<p>I never asked to know about your reproductive organs, Sawahh, because they ARE your business. What confuses me is why you brought them up if, like you said, they’re of your concern and not mine. Really, isn’t forcing a company to pay for something in effect making it, literally, their business? I would think so, but this is a point I’m certainly not that rabid about (and it’s tangential at best to this idea, because if the lack of free birth control is your best example of “oppression”, you’re really seeking out examples of inequality; to the best of my knowledge and in the interest of fairness, here, condoms aren’t free or covered by health insurance).</p>
<p>This made me giggle a little: “Lastly, I’d just like to point out that the fact that you’re a male isn’t helping your argument out much. Thus, you don’t have as much credibility as you think you do.” That’s one of the more sexist things that’s been said on this thread, so I would suggest you yield your perceived intellectual and moral high ground, there.</p>
<p>Your spiel about global oppression of women was correct, but unwarranted. That’s what I’ve been saying, and nobody in their right mind will disagree that women’s rights are severely lacking in a lot of African and Asian countries (and elsewhere, but the Third World is certainly the most obvious), so I’m not sure what you hope to accomplish, other than the creation of a beautifully-tailored straw man argument to attack. We’re not talking about other countries, especially not those ruled by warlords and sheikhs.</p>
<p>Go back to my original post. I critiqued another poster for bringing up, as a reason for <em>perceived</em> female under-representation in science and mathematics, what he or she called “restrictions”, which I took to mean unfairness in voting, which has been gone for generations, which I stated in my first response. Since you brought up that same topic, let me elaborate: Women have had equal legal rights for decades. Societal roles and concepts (and that is the cause of actual inequality, rather than laws or whatever, is important) that were expressed in ludicrously unjust laws of the past might be the cause of current sexism, so why not transcend society’s mold? Why not move beyond the simple, hypocritical battles, like trying to gain advantages through affirmative action and clamping down on politically incorrect humor, accept equality as mandated by the law, and leave it at that? Real equality is asymptotic: There will exist inequality for generations after all the real barriers to equity have been broken down, and attacking every last enclave of inequality is just a time-consuming impediment to real equity between sexes, or races, or whatever. I tell you, the little fights, getting upset over half-baked “humor” threads like this and battling the B and C words (or in the case of race or mental capacity, slurs that have long since their inception lost their meaning) and that stuff, that’s useless. All it does is antagonize sympathetic moderates like myself.</p>
<p>You should know, too, that I AM sympathetic toward equality and that kind of thing. I like my edgy humor (and by edgy I mean things that get you fined by the FCC and hated by Puritanical, uptight Americans), but at the end of the day, unfairness is unfair and this thread wasn’t really that funny from the start.</p>
and I agree with the poster in general females in math and science are rare but we do exist.</p>