Craig,
I'm only interested in getting to the truth of the matter or as close to it as possible, the idea that patriarchy is an evil or even a worse way of life to any other is untrue, the Feminist depictions of power differentials between the genders or gender as power are also untrue.
I don't see the point in coming to terms with a fallacious set of ideas or trying to synthesise truth and untruth, an argument in which one side is dishonest can't be resolved through dialectic.

Jay

‘Been there, done that and worked a 40 hour week on top of it, being a full time homemaker is an easy life for either sex’

No, you have NOT ‘been there, done that’. Anyone who has genuinely ‘been there, done that’ knows that is an outright porky.

You may have worked a 40-hour week when your children were small, but if you want to argue that it was just a breezy hiccup in your life, go tell that to the fairies. I would say that, almost certainly, it was your wife who worked a 100-hour week to ensure that you could smugly claim to be a 40-hour week hands-on parent.

As she is married to a man who dictates that ‘feminism is a mental illness’ and that if she feels exhausted by parenting, she must be ‘doing it wrong’, I assume that she dare not complain.

Craig

As you can see from the above, you can leave me out the touchy-feely group hug. I’ve got ironing to do.

Craig,

Feminists have realized that the way to get resources flowing in their direction is to control the narrative (which they claim the right-wing elite has been doing for millennia). The dominant narrative is one where society sees the social arrangements as natural, normal, or unremarkable.

If you perceive all things as 'narratives' then there is no such thing as objective truth - just competing narratives. Thus, if Jay or myself were to use evidence to point out that housework levels are at their lowest level in human history then our data is dismissed as an attempt to impose our narrative, or to use fem-speak to 'privilege' our narrative. Feminists can dismiss any science that doesn't conform to their views in the same way, hence the epidemic of 'advocacy' research and journalism rather than fact-based investigations.

So bottom line, if you can't even agree on what constitutes a fact then you can't cooperatively work toward solutions. Sadly, feminism is one of the dominant narratives in Australia so I post here in the hope that moderate people will start to see how they are being purposefully manipulated (by both sides of the aisle).

P.S. There was a great article on "a voice for men" today by Jim Muldoon showing just how these narrative favors the mother who dropped her baby in the sewer

Killarney, I'm so sorry you perceived my questions as some sort of facile psychodramatic therapy session. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I've watched you and a few others here go round in circles for years and many of your counterparts on both sides in politics and especially media do the same. I am hoping to offer a way out through mutual cooperation, which has been shown to be the way that works best for all parties in a competitive situation. Business and Government has known this for years, which is why there is anti-cartel legislation. Robert Aumann and a couple of colleagues won the Nobel Prize in 2005 for proving it mathematically.

Let's face it, school kids know it instinctively and so do you and I and everyone else, but it requires and at the same time creates, over time, trust. Someone has to be the first to offer that trust (turn the other cheek as someone once famously said), hence my posts.

Bear in mind that Aumann's work showed another type of equilibrium, which is the one that has evolved into the current deadlock on so many of the topics I've already mentioned and that is for there to be no cooperation at all. The thing to bear in mind is that this type of equilibrium is the worst possible outcome for both sides and lasts only until one side's resources run out, then another stable condition you might have heard of arises - totalitarianism.

Check out Aumann's work if you like (it's easy to follow and very, very clear) but before you do, check with your own common sense.

However, it's entirely up to you whether you wish to take that offer to cooperate in creating a trust, rather than fear-based equilibrium; nobody can make you do anything here.

Your choice.

Jay, dialectic is the only way people who behave dishonestly can be convinced not to do so. People generally only act dishonestly because they erroneously believe that it is in their own interests to do so. Often, what is perceived as dishonest is not, it's simply a product of cognitive biases derived from misperceptions.

Stev, you should take the time to read Aumann's work, as well as that of Daniel Kahnemann on behavioural economics if you haven't already done so. These are the best ways I've found of making sense of the maximally sub-optimal equilibria that dominate our post-Marxist socio-economic structures.

What I'm trying to achieve is a reinstatement of a sense of common purpose - a fair go for all to make a fair go of their life. Some of the richest people in our world have come to understand this as a necessity and it's time that the rest of us did too.

Craig, I'm very familiar with the work of Aumann and Kahnemann and I don't think they hold the solution you seek. Economists (and game theorists) typically take individual preferences as given, sociologists do not. Google 'habitus' and 'social construction of preferences' to learn more and get back to me.