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From: greg@uts.amdahl.COM (Greg Bullough)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Feminism and Vegetarianism
Message-ID: <2bB501rH774A00@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com>
Date: 20 May 91 22:01:15 GMT
References: <1991May13.223727.8721@aero.org> <49630@ricerca.UUCP> <1991May15.155434.202@eng.umd.edu>
Reply-To: Greg Bullough <greg@amdahl.uts.amdahl.COM>
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In article <1991May15.155434.202@eng.umd.edu> doll@eng.umd.edu (Steven Doll) writes:
>
>Has anyone noticed a connection between the way women are talked of
>or treated in western societies and the way animals are talked of
>and treated:

Apparently you have. However...

>     Property, belonging to (a man, humans)

...I believe that that explains it all, and it is nothing new. A wife
(or a child) has been traditionally interpreted, in most societies,
as a part of a man's "worldly goods." Less frequently, a husband
and more frequently, a child, have been part of a woman's "wordly
goods."

I'm not saying that Steve doesn't have a point, only that it's, by
now, not really a revelation.

>Say you're a feminist: people laugh; make jokes about burning bras...
>Say you support animal rights: people laugh; ask you about vegetable
>rights...

Say you're a Republican: people make jokes about Richard Nixon...

I think that Steve is trying somehow to attribute some sinister
meaning to the ridicule of various belief systems. I would only
point out that being ridiculed is one of the things that makes one
belief system distinguishable from the next. To bind any two "-isms"
together on with such a thread is, in my opinion, intellectually
unsound.

Greg