Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!usc!aero-c!nadel
From: lurkette@xanadu.com (Lurker's Significant Other)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Isn't it time to start treating men like human beings?
Message-ID: <1991Feb9.073629.15666@xanadu.com>
Date: 9 Feb 91 07:36:29 GMT
References: <513Go7_c@cs.psu.edu> <49558@ricerca.UUCP>
Sender: news@aero.org
Organization: Canard Steamed Ship Line
Lines: 185
Approved: nadel@aerospace.aero.org
Status: R
Originator: nadel@aerospace.aero.org


In article <49558@ricerca.UUCP> jan@orc.olivetti.com writes:
>
>In article <513Go7_c@cs.psu.edu> sobleski@psuvax1.cs.psu.EDU (Mark Sobolewski) writes:
>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.

Please note that before AA white immigrants were rarely considered. It was
customary to hire people from the same fraternity that the managers had
been members of. That is why fraternity membership or eating club membership
was so important. Catholics and Jews were pariahs except in Catholic or 
Jewish firms.

>    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.

This is true. Many colleges accepted only white protestants; if other groups
were accepted they were often limited by quotas. What has long amused me
is the origin of the quota system was to keep the number of Jews, Asians,
and ethnic whites down. The forementioned groups were thought to lower the
social level of the school, but to raise the intellectual level (except fot
Catholics. bigotry is so weird; Catholics were thought to be unsanitary (seri-
ously) and somewhat retarded and immoral!)

>    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.

Amen. Besides, to be facetious, if the "most qualified" were admitted you
wouldn't find very many WASPS in some parts of the country. :-).

>    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.

Or questions about what church one attends, one's parents education, 
how long one's family has lived in the same house, does one have certain
very expensive hobbies that are favored by the horsy set, whati is one's
family background, how many siblings one has, the value placed on cultural
icons such as volunteer work in certain fields and other things that are
less easily attained by the student who starts working to help support the
family sometime in elementary school.

>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.

Pathetic, but absolutely true. If you are into funereal humor read the
rest of this paragraph, if not skip it or you will be upset.
Absolutely. One of the strangest stories about academia had to do with a 
certain college that had to hire a minority person. A woman non-white
was hired. The men found many reasons to dispose of her; they settled
on the fact that she was "taking a job from a black man." Of course,since
the subject she taught was a cultural area of little interest at the time
to African - Americans (who preferred to study African cultures, not the
cultures of her ancestral continent) no black man could be found. Naturally,
they settled on a white one. But, they all sagely agreed, he might be 
potentially supporting a family...

>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.

Amen. The popular press seriously messes up. The main beneficiaries of
AA have been white ethnic males who formerly would never have been able
to learn about jobs they now apply for. Before AA, the jobs were not posted
or advertised; hiring was done through the good old boy net - and all too
often still is.

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

Amen. Women died young at jobs they hated, too. Women didn't "stay home
with the family" very much in our past. Farm wives were out working in the
fields, not merely tending kitchen gardens or cooking. The phrase "a man may
work from sun to sun, a woman' work is never done" referred to the fact that
not only did women help support the family, but that they also did all the
house tasks. Factory women worked twelve hours a day or more and then came
home to cook and clean the appalling slums they called home...

>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.  

And for quite a while following Lister, too. The witch hunts weren't just
for midwives (amazing how even feminists romanticize being breeding machines)
but more usually went after "uppity women" who had opinions on subjects that
men felt were none of their business. The midwife myth is one of the ways
that women's history has even been distorted in the feminist movement. A
quick way to get flamed off was to suggest women were of equal value to men. 

>*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.

Actually, losing a few billion people might be good for the long term 
survival of the environment, but somehow I don't think either sex is
going to volunteer to go. Seriously, this devalues the social roles of
both men and women; we are more than machines for reproduction; men have
souls and value and feelings much like women do; we are far more alike
than we are different, and much of the difference is cultural.

>>    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.

Mine too. My first suggestion is try to change your circle of friends to
people who are not as hung up on the superficial; but that is silly because
the devaluation of human beings is diffused throughout our culture. Good Luck
and Best Wishes From:

						Lurkerette	

				(I really AM Lurker's Significant Other)


>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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

-- 
"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