The check thing, tho, that really chaps my ass. In the last month I’ve been out to dinner with a male (three times a friend and once my son) 4 times and each time the check was given to the male in question. WTF?

If people have very dikfferent financial situations (say A has a good job and B is a starving student), it makes sense for A to pay mosst of the time, or for B to only pay when they go out somewhere inexpensive. If A *wants* to go on fancier dates (nice restaurants, maybe a play) and doesn’t mind paying for both, they shouldn’t necessarily only do things that are wtihin B’s budget.

Heck, I’ve had that happen with platonic friends. If one of us is in a financial crunch and the other is doing fine, the other will offer to pick up the tab for, say, dinner and a movie, because it’s not that big a deal, and more fun than going to MacDonald’s. And maybe a year or so down hte road the financial situations are reversed.

What irked me about this particular Parisian restaurant was that the waiter presented both my father AND my boyfriend (all of 22 years!) with regular menus, while my mother, sister, and I all received price-free menus. I’d never experienced anything like that. It might be one thing for the eldest male at the table to receive the menu with prices, but for the youngin’ who’s half my mother’s age to receive the price menu while my mother is forced into ignorance is just plain sexist.

My floppy-haired boyfriend clearly was not going to be picking up the check, and yet he was afforded the priviledge of knowing how much his food costs while my mother, much more sophisticated and experienced, was overlooked. Pissed me off.

Um, Tuomas, you’re comparing social inequity to a biological inequity, and what—you’re blaming women for the latter? Are women supposed to pay for the unhealthy things men do to themsleves and one another? Meanwhile the pay gap is not biological, and the very people benefiting from it then have the nerve to whine about its effects on the people it hurts.

While some of the life expectency gap is biological inequity, a huge proportion of it is caused by what are clearly social factors. Men are less likely to make regular visits to the doctor. Men are disproportionately injured and killed in the workplace. Men are disproportionately victims of non-sexual violence. Men consume a higher percentage of their calories in fats.

These are not, in any real sense, “biological.”

Not that either point makes any more sense either way. Just saying.

– ACS