “understood” so to speak. It is expected. Imagine two people married to each other having a separate of everything–bank accounts, vacation plans, maybe even separate partners in bed. Okay, I’m being ridiculous.
I hear this argument all the time and completely disagree with it, I’ve worked with woman, they are absent more than men, (to take care of their kids, to take personal days whatever) they don’t work as hard as men. and that is not generalizing. That is the reason for the so called “glass ceiling” as soon as woman work as many days as men do, and as hard as men do they’ll get paid the same amount men do.
feminism at its core has everything to do with demasculizing men.
many of these things are things that feminist woman don’t want men to have. macho, manlike, brave, forceful, etc. they want a pussy(and thus many feminists are associated with being lesbians ) then they get their pussified man and are not amoured with him after awhile at all.
you know I’m all for equal rights of woman, I think feminism at it’s core though is dangerous.
but I said explicitly “who honestly considers that a REASON FOR SHARING TWO LIVES”…
why this insistance to justify customs with “contracts” (yeah I see your uncomfortable with that but you still used it) spoken or unspoken. Actualy in marriage they are often made quite explicit.
that has nothing, however, to do with how men and women (or any couples) have to relate in a relationship.
you can share two lives without any specific (or indeed ANY) division of labour, allthough in my experience they do generaly emerge… for a whole host of reasons…
but why act as if there is something meaningful there to be said about “men” and “women” rather than about people in relationships and culture etc.
you DO give each other things you don’t otherwise have, but they’re not things that you don’t otherwise have because of your gender differences, unless you want to describe everything genitally, which is a circular argument (genders important because I phrase everything in gender terms). you give each other sympathy, love, security, sex, etc etc…
soooo many unwarranted generalisations. so some chick pussy-whiped and left you? your friend? what?
that has nothing to to with women seeking to explore their situation and create a new one. just chill out. if your such a pussy that you think lesbianism, feminist scholarship, femist political groups, etc are “dangerous” well there’s your answer… “they” allready won.
you say that your not making generalisations, well back them up then with something other than your own opinion…
feminist shcolarship, of the type you are (i think?) descrbing and exagerating is seeking to explore the things considered male and female and to deconstruct and perhaps revalue them… I’m not sure if it is an especially useful excersise, but im not woman so I’ll leave them to it (just like I leave geneticists and conceptual artists to it).
this isnt demasculising men, it is exploring the possibility that the “positive” aspects of “masculinity” arnt that positive from a “feminine” perspective… and they might be right… wait and see wait and see…
once again, I’m quite sure that your outrage is hysterical… like what, there are a little horde of feminists and lesbians and robots and pirates that follow you around your daily errands whiping you for your every wandering eye or nurturing instinct (dont know if your m/f…)… I mean come on…
they are dangerous because they believe that a father is not necessary for raising children, and no i don’t have any experience with losing my balls to a woman but thank you for asking
and yes I know they already won we have a generation of pussies out there.
No, I’m just conjecturing on whatever it is that makes people stick to one another. Feisty, aren’t we?
This is radical. I’ve never heard anyone say this before. But I think you are making sense. Frankly, I don’t even know what to say about relationships.
lol perhaps. and sorry if I come off a little heavy handed… I just find essentialist talk about gender based on generalisations from cultural practices kind of bizzare…
not sure if your being sarcastic here. if i thought this was worth continuing this role discussion i might start saying something about relationship roles being negotiated through various recursive structural modalities… many including talk of “natural” roles and the good of “dependancy” and “ying and yang” and such… memories, images, scientific research, economic necessities… all the rest also constituting such structures… the job of worthwhile feminism and cultural studies (i think) is to try and create new such structures of rules and resources so a greater plurality of roles can be creatively negotiated through them…
but I’m pretty sure taking the discussion in that direction will lead to a whole lot more crap being talked… not least of all by myself…
Thats kind of funny to me, because where I work the females (with or without kids) have been there for ages and we go through male employees like water. Mostly due to undependability and the inablity to handle several tasks at once.
Umm…as a woman I work very hard. I go to school full time and work 40 hours. I have only missed one day in 2 years at work. Perhaps you are over generalizing?
I think you are confusing feminism with wacko, combat boot wearing, hairy arm pit having extremists.
Because i dont know about any other woman on this forum, but I have nothing against ‘masculine’ men. Prefer them actually
). We are different, not in a bad way, but a positive way. Us woman are to preoccupied with existing in a ‘mans’ world that we tend to look down on some traditional roles.
You are spot on about the definition of marriage changing and people not being sure what it is exactly anymore.
? really I don’t know what you mean?
