Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Big_Bird]

Are women more democratic than men?

Marina Warner:

Insofar as women are underdogs, we acquire survival skills through cooperation and negotiation, are quick to sense potential friends and defenders, form a group, and develop a nose for danger and consequently manoeuvre to quarantine its carriers. This cooperative as opposed to hierarchical strategy can be found historically among any disfranchised group as it works for change. Many women - especially the low-paid - are still at a disadvantage; others not. The disaster is that the latter mostly start dealing with others as men in power do, not vice versa.

Marina Warner is a novelist, historian, and cultural critic.

Joanna Bourke:

Democratic institutions and practices only exist as historical subjects define them. They belong naturally to neither gender. As the concept has been constructed historically, however, the citizens to whom "democracy" refers have tended to be well-off men, swathed in white skins, western bodies.

While 19th-century feminists were not fooled by the patriarchal timbre of friendship, fraternity, and equality, democratic ideologies provided them with new ways to resist brutality. Then, as today, the task of exposing the violence skulking behind democratic institutions went hand-in-hand with feminist idealism.

Joanna Bourke is professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Galen Strawson:

To take this idea seriously you have to have no idea what men and women are really like. There are very large numbers of ideas that can't be taken seriously except on this condition, and there are of course very large numbers of people who take such ideas seriously. This, after all, is one of the most important facts about what human beings (men and women alike) are really like.

Galen Strawson is professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading.

RW Johnson:

Women are neither more nor less democratic than men, though many women leaders have been fiercer and more warlike - Mrs Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Mrs Bandaranaike, Benazir Bhutto and doubtless, if they get the chance, Hillary Clinton and Segolene Royal. The old cliche that if only women were in power we wouldn't have any wars seems to be the opposite of the truth, though the reasons for this are obscure.

RW Johnson is a journalist and historian.

Ken Loach:

It's a sexist question and the people who thought it up should behave themselves.

Ken Loach is a film and TV director.

[Big_Bird]

bumpity bump

[seoulshock]

lol

[Ya-ta Boy]

Yes, I suspect women are more democratic than men. Case in point, Catherine the Great and Maria Theresa were quite happy to share Poland with the Prussians, unlike Hitler who only shared Poland with Stalin for about 2 years before taking all of it for himself.

[pkang0202]

Anyone that's married will clearly tell you that women are fascists Dictators.

[The Bobster]