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Originally Posted by ae118
Except that generally we're talking about women lacking equality (of course that isn't good for men either).
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Except that personally, I don't find that to be a galvanizing issue on its own.
Again, why should I care more about the bad things that are likely to affect my daughter because she's a girl more than I care about the bad things that are likely to affect my son because he's a boy? As a boy, he's three times more likely to be removed from class for bad behaviour. Six times more likely to be prescribed with a drug to control his behaviour. Less likely to get honours at every grade of school. More likely to drop out. Less likely to go to university. Less likely to read when he grows up. About eight times more likely to go to jail. Three times more likely to be murdered. Five times more likely to be homeless. Far more likely to be killed or injured on the job. Three times more likely to commit suicide.
It's disheartening that so many people are incapable of thinking in universal principles, and get sucked into manichean us vs them thinking, and the emotional appeal of narratives of heroes of villains, victims and oppressors. Even if I thought that, in the wash, the negative outcomes women in Canada suffer from today for being women are worse than the negative outcomes men in Canada suffer from for being men (though given the realities I cited above, I'm not confident that's the case), why does that mean I should care only about the one and not about the other? And the believe the one kind of disparity should be politicized and the other ignored?
I suppose it's unlikely we'll ever see a politician eschew tribalism (whether it's rooted in ethnicity, gender, or class) and appeal to universal principles and values. But this is getting off-topic so I'll leave it at that. If anyone wants to discuss the merits of feminism as a political movement in 2015, they can start a thread.