Fresh enough from uni to remember stuff that admittedly wasn’t my number one interest…

itstheeconomystupid, those are hardly concerns exclusive to women though are they?

Most women were “engaged to be married at 19 and married at 21″. They worked for two years and then had children.

Interestingly, later many of my ex-class mates were active in the feminist movement, some went to University as mature students … and some of those ended up teaching there.

Times have changed for the better, and I delight in many of the the attitudes of the younger generations.

“though i note not a single one on males,”

IMHO the study of gender can only but involve men, not necessarily to do with how they’re ‘putting women down’, but the concept of ‘gender’ and how it enforces ‘masculine’ behaviours which can be just as tyrannical as society enforcing feminine gender norms - this is of course distinct from the study of the active feminism movements I, II and III(?) but should be integral to those papers you allude to….If it’s any consolation, 3rd year and especially hons papers involve a lot more discussion.

Anyhoo.

Eredwen,
It is true that the statistics are terrible, and the statistics only tell a portion of what is accually going on. What the angry women dont seem to realise though is that those events do nothappen because the individual is male or the victim is female, they happen because of the forces of sociology and because our society legitimises on a small range of approaches that are considered acceptable for people on the basis of their sex.
The angry and militant (feminazi) approach is likley to, due to afforementioned processes, do more damage to both females and males than a more peaceful and reasonable approach, which admitedly the mainstream of true feminism has followed.

It feels as though I dig a hole with exponentially increasing depth with every arguement I make based on personal experiance, so henceforth i shall refrain from making such arguements, atleast on this thread.

I will however, answer the original question and acknowledge frog for having the courage to ask it in a respectful way. It’s amazing how many people just rely on their own assumptions about what other people might be thinking. There’s a few of them in this conversation..

As a woman I would like to see some discussion about a fundamental rethink about the way we value our communities and our environment. We have created a political and economic system which values speculative largesse over constructive contributions to our communities. In fact, community doesn’t even have a value in political debate. Check out the Budget one day, see if you can find the community line item… As Marilyn Waring says it’s not measured, it doesn’t count.

But my main concern is what we’re doing to our kids. We are literally killing them.

We are raising a generation of children who will learn (from advertising mostly) that the goal in life is to have the most stuff. Unless their family intervenes and gives them some alternative messages, children today are being raised from about the age of 3 months old to buy. And they should only buy stuff if it’s made by certain companies which produce our ‘culture’. And that message doesn’t really change as they get older.

And most of us are not only doing nothing to prevent this, we are encouraging it.

If some of us do manage to raise our kids with positive, sustainable community and family focussed beliefs and they decide to take on a career which contributes back to society they will be economically caned for it.

As a woman I want to see a major rethink of our economy. And I want to see the debate focussed on what our communities value, not what’s valued by big business or their think tanks. And sooner rather than later before we completely stuff the planet.

Arohanui

In defence of some of the women who are ANGRY. Incest / rape statistics alone give one pause for thought about unequal power situations in some homes.

Abused females, from little baby girls to assaulted adult partners and sexual assault victims, can become very angry women.

They are at one end of the spectrum, and there are many whose experiences of the power differential are quite different from mine (as a woman from close to the oppposite end of the spectrum.)

For every woman who thinks men are all evil, there’s dozens of men (and no small number of women either, sadly) who interprets any attempt to expose systemic bias towards men as accusing all men of being evil.