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The more thorny question is whether relativism is relevant to those domains we generally want to put in the non-benign category: harassment, sexual coercion, even sexual violence. Could it be that offensiveness is relative to the perspective of the recipient, based on her own cultural sensibilities? More troubling, could it be that our very experience of an encounter might be significantly affected by our background, upbringing, culture, ethnicity, in short, by what Michel Foucault called our discourse?

date rapes, statutory rapes, and many instances of harassment can be subject to multiple interpretations, which has given rise to the new term popular on college campuses — “gray” rape. The writer Mary Gaitskill famously argued some years back that the binary categories of rape/not-rape were simply insufficient to classify the thick complexity of her own experience. In this netherworld of ambiguous experiences, can understanding cultural relativism be useful?

Whether workplace pornography is experienced as threatening or a reminder of the sexual power of women is simply relative to one’s expectations and prior predilections, some might say. Those who take offense are simply operating with the “wrong paradigm.” This has the danger of returning us to pre-feminist days when women’s own first person reports and interpretations of their experiences were routinely set aside in favor of more “objective” analyses given by doctors, psychiatrists, and social scientists, inevitably male.

Given that elite educated people in the top 1% of ability are highly overrepresented in the right tail of wealth suggests that brainpower/education is probably a helpful factor in becoming wealthy. However, within the right tail of wealth (after controlling for potential confounds), higher ability/education is only weakly associated with wealth suggesting it is not as strong a factor as others in predicting wealth generation.

highest average net worth appeared to be linked to inheritance, showing the wealthiest people also tended to not have been the ones to have earned their own way, even in part. Additionally, another way of looking at the percentage of UHNW individuals with an elite education is that in relation to other elite occupations in the extreme right tail of achievement 32 to 34% may be relatively low ( Wai & Rindermann, 2015).

Men and women are not equal in the macro society level and the micro level of which you interact with your peers in. The truth is that anyone who watches enough nature shows will know that males do everything they do in order to get laid, and as by definition we are animals too with instinct, humans also do too.

The modern world has largely inherited the ancient view that oratory is a matter of technique. True, we do have a romantic notion that some people are "naturals" at public speaking – whether it is something in the air of the Welsh valleys that produces the gift of the gab, or the "natural" sense of timing that great orators share with great comedians. But modern speech-writers always stress the importance of technique, and they advocate many of the same old tricks that the ancients used ("group your examples into threes", they advise – that's the classical "tricolon", which was taken to extremes in Blair's famous "education, education, education" soundbite). And the pundits who have turned their attention to Obama's great speeches have emphasised his technical rhetorical sophistication, some of it handed down, directly or indirectly, from the Roman star orator, Cicero: the judicious repetitions ("yes we can"); the subtly placed "tricola"; the artful references to earlier oratory, in Obama's case especially to the speeches of Martin Luther King.

I'm not meaning by this that women have in some way "failed" to master the art of public speaking. Not at all. The point is that "great oratory" is a category that has been consistently defined to exclude them – and the more you search for the roots of our own oratorical traditions in the classical past, the more obvious that exclusion becomes. In ancient Greece and Rome the ability to speak in public and to persuade your fellow (male) citizens was almost as much a defining attribute of the male of the species as a penis was. Men spoke, women kept quiet – that's what made them women. "Great oratory" even now has not shaken off its male, "willy-waving" origins. We are not even sure, I suspect, what a great woman's speech would sound like. Thatcher tried to get round the problem by lowering her voice an octave, but she ended up sounding more like a woman pretending to be a man.

there is something problematic about the very notion of "great oratory". For a start, it is an almost entirely male category. I doubt that there have been many, if any, "great" female orators, at least as "great oratory" has traditionally been defined. Margaret Thatcher may have delivered some memorable soundbites to the party faithful ("The lady's not for turning"), but she did not give great persuasive speeches. In fact, when a few years ago the Guardian published its own collection of great oratory of the 20th century, it obviously had a problem with the female examples.

There were some key single interest movements in the past, such as Radical Feminism and Black Power, which needed to distinguish themselves from ‘mainstream’ society and organise, educate themselves separately. But this is 2010 not 1970, and even if people need to work in single-issue groups at times, if there is no coming together, no communication, no acknowledgement of the inevitable intersection between us all, there is no future for feminism.

feminism is operating in ghettos, and how anyone who tries to break down the barriers and climb over the fence, gets her hand bitten.

I think as well there is a case of ‘blame the messenger’ going on here. I am one of very few feminists that I am aware of in the UK who is drawing attention to these divisions and conflicts within feminism. I have been accused of getting involved in ‘infighting’ instead of focussing on our shared aims and objectives.

concept called ‘apexuality’. She says that ‘apexuals’, who I think she conceptualises as ‘male-bodied’, are people who achieve power in hierarchies. And, contrary to feminism’s patriarchy 1.0 theory she says these apexuals do not achieve power based on their commonalities with other men, but rather by distinguishing themselves from them. The search for ‘uniqueness’ is a key part of the search for power. And ‘apexuals’ have to sacrifice their ‘maleness’ as an identity in order to achieve high status roles. So feminists ideas about men working together as a kind of ‘team’ are rejected by typhon’s analysis. I agree with her, if I have understood her correctly. I think we live in very ‘individualistic’ times.

I think some women gain power by invoking their ‘femininity’. I think Margaret Thatcher did, and Princess Diana, and say, Dolly Parton. I’m sure they trod on a few female toes to get where they did, too.

1) Feminism is based on an assumption that overall, men as a group hold power in society and this power, damages women as a group.

2) The above assumption, no matter what feminists say, relies on a belief in and a reinforcement of the essentialist binary view of gender (i.e. that male v female men v women masculine v feminine are real and important distinctions. That is how feminists justify their belief that ‘men’ hold power over ‘women’)

3) This means that in order to present these assumptions as ‘fact’, men are demonised by feminism as a whole. Feminism is, by its very nature, misandrist. e.g. concepts such as ‘rape culture’  and ‘patriarchy’ and ‘violence against women and girls’ and  ‘the male gaze’ and ‘objectification’ rely on making out men are not decent people, in general, as a group. To be accepted as decent human beings, the onus is placed by feminists onto men to prove their worth, and to prove why they differ from the (socialised or innate) ‘norm’ of dominant masculinity.

Ms Tan Gek Khim, senior director at the Management Development Institute of Singapore, said glass ceilings, if they exist at all, should have been shattered long ago. 'Women should not stifle themselves by harbouring negative perceptions. They should not let the proverbial 'glass ceiling' hamper them in their aspirations for higher positions,' she says. 'Such perceived constraints serve only to perpetuate the weaknesses of women.' Ms Monica Sun, president of Henkel Singapore and Malaysia and its vice-president for the adhesive technologies unit in South-east Asia, adds: 'I believe the glass ceiling can be only oneself. 'If a woman has an aspiration, and if she is determined and if she works hard, then the ceiling is where she sets it for herself.'

Companies do not have separate requirements for female and male leaders, though men need to fight the natural tendency to hire another male in a senior position as that provides a level of comfort and familiarity, says Ms Kerry Condon, recruitment firm AMS' head of client services for Asia Pacific. 'Having women in leadership roles signals that this is an organisation... that is looking to cultivate a culture of collaboration.' Ultimately, it is the leader's capabilities that matter, regardless of gender.

I agree with Gayatn Spivak that our marginality is important—but there is very little room in the margins when that space has been claimed by Marxists and theorists of all stripes. With all this jostling in the margins, who is in the center?...

Shari Benstock challenges us: “Feminist criticism must be willing to pose the question of the differences within women’s writing. . . . Feminist criticism must be a radical critique not only of women’s writing but of women’s critical writing.” She calls for us to “inscribe the authority of our own experience” (147) and to question the assumptions of that authority. I am not sure that Shari Benstock realizes how dangerous this project can be. My own career began with such critiques of feminist criticism and I have concluded that years of joblessness were a direct result of that practice.’ Old girl networks exist; hierarchy is imposed and some feminist journals have “better” reputations than others. Star feminist critics perform their acts on platforms all over the country. The only difference is that we like what they have to say, and fall asleep less easily than at a male critic’s lecture. One feminist critic says that she would not have the “hubris” to criticize Gilbert and Gubar, It is not hubris but a pledge to our collective future as practicing critics to point out differences in theory and practice. I am sure that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar would be the first to insist that such sisterly criticisms of their work be offered, for they continue to write, to grow, and to change. If feminist criticism has taught us anything, it has taught us to question authority, each other’s as well as our oppressors’. There are some cases in which theorists ignore scholarship at their peril.

I suspect it emerges from a flaw in the very project of critical theory. When Marxism, semiotics and the rest burst on the academic scene in the 1960s and ‘70s, they were seen above all as ways to probe beneath the sur- face of reality. The idea was always to unmask the hidden structures of power, dominance, and exploitation that lay below even the most mundane and ordinary aspects of daily life. Certainly such things are there to be found. But if this is all one is looking for, one soon ends up with a rather jaundiced picture of social reality. The overall effect of reading through this literature is remarkably bleak; one is left with the almost Gnostic feeling of a fallen world, in which every aspect of human life is threaded with violence and domination.9 Critical theory thus ended up sabotaging his own best in- tentions, making power and domination so fundamental to the very nature of social reality that it became impossible to imagine a world without it. Be- cause if one can’t, then criticism rather loses its point. Before long, one had figures like Foucault or Baudrillard arguing that resistance is futile (or at least, that organized political resistance is futile), that power is simply the basic constituent of everything, and often enough, that there is no way out of a totalizing system, and that we should just learn to accept it with a cer- tain ironic detachment. And if everything is equally corrupt, then pretty much anything could be open for redemption.10 Why not, say, those creative and slightly offbeat forms of mass consumption favored by upper-middle class academics?    Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, page 30

I find New Age thought, like Wicca, so much more aggravating than your average brand of magical thinking. Wicca tends to target itself to women followers. There’s a sense of female empowerment in its imagery of motherhood of Earth goddesses, mystical priestesses and the romanticizing of witch-hunt horror stories, used to symbolize the feared and misunderstood magick power of woman kind. It’s a type of magical thinking which lends itself well to taking advantage of those who may indeed feel powerless, unheard, and unseen, providing them with a way to artificially inflate a sense of self-worth using cheap parlour tricks.

The idea that women have a special inner power which grants them privileged knowledge about reality is damaging to the female image. It’s a giant step backward from the reality that men and women are equal in ability to the absurdity that women need supernatural power in order to bring themselves to the same level as ordinary men.

Typically, for a girl or woman character to play a significant role in a story (beyond being simply the love interest) she usually has to be one of two things: a) completely masculine in character or b) have extraordinary/supernatural abilities. This isn’t the case for male characters, who can be completely average and ordinary (even flawed or incompetent) heroes.