[psquared89]

The men versus women, black versus white versus asain versus etc debates have been going on forever, and unless something changes dramitically in soceity probably will continue to exist. The biggest reason that soceity can't escape them are the paradoxes presented by their supporters, women's rights activists demand complete equality for women, but you still can't hit a girl, that'd be wrong. People who want equality are (for the most part) hypocrites; they only want the positive parts of "equality". Another prime example is affirmative action, it's ridiculous. It is in no way anything but pure racism, however, since it is racism against the majority, it's allowed. The only way to ever eliminate sexism, racism, whatever-else-ism is to ignore it completely, but the average person is not capable of doing that, and it's an unfortunate statement about society.

I apologize if I offend anyone, or even if some of what I say sounds a little extreme, but I'm tired of getting the shaft because I'm a middle-class, caucasian, male. I'm tired of "Women's engineering day" and "Girls 'n Gears", what if I'm interested in engineering? Does no one care about presenting workshops for guys interested in engineering? I took the PSAT last weekend, and I couldn't check the checkbox that said, "Check here if you are of African or Native American descent and you would like the PSAT to send you name and information to more scholarship oppurtunities". How is that fair to me? How can people demand equal rights as long as those checkboxes are still there?

One of my favorite agruments is that we're "making up for mistreatment in the past". Does that mean that if I find out that my father was killed by your father, but by now both are already dead, that you should have to go to jail to make up for your father's creulty to me?

Our team is somewhere between 1/4 to 1/3 female, and they are more than just PR. Yet despite my best efforts even our team is not free of this problem, we've even won an award for it. Last year in OCCRA (a small, fall robotics competition, hunt around CD, it's well known), we recieved a judges award, and the judge told us, "It was really down to you and another team, but the deciding factor was when someone mentioned that you were the only team with two girls on your drive team". Is is fair that we won a judges award because our regular human player wasn't there and we happened to grab a female team member to fill in? I don't think so.

The only way that the assorted -isms will ever go away is if people stop paying attention to them. Even if it "has nothing to do with the selection process and is only used for research purposes", why should it matter? Until people begin to completely ignore physically defining charcteristics, people will always be judged by them.

I apologize for using this thread to vent, as well as going out of the scope of the topic a bit, but it is something that really gets to me.