Top products from r/Equality

We found 22 product mentions on r/Equality. We ranked the 33 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.

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Top comments that mention products on r/Equality:

u/Saydrah · 3 pointsr/Equality

Book: Blast from the Past by Ben Elton.

Summary: Polly Slade works in the Office of Equal Opportunity for her town council in Britain. Jack Kent is an American military general. When Polly was 17 and a radical feminist and peace activist camped outside Jack's military base in the 1980s to protest war, she had a brief and passionate relationship with Jack. He turns up at her flat mysteriously at 2 in the morning many years later. This happens to coincide with a period in Polly's life where she's being stalked by a former client from the Equal Opportunity office, who she has nicknamed "The Bug."

Polly has retained most of her left-wing, feminist, pacifist views, while Jack is somewhere to the right of Glenn Beck. They have several intense political spats on equality-related issues, from women in the military to infidelity to sexual assault. At the book's climax, it suddenly becomes clear that Jack didn't come to visit either to get Polly back or to pick up old arguments about feminism--he has another purpose in mind, which creates a rather dramatic conclusion.

Review: I found this book an engaging read but was disappointed in how Jack and Polly never really developed beyond caricatures of their political views. Jack seems to exist primarily as a symbol of American imperialism and patriarchy, while Polly is portrayed as a nutty hippie who hasn't grown up since the age of 17, but has learned to hide her fringe views more skillfully and to accept some of the material trappings of capitalism.

That said, even if neither of the main characters is particularly realistic, Elton does manage to make both somewhat sympathetic. Although Jack comes off as a villain in the end, he's not without honor and it's almost possible to feel some sympathy for his plight despite his commission of two rather heinous acts throughout the story. Polly comes off as foolish and impulsive as Jack is single-minded and calculating, but the reader can understand her motivations and sympathize with them.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend this book as an enjoyable piece of fiction--the author has done the "left wing chick with a thing for a right wing guy ends up in scary situation" formula before and with more skill in his previous works. However, from an Equality perspective, it would be a very interesting selection either for individual perusal or for a book group or school class to discuss. It opens with a particularly poignant passage on the plight of individuals Polly labels "Sad White Men" who are claiming reverse discrimination and seeking her help, which she provides despite knowing no matter how many lawsuits they file, all they'll get is a lecture on how society at large benefits from positive discrimination on behalf of minorities. Toward the end of the book, a good point is made about political correctness in hiring and promotions, while Polly says a few particularly affecting words about the nature of rape.

Overall, I'd give it only three stars, yet would recommend it particularly for situations where an opportunity exists to discuss the book with someone of differing political views.

u/wanna_dance · 1 pointr/Equality

I recently enjoyed Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs, and Manda Marcotte's It's a Jungle Out There, both of which were fast and enjoyable reads. Neither was too deep. I've liked Naomi Wolf in the past. etc etc

u/allili55 · 1 pointr/Equality

Many thanks for your remark and for highlighting the facts that struck you most. If you would like to read more of such a writing, you can get a copy of my book The Bro Code of Saudi Culture - https://www.amazon.com/Bro-Code-Saudi-Culture-should-ebook/dp/B01EE5XH6U?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0. It is available as an e-book and a hard copy. This piece is an extract from the book actually. Thanks again for your comment and interest.

u/marktully · 3 pointsr/Equality

This book is nothing short of awesome on this subject, and has largely proven true in my industry, one-on-one independent tutoring, usually for the SAT.

My job is weird, in that it's raw, brutal capitalism (traditionally masculine stuff) applied to education(traditionally feminine stuff). Advertising is simply useless; people don't go to the yellow pages when little Johnny has problems at school, they ask around. So, there's only one of two possibilities; you're good and you help people, and you get so many referrals that you have trouble keeping up with them all, or you don't help people, and you go out of business and have to find other work. There is no job security besides kicking ass.

I've always noticed I work with more men than women. (As tutors, that is; more women round out other roles in the companies I've worked for.) I've also noticed my bosses sometimes have to subtly try to hire more women so that a conspicuous sausage-fest doesn't develop. This year, I did some of the cattle calling as we winnowed out the resumes. My current outfit is a top-notch, expensive as sin outfit based in Manhattan, and we pull a few hires each year from a stack of hundreds of resumes. One of the main parts of my contribution to the hiring process, calling people to set up their first interview, was to make sure they understood the job description. In this case, driving around to clients' houses on Long Island and other suburbs (Manhattan clients all go to senior staff). I can't begin to tell you how many really awesome women with equally awesome degrees who seemed genuinely smart and genuinely cool (both requirements for the job; 16 year olds smell bullshit a mile away) balked as soon as I explained this part to them. I didn't notice until I handed our head of personnel his interview schedule, then blinked, and realized I was seeing pure Farrell.

Thinking about the women I do work with, I can say that Taoist gender models fit very snugly. They're highly valued because they're the rare women in what inexorably slides toward a man's world. They're the black dot of Yin at the heart of the Yang.

It's also impossible to have any less dichotomized conceptualization of gender in the office because none (and I mean none) of our clients do. If you ever start to feel like your gender is an insignificant part of your identity, go work at a summer camp sometime. As a guy, I of course got lots of "Hmm, maybe he's a rapist" dirty looks, but moreover, I was struck by how much I had forgotten all the gender-based rules; no boys over by the girls' bunks is just the tip of the iceberg. Gender differences are never more glaringly obvious than during adolescence, and both our students and their parents are steeped in this every day.

And so, in the office, we often have very candid conversations. "Rachel, you need to take this lacrosse jock from me. Drill sergeant isn't working anymore. He just builds the walls higher and higher. I think this calls for a woman's touch." "Mark, I've got a kid for you, I don't know what's going on with him." After a somewhat indirect conversation with dude's mom: "Oh hey, Karissa, yeah, I figured him out. He just couldn't get over wanting to get in your pants. I'll take care of him." "Ha! Explains a lot." Yes, we sometimes trade students for purely pedagogical reasons--one of my female colleagues is ten times the mathematician I am--but a significant portion of the time, gender is a consideration in tutor assignment.

All in all, I think my office is a good example of a progressive gender theory at work. Gender is relevant, though usually not completely determinative. Dynamic equilibrium seems to be the modus operandi.

u/VoodooIdol · 1 pointr/Equality

You should read this book. It talks a lot about the evolutionary reasons that such things developed in humans, and is really incredibly interesting. I think you would enjoy it.

u/Rygarb · 1 pointr/Equality

That looks good, I'll have to pick it up.

I would also recommend Good Will Toward Men by Jack Kammer, in a similiar vein.

You can pick up a used copy for only a penny.

u/eventhorizongeek · 2 pointsr/Equality

You might find the book Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Hetrosexuality an interesting read, it covers a lot of the history of marriage in it's discussion of heterosexuality (as you might expect). Or you can read an abbreviated discussion over at the Week: How marriage has changed over centuries. If I remember correctly, the general timeframe is around the 16th century, maybe a little before, when it turned from making-babies-fulfilling-societal-roles to i-love-you.

u/lilfuckshit · 13 pointsr/Equality

>When a legal distinction is determined ... between night and day, childhood and maturity, or any other extremes, a point has to be fixed or a line has to be drawn, or gradually picked out by successive decisions, to mark where the change takes place. Looked at by itself without regard to the necessity behind it, the line or point seems arbitrary. It might as well be a little more to one side or the other. But when it is seen that a line or point there must be, and that there is no mathematical or logical way of fixing it precisely, the decision of the legislature must be accepted unless we can say that it is wide of any reasonable mark.

–Oliver Wendell Holmes, quoted from here

I believe that gives some perspective on this situation. Yes, there may be an apparent contradiction with the law. However, because a written rule can't precisely cover all possible situations in the world, our legal system may use discretion when applying rules to specific events.

In that way, you may see that the contradiction isn't as blatant, but rather an exposure of the way our system works.

u/jfpbookworm · 5 pointsr/Equality

I'm not quite willing to take the author of this article at her word that the book is nothing more than smut. I've seen other books treated this way, where folks call for protests and challenges on any YA lit where teenagers acknowledge the existence of sex or drugs. (My own take on that particular controversy is here.)

I also wonder how much all the veiled accusations of the author being a perv are due to him being a male. I don't remember folks talking about how they needed to keep Judy Blume (the person, not her books) away from their kids.

That said, this doesn't seem to be a particularly good book. I've seen the author's other book, Spanking Shakespeare, at the bookstore before, but the only thing it really had going for it was that it had a little more appeal to young men than most of the books in its genre.

u/ineedmoresleep · 3 pointsr/Equality

you don't have the first clue on the matter, do you?
here's a book, read it:

http://www.amazon.com/Promises-Can-Keep-Motherhood-Marriage/dp/0520241134



u/sylvan · 10 pointsr/Equality

>Gender roles are different from society to society and therefore not innate.

This is ideological rhetoric from gender-studies academia that contradicts years of research in neurology, biology, and psychology.

There are "male brains" and "female brains" with differing abilities and preferences, and any individual's brain may exist on a continuum between either extreme.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14685-gender-differences-seen-in-brain-connections.html

http://www.education.com/reference/article/Ref_Gender_Differences/

http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Brain-Biological-Differences-Between/dp/0140263489

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/11/031105064626.htm