ena

Do you have sons or other men in your life to love? Men and women are not the same and we should enjoy and celebrate the differences.

Over the decades there has been emancipation of women and men and I see no virtue in putting the needs of one above the other. We are all struggling for a more peaceful world where we can make the best use of our opportunities and live in happiness.

My Mother and the family womenfolk before her were always equals in family businesses, farms and properties, however we could never have survived without the complementary skills and strengths of the men in our lives. They needed us as much as we needed them. It is not a competition and I certainly do not want to be like them - my femininity gives me unique strengths, awarenesses and creativity.

It is about respect. If anything, there are 'problem' people not problem genders.

I don't think I could be successful in business (or life) if I hobbled myself with a hatred and distrust of half of the population. Who needs excuses anyhow?

In Victoria in 1953 the maternal mortality rate was 67.5 per 100,000 live births and in 2003 the mortality rate was 4.8.

So while KerryMcg is correct to a point in that it was scientist and engineers who had a great impact on child mortality rates, before the advent of modern medicine. Something simple like providing clean drinking water and sewage had an enormous impact on improving life expectancy and so did immunisation.

Improved nutrition also played a part, plus today we are also take more steps in improving child safety and thereby reducing the number of accidental deaths.

Someone posted that feminists were responsible for women's health centers, this maybe true. However long before women's health centres appeared, there were hospitals for women and women only. The Royal women's was founded in 1856.

Medicine has also come along way in improving maternal and child health as shown for the statistics for Victoria.

The vast majority of pregnant women do give birth without complication, however when things do go wrong, they can go wrong very quickly and sometimes even being a patient in a major teaching hospital will not save you.

In the UK mothers are monitored and those who are likely to have a complicated labour are sent to hospital, this trend is likely to skew the results of any research paper.

I formerly referred broadly to 'medical science' and it is reasonable to include researchers like Louis Pasteur in that.

I would be the first to agree that clean drinking water and proper drainage are fundamentals for health. That is why I gave the example of washing with soap and water, another fundamental that resulted from the germ theory.

It was through application of the germ theory and their success with immunisation that allopaths, the precursors of the modern GP, obtained sociopolitical legitimacy.

Engineers only drained land and provided clean drinking water because they were directed to do so. Up to then they were interested in draining land (for example) to provide arable land and better footings for buildings. Equally they were formerly well able to dam and transport drinking water but it was not necessarily free from nasties.

I see positives in midwives assisting deliveries in hospitals (and I think that is where the quoted research has been done) after scans and professional consultation have determined suitable prospects and the woman is in agreement. However policy makers and private entrepreneurs are not beyond putting cost savings and profits ahead of health, which is why I wouild like to see community consultation before change is introduced.

I would be concerned if midwife delivery alone was promoted for indigenous and country women.

But who ever said all feminists hate men - or even that feminism hates men? The people who have said such things are generally the enemies of feminism, not its adherents.
Feminism is a belief in the equality of men and women - and, before we get bogged down into the same old silly arguments - equality does not mean the same, it means of equal value. That was the feminism of john Stuart Mill, Mary Wollstonecraft, virginia Woolf and Gloria Steinem, that is my feminism and the feminism of the vast majority of the women and men who would describe themselves so.

"But who ever said all feminists hate men - or even that feminism hates men? The people who have said such things are generally the enemies of feminism, not its adherents.
Feminism is a belief in the equality of men and women"

Erin Pizzey wrote that when she attended a meeting she was told;
"Your problem is not your isolation but your husband. He oppresses you and he is a capitalist."

"In a patriarchal society, all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent." Catharine MacKinnon, quoted in Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies."

No not all feminists hate men, but they just stand by and let such expressions go unchallanged. Even if they say they love men, they still partake in misandric male bashing.

Pru Goward said;

"You can't expect a person to step into that role when the child's 10, having never seen them before, needing an autocue to remember their name."

Daphne Patai showed in Heterophobia how the claim makers were forever expanding the definitions (case in point DV)or to do with sexual harrasement.

The Tyranny of Tolerance: A Sitting Judge Breaks the Code of Silence to Expose the Liberal Judicial Assault

"I concluded my opinion by observing the danger of imposing liability based solely on speech. “[T]he sexual harassment police,” I wrote, “seem oblivious to the First Amendment as they eagerly enlist the courts as censors of words and literature in the workplace.” More specifically, I noted that it seems clear to everyone “except for the denizens of the cloud cuckooland of radical feminism” that no court had ever held a sexual advance to be actionable in and of itself."

Ena, you and other feminist will have do alot more to convince me that you really believe in equality.

James, I think that you do Ena an injustice. I've been involved in discussions with her for some time and have not seen any sign of her being the kind of feminist you suspect her of being. Just as I don't challenge every assertion made by guys wanting to put women back in their places (or necessarily spot that right up) I don't expect Ena to do the same regarding extreme feminism.

Try an experiment, take Ena at face value and have a dialog with her - you might be surprised.

The continued refusal to accept that many feminists seek equality puts up a barrier to dialog and makes it that much more difficult to get moderate feminists to take seriously claims made about the abuses done in the name of feminism.

R0bert