You should have stopped at "discrimination in the workplace." An "awareness of the opportunities and challenges available" and a "pressure to do it all" is not oppression but a sign of equality. If you gave a crap at all about what men think, you'd realize this is what they've been feeling at least since the 19th century.

Look, what is it with you guys lately? You either just summarize some news item and repeat its claims verbatim, or you provide a couple of sentences of hastily thrown-together commentary that more often than not misrepresents the thing you're citing. Please take the time to write longer posts with more thoughtful analysis and commentary - otherwise you might as well just convert Broadsheet to a links page.

Still don't get the whole web 2.0 thing, do you? From what I understand, Amazon's marketplace works the same way that Ebay's Half.com does - people sell whatever junk they want for a set price rather than an auction. Getting outraged and demanding that Amazon pull the listing is like the conservatives demanding that Obama's site police its comments section and pull 'offensive' posts. Not to mention the T-shirt itself was obviously ironic, since the two things have little to do with each other. But then again, you guys never were good at understanding irony. Congratulations on being a bitter second-waver - I'm sure all the aging hippies of the pre-irony generation will trot out their agreement and outrage.

Can we please go for one page without trotting out the old burqa comparison? What "lack of self-control" are you referring to? Did anyone say anything about the boys raping or wanting to rape the girls? The whole larger point is about creating a mindless hypersexual environment where girls are encouraged to be sluts and boys are encouraged to be 'playas'. The fact that the former is still slightly more condemned than the latter (though at an ever-diminishing rate thanks to 'reclamation') does not change that both are equally disgusting and equally socially conditioned.

I remember being fresh out of college looking for a job, and, on the basis of some research-type things in my resume, being asked what my future plans were. The first few times I was stupid enough to say that I planned to go to grad school in the near future, and predictably got rejected. After that, I learned to give an open-ended answer and tweak my resume to downplay those particular aspects.

The question here is whether a company has some intrinsic 'right' to know about your future plans. In actuality, there is no such right. Most jobs don't involve a time contract, and as a free human being you reserve the right to change your plans and direction at any time. Of course, they are always going to be looking for a way to maximize their profit, and if you volunteer the information, you can't very well say that they have no right to act upon it. But if they have the right to ask about your future plans at all, I don't see why child rearing should be treated differently from grad school.

The main thing that bothers me about the whole process is that, because such questions are not in the formal application or employment contract, they are usually asked in an informal "getting to know you" sort of manner that puts you at ease and makes you forget that your answer might actually have an effect on your formal qualifications in their eyes. I am not entirely comfortable with lying in general, but if it was such a straightforward and obvious question as "do you plan on having kids," I don't think it would be that hard to just say "no." After all, you might end up changing your mind or becoming infertile anyway, right?

Trying to regulate what employers can and can't say attacks the symptom, not the root of the problem. You can't very well say that an employer's assumption that women are more likely to become stay at home parents than men is sexist when it's reflected by the statistics. So the real problem is that:

1. Women do take on a disproportionately large burden when ti comes to child-rearing.

2. Women are culturally expected to raise children and are assumed to be 'incomplete' without them, even if they have a professional career.

3. Regardless of social climate, women are the ones who bear the biological burden of pregnancy.

It seems to me that we should focus on changing 1) and 2), not reinforcing them by forcing employers to accomodate and work around these assumptions. To claim that not making allowances for stay-at-home moms = gender discrimination is to imply that motherhood is some essential part of being a woman rather than a life choice like any other. As for 3), that's where it gets trickier, because even if you eliminated the unequal social expectations, women would still have to take off at least a couple of months more than men. But would a couple of months really be that big a deal for most employers if they didn't come with the assumption that the woman would be far more likely than her husband to not return to the workforce? I doubt it.