Joe:

"Blokes have none of those concerns"

Maybe they don't have these particular concerns but that does not mean their life is necessarily a bed of roses. Men have different concerns. Why do so many men commit suicide if life is so easy for them?

Women have concerns that are particular to their physiology and men have other concerns that are not necessarily related to their reproductive capacity. Concerns are concerns and problems are problems no matter what the origin of those things are.

I don't think it is true to say that women in general have more problems than men - they just have different ones.

WollyB, diver dan

Yes, of course. Whatever. Politically inclined women's sense of gender and social equality begins and ends with how they personally feel about men. Men are at the centre of every woman's universe. Translate: men are superior to women, and wise women realise what side their bread is buttered on; feminists don't. Feminists have all these silly notions that women create their own destiny, apart from men, but can still have meaningful relationships with men as more whole human beings. Weird. Sick.

You have to feel passionate about something in order to hate it. So, it's a big comfort to men to assume that women who have a sense of social and gender equality must hate them. Men are so important after all.

Joe

'In traditional Aboriginal societies, women were frequently killed for stepping out of line, or being suspected of doing so.'

I'm not sure where you get this from. It may be true. But consider ... these observations were often made by social scientists and anthropologists who were witnessing a society under extreme distress, facing annihilation and traditional social breakdown. When societies come under distress, domestic violence, social violence, mental illness, alcoholism and suicide are common. The Romans made similar observations about the Celtic and Germanic societies they conquered.

I'm no expert on traditional Aboriginal society, but what I've learned is that women's sacred sites, as witnessed by cave paintings at Carnarvon (QLD) and other places show that they were focused on women's genitalia, with hundreds of images that look like an upside-down exclamation mark (draw your own conclusions). It doesn't take much to assume that these women's sacred rites were about performing abortions, sharing sexual knowledge and supporting women in their pregnancies and childbirth.

Also, cave paintings of thousands of hands have been universally documented as symbols of the family - two parents and three children (two to replace the parents and one spare). Traditional Aboriginal society was very strict about population control - no economic growth nonsense for them. Abortion was an economic necessity, not a moral choice.

phanto

You're confusing gender politics with gender happiness. Most people accommodate their lives to the systems under which they live - and many manage to find happiness. But you will always have these people who want to challenge and change things. History is full of these people and they have made all the difference.

Hi Killarney,

No, such power imbalances were usual pre-colonisation and post-, even today in more remote 'communities', away from any surveillance. In the early days in South Australia, if an Aboriginal man beat his wife to death, he was advised what the law was - since he (and she too) were British subjects, entitled to the protection of the law - and given a couple of years hard labour.

So these days, in large 'communities', where there may (or may not) be a police presence, men are just a little more circumspect about beating their wives or girlfriends to death.

But every year in the Northern Territory, almost all murders of Aboriginal women were committed by Aboriginal men. I'm not suggesting that this is unique to Australian Aboriginal society - nothing much is unique about Aboriginal society - since gross inequality is common to all pre-modern or traditional societies I can think of.

Probably it's exacerbated in parts of Australia where patriarchy still rules 100 %, and where women have to leave their own country for life in order to marry, effectively as migrant brides for life, given that patriarchal societies also tend to be virilocal, i.e. where a married couple lives in the husband's country, since after all the children will belong to the husband.

Down around the Murray Lakes, traditional society was less patriarchal, and groups were far closer to each other, so it was as common for men to live in their wives' country as much as vice versa, or even their wives' mothers' or husbands' mothers' country. But even there, from the ample written records (see www.firstsources.info, Taplin and Pt McLeay Page), there are many instances of male brutality towards women, with nothing to do with colonialism etc. And, of course, male brutality to other men, even sons towards fathers. After all, traditional societies are violent societies - unless my reading of Irish and Scottish history has been skewed ?

Best wishes,

Joe

Killarney:

"You're confusing gender politics with gender happiness. Most people accommodate their lives to the systems under which they live - and many manage to find happiness."

Accommodation is not happiness. Either they have genuine issues or they do not. Both men and women have had problems through history and neither gender has had a monopoly on that. Each gender should act to overcome their own problems. Whether they have more or less problems than the opposite gender is immaterial.

Posted by Loudmouth, Tuesday, 12 September 2017 7:25:28 AM

One of the problems in reviewing history, is that history is being judged by today's standards and norms.

The Second problem is interpreting what was recorded, as that is the only record, so a lot of information that could have been of importance has not been recorded, possibly because it was not deemed to be of interest or importance.