And the fact that women can get pregnant and men can not has no factor in this?

As a humanitarian - which as you pointed out is the root of my feminism - I am against conscription for men or women, and I see this as a feminist stance. So rather than feminists march on DC and demand subscription [I take it you mean “conscription”] of women I’d prefer to see us demand less expendature on war full stop and therefore less men dying.

The only problem is that we do have conscription for men. Now I am not going to waste anyone’s time by the old argument as to whose “fault” this is. But the reality is that men can be conscripted and women can not. So women do, in fact, have a privilege. The draft was a major factor to men in the USA from the 1940s to the early 1970s.

Even today, my university distributes a pamphlet from the Selective Service entitled “A Man’s Got to Do What a Man’s Got to Do”, i.e., sign up for conscription or else lose financial assistance and perhaps even going to jail. There are other penalties in the works.

Now supposing the government were to issue a pamphlet entitled, “A Woman’s Got to Do What a Woman’s Got to Do”, wherein women had to register for possible service as comfort girls. I think we might all be rightly indignant about this. The fact that draft registration is not much of an issue shows just how well society accepts the fact that men are expendible.

I also had no idea that contributing where I can to my family and household–which is a necessity-based rather an idealogically considered decision–made me a feminist. Someone has to keep the house clean, help out with homework, drive to swim practice, etc., and it is more than a one-person job. I am not sure that Gloria Steinem had much to do with my willingness to clean up the kitchen.

Then masturbation is………a dinghy?

(That’s for not answering my previous question Hugo)

Setorious:

The first of your points interested me: Something that is great about feminism is that it aims for both men and women to be freed from roles which are no longer necessary. Personally, I think we in the West spend way too much money on defence. We could easily pulverise the entire planet a few hundred times over, and I don’t think we’ll ever need to do that (once would surely be enough for anyone). As a humanitarian - which as you pointed out is the root of my feminism - I am against conscription for men or women, and I see this as a feminist stance. So rather than feminists march on DC and demand subscription of women I’d prefer to see us demand less expendature on war full stop and therefore less men dying. Armies should only be activated when absolutely necessary and should only stay as long as their presence is a force for good. And I agree, if it is absolutely necessary to fight to the death over an issue then both men and women should take responsibility. But, personally, I don’t think there is much we need to do that for.

We are coming out of the dark ages and finding new ways to live and surely now the deaths of men in conflict is on the large part an unnecessary tragedy. It is abhorent to me that young men are taught that it is masculine or brave to send themselves to possible death at the age of 19.

Of course they’re not the same; even if men and women were, genetically and from birth, identical, the massive, coercive gendered upbringing foisted upon most of them would make it pretty inevitable that they would be very different groups as adults.

What attracts many of us to feminism is a rejection of the shaky theory that men and women are binary opposites, with virtually no overlap in their biology, behavior or abilities–practically might as well be separate species–and that a woman who is ‘like a man’ (or a man who is ‘like a woman’) is a freak, pervert or both.

Saying that feminism isn’t responsible for women’s equality is a bit like saying that the Civil War had no impact on the end of American slavery.

I think marriage, given its development over time, has had the potential to be equal whether it was complementarian or egalitarian, however in the past, pragmatism or necessity dictated more of a complementarian approach. I not sure or at least convinced that the transition to an egalitarian marriage is largely the result of feminism.