That a bunch of people are deliberately misinterpreting what ArisC wrote in order to make snarky points about how People These Days are too nice to women and not nice enough to men. I think that sort of discussion is better conducted more straightforwardly, and I am rather bored of the way that every. single. time anyone on LW says anything suggesting what fir want of a better term I’ll call progressive social values, someone comes along to display their oh-so-brave contrarianism by boldly sticking up for the idea that maybe Social Justice Has Gone Too Far and men are the truly oppressed ones / the only real race problem is that black people are less intelligent and no one is willing to say so / etc., etc., etc. There are places where it takes real courage to say that sort of thing, but if LW was ever one of them it was a long time ago, and it really isn’t necessary to turn every discussion that touches on these issues into a whataboutthemenz-fest.
(I would say the exact same thing if every time anyone mentioned a problem faced particularly by men, or white people, or whoever, they got jumped on by a bunch of people saying “how dare you say that when women / black people / whoever have it worse?”. That is … not a problem LW has right now.)
[...] what you really mean by “gender equality” [...]
I don’t mean anything by “gender equality”; as I said elsewhere in the thread, it’s not a phrase I use. The question is what ArisC meant by it.
And no, my impression is not that he meant that women are “more equal”. Rather, (1) traditionally women have had it worse than men, so (2) “gender equality” and similar phrases have mostly been about fixing that problem, and (3) I’m guessing that in Aris’s opinion, as also in mine, women still on balance have it worse than men, so (4) it’s reasonable (or would be in an environment where anything resembling the principle of charity is applied in political discussions) to continue to use such terms to point specifically at ways in which women have it worse and we might want to fix that.
(I have no objection at all if someone chooses to use “gender equality” to mean something more like what it literally says, or for that matter to use it for a discussion of ways in which men have it worse. But that’s not what happened here; what happened is that someone used it the other way, and several people came along and pretended they thought he meant something else.)
That a bunch of people are deliberately misinterpreting what ArisC wrote in order to make snarky points about how People These Days are too nice to women and not nice enough to men. I think that sort of discussion is better conducted more straightforwardly, and I am rather bored of the way that every. single. time anyone on LW says anything suggesting what fir want of a better term I’ll call progressive social values, someone comes along to display their oh-so-brave contrarianism by boldly sticking up for the idea that maybe Social Justice Has Gone Too Far and men are the truly oppressed ones / the only real race problem is that black people are less intelligent and no one is willing to say so / etc., etc., etc. There are places where it takes real courage to say that sort of thing, but if LW was ever one of them it was a long time ago, and it really isn’t necessary to turn every discussion that touches on these issues into a whataboutthemenz-fest.
(I would say the exact same thing if every time anyone mentioned a problem faced particularly by men, or white people, or whoever, they got jumped on by a bunch of people saying “how dare you say that when women / black people / whoever have it worse?”. That is … not a problem LW has right now.)
I don’t mean anything by “gender equality”; as I said elsewhere in the thread, it’s not a phrase I use. The question is what ArisC meant by it.
And no, my impression is not that he meant that women are “more equal”. Rather, (1) traditionally women have had it worse than men, so (2) “gender equality” and similar phrases have mostly been about fixing that problem, and (3) I’m guessing that in Aris’s opinion, as also in mine, women still on balance have it worse than men, so (4) it’s reasonable (or would be in an environment where anything resembling the principle of charity is applied in political discussions) to continue to use such terms to point specifically at ways in which women have it worse and we might want to fix that.
(I have no objection at all if someone chooses to use “gender equality” to mean something more like what it literally says, or for that matter to use it for a discussion of ways in which men have it worse. But that’s not what happened here; what happened is that someone used it the other way, and several people came along and pretended they thought he meant something else.)