I could feel the hair stand up on the back of my neck as I read an article by Suzanne Venker about women’s war on men, published on the Fox News opinion blog. Ms. Venker is convinced that women have gone about equality all wrong.
We have emasculated men and now they won’t marry us. She’s spoken with “thousands of men” who tell her they aren’t ever getting married because women aren’t women any more.
It seems that men haven’t changed one bit and women have gone through this huge overhaul and nothing is fair anymore. “Men didn’t NEED a revolution!” I want to scream into my computer monitor.
She might be a qualified writer and author of three books on the American family but who is she writing for? Does she want to go back to the place where women had little opportunity in the workplace? Further back and not be permitted to work at all? Further back and not be allowed to vote? I can go back even more but we’d all be sobbing.
While I don’t live in America any longer, I still have the American gene in my body and I feel confident that I understand the way many American women think. They’d smack this woman with their iPhone as they head off to work.
She opines that women are angry at men and defensive all at the same time and we’ve pushed men off their pedestal because we never realised that we were sitting on one already. Give me a fucking break. I saw my ex mother-in-law do as she was told. She never heard of feminism and I promise you, there was no pedestal for women in that household. My mother didn’t know about feminism either and you guessed it, she wasn’t on a pedestal either.
Maybe Ms. Venker is too young to know what it was really like for those of us who were coming of age in the 60s but I know because I lived it. I remember life before the pill when only “bad girls” got pregnant before marriage.
She goes on to say that the lack of great men to marry is most likely the fault of women because we’ve browbeat them and told them there was something wrong with them. “Men aren’t threatened by us, they’re pissed off,” she says. To that I say, “Good! If we’ve pissed men off because we want equal rights to the same jobs, equal pay for the same job and the right to feel respected and valued, then I say I’m glad they’re pissed off and it’s not gonna get better.”
Men no longer have to marry us because we’ll have sex at hello, the article says. I’m not sure where that comes from because I don’t know one woman, not one, who sleeps around with total strangers. Maybe her circle of friends is different considering that she’s talked with thousands of men about sex. I’ve run a dating site on the internet for years and I can tell you that even online, women are women and yes, some sleep around but most don’t.
You’ll be pleased to know that she ends up with really good news. We can turn around this mess we’ve made with feminism by surrendering to our nature – our feminity. Yes, and that and $5 will get you coffee but it won’t pay the rent and it won’t appease our frustration at not getting paid the same as men and being passed over for promotion.
Men with brains do exist, Ms. Venker. I’m married to one. He knows he doesn’t own me, he considers my opinions worth listening to, he treats me with love and respect and is my biggest champion as I am his. I bet he’s not the only one like that. You should widen your circle of friends.