What Do Women Want? #5 - Feminism
Men and women really do need each other.
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Marriage customs have changed enough in recent years that more than half the marriages in the United States and Europe end in divorce. Earlier articles in this series examined natural selection to see what sorts of basic traits were bred into men and women over the millennia.
Women had to depend on men back when they were not strong enough to farm or hunt and there was no other way for them to earn a living. At that time, men could and sometimes did use their superior strength to control the food supply and tyrannize women, particularly when the women were pregnant which made them more vulnerable.
Part of the thrust of the "Women's Liberation Movement" was a genuine sense of injustice in that men treated women as objects rather than as people. Women's libbers felt that many men had abused women and exercised undue control over them. It is true that women had a lot to be liberated from, but it's unfortunate that they chose to go to war with men instead of teaching men to cooperate with them.
The Women's Liberation Movement also discarded traditional marriage, saying, "marriage is only a piece of paper." It is true that marriage put obligations and burdens on women, but the main purpose of marriage was to obligate men because men are "prone to wander" as an old song has it.
All successful long-term cultures recognize the sanctity of marriage. Remember shotgun weddings? Laws requiring a man to marry a woman with whom he'd had sex were written at least 5,000 years ago. Violating your marriage vows was regarded as sin or worse. Damaging a marriage by having sex outside marriage was condemned; adultery was sometimes punished by death.
Western society once regarded marriage so highly that you could sue for "alienation of affection" if someone undermined your spouse's feelings towards you. By abandoning the idea of asking a man to make a long-term commitment to a woman in marriage before having sex with her, women gave up thousands of years experience in protecting themselves from sexual exploitation.
The result is considerable pain and confusion. Some women want to build long-term relationships with men, other women want nothing to do with men at all.
Confusion and discord in relationships between men and women is especially tragic because history shows that raising children requires a great deal of intense, long-term cooperation between the mother and the father. When too many marriages break up, children end up raising themselves.
This leads to the Sun newspaper declaring "the most important issue now facing Britain" to be "the scourge of feral youngsters" which we'll discuss later. This article discusses some of the contradictions which came out of the Women's Liberation movement.
The National Organization of Women (NOW)
The NOW web site states that Advancing Reproductive Freedom is at the top of their list of priority issues. If you look at their web page dedicated to Reproductive Freedom, it's pretty clear that NOW is speaking of the freedom not to reproduce. Most of the articles and links on that page are concerned with supporting their belief that a woman can have an abortion at any time.
You might think that NOW's position in favor of a woman's freedom to choose to abort a baby would suggest that they'd support a woman who chooses to have a baby, but you'd be wrong. An article "DeVore's Pregnancy Parking Permit Bill Fails" tells of the defeat of a law which was intended to make life a bit easier for pregnant women.
AB 1940, Assemblyman Chuck DeVore's bill to grant pregnant women temporary disabled parking passes, failed to make it out of the Assembly Transportation Committee this afternoon. In an unusual move, every member of the committee abstained from the vote with the exception of Cathleen Galgiani (Yes) and Betty Karnette (No), the final vote being 1 to 1 (there are 14 committee members).
In most parts of the country, the government forces businesses to allocate far too many handicapped parking spaces; most handicapped spaces are empty most of the time. If a doctor can issue temporary handicapped parking passes while patients recover from broken legs or hip replacements, the reasoning goes, why not issue handicapped parking passes to pregnant women in the last trimester? It's not as if there are all that many women having babies these days, there's plenty of room.
Not wanting to be seen as voting against motherhood, opponents didn't vote against the bill; they simply refused to vote. Without enough legislators voting, the bill failed. The article went on:
The National Organization for Women testified in opposition to the bill, once again proving the hypocrisy of their group's title. Responding to their allegations that AB 1940 classified pregnant women as disabled, DeVore stated that pregnancy is a temporary state, not a permanent disability, much like when an athlete is injured and needs some assistance for a few months.
NOW's web site says that advancing reproductive freedom is their #1 issue. As with most liberals, however, NOW's words don't mean what you'd think.
When a liberal speaks of being "pro choice," what he or she means is that you're free to choose the same way he or she would. We've noted that millions of Indian and Chinese couples have decided that they'd rather have sons than daughters. In order to guarantee the desired outcome, they aborted more girls than boys. As a result, there are hundreds of millions more men of marriageable age in India and China than women.
When American "pro choice" activists heard that, they were outraged that so little value was put on girls. There was talk of introducing a law that would make abortion illegal for the purpose of sex selection. So much for your right to choose if you don't choose the way a liberal would!
Wiser heads realized that if they, of all groups, supported any restrictions on abortions, things might get out of hand and they might end up with no abortions at all. For the moment, women are still free to chose to have an abortion even if it's solely to have a son instead of a daughter.
Letting pregnant women have temporary handicapped parking passes has nothing to do with abortion, but it doesn't fit NOW's notion that the only reproductive right that matters is the right not to have a baby. Betty Karnette, who voted against the bill, offered her own solution: "This is why we need a man around the house."
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle?
Wow. NOW opposes a bill to help pregnant women because that's the wrong kind of reproductive right and the woman who voted against the bill says that women should rely on men to run errands when they're pregnant.
There is an incongruity in NOW's anti-male posturing. Some unmarried women who desire children pay to have themselves artificially inseminated with an anonymous donor's sperm. Artificial insemination does not happen by accident. It's reasonable to assume that women who do that intend to have the baby and would thus not exercise what NOW calls "a woman's right to choose."
The vast majority of women who seek abortions have become pregnant in the usual way, that is, by hanging around with men. Women can support themselves and don't need men to feed them or to make babies; many women choose to be with men.
Some feminists have said, "All sex is rape;" some women clearly disagree or they wouldn't need abortions.
The women's liberation movement has given women many more opportunities, but it's not clear that women are happier overall. As we noted early in this series, some women want nothing to do with men, but many women seem to enjoy having men in their lives. Women do enjoy sex from time to time, but the fact that men pay for sex a lot more often than women pay for sex suggests that men want sex more than women do.
Prostitution has been called "the oldest profession," which suggests that men have been paying for sex for a long time. There isn't as much historical information concerning what women want from men badly enough to pay, but there are beginning to be articles explaining what women pay men to give to them.
A CNN article explains that "geisha guys" are the up-and-coming fashion accessory for well-heeled Japanese businesswomen. The article explains what women want badly enough to pay between $1,000 and $50,000 per night to get:
The women pay for a man to lavish them with undivided attention.
"I give women things that men normally don't do, like complimenting their appearance," says one host, 24-year-old Yunosuke, who only goes by his single host name. "I make women happy."
Women love being treated well without the pressures that come with dating, she [a club manager] says. [emphasis added]
The article suggests that women enjoy having a man pay attention to them and praise them without the "pressures that come with dating." What might those pressures be? We know from the recent news about Gov. Spitzer and others that many men are willing to pay explicitly for sex; it's likely that women feel an implicit pressure for sex as part of the dating process.
In the old days, it was more or less understood that there wouldn't be any sex until after marriage so there was less pressure during dating, but it seems that in Japan, at least, if a woman wants attention from a man without being pressured to have sex, she has to pay.
When a man or woman pays for attention from the opposite gender, the person doing the paying tends to have a disproportionate say in what goes on. When a man pays a woman, non-sexual events occur, but it appears that sex is generally assumed to be part of the package.
This is consistent with natural selection. Having sex often doesn't do anything for a woman's reproductive success because it takes so long to have a baby and nurse it until it can survive on solid food. A woman doesn't need a lot of sex to maximize her reproductive success, she needs a man to hang around and feed her.
The more he hangs around, the more children she can raise. Thus, women are selected for wanting long-term relationships. Taking care of a woman helps a man's reproductive success, of course, but men can also increase their reproductive success by having sex as often as possible with as many women as possible.
Relationships become one-sided when one party pays; he (or she) who has the gold makes the rules. Who pays for what suggests what men and women really want from each other.
When men pay, sex is assumed to be part of the deal, but when women pay, they want undivided attention and sincere, meaningful compliments. In other words, they want an intense relationship without sex being involved, at least not nearly so overtly, but men pay more often than women pay. For every gigolo, there are a thousand whores.
In times gone by, the dating period helped a woman determine whether this guy would meet her need for a relationship. Some men were able to flatter women and get what they wanted without any commitment, of course. They used to say, "He must have fed her a line," when a good girl went wrong with a bad guy. There are other shortcuts - "Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker" - which at one time were held to be the mark of a cad.
The difficulty is that it takes considerable time for a man to pay enough undivided attention to a woman so that his praise and attention become meaningful to her. Dr. Laura pointed out that a husband can be tempted to stray if his wife doesn't meet his sexual needs, but she didn't say much about what a wife needs from her husband. If a man isn't willing to spend enough time opening his heart to her, a wife may not feel that there's enough of a relationship to make it worthwhile for her to open her body as often as he desires or even to stick around at all.
The path to traditional marriage through dating was set up so that the woman could find out whether the man would be willing to relate to her, but with the modern expectation that sexual relations will start early in the dating process, there's no mechanism to verify that the woman's need for a relationship based on attention and appreciation will be met. Couples end up in divorce when the husband's or wife's needs aren't met.
Avoiding Divorce
The divorce rate is painfully high, mostly because men and women have been told a lot of lies about each other. Popular pundits have been saying that men and women are alike in their wants and needs. This is plainly false; men and women pay for radically different services when they buy inter-gender activity; their wants and needs are quite different.
We use "whoredom" to describe the act of women or men paying each other for services; most people recognize that marriage involves a man and a woman giving to each other without payment. The difficulty is that most people find it hard to give to another person if they feel that their needs aren't being met. Once a husband or wife starts keeping score, the marriage is in trouble, assuming that marriage happens at all.
All over the web, you'll find sites discussing the burning question, "Why won't he marry me?" This issue arises when a woman lets herself fall in love before she finds out that the guy doesn't want to get married at all.
If she identifies men who're opposed to marriage before getting sexually or emotionally involved, she can wait for a man who's willing to consider the possibility of marriage. If she only dates men who are willing to consider marriage, she's much more likely to end up married.
Putting marriage on the table changes the goal from playing with each other to staying with each other. People ought not to marry unless they understand each other's needs well enough to know whether they can meet them.
To oversimplify, women want to talk a lot more and a lot more deeply than men do and men want sex more often than women do. The secret is knowing that your spouse does not share your main focus while agreeing that faithful marriage is important to you both.
The traditional marriage vows were carefully edited over the centuries so that couples vowed to meet each other's needs. Let's look at what married people used to promise:
I, X, take thee, Y, to be my lawful wedded [husband, wife], to have and to hold, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, to love, honor, nourish, and cherish, in sickness and in health, and, abandoning all others, cleave only to thee 'til death us do part.
"To have and to hold" sums it up neatly. A man expects that he can have his wife whenever he wants her; she expects that her husband will hold her whenever she wants him. "Hold" isn't merely physical, it also means to (up)hold a wife or husband emotionally, financially, and in every other way.
"Cherish" means believing, saying, and acting as if the other person is your very own special, unique, precious, irreplaceable, perfect treasure. The obligation to "nourish" isn't just about food, it's also about meeting a husband's or wife's emotional needs whatever they might be.
A woman's primary need is for a man to relate to her by opening his heart to her. Talking from the heart is harder for men than for women, so a woman has to be very careful how she talks to a man. Men like to be loved, but men need respect more than they need love - that's what "macho" is all about. Women may wish that men weren't so macho, but that's unrealistic; men are what natural selection has made them.
There's an old saying, "Nothing holds a man up more than having a woman lean on him." A man who cares about a woman is very sensitive to how she talks to him. If she honors and respects him through her words, he'll enjoy talking to her, but if her talk is painful or doesn't show him respect, he won't want to open his heart to her and he won't want to be around her. A man can always find another job and tell himself he's doing it for his wife or he can look for another woman who'll accept him, at least for a while.
What's more, a wife must respect her husband's sense of privacy. A lot of what a man says seems silly or irrelevant to a woman as a lot of what women say seems irrelevant to men. A wife shouldn't tell her husband's secrets. If he can't trust her with the innermost secrets of his heart, he won't tell her what she wants to know.
Similarly, a man must recognize that opening her body to him makes a woman feel invaded unless he's careful to make her feel special, cherished, nourished, and appreciated. Men get so focused that it's easy for a woman to feel that any willing woman would satisfy him, she may have even heard, "All cats are gray in the dark."
Old marriage vows included "love, honor, nourish, and cherish" for good reason. If a husband doesn't talk to his wife enough that she believes he knows what makes her special or if he doesn't honor her abilities and skills, taking her can make her feel like an interchangeable sexual appliance. If a man makes his wife feel like a sex toy she won't want to meet his sexual needs, but if he gives her a comfortable, safe, loving place in his heart by honoring, nourishing, and cherishing her in open talk where he contributes at least 1/3 of the words, she'll be more willing to give him a comfortable, safe, loving place in her bed.
I once heard a high-school classmate say, "I married the football captain!" She valued her husband for his status and not as a person with strengths and weaknesses. A man doesn't like being treated as an interchangeable status symbol any more than a woman likes being treated as an interchangeable sex appliance.
Bonding
Women bind themselves to other people by talking; a woman falls in love through her ears. Men bind themselves to other people by shared experiences.
Men who were shot at together 50 years ago get together to talk about it. A young man can hear the stories and learn how to behave when he's shot at, but he can never join their group because it didn't happen to him. If a woman wants her husband to bind himself to her, she must share experiences with him; that gives them something to talk about. Raising children together used to be a shared experience which drew couples together, but now that most parenthood is outsourced to day care centers, parenting has lost its bonding power.
Ideally, a man should look for opportunities to talk to his wife and open his heart to her and she should look for opportunities to give herself to her husband. Any successful marriage runs on faithful self-sacrifice. If each party worries most about meeting the other's needs, they tend to stay together.
This series started out by noting that women are having a lot fewer children than they used to. This makes sense because raising children is a lot of work. In a way, the most amazing thing about babies is that having had one, a woman might want to have another and then another after that.
The next article discusses some of the difference between having children and raising children. NOW doesn't recognize a woman's right to choose to marry or to choose to have a baby, but a number of women seem to desire to exercise those rights. This series is intended to help them. NOW can take care of itself.
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What does Chinese history have to teach America that Joe Biden doesn't know?
IN GENERAL, and there are exceptions, of course, women want to talk more than men do and men want sex more than women do. A woman isn't going to feel like a slave if her husband opens his heart to her and belongs to her. She will notice how happy he is with her when she opens herself to him. His happiness with her will make her happy.
If a man opens his heart to his wife, he'll notice how happy she is with him when he opens himself to her. Her happiness with him will make him happy.
As a practical matter, a woman's needs change over time. If she's expecting company, for example, and she thinks the house is a mess, her husband ought to have talked to her enough to notice her need and help her clean the house. His helping her with her immediate problem will make her feel a lot better.
When you're married, you can't make yourself happy if your spouse is unhappy. The best way for a married person to be happy is to focus on making his or her spouse happy. If your spouse is happy with you, you're very likely to be happy.
You can't float your own boat, but you can float your spouse's boat by figuring out what he or she needs at any given time and meeting the need.
As for deg's comment, the point was that women didn't need men at all. Most of the women who sympathized with that remark had already decided they didn't want to take the trouble to have and raise children.
http://www.answers.com/topic/a-woman-without-a-man-is-like-a-fish-without-a-bicycle
It claims that the phrase originated as an anonymous graffito much like "Kilroy was here." The page also contains an early rejoinder from men as well as a follow-on remark from more realistic feminists.
Several of the pages attribute the phrase to Gloria Steinheim, but she has been known to repudiate several remarks which were attributed to her.
I'm sorry Patience, you may have misunderstood me. My point about women having to do it all was more that men should help more, and there should be more balance, rather than that women should have to choose between motherhood and career.
It's no different than Adam Smith's principle of specialization. Why should people be forced to do equal shares of jobs for which they have different feelings? Why cannot people split things as they prefer?
Since the days when most mothers were full-time homemakers and most fathers were full-time breadwinners, have we seen an improvement in society? Not hardly. Gloria Steinem's argument is the right one: nobody should be forced into a mold, but we all have to recognize that we can't do everything and have to make choices. Unrealistic expectations simply lead to misery.
First, I don't think you could ever find any wife/mother who really WANTS to do house chores. House work never ends, it's thankless and it's tiring; I would challenge you to find one single woman who prefers it as "her specialty". I would think that it is quite false to say women find housework "more interesting and fulfilling" by choice.
Second, regardless of division of labor, children do not get the attention, discpline and support of their fathers like they should. That they get any at all is rare. Raising children in this way, while hard and certainly not lucrative, might bare fruit in the difference it makes with tomorrow's adults.
I also think this model can serve as an out for both parties. Women, it would appear, get very tired and depressed many times by being "shut in" for weeks at a time with their screaming brood. To have some other responsibility away from the home half the time might re-align their focus and energy while the father steps in.
Thing is, things weren't great back then either, there were just different kinds of misery. When we were studying Victorian literature, a girl in my class spoke up and said that she thought we should go back to those values, for much the same reason. Our tutor gently pointed out that at that time, marriage was an economic transaction, men generally had three-four wives in a lifetime because they frequently died in childbirth, love didn't come into it and there were ridiculously high numbers of prostitution, including that of children.
We shouldnt idealise things. Even as recently as the fifties the housewives popped valium because household chores were so mind-numbing.
My personal experience of such tasks is you get no gratitude and when it's all you have to do, is the most dull, mind numbing experience ever.
Also if women have no economic independence it becomes a lot harder for them to assert their basic human rights.
Exactly! Men AND women have children! They Both need to care for them.
You forget: If a women has health issues that stem from her pregnancy, or Any health issue that is exasperated by her pregnancy she IS permitted to have a temporary placecard, if not a permanent one, depending on her medical needs. And she Is allowed to use her placecard to park in All of the accessable parking that may [usually not] be available.
People need to get their Facts straight!
And this ignorant comment: "In most parts of the country, the government forces businesses to allocate far too many 'handicapped' parking spaces."
Not where I live! There are Never enough (it's accessable; not handicap by-the-way) parking spaces. Never!
When you are 17, and just had Your hips replaced, yet cannot get out of Your car at the local shops because there isn't any available parking spaces, then come back and tell me all about the so-called "empty parking spaces that need to be filled"!
People Without Disablities Abuse these closer parking privileges every day at my local shops! Why don't you focus on cleaning out those cheater's before you add yet another proup of people to list that will have their own shot at cheating the system?
Besides why do these women need to be added anyway? They can already be given placecards IF they actually Need one! Don't believe me, go ask a doctor! *Shakes Head* Silly people! Just silly...
This part again: "If a doctor can issue temporary handicapped parking passes while patients recover from broken legs or hip replacements, the reasoning goes, why not issue handicapped parking passes to pregnant women in the last trimester?"
So the people who have had their disability since they were children (like myself) are people that you have never even bother[ed] to count, and don't care less about? I've had RA since I was a two-year, and I've already had: 5 joint replacements. Next week will be number 6!
** I'm sick of ignorance! All american's in this country will eventually become "disabled". As you age you grow more Unable to care for yourself. That is "disabled".
Do not take away any senior's rights to the Limited Parking that is available! That is what such proposal's would be doing: The proposal that permits women in the last 2 months of their pregnancy to have legal access to the *accessable* parking WithOUT a Medical Necessity.
In fact: Don't take away My own right to the Limited Parking that is available! I'm as much a person as the next. It is easy to Take from the disability community. The average person thinks nothing of taking away our access to whatever they want!
We are an easy target for people to abuse. Easy targets to take from. It's the way it's always been, but hopefully this will change as people become more educated. Education is always the key.
** This was in reference to the ignorant comment that "nobody seems to use the 'accessable' parking so we should allow all pregnant women to use it as well, even without a Medical Necessity." I've proven that: Yes, people *oh GASP* people do actually need their parking placecards.
People need to quit trying to take what isn't their's. I believe it's called: Stealing. Which is one of the 10 Commandments. Something all three "major" religions believe in. *Smile* Listen to your religion if nothing else!
Post Script ~ Yes, I was born in the US in Alaska in fact. No, I've never lived in any other country. I'm merly an anglophile. {That is a person who greately admires or favors England and things English.}
So anything that seems strange about the way I place words in a sentence or my choice of words, doesn't stem from anything except my love of "all things english".
So what, exactly, is it when the government requires that something that is not theirs - like, say, a parking space - be given to someone else other than who the owner of the property might prefer it to be?
What happens is exactly what we see here: fury at someone "taking from you" something that is not yours to begin with. Which is exactly why the government has no business creating mandates or preferences of this sort, for anyone, or for any reason.
Obviously, some store owners might CHOOSE to placard handicapped spaces; others (as I've seen) may label some for "expectant mothers" and "families with kids." If you own the space, you should be allowed to do with it as you please - and of course, if a shopper doesn't like it, they have every right to protest or shop elsewhere.
And while no doubt somewhere across the fruited plain there may be some store where the handicapped spaces are full - likely in Florida where I rarely am - in all my life I have never, ever, even once, seen a store parking lot of any significant size in which there were not abundant, empty handicapped spaces. And this includes California and Arizona where you'd expect to find more retired people to use them.
But this is totally beside the point; the relevant issue is the complete disregard of the hard-core feminists for motherhood.
Patience. *Shakes Head* That is So silly! These parking places: Have ALWAYS, and Will Always belong to the Owner of the property!
LOL: The goverment does not "take" them.
Did you think that the accessable parking belonged to the goverment or something?
Perhaps ~ You meant something to do with a [possible] discount being given to People with Disabilities --- Where there is a Fee for Parking?
Whatever Fee a person is required to pay ---- is payed by a person with a disability too. There isn't a discount if you're "disabled". LOL ......
Yes, any store can have any parking place reserved as you've suggested. Many do.
The point that the article was refering to was: Creating a Law to allow pregnant mothers to have access to accessable parking spaces. I, then stated :: "If a woman has health issues that stem from her pregnancy, or Any health issue that is exasperated by her pregnancy she IS [already] permitted to have a temporary placecard, if not a permanent one, depending on her medical needs." --- My point being that:
1.) A change in the law wasn't even needed.
2.) It doesn't matter that 'The National Organization of Women (NOW)" didn't support such an unneeded bill/ law --- Since why try to add More laws which try to legalize something that is already legal?
3.) It's ignorant of any article to suggest that NOW was behaving like hypocrites in testifying against such a redundant bill. Since such a bill would be a moot point, anyway.
And that brings me back to my other statement that: People need to check their facts before writing an article, or (even) quoting one. Maybe the author of: {What Do Women Want? #5} simply didn't go through everything before taking such a ridiculous position based on a quote that was inaccurate.
The ADA states that it Must be accessable ---- that is the Law. It includes parking.
~~~~ Patience said: "... Of course, if a shopper doesn't like it they have every right to protest or shop elsewhere."
Yes, a shopper will always have a right to choose not to frequent a place that doesn't meet their needs. I know many People with Disablities who are forced to do just that.
The shops need to think about this Beforehand though or they'll continue to loose business as people cannot even get into their shop due to lack of accessable parking places. In today's ecomony loosing business is something most companies simply cannot afford.
Hummm... I'm not familiar with "The fruited plain" LOL! Let me tell you a tiny bit about where I live: It's small --- under 1,400 and rural ---- I've gone to the shops 4 times in a week, and every time there wasn't a single accessable parking space!
You are lucky to live in the community that you do. Lucky to have those available parking spaces. If you are ever in a car accident, and become "disabled" you will even be more lucky to live where you do ---- You won't need to worry about parking as much as I do.
We (my city & I) are Not California, nor Flordia and yet: There still isn't enough parking spaces! That's what makes me think that people are abusing the system, and then comes my anger about people "taking something that doesn't belong to them".
All of my earlier comments are in regards to that, not some weird right-wing fear that all 'liberals' are out to "take things" from business. (Or would like the goverment to do it for the liberals.)
Oh, and: A parking space that is accessable isn't "mine" like a car would be 'mine' (I cannot drive, so I don't own a car), or my personal computer which is 'mine'. I'm sure you get where I'm going with this, and I do not need to elaborate further on this...
Again with missing the point: Feminists have absolutely, 100% Nothing to do with MY comments! LOL: I'm for Disablity Rights first, and foremost. All those "other" categories go out the window, and then take a back seat to Disablity Rights, for me --- personally.
~~~~ Patience said: "... Complete disregard --- for motherhood."
If you read what I wrote before you should have understood how false such an 'idea' is. When you read what I wrote in this post, then you'll Know how false such an 'idea' is...
Yes, this is fairly clear from your posts. To you, disability rights supercede the rights to private property, the right of freedom of association, and so on down the line. By the government forcing businesses to provide parking spaces for the exclusive use of the handicapped, they are TAKING the right to the control of that space - which is, theoretically, private property belonging to the store owner, but now might as well not be.
You say that businesses cannot afford to give up the business of the disabled, and so ought to provide handicapped spaces without being required to. I agree that seems logical. But if so, then there is no need for any law regarding handicapped parking spots - a smart business will provide them anyway. So why do we need a government bureaucracy?
The point about NOW in the original article is their hypocrisy.
- Fact: Most women choose, at some point in time, to become mothers, which necessarily includes the state of pregnancy.
- Fact: Close-in parking spaces, nowadays predominantly reserved for the handicapped, would be particularly useful to the pregnant - of which the vast majority of women will be at one time or another.
- Therefore, if NOW cared about ALL women, including those who choose to become pregnant, they would be in favor of extending the use of handicapped spaces to pregnant women. But they don't. Now, we would expect the National Association for the Disabled (or whatever it's called) to feel otherwise. But the National Organization for Women is supposedly about helping women. Apparently not though.
You're right that feminists have nothing to do with your comments. That's what the article was about though...
Again, you missed my earlier statement: All a pregnant woman has to do is go to her doctor, and get him to sign the DVM paperwork, and she has a temorary Parking Placecard. It will allow her to park in the accessable parking spaces in any US State, until she gives birth, then it will expire as it's no longer needed.
A pregnant woman can already get one without a 'new' law: So why would a new law even need to be made?
NOW did their research, found out that the propossed bill was redundant, and then they didn't support it. Shocker: Not throwing your support behind something for no reason. {LOL}
This only makes sense --- If a bill isn't needed, then why would anybody speak in favor if it?
NOW's actions in not supporting this useless bill does not suggest the heinous myth that: All feminist's are against a woman's right to choose to have a child or children.
In fact being a feminist means that you believe in the right to have children, and the right to raise those children to the exclusion of a job.
IMHO: If you choose to be a "stay-at home" then you should get the same respect as a woman who works outside the home. Motherhood is a difficult job, and I know that many people (women included) turn up their noses at a mother for "only" raising children. This has happened to my own mother!
Feminists need to go back to their roots, and concentrate on detroying such hubris once and for all. But that is just my opinion on how far the "movement" has traveled from their origins.
Actually, it sounds like you agree with the general point of the article regarding how disconnected feminists are with reality, and how much more respect mothers deserve than they get from the standard feminists we see on TV.