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One of the things I’ve seen over the last year or so is people insisting on equality. Now, one of the things most people can’t argue is that, on paper, pretty much everyone has legal equality these days. Sure, gay marriage isn’t technically legal, but from everything I can tell by looking at the constitution…it isn’t illegal. It’s just never been done. Everyone wants an amendment to make it legal, but if you look at the original laws of this country, no law was made banning it. If anything, it is a state issue to be determined by states.
But other than that issue, I do find legal equality for all within the USA.
But despite the fact that Legal Equality was really good enough for my ancestors, it seems legal equality isn’t enough these days. I’ve had some discussions with says feminists, and some of them will admit there is legal equality, but that isn’t enough. There should be equality of outcome, if you will. Equal pay, equal numbers in authority, so on and so forth.
What most people don’t realize though, is that a lot of these equalities they want were earned over hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. Most of these rights came at a terrible blood price. The history of Europe is rife with rebellions and wars to gain what we now consider an everyday fact of life. The ability to speak ones mind, heck, to have the ability to change jobs and locations, to vote, all those came at the price of blood and lives.
But that’s in the past, it seems. White men died for the ability for people to vote, to travel freely, for people not to live in bondage, but those sacrifices mean nothing. Instead, White men are evil, they oppress because they make more money, or run companies they built or countries they died to create.
Women want to make as much as men. Most jobs, it turns out, pays everyone roughly the same when it comes to the genders. Women still earn less though, and want that to change. What is not talked about is the price of that wage gap. If a man and a woman are both paid say $15 an hour, but each week the man takes home more…that means the man spent more time at work. Women are told they can have it all, career and family. So many women will not work as much as men do because they feel they have responsibilities to their family, or they want time to be with friends. Men are taught they must have career for family. Without making as much as he can, his family will not be able to have what it wants and needs, so most men will sacrifice time with family for time at work so that he can take home more pay. A woman can leave work for her family and this is socially acceptable. A man does not have that option in the eyes of society.
Men also die more on the job than women. This is something I often find funny when it comes to women wanting equality with men. They want the nice things, but few women seem willing to push for more women to die in the work place to bring up those numbers. The same goes for suicide rates. Men kill themselves far more often then women…yet somehow depression and suicide are seen as women’s issues. Men are also not getting in to college as often as women, they are graduating less than women, they are finding fewer jobs than women. Yet somehow they are rising higher, earning more, and achieving places of Privilege.
I am sure there is a lesson there, but I have no idea what it might be.
Everyone wants equality of outcomes these days. Few are willing to accept equality of sacrifices. How much does a thing mean to you, if you are unwilling to pay any price to have it, but you keep insisting you should have it regardless. Do you expect others to keep paying the price for you, and if so, what does that make you? Personally, I think if you find yourself so deserving of gifts without giving gifts, of receiving rights but having others pay the price…it is not the “white men” that are privileged…but you, who insists your life is inherently worth more.
Son of Hel 
Having witnessed the lack of legal equality just yesterday, I have to express my disagreement with this post.
I am employed as a work-study at my college, and I work closely with the ESL teacher. Yesterday, she asked me to help an ESL student enroll in a couple curriculum classes, as Kim doesn’t speak amazing English.
Kim is a natural-born citizen of the United States – she was born in California, and she has a valid social security card. Despite that, we faced a ridiculous amount of red tape trying to get her enrolled in school.
Why? Because her high school transcript is in Spanish, as she attended high school in Mexico City. She moved to Mexico at age 3 – the reason her English is rusty – and decided to come back to the U.S. to go to college because there aren’t many opportunities for artists in Mexico.
But because the U.S. requires foreign transcripts to be translated into English and converted into high school equivalences – something that has to be done through an agency, is incredibly expensive, and takes at least a month to process – Kim has to wait until her transcript (which is more than equivalent to high school here) comes back in English before she can enroll.
And the only reason that we even got that far is because I am highly aware of the lack of legal equality that exists in the area I live and the prejudice that Spanish people face here. If I hadn’t been with her, I doubt Kim would have even gotten in the door of the admissions office.
The admissions officer had to call someone above her, and that woman had the audacity to assume that Kim’s parents were “illegal” even though Kim herself has dual citizenship. That was, perhaps, the rudest thing said all day, but the fact that people kept asking Kim if she was a citizen – even a random girl sitting in the waiting room in the Student Services building – was incredibly rude.
The fact that people automatically assume that someone who speaks Spanish as their 1st language is not a native citizen of the United States is ridiculous – there are plenty of areas in the U.S. where Spanish is the predominant language. Yet no one thinks twice about asking a Spanish person if they are a citizen or not, even though they’d never ask a white-skinned person the same question.
So, no, legal equality does not exist in the United States. Not for people with different skin tones, and certainly not for gender. While it might exist *in theory*, the sad truth is that America is not a place where equality is a reality.
Since you mostly focused on gender equality, I’ll swap directions here, and say this: some women want more than equality, and seem to want privileges not afforded to men. A quick example – women expect to be able to go on maternity leave and come back without losing their jobs. If they want that kind of stability in the workplace, then men should have the right to go on paternity leave when their children are born. That is equality, but it’s not offered.
And I’ve heard many arguments from women as to why that wouldn’t be fair – conversations about women who have been fired because they were pregnant and starting to show, conversations about women who have been fired because they wouldn’t play sex games with their bosses, etc. and so on. Sexual harassment is still a very real problem in the workplace, but people – both men and women – tend to gloss it over, pretend it doesn’t exist. That’s a mistake, because it does.
As for monetary equality, a woman does still tend to make less than a male counterpart. That’s not hard information to find. And the generally accepted reason is that men can’t get pregnant, so employers don’t have to worry about men leaving the workplace for that reason, but they do have to worry about it with women, so they use it as an excuse to pay women less.
When it comes to men and women getting into college, I haven’t done any research on that. I do know that all of my college classes have had a staggering lack of women – about 10 men to every 1 woman – but one college doesn’t determine a statistic. In any case, there is a lot more to inequality – legal or otherwise – than can be addressed via simple opinion.
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First off, I would like to thank you for your in depth response.
However, I would like to point out that your first example, the girl was ESL…was not, in fact, an issue of Legal Inequality. You never described anything legal in it. You described a few examples of social inequality (asking about citizenship, for example, assuming her parents were not legal citizens, which you never said one way or the other if they were). The closest you came was that her transcript had to be translated according to a policy of the school..which is not the law. I would like to point out that having her transcript be in English is not prejudicial in any way, shape, or form, despite the delay it puts to her application. English is the administrative language here in America, just as Latin is the Catholic Church, or Spanish is in Mexico. Insisting that she have a transcript that could be read by everyone in the administrative staff is not prejudicial. It is practical. Now, if I am mistaken and at any point in her process you had to deal with lawyers, state officials, or law enforcement who treated her by different laws than they would anyone else, please correct me because that would be legal inequality. However, since any extra-national student would be held to the same standard, as would fellow American students…i do not see an inequity in their system. Social inequality, yes, but every person has to deal with that regardless of their race.
The instances you discussed as far as women go, instances of being fired for starting to show their pregnancy, or for sexual harassment….those things, especially the latter…are illegal. It is illegal to sexually harass a woman or man at work. Does it happen? Yes. All illegal activity happens. But that doesn’t mean the law doesn’t exist. Again, those are not examples of legal inequality. Those are social equality issues. Now, I have heard of the whole “Pregnancy as an excuses to pay women less” thing.
Except, in the end, that’s not exactly how it works. Since I both love and hate math, let me do some math out-loud. You don’t have to read if you don’t want. If a man and a woman start the same job earning $15 an hour, and they both work 40 hour weeks, their pay is the same. However, lets say that one week the woman has to go to the doctor, so she misses 3 hours of work. She has now earned $45 dollars less than the man. Now there is a wage gap, and a gap of labor that must be filled, so let’s say because the work needs doing, the man pics up the slack, he has now gained $45 dollars, creating a gap that week of $90.. If she sees the doctor once every two weeks, for say six months, that is a weekly gap of $90 for a total of 12 times, leading to a pay gap of $1080. She then, after giving birth, takes maternity leave at say half pay for three months (I’m not sure what maternity leave pay is, but I know some places still pay at reduced wages, so for this example we will). so now she is earning $7.50 to the man’s $15. This creates a daily pay gap at 40 h/w of $60 and a weekly gap of $300 dollars and for the maternity leave gap a total of about $3600.
Meaning the sum total gap for the time of pregnancy and maternity leave between them is, roughly, $4680. Assuming, off course, that the man did not take up extra hours during the maternity leave to cover for the 40 h/w labor that the woman was not doing for that three months…which he probably would have had to do, further increasing the wage gap. Indeed, depending on job and company, he could have had to have taken as much or more as half the workload she did not complete. secondly, during that time she has missed out on/failed to perform 516 hours of labor for the company.
The above calculations and system is on my discussions with pay managers and business management, so I’m fairly close that is how it works.
The woman then returns to work at at the end of the year, raises are handed out. The man, having missed no work and in fact likely taken on more work than he originally had to, is given a $0.75 raise. The woman, having missed 516 hours of work, is given a raise of $0.50. Now, there is a true “gender pay gap” in wages of $0.25.
Is this pay gap unfair? The man has clearly earned more than the woman over the course of the year. But he certainly worked more than her during the year. He will now certainly earn more than the woman the next year, but is that based on his gender and hers, or her work performance the year before? The employer is, apparently, using the excuse that she was pregnant to pay her less. But at the same time, the employer has had to pay her a rather large sum of money for absolutely no work on her part. The employer has lost money with no gain for that money, where as the woman was paid for no effort job wise on her part, for no other reason than she was a woman. faced with such a loss on their business end, would it be illogical then for an employer to say “Well crap, she get’s pregnant and I have to pay all these people over time at 1.5x their normal wages because they have to do her work, and I have to pay her while she goes to the doctor/takes maternity leave, fuck. That’s money i really need to keep this place going. Maybe I should pay her a little less to help round off my losses so i can keep everyone employed and not go out of business.” Because that’s what it is, the employer is not only paying her to do a job, he then has to pay others to do her job when she can’t do that job, but still has to pay her because she’s out pregnant.
This is the equation, and yet somehow we are told to believe that the man is bad because he make’s more, the employer is bad because he paid less, and the woman deserves the same amount of pay even though she worked less and cost more to employ?
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I actually said I mostly agreed with you when it came to the workplace mentality – a lot of women will make arguments for more wages for unjustifiable reasons.
That said, a legal equality existing does not ensure that the equality is carried out in the social arena – which is the area of life that actually matters.
On paper, you can have all the equality you want. But it’s the day-to-day face-to-face interactions that actually matter. And if those interactions are full of social inequality, well, what does that say about our society as a whole?
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it says that society doesn’t just give you stuff. Every group in history has had to fight against inequality. Even “straight white men.” Is it fair? no. Is it right? Maybe.
Honestly, society is always going to discriminate. Who is popular, who is not, who is strong, who is not. that’s the way it always is and likely always will be. Women are discriminated against and in turn, discriminate against those they feel profit from their suffering, rightly or wrongly. The whole pay gap thing is a perfect example, because women earn less, largely by their own actions or actions of other women, and yet they discriminate against men for earning more.
After years of long study, I’ve come to the conclusion that equality on paper is really the best we can hope for, because then society will eventually come to be in accordance with the paper. The Magna Carta was written in the Middle Ages, and it took several hundred years for what was on paper to fully come into society. But it did come, largely because of that paper being useful to punish those who blatantly break the law, which teaches people to respect the law and the people.
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The idea that equality on paper is all we can hope for is too bleak a concept for me to accept. And even if others choose not to, I will use every resource at my disposal to keep the people around me from being forced into situations where they are treated unjustly. Because I don’t have the ability to just sit on the sidelines and watch people suffer when I know I can do something to change it.
That being said, some of the complaints people make are ridiculous. “Women are traumatized because the media portrays them as sexual objects” – I hear that a lot, and that is a very hypocritical complaint. The pay gap between men and women still exists, but the gap is so minimal at this point that I feel it’s pointless to focus on that problem.
The real problems, in a social setting, that I feel need to be focused on now is the prejudice that international citizens face in this country. The red tape barring the way for U.S. citizens of non-white backgrounds to get employed, to get enrolled in school, to live in non-poverished neighborhoods – those are problems that are a very real threat to this country’s livelihood. And I’m not okay with sitting on the sidelines just watching and waiting for things to change.
That’s how I feel, at least, but I don’t expect you or anyone else to approach life the same way I do – we all have different roles to play, after all ;p
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Well, I believe it is up to people to do as you do. Society is made up of people, and it is people respecting each other that creates social equality. Respect, however, is a hard road to walk in both earning and keeping.
I will agree there is much prejudice of international citizens, but my research indicates that it is towards all races. If you think it is hard for a hispanic person to imigrate…you should see what it takes for a German or a Brittan. Did you know we have racial quotas for how many people America will accept in a given period of time/year? I was surprised to find out about it too, but the percentages allowed by Europeans is a fraction allowed for Hispanics, Africans, and Asians. Shocking, given the narrative we are fed about immigration.
Then again, I don’t know that the USA is really all that bad for said prejudice. Even with that prejudice we are still one of the most accepting countries when it comes to immigration. If you look at Japan, for example, immigration is nearly non-existant and non-natives face terrible racism, regardless of the lightness or darkness of their skin. Most countries in the world are far, far harsher to their immigrants than we are. Are we perfect, far from, but I am given hope because we are still among the best. The only real solution we have to limitations of immigration (for which there are very good reasons) would to be enact a citizen/non-citizen system similar to what the Roman Empire had. Personally I think it would solve a number of problems we have with immigration, but that is another post.
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I agree with your post and I’m going to add that someone told me that equality is a myth. There’s so such thing as true equality as while one group gets something another group is held back. Example: A Jewish couple, who relies on others to help them, was told that they couldn’t live together. This is in New York where gays can marry and live together but people that are mentally challenged can not. I also agree that gay marriage should be left to the states, as it’s a state issue and shouldn’t of been brought to federal court. But people just don’t get that concept.
Good post and continue to write.
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Reblogged this on The Raven And The Wolf and commented:
Something that I agree with.
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