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Comment by blurry | Hacker News Reader

Feminism: a paradigm that advocates equal rights for men and women.

How exactly does having children contradict the above? Which rights should I have lost last month when I gave birth to my baby?

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People play endless games with the word "right" here, to the point that the word is meaningless. Do you have the "right" to be as dedicated to work as a childless 21-year-old whose primary goal in life is to climb a corporate ladder? Then, perhaps, "feminism" says "no children for you!" Or perhaps it demands free child care, then demands that your relationship to the child not suffer when you're not the primary caregiver.

Note how I scarequoted the word "feminism" since it would only be one particular variant of an itself-poorly-defined word. (That variant definitely does exist, though.) Such a variant would argue that you have lost a multitude of such "rights", which you may not agree with.

Nobody (or close enough it doesn't matter) is saying that you've lost anything like "the right to free speech" or any such "natural right" because you have a baby. (I personally would say you have a responsibility to it, but that goes equally for the father too. I say this as a father, but then, "parents have responsibility to their children" shouldn't be too controversial to most people.)

I beg to differ. Feminism is described as a poorly defined term only by people who wish it were so, probably out of the irrational fear that equal rights for men and women will somehow lead to the end of the world as we know it. Let's look at facts here:

Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

Feminism: The theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes

Encarta Dictionary:

Feminism: Belief in the need to secure rights and opportunities for women equal to those of men

Encyclopedia Britannica:

Feminism: Social movement that seeks equal rights for women.

Wikipedia:

Feminism: A political discourse aimed at equal rights and legal protection for women.

Likewise, when people talk about equal rights, they usually mean equal rights under the law. What's the point of discussing silly made-up rights such as "the right to be as dedicated to work as a childless 21-year-old whose primary goal in life is to climb a corporate ladder"?

I'm sorry, I hate to break it to you, but citing dictionary definitions doesn't actually prove anything. Go out and look at real political discourse, and tell me that, well, almost any political term is actually well-defined in practice. Conservative, liberal, democrat, republican, socialist, fascist, feminist, racist, you name it, the term has been virtually stripped of meaning. People slinging the term like an insult, people wrapping themselves in the term to score political points, academics deconstructing the term for fun. See also: denotation vs. connotation

Heck, I'll even cut you a break and let you just use the discourse that appears in those gloriously-editor-mediated "major media outlets" without having to muck about with the hoi polloi that wouldn't know what the OED was if you (laboriously) hit them with it; it's still the same result.

"What's the point of discussing silly made-up rights"

Well, to take one silly made-up right that has been the topic of much recent political discourse, there's the "right to healthcare" that has been making the rounds, which certainly can't be found in the Constitution or any discussion of rights of any significant age (such as the classic discourse of the Founding Fathers or Enlightenment philosophers), unless you squint really, really hard.

And, if you feel that isn't a silly, made-up right, well, I'm sure you can manage to find someone who will say "the right to pursue a career unfettered by non-gender-fair obligations like childbirthing" isn't either. "Right" has been ill-defined for a long time; it fits right in to that list I gave above. (Which, by the way, is a heavily abridged list; as I said, you name the term it's probably been stripped of all meaning, used to signify group membership more than any original denotation it may have ever had, with only rare people using it "correctly", and they not understood by any but those other rare people who use it "correctly".)

Those definitions are quite different from each other!

Like jerf said what dictionaries say does not matter.

In practice I see that feminists are like various fonbois seen here, they go on and on about their pet topic, they are very easily provoked. It is as if they are finding an excuse to start a pissing contest of arguments.

I don't think a woman who is a happy and proud 'housewife' (and there are _many_) fits well with the definitions of those feminist fonbois. And about equality: aping men is not equality its lack of self-worth. Women are different. What their traditional role was was and is respectable too. The way they were (even now in some regions) treated by society is very deplorable. The ideal society would certainly be when women are given equal rights and respect. But they shouldn't be expected to get a full-time job to prove anything.

fonbois = fan boys?

That's a typo. Sorry. 'fanbois' == Fan Boys.

Thank you.

Men and women aren't equal. Men can't have babies. Who is going to secure the opportunity for a man to give birth?

And they don't have equal rights under the law. For example, say a man and a woman have sex and make a baby and the man says, "I can't support this child, I think you should have an abortion." Well, he can't make her do that, but she can still sue him for child support. But if he says, "I do not want you to have an abortion." She still can.

Would you argue, that with equal rights under the law, a father of a child should have equal say in whether or not a child he has conceived should be aborted? Do you think a man should have the right to force a woman to give birth to the child, take custody of it, then require her, by law, to pay child support?

If you ever want to understand the differences between men and women, read some books by women who have received testosterone to undergo sex changes to become men. They say things like "I became more interested in my career and earning money. I understood math and science better. I became more interested in technology and machines and less interested in people, etc."

It's quite fascinating stuff and makes you realise how different the sexes are.

I've never heard things like this. Do you have some sources? Something like that would be a real hit to our social system that fired Larry Summers from Harvard for saying there may be differences in aptitude in the sciences between men and women for biological reasons.

Here's a "This American Life" episode where they interview one person - it's act two - http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=123...

One book I read on the topic that I can remember is "The Testosterone Files" - http://www.amazon.com/Testosterone-Files-Hormonal-Social-Tra...

The author does an excellent job of describing his experience and the differences he noticed between being a women versus being a man.

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