It seems to me that the legislator is misrepresenting the argument for charging young men more than young women. The argument is that insurance companies calculate risks based on statistics they gather about groups. Even though the brother and sister are exceptions to the generalizations, the generalizations about dangerous driving are statistically sound, and when calculating risks it is reasonable to rely on generalizations. You are unlucky if you are an outlier in your group, but the existence of an outlier doesn't make it wrong for the insurance companies to use the best statistics they can gather. Whether or not you agree with the conclusion about relying on generalizations, the point isn't about gender at all. It's about how to calculate risk and whether insurance companies should be entitled to charge individuals more if they are in a high-risk group. If we assume that insurance companies are permissible, then I can't see how they can not rely on generaliations, since they wouldn't be able to function otherwise. As far as I can see it, there is no double standard, stereotyping, or sexism here and the legislator is misguided.

On the latter set of questions you raise, it is a common complaint against feminism that it simply reverses the historical devaluation of women and instead values women at the expense of men. I see no evidence of this in the example or in the broader feminist movement. If you think it is true, then it would be interesting to discuss a different case.

The right to pursue certain goods (such as having children, or making money) does not justify using immoral means (such as exploiting women, or stealing) and does not entitle one to success (being a parent, or being rich). There are many ways to try to become a parent (or a wealthy person), some legal and some illegal, some moral and some immoral.

Perhaps you think that the right to have children is more of a right than the right to make money? (Like, for example, basic rights for food, shelter, education or health care.) Even if it was a universal human right to become a parent (which I doubt), it would not follow that there are universal human rights to be a parent by any particular means (such as IVF, surrogacy, adoption etc.)

There are many ways to become a parent, and as those in the adoption community often say, "second choice does not equal second best." I wish you the best.

You've several questions, though they're closely related. Let me start with the first one: "What does the presence of grammatical gender in a language say about the mentality of its speakers?" My answer is: "Darned if I know!" But I rather suspect that most of my co-panelists are in the same position. Whether the presence of grammatical gender in a language has an effect on the outlook of people who speak it is something we could only figure out by bringing to bear the reseources of disciplines like sociology, psychology, sociolinguistics and who knows what else. It would also call for refining the question itself to the point where we knew what counts as an answer. As you yourself observe, it's not exactly obvious that societies whose languages don't mark gender are less sexist than their grammatically gendered counterparts. If there is an effect here, one suspects that it's a subtle one, and not easy to tease out.

It may well be that if the people in a society believe that men and women are "importantly" different from one another, male dominance will be the typical consequence. But whether grammatical markers like "le" vs. "la" reinforce such beliefs is a lot harder to say. It would be hard to argue that sexist language doesn't matter (just as it would be hard to argue that racist language doesn't matter.) But the mere fact that a language sorts nouns into "masculine" and "feminine" may be quite another matter. In any case, the important thing to keep in mind is that the issues here really are empirical; speculation won't provide reliable answers.

Leave him. He's a creep.

Let me explain. From your description of him, your husband seems to regard and treat you as a mere object for his own satisfaction, and his satisfaction consists largely in giving you pain. If this is accurate, then it seems to me that you are under no obligation to continue to tolerate his company.

Your experience may be more reflective of philosophy in Germany than of philosophy more generally. There are at least three relevant factors. German students specialize early while students in the US, say, take a broad range of courses in diverse fields during their undergraduate studies. In particular, they take broad (often mandatory) Western civilization courses that focus on philosophical materials that (i) integrate well with non-philosophical materials produced at or around the same time and (ii) are attractive and helpful to students through their relevance to present society. This relates to the second point, that universities in the US tend to reward (often quite directly) teachers and departments for attracting students; and it's rather easier to attract undergraduates to feminist themes than to, say, the philosophy of language. All this in turn reinforces the third point that German academic philosophy tends to be a bit narrow and conservative.

While feminism certainly has a presence in US universities, it tends to be segregated. We have women's studies departments, for instance, and the occasional philosophy course on feminism. Yet gender issues are still not well integrated into courses on moral and political philosophy, professional ethics, and the like. And likewise for philosophical publications. There are some very good feminist writings, but virtually all the major books on moral and political philosophy, professional ethics, and the like ignore the very interesting issues raised by the systematically differential life chances women and men have in virtually all existing societies.

For an accessible discussion of who else has written on this topic, I would recommend Susan Okin's books Women in Western Political Thought and Justice, Gender, and the Family. The former deals with some older, the latter with some more recent treatments of the subject (both feminist and anti-feminist). You can probably also find out a great deal through the internet. One easy way to start is with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-topics/ with various subentries). But I also found a lot of interesting stuff through a google search for (jointly) feminism and philosophy.

I have a slightly different reaction to your question that Prof. Fosl does. The version of feminism that I subscribe to says that sexism consists in the existence of gender roles -- that is, in the social construction of categories of persons founded on differences in reproductive physiology or morphology. I envision a world in which (as Richard Wasserstrom puts it) there is no social significance assigned to biological sex. Gender categories, because they cover so many facets of life -- intellectual interests, modes of dress, choice of career, aesthetic preferences -- serve to regiment human difference. So if you know that someone likes big trucks and is the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you can predict that that person's favorite movie is not Steel Magnolias. In a world without gender, human differences would be much less systematic -- people would thus be more different from each other than they currently are. Thus I think that the question you pose involves a false dilemma. One can admit -- indeed, insist -- that we are not inherently the same and still work to eliminate gender differences. The question is not "shall we have one or two different kinds of people?" but rather "shall we let people be fully themselves or not?"

You ask a powerful and intriguing question. From where I sit, feminism ought to work towards a delicate balance of celebrating diversity and downplaying difference. Diversity should continue to be celebrated in the name of liberty so that our society is able to support maximal forms of human self-expression. Diversity should also be celbrated as a sort of vaccination against the oppressive potential of sameness. It's often the case that sameness--or the downplaying of difference--is achieved by repressing some people towards the end of re-making them in the image of other people.

On the other hand, the very ideas of woman and man (feminine/masculine) need to be undermined or at least loosened up a bit. Celebrating women (as a category opposed or differentiated in its contrast to men) can also constrain people by establishing confining norms about what it means to be a 'real' woman. Part of loosening the idea of woman will mean expanding it to include a diversity of woman, but part of it also will mean emphasizing the common ground between men and women that define us just as much as our differences.

Have feminists overshot, and do things like Women's Studies programs and Ministers for Women marginalize women. That is a bit of an empirical question, but so far as I know the facts of the matter there remains a lot of specific work to be done regarding issues that are peculiar to women that justifies their existence. One does see, and I think this a good thing, Women's Studies programs in the United States shifting their nomenclature to 'Gender Studies'. In this, I agree with Gloria Steinem that feminism must become humanism. But not yet.

This is the effect of a successful political movement, one that sought to replace the use of "he" and "his", as "gender-neutral" pronouns, with the use of something else. The reason was that people thought that the use of "he" and "his", at least in certain contexts, made readers liable to assume that the pronoun referred to a person of the male persuasion, when it need not. One option is to use something that is truly gender-neutral, such as "he or she", but that is rather verbose. Some people therefore use "s/he", but that is ugly. I've taken to using "s'he", but I'm lonely. And there is a case to be made for "she" and "her", unaltered, as well, namely that it makes one conscious of something of which one might not otherwise have been conscious.

It is as you say difficult to know how one would unwind social and biological factors in determining gender roles, or indeed a whole variety of other roles also. If people were brought up in a rather different manner from the norm, and then exhibited rather different gender expectations and behavior, that would be suggestive of the significance of the social. These experiments are easier to carry out on animals, of course, and there does seem to be some evidence there that gender roles are to a large degree social and not natural. Many philosophers would want to query the radical distinction that sometimes is held to obtain between the social and the natural in any case. Even if a particular gender distinction is natural, that does not mean that we should make it, or act in accordance with it. Civilization is often taken to be the curbing of the natural by the social, and so even if it is natural for me to act as a brutish male, I hope I resist the temptation as far as I can.

I don't disagree with the first respondent, but I'll give you a somewhat different response, and taking my cue from the 'Bonjour' with which you open, will give it en français. (If the cue was misleading, I'll be happy to translate subsequently!) Premièrement, la beauté est une chose rare et précieuse, et ceux ou celles qui s'en réjouissent ne devrait jamais se sentir coupable à son égard. Deuxièmement, même si la beauté n'était qu'une affaire d'esthétique, qui dit que l'esthétique est moins importante que l'éthique, ou que l'esthétique ne comprend pas, d'une certaine optique, un aspect éthique? (Certainement pas Kant!) Troisièmement, personne n'arrive vraiment à négliger ou à nier complètement les valeurs de la societé entourante; de plus, ces valeurs ne sont jamais avec du moins une certaine justification. Quatrièmement, c'est vrai que la beauté ouvre beaucoup de portes qui autrement resteraient fermées, mais ce n'est pas la sagesse de refuser d'y entrer pour cette raison seule; on n'a que d'y entrer avec circonspection, et sans aveuglement. Cinquièmement, pour en finir, je dirais que la vie de mannequin n'est pas, tout bien consideré, une vie souhaitable, mais qu'on peut quand même tirer de la satisfaction du fait qu'on vous l'avait proposée...

Put otherwise: First, beauty is a rare and precious thing, and those who possess it should never be made to feel guilty about it. Secondly, even if beauty is only an aesthetic matter, who says that aesthetics is less important than ethics, or at any rate, that aesthetics does not include, viewed from a certain angle, an ethical aspect? (Certainly not Kant!) Thirdly, no one can entirely succeed in ignoring or denying the values of the society around them, and those values are also never without at least some justification. Fourthly, it's true that beauty opens many a door that would otherwise remain closed, but it's not wise to refuse to enter them just for that reason, provided one enters circumspectly and without self-deception. Fifthly, to conclude, I would say that the life of a model is not, all things considered, something to wish for, but even so, one can derive some satisfaction from the fact of having been asked...