Women may be second class citizens in those socities to us, and their situations may be untenable to us, but that is their culture, and they have the very same human right to live their culture as I do mine, whether I agree with it or not. I can't impose my own ideals onto their culture, no matter how much I might think it's 'better'.

So are you saying that we should not have objected to apartheid in South Africa because it was part of the local culture, and South Africans had a human right to live their culture as they saw fit? How about segregation and lack of education and lack of voting rights for Black people in the American south? Or segregation and lack of education and lack of voting rights for women in some Arab countries? Ooops, that’s where we started. How do we determine when the trappings of culture are freely chosen and when they are imposed on individuals by force or by enforced ignorance?

I think that stupid, ignorant, and cruel cultural ideas should be just as open to criticism as any other types of stupid, ignorant, and cruel ideas. It may at times be difficult to distinguish what’s wrong from what’s merely different, but we face that same problem within cultures. It’s worth making the effort. It’s the way that we get rid of stupid, ignorant, and cruel ideas.

its a whole different head

It can all boil down to making power plays with sex organs against the weakest you can find. If that turns out to be men in prison, boys in boarding school or women out in the free world, it does affect some interpretations of it. It doesn't make me as a woman safer going home late at night to know it's not so much about my gender so much as it's about my ability to defend myself (in life, or with my fists), but the crime plays from at least two vantage points.

I don't think it can be divorced from gender, and I don't think it's a completely gender related issue, either.

Where there is oppression, generally the big oppress the small; the rich oppress the poor; the powerful oppress the weak. We look at history, we look at our own society(ies)and we know this to be true.

Generally speaking, women are smaller than men. Generally speaking, women are poorer than men. Generally speaking, women are weaker than men.

I think oppression has a lot more to do with nasty examples of humanity (and the ability and opportunity to oppress) than I think it has to do with gender or sex, though.

It can all boil down to making power plays with sex organs against the weakest you can find. If that turns out to be men in prison, boys in boarding school or women out in the free world, it does affect some interpretations of it.

But frat boys (or whatever) don't go after the pizza guy in equal numbers that they go after the stripper. He's weak, he's alone, he's right there and powerplay ready.

I really think its more along the lines of if you can't get a woman to rape you sub in a weak guy and call him your bitch or your wife or whatever.

He's weak, he's alone, he's right there and powerplay ready.

He's nowhere near as weak. And nowhere near as different.

And nowhere near as different.

Hmmmm....do you mean that because he's too much like the frat boys just by being a boy that the frats wouldn't want to oppress someone that they could, conceivably, identify with?

Women may be second class citizens in those socities to us, and their situations may be untenable to us, but that is their culture, and they have the very same human right to live their culture as I do mine, whether I agree with it or not. I can't impose my own ideals onto their culture, no matter how much I might think it's 'better'.

Slicing the clitoris off of screaming, struggling 9 year old girls isn't a right of culture, it is a crime against humanity.

do you mean that because he's too much like the frat boys just by being a boy that the frats wouldn't want to oppress someone that they could, conceivably, identify with?

As long as women are readily available and obviously more "them," the pizza boy is (the lowest ranks, probably) of "us."

Take the women away, and he'll probably suffer a rapid demotion. Unless it's blacks or kids or Jews or foreigners or the elderly.

Yeah...that's not in the Koran, either.(Not that I've read it, but credible women I respect have and have made good arguments, imo.)

He's nowhere near as weak. And nowhere near as different.

Ten or guys can do whatever they want to one guy. The weakness differential between that one guy and one girl is proportionatly nothing.

And you never hear abou ten or twenty girls raping anyone.

Women may be second class citizens in those socities to us, and their situations may be untenable to us, but that is their culture, and they have the very same human right to live their culture as I do mine, whether I agree with it or not. I can't impose my own ideals onto their culture, no matter how much I might think it's 'better'.

Well, if the gender roles, say, are that women are valued as home makers who are protected or cover themselves out of modesty or the like that argument has its place. But when you're slicing people up...