Well you are wrong on that one Houlley. It was thought that women were inferior. Even the Bible says so apparently. It was once believed that the female brain was smaller and not capable of the intellectual feats of men.

Trouble is Houlley you find a link like birth rape and suddenly it is another feminist bandwagon. Feminism is a broad church. It is not new, just a different name. It is normally called malpractice at the worse end of the spectrum.

Women giving birth are vulnerable to being treated like a cattle run in some places but that is usually due to poor hospital practices or understaffing and sometimes just a dodgy employee - happens in all industries why not medical? I don't think it refers to normal birthing procedures where it is all hands on to get a baby out if there is a problem.

Some doctors have no bedside manner and are less consultative in the birthing room than others, thank goodness for midwives/midhusbands who are usually more attentive. Most people in the throws of labour don't usually give a toss about political correctness but overt mishandling is usually understandably not appreciated.

I don't take a women as victim perspective approach and take each incident and individual on it's merits. There is quite a bit of men-as-victim thinking going around or are you oblivious to that in your critical assessments of us all.

Grim, you illustrate my point very well. The last few decades have seen traditional women's trades of nursing and teaching turned into pseudo-"professions", with an expectation that these "professionals" should be paid as well as people doing genuinely cerebral work.

Meanwhile, the traditionally male manufacturing trades have been left to languish, losing status and dropping pay relative to those others.

The real issue is that gender equality is a zero-sum game: there is sonly so much to go around and what is gained by one side must be at the expense of the other. For millennia this was not a problem, because the genders specialised for pragmatic reasons. Women bore and raised the children and worked the fields, cooked the meals, wove the cloth, while men did the dangerous and heavy stuff like hunting and war. Anything else would not have worked and selective breeding (women choosing mates who were big and strong and men choosing ones with good childbearing qualities) ensured that it worked as well as it could and also that we as a species are specially adapted to such a lifestyle. There have always been "deviants" from this norm, from flaming queers to Boadicea, shamans, witches - the list is long. Our species has accommodated those, well or poorly depending on how well off the particular society happened to be. Rich societies can afford more deviation(s) from the norm than subsistence ones.

We live in a very rich society indeed and the deviations from the norm we can afford are correspondingly large and many. We can even afford to pay people to have children and to raise them. We can afford to subsidise some sectors of the society not to work at all and we can afford to allow some members to soak up the resources of thousands for their own benefit.

Aren't we lucky?

Does anyone think this condition can continue indefinitely? If it can't, as I'm sure it can't, then what is to become of the expensive deviations from the human behavioural norm?

Severin:"Maybe she's just more capable?"

Who knows? The fact is that she WILL get more encouragement from the education system to continue to tertiary study than my son will. I hope she does more with her education than you managed. At least she doesn't regard a welfare-dependent lifestyle as something to be proud of.

Houellebecq:"If any of you differ in opinion to his argument, I think he'd be more than happy to accommodate you in a debate."

Yeah, like that'll ever happen... Intellectual cowards are still cowards.

Pelican:"There are more male uni students represented in Engineering, Science and Medical disciplines at university"

Are there? I suspect that for Law and Medicine there are more females, as well as for Acoounting/Economics and for business.

Engineering isn't attractive to women generally because a great deal of the work is in dirty and/or remote environments and there's very little time for niceties. Engineers aren't good at politesse, on the whole.

Science is a very broad area that is well-populated with women, especially the experimental sciences, where the dexterity of many women and their ability to focus on details is a positive advantage.

Women are also well-represented in the environmental and biological sciences. Maths and physics remain male-dominated, certainly.

Pelican:"occasionally it does not hurt to point out legitimate disparities"

You mean disparities that show women are being disadvantaged,don't you? You've already made clear that you don't like the idea of discussing this particular disparity, which doesn't.

What you want is a ratchet that only goes one way and that's the great failing of feminism as a philosophy.

Houellebecq, how dare you point out that some women actually want to stay home and raise kids! Pregnancy is merely a bar to greater female achievement.It's a burden to bear, not something that should be celebrated. It must be, we have to pay perople to do it, apparently...

Pelican:"There is quite a bit of men-as-victim"

What a lot of rot. What advantage does a man get by claiming victimhood? OTOH, the damsel in distress is a long-established meme, as is the white knight charging to the rescue.

Dear Antiseptic,

Interesting point...once we leave subsistence and traditional society behind, our way of operating as a society becomes skewed and the line delineating gender specialization becomes blurred - especially in a mechanised and service-based environment.
Western society as it organises itself in modern times serves perhaps as a aberration of the norm...wonder how long it will last?
It seems that the ongoing debate between the genders as to who does what and how much each should be paid is something that arises out of a need to constantly "reassess" the rapidly evolving nature of gender participation in the workplace.

pelican,

'Some doctors have no bedside manner and are less consultative in the birthing room than others'

But does that make them rapist pelican? A woman can feel violated from a vulnerable position, so she feels raped. But when she says she IS raped, well, there must be a rapist. So, therefore, the doctor is a rapist, not just a candidate for malpractice.

'It is normally called malpractice at the worse end of the spectrum.'

As it should be. But that just isn't enough now is it, we have to call the doctor a rapist.

"You mean disparities that show women are being disadvantaged,don't you? You've already made clear that you don't like the idea of discussing this particular disparity, which doesn't."

I think if you read over my posts objectively Antiseptic you will see that is not true but if you need to hang on to that belief for your own agenda there is not much I can do about it.

The damsel in distress syndrome (feminism) as you call it came about from legitimate historical experience and there are remnants of it still around - evolution takes time. At the moment I think policy makers are more humanist and even-handed in approach hence the changes to child custody arrangements. Instead of acknowledging the positive changes you are still hellbent on seeing the all-men-are-hard-done-by view of the world. It just isn't so.

Houlley
No I would not call it rape. Not sure who thought that one up, maybe something to do with lack of consent in penetration - I am certainly no legal expert.