Ah - being new here, and without knowing much about the personalities involved, I took the initial post as a joke...a response to the thread earlier down titled 'Diving with women' and posing a question or two about women divers that females found amusing and perhaps just a bit insulting (even though, to the poster, they were honest concerns). I didn't think that the 'concerns' raised about diving with men were in earnest, but were rather a lighthearted way to respond to the aforementioned thread. But perhaps I'm wrong on all that, and the person that initiated all this could clarify it?
I don't consider gender issues when diving. I've had some fantastic dives with buddies of both genders. Where I did my initial training and the outfit I continued to dive with after certification, I was pretty much treated the same as the blokes were - and, if I'd stopped to think about it (which I don't think I did), I would have appreciated it. Sure, it meant I was hauling all my dive gear out the end of a loooong pier to the boat although my upper body strength, by virtue of my physical make up, was not the same as theirs. While the blokes on the boat were fantastic fun, they never offered assistance (although they were very obliging when asked for help). We were happy enough to let each other get on with it. If I didn't have some measure of self-sufficiency for the physical part of diving, what would I have been doing out there in the first place?
I've heard the usual gender stereotypical breakdown - that men want to dive deep and have a competitive edge in this (ostensibly) non-competitive sport, seething with machismo, whereas women get the vapours over a broken fingernail and do the tragic femme thing, a helpless act. The groups I dived with locally were pretty serious divers, and the divers I spent time with on liveaboards had travelled half way around the world to do some serious diving. The men weren't the type to fiddle around with proving their masculinity, and the women weren't the type to do the 'gurley' routine. It's not to say that folks of both types don't exist, but I wouldn't say they were remotely representative of their genders.
People are individuals. They should be judged on the content of their character, their abilities, their intersts, their skills. Not race, creed, colour - or gender.
I look forward to the day when discussions like this seem hopelessly old fashioned, and we can all just get on with it.
