I's Now a Moran

feminism, asshat, stupid,
I am stupider for having read Equal Opportunity Better than Ardent Feminism, and I thought I'd share the dead grey matter with you. You'll be attending tea parties in no time!

The past half-century of the feminist revolution is perhaps best viewed as a massive human experiment in ideologically driven social engineering I guess getting the vote was okay, but birth control and equal pay were not. ("The sexual devolution: Reflections on an apres-postmodern valentine," Opinion, Thursday). The pluses for women generally have been the attainment of higher educational, occupational and financial status. well, yeah. pretty awesome, right? The minuses, and most dramatically for "attained" women, are all personal really? freeing women from patriarchy has been entirely negative, how-- oh. - basically the absence of men for dates, husbands or fathers of their children. TEHRE AR NO MOAR MENZ!!1!! WOMMINZ WIT PEEAITCHDEES HAZ SCAYRED TEHM OFF!!!elenvty!!! "Spinster" has been redefined to include many "attained" women who would prefer to curl up with a cuddly sperm bank than the men available to them. maybe it's just me, but i'll cuddle up with a sperm bank (a large building) before i engage in a patriarchal marriage. fortunately, those aren't the only two options available to me. While the gains for women have been substantial in the cold i always assumed they heated schools and workplaces. what did i know? worlds of academics, jobs and money, the costs appear to have been high in the warm and emotionally satisfying, intimate worlds of social, sexual and family relationships with men. really? do you have proof of this? any of this?
(anecdotes =/= proof)

For most men, there are no pluses, as the social attitudes accompanying this social revolution have depreciated, demeaned and denigrated them. Now commonplace and socially acceptable are slogans and terms such as "boys are stupid" and "deadbeat dads." The consequences of this denigration for boys and men, who were fully capable before the feminist revolution in education and work, are obvious: lower educational, occupational and financial attainment. The personal consequences for boys and men appear to be lower self-esteem and life satisfaction and, I suspect, a major withdrawal from the pursuit of educational, occupational and fatherhood opportunities, which they rightly perceive as being stacked against them. In my view, both men and women would be far better off if America were to return to the land of equal opportunity rather than feminist social engineering. Such a land of equal opportunity would enable women as well as men not only to survive but to thrive as they strive for success and happiness in education, occupation and their own social and family lives.

multiple contradictory statement alert. "we need to return to the land of equal opportunity", but in the first paragraph, women gained opportunity through the feminist movement. seriously, pick one. also, you just outright stated that men can only succeed if women aren't on the playing field. apparently, women should be in charge, because men are just too delicate to compete. (if i actually believed that, i'd be all for some EO changes, but i don't.) This is, btw, the same sort of argument you see about minorities and affirmative action. white men are just screwed all around, I guess.

GORDON E. FINLEY
Professor of psychology
Florida International University
Miami

$50 to the first person who leaves a live donkey in Mr. Finley's office!

Men are marrying up. the horror! Increasing numbers of men are marrying women with more education and a bigger paycheck than they have. sauce for the goose and all that. i can't see what's wrong here. in fact, this summer you will have to do without me for a few days as i attend the wedding of my MBA brother- to a neurosurgeon who makes 10x what he does. Women had best forget looking for a knight on a white horse. we don't want or need to. They may not like it - and many don't show. your. work. - but the knight errant probably is trying to run away on a gray mule. is that a reference to Don Quixote or are female neurosurgeons grey mules? you might want to reconsider that considering that the neurosurgeon excels at kickboxing. (she is my hero.)That might be a wee overstatement ya think?, but the Pew Research Center reports that the number of wives with greater incomes than their husbands rose from 4 percent in 1970 to 22 percent in 2007. in other news, 65% of days are sunny in Philadelphia. so what? In almost a third of marriages in 2007, the wife had more education than her husband, up from 20 percent in 1970 to 28 percent. The number of years of formal education doesn't mean smarter or wiser obviously, but it does indicate the likelihood of a better job for the wives, who then tend to be the primary breadwinners. prove to me why this is bad. oh, right, you can't patriarchy all over the woman who pays the mortgage. that is bad. or not.

The stories beyond the statistics are dramatic and sad. For a long time, feminists complained about fairy tales peopled with Prince Charming; they imagined that such stories prevented little girls from asserting themselves. The new Walt Disney movie "The Princess and the Frog" turns on its head the ancient tale of the little girl who kisses a frog and turns it into a prince; she kisses the frog and turns into a frog herself, at least temporarily. The next version probably will keep the little boy a frog forever. That's hardly something to croak about, satisfying only the girl frogs who long ago resigned themselves to taking an ugly green guy, warts and all. clues for the clueless: there is a life outside of men , and, isn't it the women of the past, without hope of education, income or personal determination, who had to settle for frogs?

Not all women are buying the new scenario, and sad corollaries abound. I've met women who wanted good fathers for their children but spurned less "qualified" prospects for a date with a laboratory sperm just out of the deep freeze. Over the past three decades, more women with college educations have been choosing to have children without husbands. According to the Pew survey, their less-educated sisters are only half as likely to make this choice. Anecdotal evidence is sadder still. I once gave a party for an eligible college-educated bachelor and invited several attractive, successful single women in their late 30s to meet him. All the women said they had expected to have children with a husband by then. My attempt at playing Cupid failed, too. The bachelor saw his possibilities as endless, and the women, all self-sufficient, were by this time unwilling to "settle." Picky, picky. that's right. refusing to settle for some random guy, any guy, (who, if he's a friend of this writer, you should run away from him as fast as you can) is just unwarranted pickiness. fuck happiness, you need a man!

the rest of this devolves into similar half told stories about all the women having babies via sperm banks and TEH SADNESS this causes, but quite frankly, i may now be too stupid to continue with this . . . Flowers for Algernon, bichez!