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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

>This got me wondering... Thinking in reverse, are there any issues that you think should be decided by men only?

Military conscription and field duties would be an example I can think of.

For example, in my European country we have mandatory conscription for men over 17 but there was a referendum a while ago if this should still be kept, and it was funny that women also got to vote on whether men get conscripted or not lol. And guess what, most women (and boomers) voted in favor of the mandatory conscription of young males by quite a margin and unsurprisingly the only ones who voted against but got outvoted, were the young men.

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Yes this discriminates, but your example illustrates the exact reverse way to what I meant. Being subject to conscription is like a negative right/loss of rights - men are being forced to potentially put their lives on the line. Can you think of a female equivalent where females are ordered by the government to put themselves in harm's way?

In both cases it seems like the discrimination is not in favour of men. Apparently men ought not to get a say in "women's issues", but it is also right that men be forced to put their lives on the line.

If that is correct, it is the case that men have less rights.

They answered your question "are there any issues that you think should be decided by men only?"

In this sentence, you are looking at different parts of the equation depending on case 1 and 2:

> Apparently men ought not to get a say in "women's issues", but it is also right that men be forced to put their lives on the line.

No, in the first case it could be argued that men shouldn't have a say, and in the second it could be argued that women shouldn't have a say. In the first case women are (potentially/allegedly) negative affected, in the second (young) men.

> Can you think of a female equivalent where females are ordered by the government to put themselves in harm's way?

Anti-Abortion laws in the US would be such an example.

If absolute gender equality is what we're after, I think the premise is flawed form the start.

Men have less rights by nature/biology because they are expendable (women are the reproductory bottleneck of the species) and they are the only gender with the physique optimized for physical fighting and hard labor, hence the famous line "women and children first".

We can say it's unfair and imbalanced but that's not gonna change biology and the status quo when push comes to shove and an enemy invades or a natural disaster hits and human meat is needed for the grinder, hence why there's no sympathy towards men and why much less societal help available to men in need (men have 10x the suicide and homelessness rates than women).

Men and women can never be equal in absolute terms outside an utopia of peace and prosperity, because evolutionary biology and gender dysmorphia has engineered our bodies to be good at completely different tasks meant to complement each other in order to ensure the survival and procreation of the tribe/species.

> If absolute gender equality is what we're after, I think the premise is flawed form the start.

I thought we were talking about some sort of equality. Re the OP, who mentioned that they wouldn't participate in certain "women's issues", I couldn't think of an equivalent example where women shouldn't participate in "men's issues". That fact alone strikes me as unequal - it can't be that one sex (or race, or whatever other distinction) should have rights in law, that others don't have. Such a circumstance would an example of creating inequality, which I think is the antithesis of the OP's point.

These questions are not straightforward. Presumably we don't want to initiate or institutionalise inequality.

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