Thursday, January 26, 2006

Merkel and more discrimination

There seems to be a pattern that the more women achieve something, especially things that fit nicely into feminists’ plan of action to bring about matriarchy on the planet earth, such as winning elections or becoming the first women to this or do that, the more feminists will complain about gender discrimination. Quite expectedly, or even a bit belatedly if you consider feminists zealotry to exploit any opportunity to advance their agenda, European edition of the Time magazine carried a cover story about the sorry state of women in Germany. I guess this story could have been published whether Merkel captured the Chancellor post or not - if she lost it, after spectacularly losing almost all of the wide lead that her conservative party had over its main rivals – something that not many male politicians in Germany had done in the past (but somehow mysteriously was able to hold on the post of the party leader and then eventually become the Chancellor -again something that not many male politicians were able to do in the past), Time will claim gender bias for the her not being able to become the Chancellor. In the article, as in any other article of this sort, feminists do two things at once, trumpet women’s achievement in Germany (Merkel) and whine about the sorry state of women in general in Germany.

The kind of statistics used in the article are all too familiar to American readers (gender wage gap, relation between the number of child day care and women’s participation in politics, percentage of women in politics, business, etc, etc), and women who took up non-traditional, stereotype-shattering occupations are glorified. It is the cookie-cutter feminist advocacy article.

It’s a little confusing when feminists refer to Sweden and other Scandinavian countries as a model for gender equality, when many Swedish feminists are whining about gender discrimination in their country and how men are comparable to pigs and so on. Well, actually in Sweden, feminists whining will go much further and female politicians discuss seriously about what to do with Swedish men who take almost as much parental leaves as mommy do but spend far less time actually holding and caring babies – what’s the solution – passing a law that that requires if women hold babies for 5 minutes and smile at him for 10 minutes, men have to do the same or more? It’s a country where when men travel abroad, a secret police of sort would follow you so that they can arrest (arrest! a number of legal arrangements between Sweden and host countries to this effect have been made) any Swedes who try to make use of local brothels. Well, feminists may want to look up to this great country.

Feminists’ logic in this advocacy article is, as usual, shaky, to put it mildly. For example, if the German economy is doing so well and is so big (the third biggest in the world) and their science is so advanced compared to other countries, what exactly is the problem? Actually couldn’t you say that overrepresentation of men in these areas is responsible for strong economic growth and academic quality? Certainly the under-representation of women is not a problem in any way with regard to the economic growth and technological advancement, because presently women are under-represented and these two areas in question are doing great. Wouldn’t it be that if we were to artificially boost the women’s number in top business circles and academia by instating various social engineering schemes, it would actually hurt the economy and academia? Would anyone have ever given a thought that the absence of various social engineering schemes, such as affirmative action or positive discrimination, tapering or lowering of criteria and employing less qualified people over more qualified people actually hurt the competitive edge?

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