jibber

as proggyman said, way to have a sense of humour.

and since I just cant let this go, I'm interested to know how old you are. I'm a bad example to talk about this, since most of my close friends are guys. However, those few female friends I have that are very close to me are without a doubt some of the strongest people I know. Little things do not bother them, and in face of the big stuff, they get on with it. Im always the one who my guy friends come to. I'm the one who gives them advice, helps them deal with their ****, and gets them back on track. I and many other women disagree completely with your reasoning, because you're only basing your knowledge off of the women you know, which is a very, very small number in the grand scheme of things.

I'll say this, in my experience, women have a greater capacity than men to get over things, even the big things. I may not have a lot of close girl friends, but i have A LOT of close guy friends. They seem to hold on to things, and take a lot longer to get over things than me and the other women I know.

And as for lateralus's comment, I'd agree in part. I'm only 22, so barely odler than her, and yet I have noticed a disparity between the sexes, mainly because i'm so involved in a lot of male-dominated areas. Skiing, kayaking, photojournalism, very much male-dominated fields. My field of work is EXTREMELY high pressure, and involves a real capacity to deal with stress. The insinuation that I as a woman cracks under any kind of pressure is insulting, and it's the stereotype that I deal with constantly. There's not many people in the world who can deal with the amount of stress that such a career brings up, man or woman. You need a thick skin, you need to be able to work under extreme pressure when you've had two hours of sleep every night for the past 3 or four days, and you need to be able to think calmly and do your job under a seemingly impossible deadline. So don't lump us all in with the few weak women you know, because trust me, I know A LOT of men who simply can not deal with stress, or any kind of pressure.

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What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do -- especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways

Your toughest competitor lives in your head. Some days his name is fear, or pain, or gravity. Stomp his ass.

HOOKED ON THE WHITE POWDER

Astronomer

More awesome than their brains?


And thank you, Jibber.

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Predator

Hey now, no twisting my words against me.

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The answer is hidden in plain view.

Astronomer

Haha you're right, I'm sorry I need to curb my defensive behaviour. I probably get it FROM BEING FEMALE.

Okay I'll stop now, I promise.

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GuitarBizarre

I love the way that fact comes up in these situations every time. Yes its been proven the average female wage is lower than the average male wage, however its also been proven that women choose to go into lower paying fields of work than men.

As for constantly being patronized and so on, theres plenty of media out there that portrays women as being the more powerful of the sexes. There has been such media in ever increasing quantities since the 60's, and its not going to stop growing now. Hell, there are women produing porn for female audiences. I'd say you don't GET a more male dominated field than that, and the woman in question is the reciever of much success.

As for the having a child argument, I'm sorry but as I said before, for every argument there is a counterargument. I proved that much with the first damn paragraph of this post. Theres plenty of emotional strain with a hell of a lot of things, and while having a child is definitely one of the bigger ones, theres equal and bigger that happens to everyone, and some people never have any of any of them because they're lucky and go through life relatively easily.

Sexual assault? Again, a valid point from your perspective and another of those facts that gets trotted out at every showing of this discussion. Its true. Women are more likely to be sexually assaulted than men. But then...

Theres also the other side of the statistics coin. Women are more likely to have higher grades than men in schools. Women are more able to initiate a relationship. Lots of little tidbits of information that add up to basically bring every argument a balancing argument.

Women have plenty of advantages in a lot of areas, and while not everything is perfectly equal yet, threads and discussions like these don't help it.



What threads and discussions like these do is to highlight the divide with debatable facts or personal opinion, put forward by people with agendas in making one or other side look good. I couldn't care less about saying men are better than women. I just hate being put forth as some kind of scapegoat for something I personally have no involvement in. Its just guilt by association and exaggerating the divide between the groups just makes everyone more and more likely to think in terms of groups and delineations rather than as personal cases and individuals, which is what most of us would do in real life to each other and what all of us should be doing to get rid of the ridiculousness once and for all.

If I hear someone say as a blanket statment women are better than this, how many personal cases has each and every one of us met that breaks that description? The statistics say that women are less likely to cheat on men, but I know many more the other way round. The statistics say women are more nurturing and caring. The statistics say men are more impulsive and rash, that women are less violent, that women are less likely to drink and do drugs.

In other words, statistics say a hell of a lot of things, but if I treated every woman as indicative of those statistics, I'd be making a hell of a lot of mistakes, because I know women that have fallen on all sides of those statistics. Instead, what I do is I treat and intend to treat everyone as a single individual with their own preferences and tastes because thats what true equality IS.

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GuitarBizarre

At no point did I insinuate anything. My entire point was that my experience is different and that by that very fact the implication that one sex is better than the other at anything is nothing but a collection of errant statistics that have little or no bearing on any real life scenario.

Trying to use those errant but collected statistics is an exercise in futitility because they can't be applied succesfully to any real life grouping of either sex, and, being statistics, are extremely liable to twists and interpretations that render the facts almost unreadable. I'm sure we're all familiar with the concept that correlation does not imply causality, and thats one of many many ways that facts numbers and statistics can be misinterpreted for the good of one or either side of an 'argument'.

You said it yourself, you work in male dominated areas, thus many of the statistics do not apply to you. You are not the only one that statistic does not apply to. The same holds true for any statistic you can conceivably conjure up.

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Predator

Good job Jackhammer. Posting a joke and having the funny killers start a debate about it. I know you saw this coming.

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The answer is hidden in plain view.

jibber

meh, I was all for the joke, like I said at the start, I agreed with you proggyman. Now lets all just agree that all men are the same as homer simpson and peter griffin and be done with it.

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What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do -- especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways

Your toughest competitor lives in your head. Some days his name is fear, or pain, or gravity. Stomp his ass.

HOOKED ON THE WHITE POWDER

Astronomer

I was all in for the joke as well, but just couldn't resist the urge to reply.

I am a teacher, and most of my male colleaques have EXACTLY the same amount of qualifications as me and they get paid more. I probably did way better than them in high school and in university but they get paid more. Whenever I question this I get told that they are a safer bet as an employee because they aren't going to have children, that's why they get paid more. I tell my employer that I do not plan of having children anytime soon. They tell me that they can't prove that. So I get paid less. JUST FOR HAVING A ****ING UTERUS.

Each day observing the media I could probably point out over 10 instances where women are represented as subordinate to men, and probably about 2 that are vice versa. And please don't use PORN as an argument about female representation?!

Okay so getting higher grades than men and being intimate in a relationship make up FOR BEING SEXUALLY ABUSED AND RAPED?!

As I said, I don't think women are better than men AT ALL, I'm just saying that women still do not have equal rights or opportunities in society. I could go on and on about how wrong I think you are but this is not the place so I am going to stop arguing. I apologise for the rest of MB members for having the urge to reply to GuitarBizzare's comments and for going incredibly off-topic.

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Rubber

You know... Proggyman hasn't even posted in this thread.

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