Poeticlyskuac,
Although I will never assert that I am completely unbiased (in this instance defining bias as pre-concieved notions about a particular topic), the irony here is that you are far more biased than I. The reality of human nature is that we are to some extent all slightly biased--ie. predisposed to lean in a particular direction and care about particular topics. I, however, at least have asserted that both genders have certain priveleges and certain disadvantages. While I argue in favour of women's rights, I care about equality, not 'equality plus;' I thus argue that those balances which are currently tilted in women's favour should be equalized as well. You, on the other hand, seem so fixated on the idea that men are disadvantaged in society when it comes to their relations with women that you seem to be incapable of actually recognizing what is instead of what you believe there to be.
You've also lost me in your argument about consultants--to my knowledge, I never used the term in any of my earlier posts. Nor have I argued that women are entitled to free advice about what to wear/what to career to pursue/how to talk, ect. Please clarify your statement, or at least point me to where you believe I made the statements that you are responding to.
I also must confess some amusement at your insistence that my focus on women's rights is misplaced because there are other issues in the world--in your example, you cited that women tend to have a longer lifespan than men, and asked why I was directing my efforts towards correcting that imbalance instead. Without delving deeply into the topic of gender in comparison to lifespan, I read this article and found it to be quite helpful:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article ... 62,00.html. As is indicated in the article, the discrepancy is not entirely due to environmental or societal factors--some of it could simply be a result of nature. If you'll recall, earlier I stated that justice does not necessarily require us to compensate for natural variations. Just as it is not an injustice that without medical intervention more baby girls will be born than baby boys, it is not an injustice that women's bodies tend to predispose them to live longer than men because of their physiology.
The other thing that you have to account for is the variable of choice. During my parent's youth, lung cancer was largely considered to be a male disease. The reason? More men smoked than women, partially due to WWI and II. Was it an injustice that men were dying from this disease in far greater numbers than women? No, because it is not an injustice that they smoked while the women tended not to. Please recall that the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer had not yet been discovered at this time--cigarettes used to be considered good for the lungs and for certain conditions such as asthma.
The real reason that I find your assertion amusing, however, is because I have seen it before, although not in this form. For a while, I read a pro-life blog, and every so often the pro-lifers would rail against Christian churchs who they felt were not adequately supporting/contributing to the pro-life community. While I realize that it can be difficult for people who are deeply passionate about a particular topic--and particularly in the case of abortion and similar issues--to understand how other people could either disagree with them or chose to support something else, I find such assertions to be perilously misguided. Our world has a lot of problems--global poverty, the oppression of women and gays (particularly in places like Afghanistan and parts of Africa), global warming, the inequity of resource distribution, the destruction of the the Amazon, the oppression/marginlization of indigenous peoples, infantcide, ect. If we threw all of our resources at a particular problem, it's possible that we would be able to solve it. However, I would argue that the world would actually be worse off because, instead of society diversifying its efforts and improving a number of problems, focusing on one problem would, in comparison, benefit a far smaller number of people in a far more limited manner. The other reason that I find this to be a myopic view is because it treats problems as though they occur in isolation.
For instance, let's say that society decides to solve child poverty. We don't care about anything else, we just don't want children to grow up in poverty. The problem is that not all poverty looks or is created in the same way. Some children live in poverty because their family has recently suffered a crippling medical issue that has destroyed the family's savings, other children live in poverty because their parents are drug addicts. (There are far more reasons than this, I'm just listing two examples for the purposes of this discussion.) In order to effectively combat child poverty in those two families, your actions should look different in order to be most effective. In the case of cripplingly expensive medical care, the problem is a systemic one, most effectively dealt with by transforming the medical system itself. In the case of the drug-addicted parents, the problem may be the availablity of other options for the parents to pursue apart from becoming drug dealers, a lack of work ethic, the foibles of addiction, ect. In order to solve each of those problems you need to focus on the other problems that either contributed to or caused your target issue--anything else is, quite frankly, counterproductive.
In your insistence in throwing up random instances or daily examples that I failed to mention, you miss the intention of my argument. I'm arguing on the level of general principle, not each specific case. if you insist on me answering every little example that you can throw out (men getting asked to lift stuff, women getting additional bathroom breaks or whatnot when they're pregnant), we're going to be here for a very long time. (As an aside, I never said that men and women have identical abilities--it often makes sense for men to be asked to do the heavy lifting because, in general, they can lift more than women because of their muscle fibers. In my view, it is no different from asking a man to pregnant. No one--apart from the most ardent feminists, maybe--views it as an injustice that men can't get pregnant because men's bodies (unless they're transgender men) aren't capable of sustaining pregnancy. Men tend to be stronger than women--get over it.)
It would also really help your argument if you stop making unprovable assumptions. Because I'm female, you assume that I must have treated someone badly because it was my time of the month (I've never been pregnanct, btw). You have no facts upon which to base your assertion, and the fact that you consisently bring up my gender in relation to either my character or my argument reflects far more poorly upon you than me. It is also indicative of female stereotypes in society. Why did everyone start harping that I was being too emotional and biased? Because I'm female. Several male commentors on this post have demonstateably been far more biased than me, and I'm the one that everybody calls on it. I don't use personal examples in place of an argument. Personal experience is relevant, but a strong argument cannot be based entirely upon it.
And no, I do not act as though a large percentage of the male population in involved in rapes, assaults, ect. If you'll recall, I mentioned women abusing their children as well. Did that reference somehow imply that all women were either child-abusers themselves or implicit in the abuse of children?
There are stereotypes in favour of women in society, and I hold that those should be corrected. (Your example of rape and female-perpetuated abuse both fall into this category.) You're also wrong about a man's ability to adopt his child, btw. I'm not entirely certain about how parental rights play out in every case, but a father does have parental rights over his children, and is often able to adopt them if the mother choses to give them up. However, the man shouldn't have any influence of whether or not a pregnant women should be able to have an abortion. Say whatever you will, pregnancy carries the risk of serve health problems either immediately or later on down the line (this includes death, btw). It also permantly alters a woman's body--her hips and her breasts, specifically.
Should women be able to have a say over whether or not a man can have a vestecmy? Should she be able to compel him to have one against his will? Unless you're willing to say yes on the grounds that a man's ability to impregnant his partner warrants enough interest in his virility on her part to justify such a compulsion, I don't see how you can argue that a man's interest in having a child warrants a similar sort of compulsion. Women are not incubators, and men are not walking sacks of sperm whose distribution must be forcibly controlled.