Thread:User talk:WaitingforGodot/Thoughts/reply (6)

That makes more sense, actually. I imagine I could be reading it as "they're after gender equality, so why don't they call it that?" when it could well be that it's "they're after women's issues only to be heard", in which case fine, to be fair to them.

To be honest I'm not entirely sure what the committee does or what the officers do. The only time I ever hear from them directly they're in the newspapers complaining; but badly-written complaints is just what all student media is, I suppose (Sturgeon's Principle applies), so that says nothing. There are a lot of buzzwords about "being heard" and "safe spaces" thrown around, but I've never grasped the day-to-day practicalities of it. Giving out rape alarms is part of it I'm sure. I'm just not convinced that this aspect would change merely by re-branding it and admitting men.

I think the part that I don't get is the idea of the under and over-representation. Sure, I agree that the balance isn't equal, I can see that and acknowledge it's a problem to have only 20% of these people being women. And I would want that addressed, but the jump is where this then leads to "representation". Imagine that the Student's Union President - the top position, head honcho, bit of a figurehead but still wields power and influence at a single point, the Fat Tony, the Pres, the Mad Cap'n - for instance, is a cis-gendered heterosexual male. Does he, then, represent all cis-gendered heterosexual males in the context of their gender and sexuality and by extension no one else? Obviously not, because that would be logically equivalent to saying that a trans-gendered homosexual female president would only be there to represent trans-gendered homosexual females and couldn't possibly represent or understand the issues of the cis-gendered heterosexual male population.

So I suppose my question is this; if we're in a free and open forum, with groups specifically allocated to promote the ideas and needs of special interest groups for whatever their own reason, then why does a disparity in a population automatically become logically equivalent to representation. Why isn't it left as, well, basically just left as a straight ratio problem. I mean, it's bad because it's bad - we're potentially robbing a chunk of the population of experience unjustly. I can't see the jump between this and this "representation" word. I would hope that a Union would represent me because I belonged to that union, not because I was part of a particular religion/gender/sexuality that matched with the person I was talking to. Do you get where I'm coming from on this part? I imagine it sounds almost abhorrent to not get this "representation" thing.