[Skybird]

Tchocky,

You claim statistics being abused, and then give it a twist yourself? I know that women are a minority in teaching positions at universities here. But their number is skyrocketing, and that is not due to massive rise in competence and bigger interest all of a sudden. That women are being underrepresented in many branches and fields , has many causes. For example that women are not interested in branches and certain things that men claim to have high interest in. Because men and women have different interests, and different life plans. A simple fact that feminists and gender equality-enforcers social engineers fighting for a 50:50 relation constantly deny and ignore.

Fact is that in germany we have a legislation now that demands to boost the number of female professors by denying male candidates the right to have their bid taken into account - they get excluded because they are men. It is policy of all parties, and it is valid law. It also is part of EU legislation. Fact also is that the principle that when you compete for a job or position, where men and women should have the same rights and should not be discriminated, is being violated, although we even have it in the Basic Law. Fact also is that over the cause of the past 12-18 months here in Europe we have had several incidents illustrating to what degree the feminist lobby already has hijacked the decision- and policy-forming levels of the hierarchies, that even male colleagues fall into the propaganda vocabulary of feminist dogma, and that it is spreading. If only I would have posted the many German news reports of that time. You would see how tremendous the damage is. It does not boost our competitiveness and the competence of our students. Both are in decline instead. That also is a fact. One has to read beyond the statistics given by the government, though. But that goes without saying with any government statistic.

As you may know, in German we have verbal differentiation between male and female articles that are unknown in English. In English, a male professor is the professor, and a female professor again is the professor. In German, we have the male "der Professor" and the female "die Professorin". We also have what is called genus commune, or ambigen, a grammatical case deriving from linguistic developments from the early medieval on, or was it even Latin, I am not sure. It is a grammatical clause for both the masculinum and femininum. It means that when addressing a general, gender-unspecific group of mixed males and females, one apparent article is used to adress and imply both men and women. It then means both explicitly and implicitly, even if it sounds like the masculinum.

How did this come? In indogermanic languages, there were two genera, ambigen (for all persons), and genus impersonale (for things and objects). Later, probably during a relatively matriarchalic period, the femininum was introduced, as an honourful grammatic addressing of women. A dedicated genus for men did not exist, and instead the genus commune was then to adress sometimes a mixed group of men and women, sometimes men exclusively, depending on the real situation. So, the ambigen was used to address men, and then was called masculinum, while women got a different in form and sound genus for themselves. The existence of the socalled masculinum in German and related languages is a misunderstanding of history, in the end. A dedicated masculine genus does not exist! Just a genus communale that later was used to adress not only mixed groups and all persons in general, but also to refer to men. If they would not have called that "masculinum", feminist language war would not exist today.

You wonder why I try (and struggle) to explain this, and you give spit for it because you underestimate it anyway. But it is important. Because you do not know what deformations and distortions we do to your language since some years. That politicians politically correct address the people with "Liebe Mitbürgerinnen und Mitbürger" where Englishmen see no discrimination at all in just adressing the people with "dear citizens" (instead of saying something stupid like "dear citizens and citizencenesses") has become known outside Germany in past years, and caused clueless scratching of heads and mild amusement. But that we now have ambitions to have "Vorständinnen" (femininum) accompanying our "Vorstände" (genus commune; and many more stunts like that, is a rape of our cultural heritage, which last but not least bases on our rich lingual heritage, last but not least. And the first two universities now have banned this genus commune, although it is completely gender neutral and not expressing a male-focussed grammar at all, which is a fact, to make that clear again. Male professors now are adressed by a gender-specific grammatical format: the feminum. And that is no "gender commune". A male prof now is "Frau Professorin". That compares to calling a man in English a Miss. Obama is Miss President, or to Germanize it a bit to make it clarer, he is Miss "Presidencess" (with no gender commune implied).

As said, the first two universitiy have forced this into offocial lanmguage usage in their institutes. Other universities are annluncing to follow.

Ironically, the whole issue started as a bitter sarcastic joke by one male prof who complained about the political correctness in language killing the easy and comfortable verbal conversation by headlessly "bureaucraticing" it and making it hilariously complex over nothing. The left groups at the university fetched that up, made it an agenda, campaigned, and finally had the established feminist group in the administration pushing it through. Such groups and lobbies have become extremely strong in the education system over here, additionally to the feminine basic climate you already have in schools, the soft-being and girls-nursing, the forbidding of boys playing like boys, with that beign sanctioned and always smiling supressed and then wondering why boys' rates of showing behavioral anomalities and cognitive deficits are skyrocketing. It's all a system designed for girls, and doing damage to the difference that lies in being a boy. And I happen to have several teachers in my social circle, I really get told some stories and complaints on the system's derailment, really. And these lobby groups are not equality between men and women, and they do not mind equal chances and justice as demanded by our Basic Law. They want feminist dominance and the minimizing of male values and the discrimination of men. Many events there have been in Germany, Austria over the past years that illustrate that the campaign is anything but weak, and anything but harmless, and already has resulted in the juristic legalisation of discriminating men on the basis of male gender. I am all for equal rights before the law, but I bitterly refuse attempts to redefine both sexes as equal in interests and psyche, to make everybody equal, or to replace injustice against the one by the injustice now committed against the other. It has all derailed, with balance destroyed and handsight refused.

But go ahead, stick your head in the sand, keeping only the left eye open. Not the only issue where you react like that, as we both know.