[SIZE=Default]So is that supposed to mean that people who disagree are supposed to accept things just the way they are? Obviously it takes more than one person to change a culture. I thought that was implied when I posted it....
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I don't think a lifestyle approach has ever changed culture on a large level, even if a counter culture ends up being developed for a while and in small communities. We've had nude beaches for a long time but nudity is still understood sexually by the vast majority of people, for instance.
On the other hand, slavery continued until the contradiction between the fuedalist and industrialist areas of the United States, which resulted in new economic conditions for blacks. This in turn lead to the civil rights movement and to the development of black activists. There were always Blacks opposed to slavery, but Black activisism never caught until the conditions could support it. Likewise, there were always Whites who were opposed to slavery, but they never could convince the slave owners to all give up their slaves (lifestyle approach).
[SIZE=Default]This isn't about forcing anyone to do anything. I've said it before, but I'll say it again, I'm talking about affording women the right to present themselves anyway they like (and if that means showing some skin, so be it) and then not shaming them into feeling cheap because society likes to leer at them.
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I believe I understand what you're saying, but I'm not sure you understand how I am actually approaching this. You are not likely to hear me talking about anyone having the "right" to do anything, past political rights ("right to a lawyer" for instance) that can be granted or taken away depending on what the government wants. So it's not that I don't understand that you're talking about an individual right, it's just that I don't analyze things that way because of the reasons I've been saying.
At this point, I'm afraid we're just being contrary.
"Sometimes when people meet, we argue and we miss each other. We miss each other because, in the first place, we think we're having a contradiction when we're only being contrary. For example, I would say the wall is ten feet tall and you would say the wall is red, and we would argue all day thinking we're having a contradiction when actually we're being contrary. When people argue, when one offers a thesis and the other offers an antithesis, we say there's a contradiction, and we hope that if we argue long enough, provided that we agree on one first premise, that probably we hope that we can have some kind of synthesis. "
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Huey Newton (Edit: Actually, I read this in a book, "The Huey P Newton Reader," but it was published in this newspaper too)
I certainly don't object
in principle to a person (not just a woman btw) being able to dress how they want.
[SIZE=Default]You're not challenging anything, though. If anything, you're only trying to maintain the establised order.[/SIZE]
Pretty far from that.
No, you're not. However, maybe you have a difficult time talking with women about women's issues because you don't try to see it from the woman's perspective.
I do try to be able to see it from a woman's perspective, which is a big part of why I talk to women about it in the first place, but I don't try to
adopt the perspective of a mainstream woman in order to get a better reaction.
Women aren't the only people I upset, by the way. I'd like to hold hands with everyone and sing about tolerance, but god didn't make me a hippie, so I have to accept that people aren't going to like some of the things I think. A situation where I upset a group even more consistently than I do when talking with women about women's issues is when I talk about drug issues with drug users. They want me to say that they have the right to do whatever they want with their own body too, but I won't, and they get so defensive, even though I'm not telling them to change what they do in their personal lives. I don't want to upset them, but I'm not going to change or muddle my viewpoint to avoid upsetting them.
