In New Zealand, men are 14% more likely to get cancer than women and 18% more likely to die of cancer. Yet in the last 10 years, female related cancer research funding has received 10 times the amount of funding through the New Zealand Health Research Council than male related research. Prostate cancer is the most prevalent cancer for men, with 650 NZ men dying from it every year. Yet we still don’t have a regular screening program, a reliable way to test for it or effective treatments. As it is Men’s health week it’s time we discuss how we can get more funding allocated towards men’s health.

https://www.hrc.govt.nz/resources/research-repository

https://www.health.govt.nz/publication/new-cancer-registrations-2018

As this post pointed out, the church may never fully embrace LGBTQ individuals, but for the sake of this post let’s say it eventually does happen.

To fully embrace the LGBTQ community, the church first has to get rid of the inequalities that exist between genders.

• If two same-sex couples get sealed in the temple, who invites whom through the veil? Who gets to know the new name?
• If someone is non-binary, do they get the priesthood or not? Do they go to relief society or Elder’s quorum (or do they get to choose)?
• If I’m born intersex, what do I do?
• If I’m a transgender woman, do I still get to exercise the priesthood if I got it earlier in life? If I’m a transgender man, do I get the opportunity to get the priesthood?
• Who gets to “preside” in same-sex couples?
• Does one of us need to be a “king and priest unto god” because the other is only a “queen and priestess in the new and everlasting covenant”? One of us probably needs to be ordained to God, right?

I think these questions would be a lot less tough to answer if women had equal access to the power of God, equal language and rituals in the temple ceremonies, and if we focused more on marriage as a partnership with equal say instead of one having authority (or whatever "preside" means to you) over the other.

Women have had, and are having a shitty time, no question. However when people declare that women have had a worse time than men historically, isn't that an oversimplification? In a lot of places and situations, for example, with basic freedoms and basic rights, women have unquestionably had it rougher than men. However, in terms of societal roles, I would argue that men have had a pretty shitty hand too. Dangerous manual labor? Military service? Practices such as conscription and being required to perform extensive daily labor to feed their entire families? As recently as 2018, only 15.1 percent of the US military were female. Only 4.5 percent of coal miners were female in 2020.

Men have mechanically stronger bodies for lifting, pushing, fighting etc, but why does that justify such a huge split on filling lethal jobs? How is that not an example of harmful gender norms? If there's more than 50% more men committing suicide than women, clearly our society isn't working for us either.

It's shitty that women aren't always allowed to work for the same pay and with the same qualifications as men, and are expected to be home makers, but isn't it also shitty that men are virtually barred from being housekeepers and child raisers?

Above all, my question is, isn't a one sided approach to gender inequality rather ineffective? By blaming half of society for the suffering of the other half, the half being blamed becomes resistant to change. This is a generalization that doesn't apply to everyone, and definitely doesn't apply to me, but in most cases it is valid. Wouldn't it be more effective to explore narratives such as this, which shows that our societal structure is equally disadvantageous to everyone, thus encouraging more people to invest in and support changes? I'd imagine it'd be a lot easier for us to get people to agree to "this society is shitty for all of us, let's change it".

Would there be more equality between the sexes if women weren’t the only one who could birth children? 🤔

So hi guys. I'm a teacher and I want to start our next topic with a cool song that fits (the topic is "women in British pop culture") and maybe some of you have any cool suggestions! I was thinking about "hard out here" by Lily Allen but then we'd have to listen to the word "bitch" for like 37 times so I'd rather not use that one ;)

I recently stumbled on a study in Harvard Business Review that found bosses favor early birds (people who show up to work early) over night owls in offices that have flexible start times.

It occurred to me that this has a gendering component to it when you consider families with kids and the work required to get the going in the morning. Consider one parent who is vying for a raise or promotion. For them to be in good graces with their boss, they will have to show up early. Any morning household tasks, like taking kids to school, would fall on the other partner to complete. If the other partner works in a similar environment, then they are sacrificing their opportunity for advancement.

I’ve read other articles, like this one, that suggest men are penalized for not conforming to gender stereotypes. While not mentioned in this article, this may include the “bread earner” stereotype that men put work first and family second. So I think the downside to this early bird problem would hurt either gender.

If this is true, it is an example of how companies nominally support workplace gender equality, but in practice they put both men and women with families in a position where one partner must hinder their career in order for the other to advance professionally. In male-female households, I suspect this tends to be the woman.

What are your thoughts?

Trigger warning for anyone who doesn't want to read about sexual abuse. This post is something of a warning in and of itself.

The following post is entirely my own thoughts, and may not be entirely correct, but I am open discussing them, because I believe things like this are important, even if they are often uncomfortable.

I started reading a manga called Kagakuteki ni Sonzai shiuru Creature Musume no Kansatsu Nisshi / The observation diary of scientifically-existing creature girls a few years ago, and recently it's started getting more attention, so I had the opportunity to catch up.

Creature Musume is the story of a university biologist (and potentially a few of his classmates) that gets transported to another world. The main character declares himself the harem king of this new world, vows to start banging every monster girl in existence (while simultaneously making observations about their biology, how it evolved, and it's place in the world's phylogeny), and for the most part, does exactly that, while also imparting somewhat more modern day knowledge and technology onto the primitively living races he encounters. Most of the girls that join his harem do so partly because they actually like him, but also partly because many of them understand the value of his modern day knowledge and the power it can grant to their society.

Now, this is a very, very ecchi manga (it has full view sex, so it's hard to not just straight up call it a hentai manga), so I'm not going in expecting a pinnacle of morality in terms of it's writing. Things like rape get thrown around fairly frequently, but the art, characters, and many of the story beats were good enough I was willing to overlook that.

However, my main issue comes in chapter 20, and later chapters 24 and 30.5, where several of the characters bring up the topic of feminism. This isn't just some in-universe discussion of gender roles, but chapter 30.5 makes it very clear that these are the author's actual views on gender roles, politics, and feminism.

If anyone wants to see the actual chapters in question, let me know, and I can help you out, but for now I will paraphrase the author's main points.

The author tries to make two main points with their commentary:

1. Women are not inferior to men.
2. Anyone who believes in movements intended to raise up women to be equal to men actually believes women are inf

This was a discussion question we did in class and I found there to be a number of ways schools showed gender inequality.

I’m kinda on this like crazy productive streak and I have a paper I’m gonna knock out tomorrow. It’s a research paper and I’d like it to be over this topic. It’s super short, 5-8 pages, AND it includes cover page, abstract page, and reference page! So I only have to actual write around 3-4 decent pages.

I’d love to hear your guys opinions in it to generate some ideas for an outline I will make to get started. Or like anything that might be beneficial to include!

This is a long one, but there’s no block text here (only well-spaced paragraphs!), and I genuinely need the help, so here goes:

Thanks to COVID, I haven’t had sex in a year. But now that I’m comfortable getting back out there... for the first time in my life, I’m feeling kind of numb about it.

I’ve never had any issues before. But while I was enjoying myself on PornHub one day, I was suddenly taken aback by the inequality. It’s like I was seeing it for the first time and it really got to me.

PornHub has a lot of videos showing humiliation, degradation, violence. None of that is inherently wrong, but why is it only directed at women? That’s what I noticed. And I realized, I wouldn’t be bothered if it were gender equal, but it’s not.

And once I started thinking about it, I just kept dissecting it all and feeling worse and worse.

What I realized was:

We’ve smashed gender roles in so many areas of life, except the bedroom. There, it’s amplified. And the general message is that women achieve sexual empowerment through submission. That’s what we celebrate and push as natural and correct.

Yes, there are videos to the contrary. But it’s not mainstream, female submission is the norm.

And as I’m thinking, I’m suddenly seeing the parallels between sex today and women who wanted careers in the 1950’s.

Then, women were homemakers; it was believed that’s all they were suited for. And the media reinforced these ideas, it’s all you saw. It was limiting, excluding (and sometimes shaming) women who wanted something different.

The media is the same today. In sexual situations, women are rarely in charge. BDSM is a more extreme version, but where is the 50 Shades of Grey for men? It doesn’t exist. Women just aren’t portrayed in mainstream media having sexual power like that.

Going back to careers, society eventually acknowledged that women are not naturally subservient and inferior. As a result, we get to choose; home-making or working are both acceptable now.

Yet, where sex is concerned, I don’t feel like I have a choice at all. Scrolling through PornHub, it’s very obvious what’s expected and how society views women sexually.

In fact, I’ve heard many arguments as to why it’s just natural women take on a submissive role: it’s biology, women aren’t interested in leading, they’re just not as sexual, it’s in the Bible. And so on.

But if you substitute the word “homemaker” for “female submission” their arguments just sound like sexism. We’re still being told who