Thread:User talk:WaitingforGodot/Thoughts/reply (4)

I think it's an "angry angry person writing in student media" thing. Most of them are like that.

I see your point on specific issues perhaps being swallowed whole. This is perhaps why we're not at a stage where we can roll it all into "equality committee" and say WHOO, WE'RE THERE!! Certainly blending LGBT in with everything else (LGBTQQAIAJGSIIASNVVV), as much as I'd like to see that eventually, has caused this to be the case with dozens of issues now being rolled into one and fighting for attention.

But (it's me, there's always a but) I can't quite see how switching from "women's" to "gender equality" would cause that, not in the way that expanding LGBT to include everyone except cis-gendered-white-heterosexual-vannila-males would do. I'm not sure it holds entirely to compare those cases with gender equality, as in the case of gender equality we have two things (the binary, I'll leave the complexities out for now for the sake of illustration) that need to mesh together, that are defined based on each other, and interact constantly. You cannot study one without the other, you cannot make life equal for one without the other - it's like having two half-equations in redox chemistry, basically just what one thing does in a reaction. They're informative on their own, and interesting, sort of, but in reality they don't exist on their own so their usefulness, on their lonesome, is very limited. You have to put two half-equations together in order to balance them, form a meaningful statement and get real-world information from. Same with gender equality, I don't see how balancing it would do anything other than give it more meaning. If a committee was to change, the remit would effectively be identical. This is because when it comes to gender equality the issues are the same no matter what angle you attempt to approach it from; wage gap, safe streets, health and so on. These are there and recognised, they're not going to change. So approaching these from a broader angle is best, rather than a narrow field of vision that presumes that a single half-equation actually exists in isolation in reality. After all, the mantra-du-jour appears to be that "feminism = gender equality" (hidden connotations be damned). If anything it would give these issues more clout because you can press them without ending up alienating 50% of the population.