One of the on-line dating sites did a survey, and found that for the majority of women, “works in manufacturing” is one of the worst disqualifiers for a man.

I’ve seen comments by high-level manufacturing people…plant managers, company owners, etc…suggesting that they encounter the prejudice against manufacturing even at their levels.

The feminists – then in full malignant flower, if that’s not too politically incorrect – howled about the discriminatory effect of this test, because a lot of female applicants couldn’t do it. (Fair enough; it was body weight for most of them.)

Upshot: test removed. Now why would a fireman ever have to carry a 120 lb. weight down a flight of stairs? I guess a male victim of a fire was just SOL (unless he weighed less than 120 lbs.)

A similar story obtains with the police department and climbing over a six foot fence. I left before this one played out, and so don’t know the fate of the test, but I asked a friend who was a Berkeley cop whether cops commonly had to climb over fences. His answer: “All the time. Few perps are polite enough to run down the street so you can just drive up behind them.”

From a big picture perspective, one reason I think we learned to handle our own affairs was that our parents were there, but most of them didn’t hover the way I see parents doing today. I had no skin on either knee for most of my childhood. This was considered the norm for boys my age at the time. Lawsuits against the school or city for not making its playgrounds, sidewalks, etc. “safe” never came to mind. We played tackle football and ice hockey without protective gear, rode bikes without helmets, caught wasps in mason jars, and climbed anything we could. Yes, we paid for it sometimes (I broke a wrist falling off a skateboard), but it was looked at as a “learning experience” by my parents, not as an opportunity to get rich by suing the skateboard manufacturer.

If gals misbehaved they were lectured but guys got smacked, and I mean physically. Nuns hate men, that’s why they became nuns.

We had a class size in grade school of 42 students. Many are now doctors, attorneys or other career professionals but some are dead from overdose.

Education is what one makes of it and parents like mine who expect results.

Not buying the psychobabble.

Thats partially right. What the left wanted was to choose and bestow these jobs only amongst the right thinking party (democrat) supporters. Hence all the roadblock regulations that discourage the common man entering the fray but favor big bureacratic labor unions that supports the party whether its members want to or not.

It’s all cronyism and facism straight up.

I said, yeah, sure, some women can fight effectively (though most of us, honestly, would prefer not to!), but whatever happened to being able to admire a man who “knows how to handle himself in a fight”? Why is that verboten?

Again with the squirming. Again with the “it’s not only MEN who can fight, are brave, yadda yadda.” Not one of them would address the question.

Similarly, it’s now okay for any homosexual guy to claim equal access to being a Marine, no matter how sissified he is? Since when, and in what universe, does that make sense? And you don’t have to be in favor of picking on gays, for cryin’ out loud, to know that most of them couldn’t hack it for temperamental reasons alone.

But they’re all sacred cows now. Contrary to all the horse sense that our culture, and everyone else’s, has had for millennia about this matter. Same thing with the attempts to make women and men “identical.”

I do favor equal opportunity for everyone. Let anyone who wants to take a crack at a job, go to it! But for heaven’s sakes, let’s preserve some sense of reality. Look at what happened to the East German women swimmers, for instance: they were given massive doses of male hormones, and though their muscles got stronger, guess what? their more delicate, gracile skeletal frames couldn’t take the extra punishment. They’ve all had terrible health problems in the following years.

It’s also sensible, as a female, to look for a man who will take care of you and provide for you while you are vulnerable and need help during your pregnancy, and with a baby and toddler afterwards. What do we women gain by denying this basic reality? do we really want men to be nothing more than sperm donors? Or do we really want to shoulder ALL the burdens, just to “prove” that we can?

I see my nieces, all in their early twenties, struggling with these idiotic mores, and I can tell you they aren’t happy with it.

I am just old enough to remember some of the restrictions on women’s achievement, and I do have a respectably high IQ, and chafed at the oldtime, unthinking condescension meted out to the “brightest” of us. Really infuriating, in fact; and frustrating. But I never thought that gelding our men was the answer.

Try finding any articles like that after about 1968. Blue collar workers, rubes on farms (aka rednecks), men who wear hard hats to work: aren’t they the ones who hoot at and abuse women? hate minorities? ruin the environment? vote for Richard Nixon fer chrissakes??

IE: the working man, and the jobs that both sustained him and in which he took pride, became enemies of the Left in the 60’s. Now, you’re a failure and a loser if you work on a farm or in factory or in industry. So what’s left besides the military, government work, teaching, professions (law or medicine) or financial services? What happens to the men who can’t or won’t do these things?? They are supposed to spend their lives apologizing for who they are and what they do.

In those days, men were supposed to get a job, support their family and protect their wives and children.

We were surrounded by the men who survived The Depression, won World War II and behaved like men.

We were not taught that men made dioramas or needed to get in touch with their feelings or be vulnerable and all the liberal squish which now passes for manhood.

Take a gander at the “men” now on TV and in the movies – cute little girlymen who think soccer is a rough sport and are worried about their masculinity.

We have raised a generation or two of wienies. How sad.

Paul’s got a point. Liberals view any imperfection as a damning indictment of the entire system, rather than as something that could benefit from a small tweak, or, in many case, something that should just be lived with, as any cure would be worse than the disease.