*Feminism IS Population Control*

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Magnus sounds like the perfect woman, from a male point of view

As I said, I was kidding. I am not going to define and enforce gender roles for other people. Not interested in anyone's personal life but my own and those immediately around me where I live.



Huh? What about a man that gets injured or sick? Obviously, if they can't perform the duties, they need a leave to recover, or they need to be discharged. But is the number of women in the military who get pregnant large enough to disqualify ALL women from serving in ANY role in the military? I don't think it is.



I agree. But women are generally prohibited from serving on the front lines or in combat positions. And a two year leave of absence is feasible - the Army isn't going anywhere, there will still be a need for people 24 months from now. And why do corporatists resist giving women leave for pregnancy and child rearing? Oh, yeah, because it reduces their profits.




Huh? I'm not saying there is no difference. I think that most jobs in the military are not that different from other jobs in society these days, and that women should be allowed to serve in such capacity.

So increasing the rights of children was to blame for a reduction in women's rights? Interesting.

Not children's rights, just their welfare. Different kettle.

But Shulamith Firestone has argued that so long as children don't have real rights, like the rest of the human species, it will always limit women's use of their own rights, because they are connected.
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You are right, that is very interesting, because by making it illegal for children under 12 to work in factories the govt actually took away a right from children, a right that they had had from time immemorial, which was to work. And by doing so made having children a far less worthwhile/more expensive investment, as you pointed out.

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Last edited by ouinon on 24 Dec 2008, 2:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Well, happy holidays to all - I'm out for a few days.

The chronology was as follows:

The 1819 Cotton Mills and Factories Act stated no children under 9 were allowed to work in factories, and 9-16 year olds limited to 12 hours a day.

The 1833 Factory Act stated that 14-18 year olds allowed to work up to 12 hours a day only, and 9-13 year olds not to work more than 8 hours a day, and to receive 2 hours a day of education.

The 1844 Act stated that 9-13 year olds must not work more than 6 hours a day, and women no more than 12.

1878 Act stated no children under 10 to work, and 10-14 year olds only half days.

1901 Act stated that no child under 12 could work.

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So the "problem" in countries whose population growth rate is still high is that they allow children to work, whether in factories, or seasonally on the land, or in their shops/small businesses etc. So long as children have the right to work people will keep having them.

So was the most effective population control actually simply making children a less interesting proposition from the financial point of view? Which was not an inevitable result of industrialisation, but of popular/middle-class reaction to conditions in factories.

After which women obviously had to find something else to do. They had been made redundant.
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So I retract statement/reject hypothesis that feminism is population control, and replace it with "removing children's right to work is population control".

PS. Thanks, monty.
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Last edited by ouinon on 24 Dec 2008, 4:33 pm, edited 2 times in total.

You judged the content of my words based on my name and avatar. People who say we are equal but then deny the reality of the situation in real life are great examples of this gender equality hypocrisy. I point this out as a reality and how we can manage it to go with the flow for peace and harmony and I'm the bad guy. Yes I said bad guy because it just sounds dumb to say bad woman. The feminists will probably have an issue with that too.

Wondering whether the people who protested against the conditions in factories, horrified by what they saw there, and who campaigned for the welfare laws which gradually forbade children to work at all, were like the "sensors" which in other animal species pick up indications that the environment is becoming too hostile/severe/stressful and cause the fertility rate to drop, ( by inducing the animals to have entirely natural spontaneous abortions, etc ).

Perhaps such manipulations of, alterations to, human rights, ( expressed/formulated in PPR; politics, philosophy and religion ), are the human species' version of other animals' instinctive reactions to the environment.

What looks so artificial, so abstract/theoretical/detached from "the animal", is just the way that the animal homo sapiens sapiens reacts to information about the environment, how we function as part of the "grand scheme of things".

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Huh.

I haven't seen this take before. Thanks for the shiny new idea.

I'm of an age when I heard 'Magnus', I thought of 'robot fighter'... (very old comic book series...

but I have to admit between the cleavage and the sunglasses, it's hard to get a sense of the person behind it... (no 'fense...it makes your postings easier to spot...

As technology advances, the numbers and desire for children will change (Some developed countries are actually shrinking in population...and some aren't that egalitarian, either)

as things change further, there will be some who don't change. I married a wife with 6 children, and grandchildren 15 and 16 are on the way...no problem with them disappearing...

pakled wrote:

Hopefully I can live up to the title of Robot Fighter one day.

Removing children from the workplace does cut down on population. It's probably an unconscious thing parents do. I don't think they have kids just to put them to work.

I think the main reason why people don't have more children is that it's too expensive.

Child-labour is not a good thing. It is even more barbaric than denying women their basic human rights. Victimizing children is always the lowest.

That is what is so interesting about "morals", that when circumstances require a certain response from humans morals/rules arise which seem like absolutes.

In fact there is nothing fundamentally wrong with children working. The children working in countries where it is still legal are many/most of them happy to do so, glad to be active contributors to the economy and wellbeing of their family and community. Children like to do what the adults around them do, are in fact programmed to copy what the adults in their community do.

If you have seen a boy running errands for his father's business, a child serving in their parents shop, a boy out on the hillside guarding the goats, a girl feeding her family's hens, or caring for her younger brothers and sisters, then you know that there is nothing intrinsically wrong about "child-labour". The number of children who are exploited/abused/overworked is no more than the number of adults.

But it becomes "wrong" in a society which needs/apparently needs to reduce its fertility rate, because so long as children have the right to work, if they are capable of it, like most other humans, they are too valuable a resource, and people will continue to have lots of them.

When the population was steady child-labour was completely normal, but in a society creating food and wealth and sanitation at such a rate that the population soars, "child-labour" becomes something taboo/scandalous, in the same way as a lone/"loose" woman was a taboo when the population was small(er) and the tribe/society was aiming at increasing its numbers, ( being fruitful and multiplying ).

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