No one here is denying that Sir David King has made valuable contributions to the cause of fighting global warming. And we understand that he was trying to make a point about how our society should discourage wasteful consumption rather than encouraging it. Nevertheless, he chose to make his point using sexist language which reduces women (in his mind) to being passive, and at the same time makes them (paradoxically) responsible for the behavior of men. That is unfortunate, and that is what this article is about.

Nevertheless, he chose to make his point using sexist language which reduces women (in his mind) to being passive, and at the same time makes them (paradoxically) responsible for the behavior of men.

You set up a false premise by ASSUMING this is what the guy is thinking (!), which you then knock down by running with the false presmise you set up in the first place.

"sexist language" is your term and your definition. Others would just call it normal language.

Woman and men are both human, sometimes passive, sometimes active, often in highly intertwined ways that may seem contradictory on the surface.

And this is ultimately the fatal flaw of feminism, it is all about surface and gross generalization and then damning others based on the gross, usually false, generalization you generate.

To call someone responsible for the behavior of someone else also implies other things, like the person cannot think for themselves.

Nothing is this simple in life.

Feminism sounds more and more shrill and immature in its' adherents attempts to constantly force fit the whole of human experience into the tired, misshapen and inaccurate shell it spawned decades ago by people who were more interested in damning the male sex wholesale than in developing a living and accurate model of human intergender interaction from which to develop humane models for living.

feminism is about ensuring that men and women have the same opportunities in society, are equal before the law, and aren't chained to pre-ordained roles.

It's about freedom, for everyone, that's it.

That's it. Do you see a flaw in that?

Beyond that, there are tons of theories of course and there are as many viewpoints as there are people. Argue those points if you like, lord knows there are many arguments within feminism itself.

But I don't see how you can argue with freedom.

It is about what is happening in the street as the practical application of feminism.

It is what womemn think and do and what men think and do.

That is what feminism IS.

The ideal is all sweetness and light.

What feminists do to men in the courts and in the laws they promote and in the trouble they cause society is a different matter altogether.

I can say Brightstar65ism is about freedom. It means just as little as when you say the ideals of feminism mean something.

Feminism long ago surpassed its sell by date.

It's just it's important to define terms, because when I see you speaking out against feminism, what I hear is that you are speaking out against freedom (freedom for women, in this particular context).

But if you are arguing against certain viewpoints within feminism, and outcomes of feminism -- that's fair. From what I've seen so far, we would likely disagree on most points but at least we would hopefully be communicating.

I don't think this is just semantics, by the way...I think many debates (fights! wars even!) result from miscommunication because people make assumptions about what the other person means.

From all your posts that I've read, Brightstar, I get confused because you do seem bright and sometimes you posit interesting opinions, and make interesting points, but then you just say mean things about women or make sweeping generalizations about us, or you pull out stock sexist phrases that just seem intended to offend -- and it freaks me out and I just don't get it.

more and more shrill and immature in its' adherents attempts to constantly force fit the whole of human experience into the tired, misshapen and inaccurate shell

This is exactly what you're doing with your picture of the world populated with yacht-lounging hotties and the men who chase them, and your paradigm of sex being the result of a successful deception perpetrated on a woman by a man.

Why is a man who is successful at getting sex from women also equated with being deceitful or "saying what the women want to hear?" This also implies that sex isn't something that a woman would want on her own -- it's something that she has to be tricked into by a smooth-talking liar. It also implies that because men have to deceive women, men also hold women in some kind of contempt -- why then would woman want to sleep with that?

No doubt, there are deceitful liars in the world. And there are gold-diggers. But to talk about most relationships between men and woman, talking about the hot women in Saint Tropez on the arms of old billionaires -- it doesn't say much about what goes on with regular people.

I have to echo the poster above who says that men are the ones who point out the hot cars, at least in my experience. I was at a family dinner in the "Viagra Triangle" part of Chicago, and my brother pointed out some kind of hot $200K car on the street with awe and amazement. Me, I didn't even notice it.

I wouldn't even know what a Ferrari really looks like, and frankly, I wouldn't care. I'm not into cars, and I'm especially not into other people's cars, because what is that to do with me? Somebody else's Ferrari and $3 can buy me a cup of coffee at Starbucks. And, as I thought about the $200K car parked casually on the street, all I could think about was "Could one drive that to the Jewel? Won't it get keyed? Won't somebody try to carjack that? Is it worth the bother?"