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From: jan@orc.olivetti.com (Jan Parcel)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Isn't it time to start treating men like human beings?
Message-ID: <49558@ricerca.UUCP>
Date: 6 Feb 91 23:08:27 GMT
References: <513Go7_c@cs.psu.edu>
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In article <513Go7_c@cs.psu.edu> sobleski@psuvax1.cs.psu.EDU (Mark Sobolewski) writes:
>This is in response to a reply about a posting I made in soc.men.
>Valerie had justified Affirmative Action based on her philosophy that
>it's making up for "centuries of discrimination".  I pointed out that
>while I could have talked to many of my grandmothers, aunts, etc. on
>this subject, my paternal ancestry was forever silent to me, because
>they were all dead before I was born.
>
>They either worked in coal-mines, in stores, almost always doing heavy
>labour in stress filled environments that shortened their lives.  They
>did this for their families as many men feel they have and had to do.
>So their women could stay at home.  Now I'm supposed to be punished
>for this?  For what my fathers did?

It's obvious that you and I disagree about affirmative action.  But the tone
of you post indicates (IMHO)  that you have a strange idea of the motives 
behind affirmative action,

Now, I am not talking about any particular implentation of aa here, because
it seems there is always a horror story somewhere, but even those are sometimes
distorted.

I keep seeing posts from college people about "less qualified" and "punishment."
My undertanding is that aa for college vs. for the corporate world are
quite different.  For college, the idea was supposed (in the 60's, when
it was first proposed) to be based on these ideas, and without aa these
things would still be true, IMHO:

    1.  Majority Americans and immigrants with families intact had
	role models for education denied to slave people whose families
	were deliberately broken up and sold, and who would be punished
	for speaking their native language.  Continuity of culture was
	deliberately denied.  There were also the Jim Crow laws making it
	a crime for a slave, or, later, ex-slave, to read and write.
	Therefore, an educated "base" needs to be established, of neighbors
	and parents who can act as resources to the community.

    2.  Colleges actively panic and start taking action if the supply of 
        qualified white applicants starts drying up (remember, this was
	when "applicant" was almost a proper subset of  "white". )
	Maybe if they're required to find applicants of all colors, they will
	also start taking action (such as contacting secondary schools,
	lobbying for legislation) if there are not enough nonwhite applicants.

    3.  At least for public colleges,  which are tax supported, an education
	is not a prize to be won, but a community resource, and it is no
	more right to give educations to the "most qualified" than it is
	to give streets to the "most qualified."  There should be a 
	qualification threshold above which everyone has an equal chance
	to be selected.

    4.  The definition of "qualified" tended to be biased -- questions about
	Rogers and Hammerstein but not blues and jazz, interviews with
	unconsciously biased people, etc.

Now, as to the corporate world, a couple of comments.  "Remedying past 
discrimination" does not mean punishment.  It means that (and I have found
this to be true everywhere I've worked) employers don't usually hire the
"best" qualified, they usually have a threshold, and interview people sent
in by personnel and friends, weed out those below the threshold, and
then choose the most comfortable personality from those above the threshold.

This means that as long as those already "in" are all from the same culture,
or sub-culture (ethnically and, also, gender, for fields formerly 
male-dominated), the most comfortable applicants will be just like the 
people already there.  Until aa created a need to examine
prejudices and diversify the field of people already at the company and
making the environment into which the new person must fit, there was
still a STRONG tendency to hire more of whatever one already had.
In other words, "remedying past discriminatin"  refers to changing the
environment, not to reparations.

Lastly, the newspapers give a very weird view of many aa decisions.  The
famous case in which the newpapers said the Supreme Court said that aa may be 
used to hire a lower-scoring person was actually not even close to what
they decided.  The case involved a woman who WAS legally qualified for
a job, against a man who WAS NOT legally qualified for the same job.  
(If you ignore the legal guidlines for that job, he may have been slightly
more qualified -- but he didn't meet the legal guidelines of working his
way up in the department.)  First he got the job, then she got it away 
from him by calling the aa office, then he sued, and she won.  Her 
"interview" score was lower than his.  They each interviewed with three 
people.  One of these three people was a former supervisor of hers who
she had had to file a grievance against for failing to provide her with
work clothes.  The interviewers each gave the applicants a "score", and
the man's was highter than the woman's.  But the score wasn't a test score,
it was a preference score.  The Supreme Court said that if the department
was going to ignore its own requirements in favor of other considerations,
then one of those considerations could be affirmative action.  It DID NOT
say that a "lower-scoring" woman could take the job because of AA.


>    About women's contributions to our society.  Just because men died
>young in the past at jobs they hated doesn't make them saints.  

I am not opposed to giving men credit for sacrifice.  IMHO the reason
feminists *appear* to be discounting men's contributions is because
we are already taught about them in school, so we are trying to augment
what people already know.  Also, my understanding is that after the
midwife-hunts (which are taught in school as witch hunts) and before
Lister, women still had a shorter life expectancy than men because
of childbirth.  

*IF* there was a shortage of population (which there ISN'T), then and
only then would it be true that men's contribution to population growth
is less significant than women's.  But we could loose 4 billion people
before that would be a valid reason to preserve women over men.

>    I've noticed this attitude all over the place: When I point out
>how I want to be regarded as a human being and not as a success
>object, I get the line: "We're all free to make choices to go with
>society, or not..."  But if a woman is harrassed because she's trying
>to do something out the traditional expectations of her gender,
>everyone gushes lakes of tears.  What sort of people think this way?

That is because you are on the cutting edge of the men's rights movement,
whereas the feminists have been around for 100+ years.  You are suffering
from being a pioneer.  Corragio! You have my sympathy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ jan@orc.olivetti.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We must worship Universal Consciousness as each of the 5 genders in turn
if we wish to be fully open to Yr glory.
						-- St. Xyphlb of Alpha III

-- 
"Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer (not advised) are
called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are
software."                                               - Richard P. Brennan
nadel@aerospace.aero.org