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BETSY HART: Feminists don't like women very much
Scripps Howard News Service
Published 11:35 am PST Thursday, January 19, 2006
(SH) - The most remarkable - and disingenuous - thing about my feminist sisters is that they and their elite friends seem to want to pretend that the excesses of the women's movement, all those outrageous things they did and said and advocated, were just so, well yesterday. From the failed so-called Equal Rights Amendment to the famous feminist dictum "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" to Gloria Steinem's declaration that "we badly need to raise boys more like we raise girls," they seem to want us to believe that it was all just a fad - kind of like Leif Garrett or something. And really, haven't we all matured from that and moved on to more reasonable things? In a word, no, as National Review editor Kate O'Beirne dem
onstrates in her best-selling new book, "Women W
ho Make the
World Worse: And How Their Radical Feminist Assault is Ruining our Schools, Families, Military and Sports" (Sentinel). In a book that displays all the humor our dour feminist sisters lack (is there anything they think it's OK to laugh about?), O'Beirne shows how extremist feminist thinking today suffuses and damages not just our major institutions, but our very cultural assumptions. O'Beirne shows in her daring account - she actually writes that Maureen Dowd, feminist darling and New York Times columnist extraordinaire, is "living the lonely legacy of the sexual revolution" - that it's the insidiousness of feminism that's so destructive. Maybe it's a little like a lobster in a pot, but we're at a place today that was unthinkable just a few decades ago. O'Beirne makes clear that it's thanks to feminists that we blindly cheer single mothers of young children as they go off to war and "def
end
the men" on the home front. We unquestioningly assume that of cour
se single women will make themselv
es sexually available to men outside of marriage no matter the self-destructive consequences. And marriage itself has been so devalued as an institution that protects women and children in particular that we no longer discourage, much less stigmatize, the men (or women) who do so much damage by, often unilaterally, leaving it behind. Crushing some basic tenants of, oh, thousands of years of civilization is not all bad for a generation or two of feminist effort, now is it? But even where mainstream culture has not fallen for the feminist agitprop, it still profoundly infects our most important institutions. As O'Beirne points out, the typical mom knows, for instance, what feminists are loathe to admit - that we want to be home with our young children instead of pursuing some mythical golden ring for 60 hours a week. And most parents will almost laughingly concede what seems to goad feminists most
of all
: that boys and girls, men and women, are inherently and fundam
entally different. It's not cult
ural bias that makes little girls want to play with dolls and boys with trucks. But forget common sense, because it's still feminists and feminist thinking which dominate throughout our educational and legal systems. And, as O'Beirne lays out, wherefore go the feminists also go billions of federal and non-profit dollars and all sorts of laws, which often end up doing great damage to both men and women. That means, for instance, that many colleges and universities have had to virtually shut down men's athletic programs to make up for the fact that most college women choose not to participate in varsity level sports. How does that help women? And national retailer Wal-Mart, for example, where 80 percent of department managers are women, is in the middle of what may turn out to be the largest class-action discrimination lawsuit in history. Not because the women who began the case could show r
eal sex dis
crimination, mind you, but because the "macro" ratio of
women hourly workers to managers isn't
at parity with the men. The sisterhood is determined to line the pockets of lawyers and make Wal-Mart pay big time because it's very possible more women don't freely choose to pursue the management route. If companies like Wal-Mart aren't already nervous about hiring women to begin with, they should be. That's really the point of O'Beirne's book - that over and over again feminists in so many ways have, and are, hurting the women they are supposedly trying to help. After reading O'Beirne's book, one can't help but walk away thinking that, to borrow a phrase, our feminist sisters may love females - but they don't seem to like women very much. Betsy Hart is the author of "It Takes a Parent: How the Culture of Pushover Parenting is Hurting Our Kids - and What to Do About It." She can be reached at www.betsyhart.net.
www.sacbee.com/
content/women/24hr_women/story/3089769p-11789433c.html
]http://www.sacbee.com/content/women/24hr_w...-11789433c.html[/url]
Scripps Howard News Service
Published 11:35 am PST Thursday, January 19, 2006
(SH) - The most remarkable - and disingenuous - thing about my feminist sisters is that they and their elite friends seem to want to pretend that the excesses of the women's movement, all those outrageous things they did and said and advocated, were just so, well yesterday. From the failed so-called Equal Rights Amendment to the famous feminist dictum "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" to Gloria Steinem's declaration that "we badly need to raise boys more like we raise girls," they seem to want us to believe that it was all just a fad - kind of like Leif Garrett or something. And really, haven't we all matured from that and moved on to more reasonable things? In a word, no, as National Review editor Kate O'Beirne dem
onstrates in her best-selling new book, "Women W
ho Make the
World Worse: And How Their Radical Feminist Assault is Ruining our Schools, Families, Military and Sports" (Sentinel). In a book that displays all the humor our dour feminist sisters lack (is there anything they think it's OK to laugh about?), O'Beirne shows how extremist feminist thinking today suffuses and damages not just our major institutions, but our very cultural assumptions. O'Beirne shows in her daring account - she actually writes that Maureen Dowd, feminist darling and New York Times columnist extraordinaire, is "living the lonely legacy of the sexual revolution" - that it's the insidiousness of feminism that's so destructive. Maybe it's a little like a lobster in a pot, but we're at a place today that was unthinkable just a few decades ago. O'Beirne makes clear that it's thanks to feminists that we blindly cheer single mothers of young children as they go off to war and "def
end
the men" on the home front. We unquestioningly assume that of cour
se single women will make themselv
es sexually available to men outside of marriage no matter the self-destructive consequences. And marriage itself has been so devalued as an institution that protects women and children in particular that we no longer discourage, much less stigmatize, the men (or women) who do so much damage by, often unilaterally, leaving it behind. Crushing some basic tenants of, oh, thousands of years of civilization is not all bad for a generation or two of feminist effort, now is it? But even where mainstream culture has not fallen for the feminist agitprop, it still profoundly infects our most important institutions. As O'Beirne points out, the typical mom knows, for instance, what feminists are loathe to admit - that we want to be home with our young children instead of pursuing some mythical golden ring for 60 hours a week. And most parents will almost laughingly concede what seems to goad feminists most
of all
: that boys and girls, men and women, are inherently and fundam
entally different. It's not cult
ural bias that makes little girls want to play with dolls and boys with trucks. But forget common sense, because it's still feminists and feminist thinking which dominate throughout our educational and legal systems. And, as O'Beirne lays out, wherefore go the feminists also go billions of federal and non-profit dollars and all sorts of laws, which often end up doing great damage to both men and women. That means, for instance, that many colleges and universities have had to virtually shut down men's athletic programs to make up for the fact that most college women choose not to participate in varsity level sports. How does that help women? And national retailer Wal-Mart, for example, where 80 percent of department managers are women, is in the middle of what may turn out to be the largest class-action discrimination lawsuit in history. Not because the women who began the case could show r
eal sex dis
crimination, mind you, but because the "macro" ratio of
women hourly workers to managers isn't
at parity with the men. The sisterhood is determined to line the pockets of lawyers and make Wal-Mart pay big time because it's very possible more women don't freely choose to pursue the management route. If companies like Wal-Mart aren't already nervous about hiring women to begin with, they should be. That's really the point of O'Beirne's book - that over and over again feminists in so many ways have, and are, hurting the women they are supposedly trying to help. After reading O'Beirne's book, one can't help but walk away thinking that, to borrow a phrase, our feminist sisters may love females - but they don't seem to like women very much. Betsy Hart is the author of "It Takes a Parent: How the Culture of Pushover Parenting is Hurting Our Kids - and What to Do About It." She can be reached at www.betsyhart.net.
www.sacbee.com/
content/women/24hr_women/story/3089769p-11789433c.html
]http://www.sacbee.com/content/women/24hr_w...-11789433c.html[/url]
