COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY REBECCA SOLNIT IN THE GUARDIAN
“if I were a man”
Equality is pretty much here.
My mother struggled to bring up two boys alone back in the 1950s, and I am intimately acquainted with the world's prejudices, but today in no significant way resembles the 1950s.
However, even "equal" things can be unequal in certain aspects.
All the kids in a classroom are equal in important senses, but we all know immediately that in no classroom will all the gifts of nature be equally distributed.
Some will be beautiful, some not.
Some moody or disturbed, some not.
Some intellectually gifted, some not.
The trouble with using a term like "equal" in an absolute sense is that it throws away this complexity which is always there in every situation.
It generates demands and expectations that every individual will be treated the same way.
It is a fantasy. That simply will never be. Every job and career has needs better met by some rather than others, and pay and rise up in the hierarchy inevitably reflect that fact.
I'm not saying, for I certainly do not believe, that this means men on top.
However, we do not have enough scientific knowledge on the distribution of nature's gifts to say, things will always end up equally distributed.
We proceed on the pragmatic basis of who best fills the job, and lacking the presence of genuine bias, the outcomes will not likely be perfectly equal.
That applies to any human division you care to mention - black vs white, male vs female, or young vs old.
