(12-19-2024, 12:11 PM)The Real Marty Wrote:

(12-19-2024, 11:41 AM)Jag149 Wrote: I can see this. The trick in my opinion is to just see people. Anytime you try to artificially make things "equal" by passing laws, demonizing others or protesting you actually set things back.  Instead if you concentrate on providing equal chances for all people then competition will sort this out over time, the cream will rise to the top. Those people that choose to do the work and take advantage of this will improve their lot in life those that don't will not. Racism is a two edged sword.

That's idealistic, but what happens when the cream rises to the top and it's mostly from one group?  People start looking for reasons that fit their own point of view.  Then the blame game starts, and the assumption from some people is that the "winning" group got there because of an unfair system.  And if you don't agree with that, you get burned at the stake.

Right now in chess, they've tried to rectify the inequality by setting up special tournaments just for women, and a special category of grandmaster, called "women's grandmaster" where women can qualify for that title without being a real grandmaster.  Supposedly this is to encourage more women to participate in chess.  I think that whole approach is very demeaning to women, and some women who hold the real grandmaster title have refused to participate in such activities.

It's called human nature. If you go to the biblical story of Adam and Eve you see two people who were created to be stewards over the earth, not over other people but over the animals and such. They could have anything they wanted except to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge Good and Evil (something like that). They were 100% fine with that until the serpent tells Eve what she's (allegedly) missing, what's being withheld from her, why she's incomplete without being able to eat from that tree. And it was a lie.

That is what's wrong with society in general and it's been happening for millennia. Add that to what Bunnie said about how differently boys and girls are talked to and the fact that women not only couldn't have a checkbook of her own but couldn't buy anything that required a loan without her husband's signature. They also couldn't have their name on a news story even though they did all the research and wrote the articles. They had to turn it over to the men who put their names on it and were called 'brilliant'. That was in the 70s and these things and so much more was some [BLEEP]. 

It takes a couple of generations at the very least to weed that patriarchal BS out of people's minds but many, mostly southern white men, just can't let it go so it lingers and a diluted version is passed down to their kids who are told the things Bunnie mentioned and those kids grow up with a distorted view of themselves and the world. Just as Eve was told what was 'wrong' with her, us girls are too, just in different ways. I'm obviously not a boy and can't speak to that but I'm sure it's similar.

And don't even get me started on what present day so-called 'feminists' have done to undo so much of what my mother's generation started for women's rights. 

I went off the rails from your original intent for this subject but you only have two of us here that can give a woman's perspective and Bunnie had her say. I get a bit....animated on this subject. 

As for math and science, I sucked at both. Hardcore. If there is dyslexia or something similar in math I have it. Without math you don't have science. Or a career in the medical field above a nursing assistant or EMT. I wanted to be a nurse or a cardiac ultrasonographer in the Army but both required math that my mind couldn't process so I was a medic. I actually was not a good student across the board because I had undiagnosed ADHD (inattentive) and my brain couldn't learn the same way normal kids could. I believe things like that also affect how girls and boys think and grow into adult men and women and what they end up going into.

---