Thursday, 31 March 2011

Oh lord, he's like a kid who's just discovered that yelling "fuck" makes everyone look at him and make a big fuss. (Analogy stolen from LabRat's excellent post here.) Scott Adams is still at it.

No point-by-point, but a few things that were just so egregious.

Take the question of equal pay for equal work. If you see it as a gender issue, aren't you leaving out a few dimensions that are also important? I saw an interview the other day with the woman who is the lead plaintiff for the class action suit against WalMart. Her complaint is that WalMart discriminated against her for being a woman. The thing that fascinated me is that somehow she managed to discern that the discrimination she experienced was because of her gender and not the fact that she's also obese, unattractive, and African-American. Based on the interview, she also seems to have a sketchy command of grammar. I couldn't judge her height or personality, but those are two more factors that have a big impact on career advancement.
Classy motherfucker, ain't he? And then he goes on to acknowledge that he's a "a short, hair-challenged, nearsighted, unattractive, over-the-hill individual" so he's faced discrimination too ya know, plus even more discrimination for being a white male... while somehow missing the part where he's rich and famous.

I don't really get the point here, though. It's a huge class action lawsuit, so presumably there are some skinny pretty white women in the class too. And if Wal-Mart was "only" discriminating against her size/appearance/race, that would be... okay?

(In fact, here's a picture of some of the plaintiffs in the Wal-Mart suit. Three are white, at least one is definitely not fat, and "attractive" is subjective but c'mon, they're definitely not "too ugly to promote," whatever the fuck that would even mean in what wasn't exactly a glamor industry to begin with.)

So I propose a simple test to determine if you, individually, are a victim of gender unfairness. If a genie gave you the chance to magically switch your gender, and become a member of the other sex, would you do it? And let's say the new you would be about the same as now on the scale of attractiveness, intelligence, ethnicity, circumstance, and health. The only real change would be gender. Do you take the offer?
If your answer is no, then maybe fairness isn't what you really want. Maybe what you want is all the advantages you have now plus the good stuff that other people have. I totally understand. I want the same thing.

Actually, yeah. I do want all the advantages I can possibly get. Um... how terrible? I want women to have all the good stuff available to men and vice versa. That actually sounds just dandy to me.

The whole point of feminism (at least my feminism, blardy blah) isn't that men have it so much better than women. The point is that gender roles screw everything up for everybody. I don't want to be a man. (Well, I'd like to try it, but this isn't about me.) I want to be a person.

I apologize to anyone who was offended by this post.
I repeat: classy motherfucker.

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