dorettas@tekecs.UUCP (Doretta Schrock) (02/12/86)
>--Jamie. >...!ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision!ubc-cs!andrews > Political and economic prejudice: no question. Social and >emotional prejudice: a significant amount directed against men. If >you're not a man, I don't expect you to empathize with this completely. > I'm interested in no such competition, but there are a lot of >women on the net who ignore the fact that men do suffer because of >stereotypes, and I consider it my duty to educate them. > I agree completely, but who said that sexism had only to do with >power? A lot of people don't realize that when they think that money >and power are more important than knowing what your real emotional >responses are, they are falling for the standard line of our great >North American materialist society. No Jamie, I do value your opinion as much as Rita Mae Brown's, but I'm not very moved by this particular argument for two reasons: 1. I guess I do believe in the hierarchy of needs business (as popularized by Maslow, if I recall correctly). The thesis here is that it is *only* in societies like the "great North American materialist" one that we live in that people have the luxury of worrying about "knowing what your real emotional responses are". Everyone else has to worry about things like having enough food to feed the kids, being physically safe etc. Males in our society have a big advantage in filling those fundamental needs. 2. It has been my experience that a man's inability to understand his "real emotional responses" usually causes as least as much grief for the women who have to interact with that man as it does for the man himself. As the saying goes, women "can't win for losin'" on this one. Actually, I don't believe that Jamie and I disagree much at all about the effects of sexism on both men and women. We just disagree about the significance of those effects. Doretta Schrock {most any backbone}!tektronix!tekecs!dorettas