Regarding Men: So You Think You Want Equality? UN Women’s vision for the future called ‘Equiterra,’ an imaginary country that has ‘achieved gender equality.’

A tip of the hat to Tom Golden for re-publishing on his Substack channel a Regarding Men (Paul Elam, Janice Fiamengo and Tom) episode from 2021. Enjoy (video, 57:01).
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2 thoughts on “Regarding Men: So You Think You Want Equality? UN Women’s vision for the future called ‘Equiterra,’ an imaginary country that has ‘achieved gender equality.’

  1. Interesting. Of course Equiterra has been tried, and remains the ideal of Cuba, China and North Korea amongst others, in the USSR and Eastern Europe. An equal pay regime, abolition of marriage, abortion on demand, allocation of educational opportunities and jobs, and even women working in dirty and heavy jobs. Universal state nurseries too. It is one of the mysteries of the age that so little attention is paid to the regimes that have actually had a go at this, remember in China everyone even dressed the same. Probably the pre war USSR was one of the most radical, the wheels falling off the complete eradication of kinship and patriotism once it became obvious that fighting for your comrades, women and children and home were far better motivators than Communism. However much of this was still in place and my friend, who married a Czech just after the failure of the “Prague Spring”, and lived in the Czechoslovakia for over a decade, has many a tale of the many regulations and official intrusions to ensure people could not deviate from being “equal”. Of course in fact the modern feminists may not even know of the deep roots of their creed in Marxism, but the idea of paying everyone the same salary has been tried extensively. As has the allocation of jobs by the state, rather than choice. As old communists will tell you the withering of “patriachy” (aka “false ideological consciousness)was only undermined by the cold war, requiring “martial values” to be inculcated in young men (because even in such equal societies they couldn’t cope with actually having women fight) . The central point being that in order to so change human nature (and economic reality) one ends up with repression so pervasive in infects every part of every person’s life.

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  2. The team begin with a classic, where men killed or trapped in a Chinese Mine are always and only referred to as “miners”. In a report that does the sort of grammatical tricks so familiar, to preserve the notion that occupations are gender neutral. Yet of course as we read “firefighter” “Police officer” and so on, we know that in fact if there were women actually there there would be “including 2 women” or the like.
    In such a frame of mind the BBC dubs the female observers in the IDF ” watchwomen” (a new word I think) in their article about the young female soldiers who had been observing across the Gaza border. In a piece that is faintly amusing as it includes the idea, they weren’t “listened to” due to sexism (as if 19 year old male soldiers have the ear of their superiors) and bats on about these “watchwomen”. Of course never considering that they are on fact “observers” which would have also fitted the gender neutral mantra applied to any occupation that is wholly or mainly male.
    Double standard nicely exampled https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67958260

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