Cornflower,

It's symptomatic of your biassed approach that you quote one part of the article I referred you to but not the others that do not suit your prejudice - but run clean contrary to it.

For example, the ruckus at the Athenaeum Club over admitting women as members "...has prompted Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Graeme Samuel to walk out.

"Mr Samuel, who had been one of the club's strongest internal advocates for admitting women, said yesterday he had "ceased to be a member, full stop" and had no further interest in the Collins Street club. "I am a member of the RACV; it's a wonderful club," he said. The RACV Club admits women."

And Melbourne businessman and former Treasurer of the Liberal Party of Australia Ron Walker, an Athenaeum member, said that change was overdue. "As a natural progression, I believe the presidents of men's clubs in the city would be well advised to consider the rights of women," Mr Walker said.

As CJ Morgan says, if you've got a good argument, why do you need to tell lies - by not telling the whole truth? A dead giveaway.

Spikey

What bearing can two members' resignations have on the core issues which are:

- firstly, that the majority of members obviously want to keep the membership as it is;

- secondly, a government funded bureaucrat should not be sledging a private club or business where it is not doing anything against the law; and

- finally, what is sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander because there are women only clubs that are not being similarly attacked for being 'discriminatory'.

Of course 'discrimination' is a one-way street, otherwise you and other feminists would be in uproar about the forthcoming State-sanctioned prejudice against white men in employment.

If I hire a barrister I want the best available. Similarly I would want the best available surgeon operating on me and the best available CEO heading the company I invest in, not people who couldn't win by merit alone.

But tell me in your own words why it is OK to discriminate on the basis of gender and race as the Victorian government aims to do and why it is OK for a women's club to be exclusively for women but it is not OK for a men's club to do the same for men.

ninaf: "go on anticpetic"

Do they offer remedial spelling and grammar classes at that institution you're in, Nina? I recommend you investigate, like a good little "journalist". You might do well to ask someone about a little thing called "logic" as well.

In your world, the brave women have fought and forced the ignorant "other people", [can't even use the word "men"?] against their will and despite them holding all the power and authority and having no self-interested reason to do so, into giving women "rights" they always had. I'll bet your lectures are a real hoot without any help from me, hon.

Do make sure you provide proper attribution when quoting me in your notes, won't you? None of that naughty plagiarism.

As it happens, I agree with much of what I think you're trying to say, though. Women and men have equal capacity, in general, for survival and prosperity given equal opportunities. It therefore makes sense that there should be equality of opportunity, insofar as it is possible within the limitations conferred by biology.

The biology is where much of the problem arises: it is costly to compensate for the differences between the genders.

It is only within the last 100 years that our society has had sufficient wealth and spare energy to make domestic machinery possible, freeing much labour. Healthcare for women is extraordinarily good and very expensive, especially maternity care. Childcare as it is done today is perhaps the greatest cost burden, supportable only if the economy is running well. If the subsidies are not there and parents have to entirely self-fund, it becomes unviable for one parent to work, very often.

Because of the biology, it was men who made the decisions to fund or engineer all of those things that make modern women sufficiently free of toil to be able to be feminists. If the recession turns sour it may be women, who are now the Ministers, who have to make the decisions to cut funding for some of them.

Banjo I think you've misunderstood my post. I wasn't referring specifically to an immigrant or other minority.

One of the tactics of resistance by mainstream society against new and different ideas is for people in the mainstream to try to dictate how the issue should be presented or argued. An example, as I mentioned, is to imply that a group is disorganized or irrational by proclaiming that they are all saying something different and so "...don't know what they want".

People who are firmly in the mainstream don't always hold exactly the same views on every topic, or all live completely the same way. That is, the mainstream enjoys diversity only up to a certain (non-threatening to what is known) point. Any individuals beyond that point are cast as irrational if they don't all behave and speak the same way. It's just a way to dismiss the new idea rather than bother to genuinely consider new information.

One example would be the notion that all feminists are the same or have the same views on everything. We don't - feminism is as much a philosophy as anything about opposing injustice based on sex and reflected in patterns of power and control in society. Some feminists choose to live in a traditional relationship configuration; some choose same sex partnerships; some support pornography; some don't; some are Christian; some aren't and so on.

Some feminists feel particularly impassioned about the legal system; some about teaching; some FGM and other multiculural issues - all feminists care to some degree about all abuses and injustices based on sex - but the range of interest is wide. Nobody says that someone in the mainstream can't legitimately present an opinion on a lighter topic so there is no good reason why someone with a feminist philosophy shouldn't have opinions on such matters and express them.

Btw: feminists don't (and shouldn't) 'own' any campaign against FGM. It's something that all of the community should care about and oppose - and our laws reflect that.

Trade 215

'Even so, many of us (men) will still come to your defence and protect you, notwithstanding personal danger ...'

Just some thoughts on this ... not necessarily directed to you.

Saving people from danger is just standard human instinct. Given similar circumstances, women would do exactly the same for men.

However, as a feminist I am fascinated by the way in which the damsel-in-distress convention remains stubbornly entrenched in our dramatic tradition - despite decades of supposed equal gender rights. For example, I finally caught up with movie The Dark Knight the other day and was appalled at what a throwback this was to traditional gender belief systems - i.e. that the world is in a continuing struggle between good-violent men and bad-violent men, and women are either peripheral to that struggle or the victims of it.

Not that I'm totally against all damsel-in-distress scenarios. By contrast, another film, Twilight (which, BTW, I loved) has the heroine being saved by her vampire boyfriend about once every ten minutes. However, his vampire sisters help him out a bit on some occasions, and in most of these scenes the heroine is shown to be proactive in trying to save herself.

I suppose that when over 95% of filmmakers worldwide are still male, we can't expect much to change very soon. I guess we women have little choice but to keep on watching ourselves getting tied to railway tracks by bad men and getting untied from railway tracks by good men.

Pynchme

You make many good points, especially this one ...

'One of the tactics of resistance by mainstream society against new and different ideas is for people in the mainstream to try to dictate how the issue should be presented or argued.'

So true. Like the media constantly referring to business 'leaders' but union 'bosses' etc.

However - and in keeping with Nina's 'woman's identity' thread - another mainstream resistance tactic is to keep ensuring that gender language does not keep pace with women's changing role. For example, so many writers still cling to generic 'man' or 'mankind', when 'humanity', 'humankind' or 'people' would fit just as well. Same with the generic pronoun 'he', which still persists despite being easily substituted with 'he/she or 'they'. Or forms that still ask us to circle either 'Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms ...', subliminally reminding women that their marital status still defines their identity.