Quote Originally Posted by Subotan View Post
Is that really the case? Surely it's preferable and more economically efficient to create a work environment where women don't feel as if they will have to drop out of their careers halfway through to raise kids at the get-go?
Not for the individual couple. Yes, women should absolutely be allowed to return to their careers after taking 9 months maternity leave, but they will be nine months behind everyone else when they come back, that's all. On the other hand, I think women should be allowed to drop out of their careers in order to make sure their children are raised well by someone who loves them and not a paid nanny.


This isn't true - if it were, then the gender binary wouldn't exist were it not for feminism. Feminists recognise the differences society places upon each gender and seeks to correct them.
This assumes there is automatically something to correct. Historically, yes that was true but today not so much. Also, you are making a huge, and I think erroneous, assumption about the interaction between social constructs and human nature. It is a simple fact that men became politically dominant in most cultures because men are the ones who go off and do the dying in war, and therefore they demanded the biggest stake in politics to decide when to do that dying. I don't think it's any accident that we have a more sexually equal society today as well as a more peaceful one.

Do you think that that's representative of all male feminists?
I have met male feminists like that, they don't actually have good relationships with women.

Feminism does not advocate the comodification of female sexuality, nor the dismantling of "social prudishness", for lack of a better word. Feminism only seeks to see female sexuality treated as seriously as male sexuality.
We're not talking about prudishness, we're talking about manners. Manners are a way of communicating on an open and mutually understood field, and of showing respect. Men an women don't talk the same way, don't quite think the same way. Manners create a "safe" space to interact in. Part of Manners was not openly objectifying women, another part was insisting on opening the door for her. Feminists rejected traditional manners as sexist (which I think is debatable if you've ever seen a petite woman put her shoulder to a fire door) and so they denigrated the whole edifice. That created the vacumn that sexual comodification seeped into. Also, there was a period where some feminists sought to confront men with female sexuality by, say, posing naked. That didn't actually help because no man is actually impressed by a woman taking her clothes off, it just encourages objectification.

As to female sexuality being treated "as seriously", they have achieved that - because it is now as trivialised as male sexuality, as a result female sexual activity is also trivialised - which is bad because it encourages young women to engage in casual sex which can have serious reprocussions. I get the point about repression of female sexuality, but it's not a constant even in a "Patriachal" society, it varies quite a lot.

Why do you assume that it has to be a man who saves the rape survivor from her rapist?
I don't, the point is about how women encourage men to behave.

Of course it is. I think there's something very innate to being a man in the act of protecting somebody close to you from harm.
I agree, but a feminist would ask, "why do I need protecting?" which misses the point.

Define "protection". Why are men less able to do it today than before feminism?
because women are less likely to let them.

lolwut this is completely wrong.
No, it isn't. Read a lad's mag to see the start of the problem. Men have to compete, with other men and not women, deny them that and they become frustrated and act out. In some cases they become ardant football supporters (there are recorded cases of sexual dysfunction if a man's team is on a losing streak), they join gangs or become hooligans, in extreme cases they rape women in order to exercise power. Rape is all about power and subjugation. If you stop casting the ideal man as the White Knight then the average man is more likely to exhibit tendancies of the Black Knight.