Gender in General

Last post I discussed the gender power imbalance on the internet, inspired by my inability to transcend the gender role divide and cook. I burnt down the kitchen :(

Not my kitchen, but close.

I don't want to talk about it...

I'm all for breaking down gender stereotypes though. Aside from this incident I do cook more than just the furniture, and it tastes delicious. The trick is to render the recliner with  radish relish before roasting.

Thanks for all the comments last post by the way,. The prevalent opinion of non-existent women on the internet supports my hypothesis on all internet women being transsexuals. Meanwhile the  "women" commentators happily ignored this and posted nice comments anyway. :D :D :D

I digress...

There are many ways that our society discriminates against gender.  It is important though not to get side tracked and support one gender and not the other. Feminism falls into this trap. I fell into this trap too once. When I was younger I used to think that behind the scenes it was women who ruled the world, men might have held all the apparent power but each man had a wife and each and every man did exactly as his wife ordered. Ergo women rule the world through proxy via superior social power (in actual fact it is the babies who rule the world, since all women do exactly as their baby requires).

I am quite serious, that is what my high school self firmly believed. Maybe it is true, but doesn't mean that men don't mistreat women based on gender either. As I stated in the last post, men clearly do mistreat women. Both genders hurt each other in different ways, and in sometimes the same way. I'm sure you have heard the innumerable cases of women mutilating their husband's pride and joy. That's like cutting off a woman's clit. For the record, men are guilty of this too.

These are extreme cases but in some parts of the world they are not crimes. This needs to change.

For all of you who, like me, live in western nations, gender discrimination is a lot softer and subtler but that doesn't mean we should sit by and let it happen.

Let me give you an example: Deliberately hiring a female candidate instead of a male because the employer feels that he/she needs more females in his/her firm in order to not look like they discriminate is discrimination. That's bad. Just as bad as hiring a man instead of a woman because the employer doesn't want to pay for maternity leave down the track.

Speaking of maternity leave... I support paid maternity leave. But I also support paid paternity leave. It's not fair for a man to be away from the house when his woman and his child needs him most. He needs to be there. It's a crucial time for the baby and its a make-or-break time for the relationship.

Another example: How many times have you blokes dressed up to the nines to go out clubbing yet been turned away by the bouncer because you're "not dressed appropriately" and yet the hot girl behind you in thongs and a boob tube goes right in? That is discrimination.

Then there is the fact that men never get offered secretarial positions and that only hot women get to work behind the bars at clubs (with a few exceptions). But then, women are never chosen to be laborers or bouncers (if it can be helped).

There are countless more examples but the point is that we need to do every little bit that we can to stop gender role stereotyping and gender discrimination.

So please dear readers! Do your part!  Hire sexy male secretaries! Promote women wrestlers and weightlifters!

You know you want to...









And for god's sake, let me into the club damnit!

On Gender Online

You can thank the feminine commentators on my blog for this post. Once it got over 20% and after reading Erika's post on Girl On The Internet Syndrome (the web's version of mesothelioma), I felt obliged to post.

First let me give you my honesty on the matter. Girls on the internet scare me. After years of persuading women IRL that I am not a keyboard jockey, I find it disturbing that there are women who would claim that they ARE keyboard jockeys... Do they have no libido? Has evolution granted them an uber-libido that makes them want to sleep with the internet as well? Or perhaps they are just male to female transsexuals in need of some loving. That must be it.

I baulk at the sight of innocent men pandering to the effeminate side of humanity online. That includes me too. There is something wrong about it. How easily men sell their soul to someone they have never met and never will.

So how does all this relate to war, religion and politics?

It relates to all three. In a sense there is the age old battle of the sexes being waged online. Men worshiping the fabled GOTIS is a religion and gender politics is exactly that.

I am not sure how much of a war it is though... It seems rather one sided. In the male dominated forums, white knights protect the few females and in the female dominated forums, the few men there are gay.

Perhaps I over exaggerate.

I do think it is wrong to put women on a pedestal. It is degrading to the man doing so and in the long run it only hurts both parties. It is expectancy theory. If everyone expects you to be a genius then you will be a genius, if everyone expects you to be a man, you will be a man, but if everyone expects you to be a princess... Then you will be a princess... Until you finally wake up to the reality that you are just another woman living in a cruel world that only values you for your vagina.

So guys, I ask you. Please treat women the same way you would treat a man. If that means verbally abusing them and accusing them of being a 40 year old virgin then so be it. Because they deserve to be recognized solely on their merit, nothing else.

Honour Killing

So I was watching the last half of a documentary tonight. "Forbidden Lies" tells the story of a writer who wrote a book about an honor killing in Jordan, but as it turns out is a complete fraud.

Which I find sad really. Because these honor killings do occur, and all a fraudulent story serves to do is discredit all those true accounts out there. It is a very real problem.

Before I get too in depth with it though, I should explain what honor killing is. Put simply it is the killing of a family member in order to protect the family's honor. An example might be that a woman in the family committed adultery, if the girl knew she was found out then she might save her honor and her family's honor by suicide bombing some Israelis, if not then the family might kill her to save their honor. That might be an overgeneralisation but that is the gist of what happens.

It is wrong. Unfortunately I don't know how the problem can be solved. On one hand the problem seems rooted into the islamic belief system but if that is the case then why is the figure only 5000-20000 a year? If All muslims were that fundamentalist then presumably the figure would be higher. Then again, maybe the women of islam are just that good at following the laws and customs of their faith.

I'm somewhat inclined to side with Richard Dawkins on this one. If the Muslim faith is causing all these killings then this religion is dangerous.

Before I end this post on such a note however, I would like to add that women are not the only sufferers of honor killing. Fratricide is not as common but it does happen too. And let's not forgot those poor blokes out there who readily kill themselves because they feel they have let Allah and their family down.

As I said before, I can offer no solutions to this problem. But that is no reason to turn a blind eye to it. We all need to be aware of this travesty.