args

Feminism is no longer about gender equality

I would like to thank the Con for challenging me with that well-written response, this debate should be a good one. I also applaud my opponent for recognizing the fact that discrimination against men and boys does exist and that there are feminists who could be described accurately as misandrists. This is progress of a kind, because when I type the word misandry the spell-check reminds me that many people don't believe hatred or discrimination against men exists. The problem is that these radical feminists and there ideas are not on the fringe but are actually the feminist orthodoxy. Its clear that feminist organizations are inherently gynocentric, that the men in these organizations are a small minority and the male point of view completely non-existent. Warren Farrell (http://en.wikipedia.org...), the only man to be elected three times to the board of NOW (National Organization for Women) in New York, found himself quickly falling out of the favour of feminists as soon he began sharing the the male perspective and raising issues concerning men. "Farrell was leading anti-sexism workshops on college campuses across the country [...] [He] made men participate in "beauty pageants" to make them see what it was like for women to be judged on their looks alone. The feminists were good with that; they loved him; they sponsored him; they took him out to dinner and told him how wonderful he was. But Farrell also wanted the women to see what it was like to be a man. Men, according to Farrell, "take 152 risks of rejection from first eye contact with a woman until intercourse." He decided that women should have to participate in a role-reversal exercise in which they were forced to ask a man out. The feminists did not like that. According to Farrell, most of them, after watching the men go through the beauty contest, walked out when it came time to participate in the role-reversal "date." But Farrell's biggest argument with feminists came in the mid- to late '70s, when, one by one, NOW chapters across the country came out in support of giving mothers primary custody of children in cases of divorce." (Save the males: http://www.salon.com...) None of this made Warren any less of a an advocate for women's rights and freedoms, yet there was something unacceptable about this to feminists. Farrell eventually found himself excommunicated from the feminist community and blacklisted from media appearances. All because he tried to be fair and give men equal representation within the feminist movement. It is indisputable that feminism has a strong female bias and membership, and as a consequence, is incapable of being equal. Now with the other issues you raised, albeit off topic, its really a difference between equality of opportunity or equality of outcome. What's important is that women have equal rights, freedoms, and opportunities, but the outcomes don't have to be equal in every way and shouldn't be imposed.