Feminism/Masculinism?

[Rave]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/ar...-Mens-Lib.html

Yes, it's the Mail, but I really respect Jenni Murray. And what she has to say there chimes with a lot of what I see in my life nowadays.

I'm a 30 year old bloke, and having been a hardcore liberal for as long as I could think, I count myself as a feminist. I can't abide any old school glass ceiling behavior/patronisation etc. Thankfully where I work, in general the women work better than the men, whether they're my superiors or the drivers working for me. There's a couple of exceptions, but hey.

But, ultimately, kids don't bring themselves up, as the crime stats show. I'm not trying to be controversial here, but maybe women are a bit better at dealing with young kids than men are- just on my own experience, my mum was a pretty patient parent, whereas my dad's answer was just to slap us all. Thirty or forty years ago there was no difficult argument- men earned the money, women brought up the kids. But-importantly- they could expect to get by on the man's earnings.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I don't think there was much wrong with the old model- that the man went out and earned the money and the wife stayed home and brought the kids up.

There was just one thing wrong of course- the automatic assumption that the man worked. Clearly there are a lot of clever, hardworking women out there, who are more than capable of being the 'breadwinner'. The problem is nowadays that no working class couple (as in both partners work) can get a council house, so the incentive is to reproduce early to get somewhere to live, rather than to work together to build a stable base to raise a family.

I venture to suggest that if the Thatcher and onwards governments hadn't sold off much of our council housing without replacing it, and had instead spent the revenue gained on building more social housing, we would not now be in a situation where we have the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe. As it is, getting pregnant is the only way to assure an affordable place to live, and you reap what you sow.

[format]

Tis a very good article - it's something I actually think about quite often.

It's funny that a lot of girls I mention it to can't see the double standard that goes on with regard to this stuff.

[Greenlizard0]

No, they're not silly enough to not see the double standards, they just don't mention them

[0iD]

[Offtopic]

a hardcore liberal

Contradiction in terms... no?
[/Ontopic]
I think it's pretty natural to make sexist assumptions such as this, but it's less of an issue than it was say, in the 70's & will continue to decline in importance. As a single male parent of daughters, 15 years ago there were no changing facilities in mens toilets, and do not get me started on the CSA

[Lapis]

I'm not sure that women are generally better at being the principal parent than men; I think that this just appeared to be the case in years gone by due to social conditioning and the fact that, sometimes, it wasn't the done thing for men to show the depths of their nurturing capabilities.

One huge issue is the uneven support offered to men as parents, especially when a couple splits up. The law is enormously skewed towards the rights of a woman regarding access and the choice of who should be the 'resident parent.' As the poster above mentioned, the one time you will see the authorities show an active interest in the male's parenting is when money is concerned. The CSA is an outfit that seems solely designed to marginalise and even persecute non-resident male parents. Of course a man must support the upbringing of his children as best as he can, but I think a lot of good fathers are made to feel like criminals through the aggressive attitude and assumption of guilt that this organisation seems to have.

Jessica.

[pp05]

I'm not sure that women are generally better at being the principal parent than men; I think that this just appeared to be the case in years gone by due to social conditioning and the fact that, sometimes, it wasn't the done thing for men to show the depths of their nurturing capabilities.

One huge issue is the uneven support offered to men as parents, especially when a couple splits up. The law is enormously skewed towards the rights of a woman regarding access and the choice of who should be the 'resident parent.' As the poster above mentioned, the one time you will see the authorities show an active interest in the male's parenting is when money is concerned. The CSA is an outfit that seems solely designed to marginalise and even persecute non-resident male parents. Of course a man must support the upbringing of his children as best as he can, but I think a lot of good fathers are made to feel like criminals through the aggressive attitude and assumption of guilt that this organisation seems to have.

Jessica.

I've heard similar things by men speaking about that agency. Simply put they were an ATM machine nothing more.

[Fraz]

Surprisingly decent article for the daily fail.