Man, you’d think they woulda learned after Newsweek had to fall on the sword a coupla months ago on the whole "you’ve got a better shot at being slaughtered by terrorists than getting married" story … but Forbes magazine apparently published (and then quickly yanked) a story about the UNdesireability of career women.
In a classic bit of lining up isolated factoids and then drawing sweeping conclusions, the author (whose visage is adorning the dartboards of career women around the world) attempts to show that marrying a woman who is anything other than a combination sex slave and mommy/maid will have dire consequences to your mental, emotional and physical wellbeing.
Sheesh.
The Nietzsche quote: "One seems not to realize that worldview is a confession of character" seems to apply here. Them damn uppity career wimmen! The Feministe site has a pretty good deconstruction of the absurdity of this thesis. But at the risk of being redundant, yeah, as an adult human (mostly evolved and enlightened) male, it is embarassing to have some screeching bundle of Oedipal issues purport to speak for you. This whole argument seems to be a throwback to the late 60s-early 70s, when the Women’s Lib movement was creating a backlash of insecure guys worried that the women in their lives might (horrors!) have their own brains, their own opinions and might actually be strong, interesting people in their own right.
Thus, the whole Billy Jean King/Bobby Riggs pantomime, as well as the profusion of angry movie/TV shows of the time whose recurring theme seemed to be that a woman got too ambitious and wound up getting her comeuppance in the second act, only to be redeemed when She Learned Her Place in the Scheme of Things. Sort of the flipside to the "Lifetime" hack movies polluting our airwaves these days…
I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise to me that this kinda crapola is back out from the stale meme dustbin; the whole "rise of the conservative movement" thing we’ve been having to endure fits right in with all this … all the guys voting Republican and driving H2s and trying desperately to prove that they measure up to their hairy-chested he-man fantasies find nothing quite so terrifying as a woman who just won’t fit into their little proscribed categories.
I hate to say it, but I know of a lot of men in L.A. who are the perfect target audience for this kind of tripe – the kind of guys who laugh uproariously at "jokes" like: "What’s the smartest thing ever to come out of a woman’s mouth? Einstein’s dick! Haw-haw-haw!" There’s a level of insecurity there that would take a doctoral-level thesis to deconstruct … and then there’s this odious little essay by a "man" desperately trying to prove how strong and independent he is … little realizing that all his protestations of strength and self-righteous self-centered behavior are transparently the whimperings of a scared little boy.
Anyway, here’s a proposed alternate headline for the Forbes piece that made me laugh:
Or, Why Michael Noer Never Got Laid Again, Except By That One Girl Who Works at The Piggly-Wiggly and Cain’t Read so Good