Re the original post, I think it should only affect your opinion if the person concerned was claiming experience that they don't have. That'd affect your opinion of them because they'd be lying.

I do NOT want to find myself in a situation where I have to say to a WOMAN ---" OK ! It"s your turn to crawl out there on your stomach, to the trenches of the Taliban rebels, and slit their throats, even though I realise that you are three months pregnant, and if you are captured ,you will be raped and tortured to death, but HEY !! That"s OK, because look !! --We"re all equal now !! "

If a woman chooses to do that job and has the skills to do it, you *should* be saying that. Hence I find all this stuff focussing on poor little Fay Turney to be very disrespectful to the other sailors who were in an equally bad situation, ie. being scared they would be tortured and murdered. Men are equally vulnerable to sexual abuse and rape.

Equally I was disgusted to find the other day that there are still three Cambridge colleges which are only open to women. The fact of the last men-only Cambridge college being opened to women is held up as some kind of triumph of equality, when the women-only colleges are quite happy to keep up their sexist admission policy. I also find it cynically amusing that in all the graduation photos for physiotherapy at the local hospital, covering about 20 years and hundreds of people, I wouldn't need both hands to count the men; whilst a shortage of female engineers is reported nationally as a tragic condemnation of teaching.

I'd be happy to say I'm a feminist, in that I want to see equal treatment of women. But I'd also say that there are too many "feminists" who aren't - they want all the advantages that men previously enjoyed, but they don't want any of the disadvantages that went with it, and they don't want to give up the advantages that they're used to as women.

The whole "jobs-versus-children" question, for example. Most countries still discriminate against men in only allowing a few weeks paternity leave (unpaid, of course) where a woman has a statutory right to paid maternity leave. And most cultures (including the US and UK) still discriminate against men looking after children. Judges routinely award custody to mothers, even if the mother has been abusive or has left the children without a word. I've seen several newspaper articles written by men who look after children, describing routine sexism from women in kindergartens and schools. And there are *still* sitcoms being made about househusbands, which is the sexist equivalent of having a black man doing monkey impressions and going "ooga-booga" while the whites laugh at the dumb nigger. We're thankfully past that with racism; it would be nice if people could get past it with sexism too.

Graham.