I think it had to be some ingenious men behind the women’s movement. These Joes who, after 30 years of a 9 to 5 existence and a couple stress-induced heart attacks, peered into the lives of their housewives and decided it wasn’t fair. It was time for the women to carry the financial weight for a while.
Scheming like Mark Twains, they pulled the, “Oh I am having so much fun out here painting the fence!” routine. The joke backfired with these men’s 35-year-old grandsons keeping fit with the wii as their daughters slave at two jobs to pay for it. The problem is the women didn’t get the joke and now the gender reversal seems permanent.
Maybe I shouldn’t blame men (that would be so female of me).... But it is hard to believe we are really so stupid and masochistic that we did this to ourselves. Oh, we’d been complaining about our rights for years, but the Fall of Women didn’t really become a screeching, illogical, full-fledged hissy fit until the 1960’s. Little dissatisfied housewife, Betty Friedan, in The Feminine Mystique, “found herself” in blaming men’s sexism for all the world’s unhappiness. She captained a cackling breed of loud-mouthed females who chimed in, “Those rotten men, they make us so mad! They shouldn’t get to have all the power. They make more money!” It’s shrill hypocrisy was exposed when they burned their bras and complained, “It isn’t fair! Men judge us on our breast-size!!”
It began to be drummed into our tiny girl heads: true feminine bliss and justice is for us to have men’s jobs and power--no, actually MORE power! (After all, it the housewive’s revenge for all those years of having to vacuum and iron while their husband were off frolicking in the fields singing beer songs in unison all day long.) What typical feminine illogic to demand from men they enact laws handing over their positions so we could oppress them. (Wince.) Men are so generous, they actually did it. They couldn’t help it, we cried.....
Let’s be honest, ladies, we are not the best problem-solvers. If we were, we would not have needed the women’s movement to rescue us from our own victimhood. We irrationally assumed our misery was because the male didn’t respect us. Come closer so I can let you in on a little secret: in general, men would LOVE to respect women, they just expect them to earn it--like they did. Truth be told there is no more relentlessly oppressed group today than the male. They are bashed and ruthlessly demeaned by every female comic, liberal newspaper and sitcom--not to mention all the laws giving the jobs they qualify for to those women who don’t. But they take it and never whine. Maybe, women, we could take a lesson from their sense of humor and their ability to take a punch.
I can imagine all the handwringing from my sisterhood. “Some men really did treat women badly!” But if you didn’t notice ladies, there have always been both rotten men and rotten women. Yet, again with the female logic, rather than using our true feminine power to make men worship at our feet, women decided to become “equal” by choosing to become one of the wife-beating bubbas. We have been “liberated” from sexism and unabashedly enter wet t-shirt contests so men can get gratis peep shows. Now men freely cuss in front of us and blush at our own potty-mouthed, belching, rear-scratching liberty. Women can look as sloppy as men, wear combat boots, have six-pack abs and professionally wrestle, wear clerical collars, make lawyers rich in sexual harassment and no-fault divorce lawsuits, keel over with a stress-induces heart attacks, divorce their husbands and relieve them of having stress-induced heart attacks.
Thanks to our radical grandmothers we deem it our sacred entitlement to shamelessly discard our virginity by popping a contraceptive and wearing such sexually explicit clothing we advertised that we were ready and waiting to get an STD for free. But, no worries, abortions can take away any unwanted permanent outcomes of our promiscuous lifestyle.
The eighties-liberated woman bellowed that we didn’t need fathers to screw up our children. So after releasing him from sexual responsibility, we cry foul and call him a dead beat dad when we keep his child, then we vengefully sue and jail him. What? We have the right to change our mind, remember? (Or maybe that was the old, oppressed woman who had that right?)
For forty years a lovely group of women’s activists can be found in that quilting-bee group called, NOW (National Organization of Women). Among other things, they lobby congress to enact laws making men stop beating their girlfriends and wives. Let me give women a suggestion that would save NOW a lot of money: learn from men. They don’t go around whining if they get beaten up, the take self-defense lessons. If a women feels particularly petite, hand her a Colt forty-five. That would end male violence.
NOW also seeks to legislate against “soft hate speech”. What would be an example of “soft hate speech”? Your bottom looks fat in that dress? I guess we’re going to put a man in the stocks for calling a woman the demeaning “sweetie.” The feminists have made our lives so much better because of gender-based affirmative action and non-sexist language. That “herstory” instead of history, really spelled justice to me and how that Ms. thing caught on! Firefighter instead of fireman.... now that forced men to respect women.
You think I am being hard on my sex? There is no way I could be as hard on them as we have been on ourselves! Wearing tight curlers over the generations must have affected our brains, for we don’t see that everyone has been discriminated against: Fat people, ugly people, short people, stupid people. So how do short, ugly and stupid men combat these inequalities? Ask the Three Stooges--they laughed all the way to the bank.
The feminists will claim the credit for the list of fabulously successful women today, but honestly it’s the law of physics, not affirmative action, when cream rises to the top. I can give you a history of powerful women who somehow changed the world without the benefit of NOW.
So what did the feminist movement take away? We lost: men paying for the privilege of dating us, fathers who cared enough about our virginity to quiz our suitors, men standing when we came into the room, opening doors for us and saying, “yes ma’am,” strong marriages and families, men making lifelong commitment to us that inspire them to mature, the choice to stay at home with our children influencing their characters, time to cook a nice, healthy meal, and when all is said, the women’s movement actually took away women’s true power--our femininity. (The smart, gutsy woman of our past knew if we really needed something, we didn’t expect the government to demand it, all we had to do was put on a smile, some perfume and ask sweetly.... Oh how demeaning!) Yes, we have come a long way baby, and now we are worn-out from working full time and have successfully butchered our family and culture. Feminism led us like lemmings, off a cliff.
Dearest Grandmama,
If you really had our best interests in mind as women, if you wanted us to not only equal men but excel above them, why did you place before us the lowest, coarsest in men to emulate? Why did you insist we become the power-hungry, materialistic, self-centered, troglodytes? If you had contemplated history, you would have chosen a better role-model. You would have been influenced by great men like Aristotle who taught that to achieve happiness you must sacrifice self to do what is right. You devalued and tossed away the greatest power on earth. Like Dorothys with the ruby slippers, we had the power of happiness all along right at our feet, if we only would recognize and nurture it. The power of women is to give life and to love.
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