Nas wrote:
Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
Nas wrote:
Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
denisdman wrote:
Ok, then should we stop dealing with Japan? They have very strong culture norms against women? Should the Scandinavian countries stop dealing with us? I know at least one of them has rules that require 40% of board seats go to women. I believe Brazil has a rule that requires political parties to run a certain number of women.
Once you go down this road where our norms are right and everyone else is wrong, you quickly end up boxing out the outside world.
I understand. That's why I said it was tricky. Sometimes we make accommodations in pursuit of other goals/interests. You have to decide what your deal-breakers are.
But I don't think it's a matter of thinking one's norms are "right". Everyone thinks that, that's why those are their norms. But I'm pretty confident that my norm is better than making women live in bags. How about you? If you think all ideas are equal pretty soon you're making the case that the tradition of a woman voluntarily taking her husband's name is no different than bagging a woman's head upon penalty of lashing.
A woman "volunteering" to become the property of a man (Or risk being ridiculed) is worse than a woman "volunteering" to wear a hijab. In my opinion both are backwards but they are tradition for MANY.
There is a lot of talk about "moral equivalence" on this board. I don't see how ANYONE could not recognize this as one of the most egregious examples of drawing such. Is there any penalty for a women not taking her husband's name in modern American society? Hell, I know some guys who have taken their wives' names. Others who have hyphenated on both sides or created a new name entirely. Of course the tradition of a woman taking her husband's name is patriarchal and rooted in the concept of women as property, but, unlike the forced hijab- and other anti-woman customs that are even worse- that concept is not currently in practice in the USA.
In every Muslim country the tradition of wearing the hijab doesn't mean a woman gets her ass kicked if she doesn't. Women and men a mocked and ridiculed here for thumbing their noses at the tradition of making a woman the property of another man.
Do you really think a woman taking her husband's name is evidence of some proprietary control he has over her? I find the idea preposterous. But maybe that's because of the house that I grew up in. The idea that my father- or any man- could give my mother orders or tell her what to do is so far from reality that it simply seems laughable to me.
I do have friends who bully their wives but I consider that personal rather than societal. Bullies and the bullied seek each other out. And I also have friends who are bullied by their wives.
I never really gave this much thought before, but I consider my mother a feminist although she would NEVER have described herself that way. I'm sure she only vaguely knew who Betty Friedan was, if at all, and I'm almost certain she had no idea about Naomi Wolf or Catherine MacKinnon, but in my house the idea that a man is in some way dominant over a woman was just not countenanced. And it wasn't because my old man was a pussy either. He wasn't afraid of my powerful mother but he knew damn well he wasn't going to push her around. Although now that I'm typing this, I can actually hear my sister and my female cousin who lived with us saying something like, "Oh yeah, listen to the Golden Boy" and then imitating my mom saying, "My son! My son!"
Hey, primogeniture has its privileges.
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