A bit of humor. I am a FIRM proponent for equality. Not JUST equality between men and women, or gays and straights, or any two other subgroups you care to mention, but TRUE EQUALITY for all.
From MY view, the people who focus on ONE aspect of that are more often simply looking out for themselves. I marched for rights for blacks back in the late 60's and early 70's, but MY motivation for being there was less likely to have been PURELY for my personal benefit than the far more black people with whom i marched. I carried signs seeking freedom for the Latvians/Lithuanians/Estonians in Washington DC when Gorbachev visited, but i'm not from those cultures. so MY interest there was also not personal. Similarly, i'm not female but i have always stood up for women's rights and i'm not gay but i am also a proponent of their rights. If i ever march for atheist rights, i could certainly be accused of THAT being self-interest, but i think my track record in this domain over the last almost 50 years shows that even there self-interest won't be my only motivation.
having said all this, i'm no more tolerant of some of the NONSENSE put forth by those who champion those causes than are their detractors. less, actually, because i think that when you have JUSTICE on your side, you don't NEED to lie to make your case. For a black person to accuse another of racism simply for noting that the majority of deaths of young black men occur at the hands of another black man is NOT reasonable. And the next time i hear a woman repeat the "Women earn less money then men for the SAME WORK", i may just have to scream. That's just NOT a fact... and in FACT when stats are analyzed for cases where men and women do the SAME work, women are actually paid just a bit higher, but not enough to draw a statistical conclusion from it. NOTE: Don't bother sending me more propaganda from NOW. I've seen the ***objective*** research, and for ME this issue is settled.
Now, having said that i believe that we are all equal, that doesn't at all translate into i think we are all 'the same'. Either from cultural training, or inherent biology, members of some groups are FAR MORE LIKELY to exhibit certain behavioral traits than members of other groups. There are always exceptions, of course, but to use a 'positive example' from when i was teaching, the students i have taught tech school courses to who are from asian cultures were always more attentive, courteous, and dedicated to learning than the non-asian students. This is NOT to say that i didn't have SUPERB students in every other group, but the asians were ALWAYS ready to give 100%, because that was a value that was taught/enforced at their homes far more so than in other communities.
The differences between men and women RUN DEEP. The BEST software troubleshooter i ever worked with was a woman, but she is an exception to my GENERAL experience that men are overall better suited to that kind of left-brained activity just as women - having far more connections in the corpus callosum between their two brains than men have are GENERALLY better suited to perform roles that require social interaction/compassion. Again, EXCEPTIONS exist on both counts, and they aren't even RARE, but on AVERAGE i find that this kind of generalization IS valid.
OK, NOW for the joke... in case you forgot ;-). This was a situation where the DIFFERENCE between men and women was clearly demonstrated with no anomalous results.
Years ago i was in a position of authority at a large software development company. I supervised, directly of indirectly, close to 2000 people. I was responsible for scheduling the releases of our ever evolving software platform, and always tried to 'keep things light'. One way i did that was to give the releases names that allowed people to make jokes about them based on the names, and i usually used a theme for each year's associated releases. So, one year, rather than release 1-8, or naming them after the dates they occurred, i named the 8 scheduled releases after Snow White and her height challenged friends.
When i was first setting that up, i included my intention to do this in the note i sent to my team, as well as noting that i couldn't remember all the dwarf's names (this was BEFORE Google), and asking if anyone could jog my memory about the other two. I received close to 100 replies, and about 3/4 of them were from women. Every response from every woman simply gave me the requested information. BUT... EVERY response from EVERY man didn't give me the CORRECT answer, but was instead a variant of "Sleazy and Horny".
I've heard it said that men think of sex every (insert short interval of time here). This incident always comes to my mind when i do hear that assertion.
OK thanks for reading, and i hope the responses from the men gave all of my readers, male OR female, a chuckle.
