A New One - School Skirt Bans!

Clippings from news sources involving fashion freedom and other gender equality issues.
Stu
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Re: A New One - School Skirt Bans!

Post by Stu »

pelmut wrote:I heard this morning that 40 schools in the U.K. have now banned skirts for all pupils, it will be interesting to see how the feminists react to that (if it is true, and not just media hype).
Feminists claim to want equality, but they will always fight to preserve female privilege where it exists and this is one such example.

They will claim that boys can wear skirts, but then point out that just about every clothing store offers girls' trousers and ask them which ones sell boys' skirts, and they don't have an answer. Of course they don't want boys in skirts as they like the fact that these garments are their own and they don't want them, to be appropriated by males.
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Re: A New One - School Skirt Bans!

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Couple of recent Guardian articles on this. The first one says 'Let everybody wear them':
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... tereotypes
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyl ... rls-gender
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Re: A New One - School Skirt Bans!

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One of the comments on the first article was:
MarkB35
Challenging the patriarchy is often a thankless task. At my school I decided to make a stand : the shirt , tie and trousers went in the bin and I arrived one Monday morning in a skirt and blouse. The sniggering didn't bother me at all but I received no support whatsoever from the headteacher. In fact I was sacked as head of maths and escorted off the premises by the police.
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Re: A New One - School Skirt Bans!

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Stu wrote: Feminists claim to want equality, but they will always fight to preserve female privilege where it exists and this is one such example.

They will claim that boys can wear skirts, but then point out that just about every clothing store offers girls' trousers and ask them which ones sell boys' skirts, and they don't have an answer. Of course they don't want boys in skirts as they like the fact that these garments are their own and they don't want them, to be appropriated by males.
I think that women are usually determined to keep males in the stultifying little box of traditional masculinity.
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Re: A New One - School Skirt Bans!

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The first article is feminist claptrap. Basically she is accepting that skirts are feminine attire, but boys should be encouraged to wear them because they should be able to embrace their feminine side. And the usual mentally challenged notion of "the patriarchy" just shows her true colours. She thinks she is oppressed. I have no time for this anti-masculine nonsense. My view is skirts could and should be de-gendered in the way that trousers have been. They are not to be regarded as automatic signifiers of femininity any more than a pair of jeans automatically signify masculinity.

In short, schools can claim that their uniform skirts can be regarded as gender neutral as much as they like but the reality is that the only boys who are going to wear them will be those who identify as girls; for them, skirts are precisely their means to signify that. And schools are encouraging that by making the link with trans children! To further reinforce this point, where are the (rare!) boys who want to wear skirts going to find them? On the boyswear racks in the stores? On the boyswear pages of Internet clothing suppliers? Not a chance. While girls can easily obtain trousers designed, cut and marketed for their gender, skirts are designed, cut and marketed only for girls, so any boy who does turn up for school in a skirt is literally wearing girls' clothes.

While we may welcome attitudes like the one expressed that says let boys wear skirts, we have to be careful we don't arrive at the same conclusion by following their dubious reasoning.
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Re: A New One - School Skirt Bans!

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Grok wrote:I think that women are usually determined to keep males in the stultifying little box of traditional masculinity.
Indeed many are, while feminists seek to destroy any trace of western masculinity.
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Re: A New One - School Skirt Bans!

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We have a very steep hill to climb. I expect MIS to start to gain traction-at the earliest-a few decades from now, with people who are now quite young.
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Re: A New One - School Skirt Bans!

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Stu wrote:Indeed many are, while feminists seek to destroy any trace of western masculinity.
I would tend to disagree, from my observation, it seems women are trying to take over masculinity, and eliminate the male from the equation.

As men, our job is simply to exist, die in the wars, and do the other sh!t work that women are too good for....
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Re: A New One - School Skirt Bans!

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Stu,
Do you think the western world is not a patriarchy? How would you describe the social structure? Perhaps confining women to skirts for hundreds of years was just egalitarianism, or was it a meritocracy then?

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Re: A New One - School Skirt Bans!

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TheRod wrote:Stu,
Do you think the western world is not a patriarchy? How would you describe the social structure? Perhaps confining women to skirts for hundreds of years was just egalitarianism, or was it a meritocracy then?

Rod
The western world is most definitely not a patriarchy. In fact, it is rapidly turning into a gynocentric society. The social structure is heavily designed around the interests and needs of women, often affording them unjust privileges and treating masculinity as toxic, and some kind of defect.

Women weren't "confined to skirts" by some kind of evil patriarchy in the past. A little over a century ago, the typical life expectancy of a western woman was around 56, although higher class women tended to live longer. Out of that time, they went from having periods which were relatively poorly managed into numerous pregnancies, childbirth, lactation and rearing infants, soon after which they hit the menopause which was, again, poorly managed owing to lack of resources. Out of a possible working life of around 40-years, for at least half of that she was indisposed by virtue of her biological processes. Women weren't "confined to skirts" because some mythical patriarchy made them wear skirts, but rather the sexes had very specific and defined gender roles, and these roles weren't simply imposed on them by this patriarchy; they were considered by both sexes as the natural order. In individual homes, patriarchies in the literal sense could and did exist, but again this was understood as the natural order. Human evolution from the first primates dictates that males are the primary provider of resources in a family and the female is the primary carer of the young. That has been seen in bonobos, spider monkeys, chimpanzees, orang-utans and gorillas as well as around 98% of human societies, civilised or otherwise. Women have thus adapted to best survive if they can appeal to males on the basis of need, hence the phenomenon of neoteny which we discussed recently on another thread but, put simply, males are attracted to females who have child-like qualities like big eyes and clear complexion. Their characters and other attributes have followed the same path, which is how some women become gold diggers, preying on wealthy, but much older, men. It's also why women are attracted to male muscles, height and physical strength because such a specimen can provide for her and protect her and her young. That's not to say society hasn't changed markedly, but these chances are extremely recent in evolutionary terms and they are far from established in out=r psychology, let along our physiology.

But meritocracy has largely existed for many years and can even be found a long time ago in respect of the few women who broke into traditionally male disciplines, which is why Marie Curie was one of only two people who ever won the Nobel Prize for Physics twice, around a century ago. In our present times, women have rights and privileges way ahead of those men enjoy and, if you want me to outline these in more detail, I am happy to do so.
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Re: A New One - School Skirt Bans!

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Stu wrote:... which is why Marie Curie was one of only two people who ever won the Nobel Prize for Physics twice.....
Sorry to be pedantic, but she didn't win the Nobel Prize for Physics twice; she won it once (in 1903) and the Nobel Prize for Chemistry once (in 1911). She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win two prizes, and the only person to have won prizes for two different sciences.
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Re: A New One - School Skirt Bans!

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I stand corrected.

But it still demonstrates my key point that even back then, a woman was not simply "confined to skirts" in the metaphorical sense, but was able to make great achievements and win recognition.
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Re: A New One - School Skirt Bans!

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Stu wrote:I stand corrected.

But it still demonstrates my key point that even back then, a woman was not simply "confined to skirts" in the metaphorical sense, but was able to make great achievements and win recognition.
Absolutely :D
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Re: A New One - School Skirt Bans!

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Stu wrote:
I stand corrected.

But it still demonstrates my key point that even back then, a woman was not simply "confined to skirts" in the metaphorical sense, but was able to make great achievements and win recognition.
I'm not sure that Marie Curie is the best example to use to demonstrate that women's status in our culture has usually been inferior to men's. Yes, she was able to make great achievements and win recognition and yes, she remains the only person to have been awarded Nobel Prizes in two different categories, but more than 100 years after being awarded the prize for Physics (btw, it was a joint award with her husband) she remains the ONLY woman to have won a Nobel Prize in physics and her chemistry prize is one of only three awards received by a woman (her daughter also was awarded the prize in 1935) since the prize's inception in 1901.

Yes, she was a remarkable person but as a representative of women's achievements, I think she needs to be seen as something of an outlier.
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Re: A New One - School Skirt Bans!

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@Disaffected.citizen

Yes. So what? Are you suggesting that the Nobel awards committee are practising discrimination? Are they sitting in Oslo saying "No, we can't give her the prize - she's female!" ? I don't think you believe that. So why have so few women won the prize? As the prize is awarded on merit, the only explanation is that far fewer women than men have made the achievements necessary to win the award.

Of course we all support equality of opportunity. Women already have that plus they get extra help on top, but there is no way society should be striving for equality of outcome.
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