Second, I never said that women were "under the heel" of anyone. I said men run the world and women will always be viewed first and foremost by men as sexual objects.
Women being viewed as sex objects and not as equals
does put them under the heel of men. When they're looked at as objects and not people, they
are being dominated.
Gay marriage, LGBT, women's rights...none of that stuff directly affects men as a whole so they largely ignore it as a 'threat'.
If this were true, why then would there be such virulent opposition to all of those social movements? Why do these movements have significant male opposition to them? If what you said is true, men would ignore these social movements, but they don't.
That woman has two college degrees and I'm a mailman. Yeah, she's "under my heel".
You mentioned that women are getting more college degrees, but that those are largely service degrees; you also said that men run things because they have business, science, and technical degrees. Why do service degrees suddenly become more important here? Based on what you've said previously, service degrees don't give women much of a boost in terms of gender equality. You basically said that her degrees don't level the playing field with you because they're service based, but this quote makes it seem like you think it at least puts her on par with or better off than you being a mailman. It really can't be both ways.
To put your example of you being a mailman and your wife being a teacher in perspective, depending on where they work, what organization they work for, etc., the average salary for a mailman starts out at
around $50k. Again, factoring in for location and organization, the average salary for a teacher tends to be
less, with starting salary at $32k. Her degrees don't appear to help all that much in terms of salary, so why are you implying that she's better off than you in some way?
Even though it's an ad for Verizion, this video perfectly illustrates part of the reason why fewer women go into math or science-based fields. They're being repeatedly told by the rest of society that they're valued for their appearance and not their actions, so they're clearly not going to go after those kinds of degrees when they don't think their contributions will be valued.
[M]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP3cyRRAfX0[/M]
Women live easier lives than men and they live longer. Why would they want to disrupt the status quo?
I don't even know where to start with this. I'm genuinely curious, what makes you think that women live easier lives? Childbirth is one of the most painful experiences a person can go through; the average man will never experience that kind of pain. After that, women are largely the ones who take care of domestic tasks and childcare, even in relationships where both spouses claim they divide work equally; women are expected to be the domestic workers and are raised as such, so of course they're going to do most of the the work in that area. Women don't even get paid for all the work they do, and they do far, far more domestic work than men. In the event of an unintended pregnancy, women are usually the ones who get blamed for it (slut, whore, etc.) and get saddled with the childcare because it was somehow the fault of the woman and her fault alone. Men, on the other hand, get to go out, have all the sex they want, and be "players" and "studs." None of these situations that women face sound "easy" to me.
Beyond that, you've said that men rule the world and always will, but if women live easier lives, wouldn't they be the ones doing less work and making important decisions that would earn them the widespread respect of society?
As for living longer, correlation does not imply causation. You can say that women live better lives because they live longer, but that could simply be boiled down to the fact that women are
less likely to engage in risk-taking behavior than men.
Third, that's not going to change.
That's the same thing that has been said countless times to women, African Americans, and other groups when they mobilized to get the right to vote. Things changed; sure, it took a lot longer than it should have for them to get the right to vote, but things
did change. That's the thing about social movements: they don't succeed over night. There is absolutely no reason why society cannot change so that women and men would be genuinely equal. Quite frankly, when you say that nothing will ever change and tell the women in your life that, no matter what they do, they will never be equal to men, you
are part of the problem.
You might think that it's harmless to tell people that things will never change, but it's not. You're instilling a sense of defeatism in them that makes them think, "Well, things are never going to get any better, so why try?"