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[SheilaT]

178. And being a woman is so incredibly easy?

Let's start with you generally cannot control your own body, then move on to unequal pay and then to all sorts of other discriminatory things.

As several others have already noted, it's tough being human. Generally speaking we inhabit a body of a particular gender, and do more or less well with society's expectations of us.

In 1969, when I was twenty years old, I had a co-worker, and African-American man who had recently retired after twenty or so years in the Army. The Women's Movement was just getting under way. Most companies (ours included) openly paid women less than men, and severely limited advancement opportunities. Ray really got it why we women were so unhappy about those things. I have no idea what kind of discrimination he must have put up with in his life, but he knew what it was like to have someone take one look at him and make automatic assumptions about his intelligence or abilities and not give him any kind of a chance to prove his worth. That's what we women put up with back then and even now.

It's probably no harder being a man than being a woman. Just different.