Gender Equivalence

Pasted from my main website:

A little bit of party politics (shudder) and gender politics in this article I’ve just written for Men’s News Daily. I hope I didn’t make it too pro-Conservative as I’m not that big of a supporter. Maybe some positive comments (or constructive negative comments) will make me get on with the book.

Last week I finished off another article for a print magazine. I’ll let you know more when it’s closer to publication date.

Don’t worry, I’m still alive and still beavering away at the book, in between other writing assignments.

Excerpted from my main website:

I’ve just had an article published over on Men’s News Daily. It’s a great publication for people interested in gender politics and the growing men’s rights movement. Some of you will know that I have been working on a book on gender politics (see the gender equivalence subsite site for more info)for the past few years. It’s also the first time that I’ve written for a website rather than a print mag in over a year, and it’s a funny feeling to get back into the fast paced dynamic of web publishing. I hope that I’ll be working with MND a lot in the future.

Some progress has been made on the GE book, but it keeps getting pushed back due to other bits of work that have taken priority. I took time off writing the GE book to put together a self published article omnibus book.

The omnibus book is called Tech Book 1 - Published articles Oct 2006 - June 2008 by Michael Reed. Even though this book is about tech, it does contain two gender politics articles, rehashed versions of two of the articles on this site. If you follow the links to the oldish articles entitled ARTICLE: Defining equality and ARTICLE: Attacking feminism: why should a geek care? you can read the updated versions that I created for the book.

[edit: In addition, please note that, although a self published book, it is still a valid, citable source complete with an ISBN number. If you are writing about or researching male rights, it might  be handy. Look over the PDF version of the article. It contains UK-centric information about affirmative action, female involvement in open source software development, education and feminism. Lot's of handy (and fully cited) facts and figures.]

If you like, you could buy a copy of the book by visiting my main website. Or, if you’re feeling a bit hard up, you can download a free e book copy by clicking here (PDF format 6.5 megs).

An interesting article that I came across the other day. It’s a good dose of comon sense and a useful refute to all of the “But, it’s been shown that women only earn 75% of what men do” nonsense.

From the article:

“Full-time employed males (whether fathers or not) on average work eight hours a week more than full-time employed females. According to the International Labor Organization, the average American father works 51 hours a week, whereas those mothers of young children who do work full time (themselves a minority) work a 41-hour week. Women earn 76% of what men do for working 84% (not 100%) as many hours. “

Is Pay a Function of Gender Bias? (link to the full article)

This might be of interest to people in the UK:

As most of you will know, the government website sports an official petition system. Using this system, members of the public can set up web-based petitions which, apparently, the goverment will monitor.

I spotted a good one today, on the subject of extending provisions of shelter facilties to include all victims of domestic abuse. Currently, there exists almost no assistance for men who find themselves in this position.

Click on this link to read more about the petition. Consider signing up if you are a UK citizen and agree with what is being proposed. http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/DVJUSTICE/

About half the people reading that statement might be left scratching their heads, wondering why this is significant. In a nutshell, the police and government statistics show that the problem of, so called, “battered husbands” is extremely significant. Some studies estimate that 17% of all victims of domestic violence are male. For some more background on some these issues, I invite you to check out this blog posting on another male rights blog:

Two interesting articles that I stumbled onto today. Reading articles like these, written by women, and representative of such a reasonable perspective on gender issues makes my day.

Are Fathers’ Rights a Factor in Male Suicide? By Wendy McElroy

Interesting and balanced overview of some father’s rights issues. Worth a read, IMO.

Wendy also has an interesting website called ifeminists.com which describes a sort of libertarian third wave equity feminism. It’s feministic but at least makes an attempt to include male/female equality as opposed to the typical feminist ‘women good/men bad’ dogma. As the content of the above article would suggest, her ideology includes some acknowledgment of both male rights issues and criticism of feminism. Just a shame that she has to call it “feminism” at all, IMO.

Male abortion rights? by Marianne Bossert

Another nice article. This touches upon a topic that I am developing for the book.

Last month saw two new, separate but connected, developments in my research for the book.

The first, and most outwardly apparent, was the creation of this website. I’ll use the site both to self-publish articles on the subject of gender politics and to post progress information on the book.

As soon as you are about to dismiss something, don’t.

The other change was that I decided to have a look around the web to see what other people who were interested male rights were doing. This is a big change for me as, frankly, I don’t do much reading on the subject of gender politics as I prefer to concentrate my studies upon the more fundamental aspects of humanities and social science research.

[sanitised to remove the name of the website - you know who you are ;-)]

A few days ago (at the time of writing), a news site that I sometimes contribute to linked to an article about gender issues affecting women’s entry into IT. The article was quite provocative and I think that I’m being fair when I describe the tone of the article as “feministic”. Anyone who knows me well can probably guess what happened next… I decided to make “gender issues in IT” the topic of my fourth article for that site.

Unfortunately, this article was rejected. And through the experience, I think that I’ve learned a few things. I’ve taken the criticism on board, and the truth is that the article could have been better executed. The subject matter is important to me and the article - in both conception and execution - isn’t representative of my best efforts. However…

I’ve created this wordpress based site to contain some of my materials relating to the subject of gender. I’m not sure, at this point, what the eventual scope of the site will be.

Expect to see the occasional article and more information about my philisophy of gender politics.

The site can also be used as the central resource for progress information on the book.

[imported from the old site]

Although it might not be immediately apparent, I see a connection between the subjects of ‘tech’ and ‘gender’. In a way, it’s a bit like class-struggle: we geeks make the world what it is as we invent everything but, I wonder, do geeks do very well in the sex wars? I would hope that tech-geeks would be interested in the subject matter of my book. Does an ‘average geek’ ever get upset when when he observes ‘men’ being criticized in the media again. Are we really that inferior? The principle idea behind Gender Equivalence is that men and women are equals in matters such as morality, intelligence and romantic sensibility and I hope that fellow geeks would agree with that.

All in all, I suspect that a fair proportion of my fellow geeks will have had the same experience of saying ‘but that doesn’t make sense…’, quietly to themselves when they are confronted with yet more media feminism.