Kathleen Parker: The great feminist hoax comes undone

New Hampshire Union Leader ^ | 11/02/05 | Kathleen Parker

[StoneGiant]

The great feminist hoax comes undone
By KATHLEEN PARKER


SO WAS THE feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? Do women get less desirable as they get more successful?”

Columnist Maureen Dowd posed those questions in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine in an essay adapted from her forthcoming book: “Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide.”

Entertaining as usual, Dowd explored her premise that many women end up unmarried and childless because they’re successful by reviewing women’s evolution since her college days, which happen to have coincided with my own. We both came of age as women’s lib was being midwifed into the culture by a generation of women who felt enslaved by homemaking and childbearing.

Now, in the span of a generation, all that business about equality apparently isn’t so appealing to a younger generation of women, who are ever inventive as they seek old ways to attract new men. Dowd writes:

“Today, women have gone back to hunting their quarry, with elaborate schemes designed to allow the deluded creatures (men) to think they are the hunters.”

Dowd, herself unmarried and childless, wonders whether being smart and successful explains her status. She observes that men would rather marry women who are younger and more malleable, i.e. less successful and perhaps not so very bright.

No one vets the culture with a keener eye than Dowd. Her identification of trends — especially the perverse evolution of liberated women from Birkenstock-wearing intellectuals into pole-dancing sluts — is dead on. But while she sees women clearly as they search for identity in a gender-shifting culture, she doesn’t seem to know much about men.

Men haven’t turned away from smart, successful women because they’re smart and successful. More likely they’ve turned away because the feminist movement that encouraged women to be smart and successful also encouraged them to be hostile and demeaning to men.

Whatever was wrong, men did it. During the past 30 years, they’ve been variously characterized as male chauvinist pigs, deadbeat dads or knuckle-dragging abusers who beat their wives on Super Bowl Sunday. At the same time women wanted men to be wage earners, they also wanted them to act like girlfriends: to time their contractions, feed and diaper the baby, and go antiquing.

And then, when whatshisname inevitably lapsed into guy-ness, women wanted him to disappear. If children were involved, women got custody and men got an invoice. The eradication of men and fathers from children’s lives has been feminism’s most despicable accomplishment. Half of all children will sleep tonight in a home where their father does not live. Did we really think men wouldn’t mind?

Meanwhile, when we’re not bashing men, we’re diminishing manhood. Look around at entertainment and other cultural signposts and you see a feminized culture that prefers sanitized men — hairless, coiffed, buffed and, if possible, gay. Men don’t know whether to be “metrosexuals” getting pedicures, or “groomzillas” obsessing about wedding favors, or the latest, “ubersexuals” — yes to the coif, no to androgyny.

As far as I can tell, real men don’t have a problem with smart, successful women. But they do mind being castrated. It’s a guy thing. They do mind being told in so many ways that they are superfluous.

Even now, the latest book to fuel the feminist flames of male alienation is Peggy Drexler’s lesbian guide to guilt-free narcissism, “Raising Boys Without Men.” Is it possible to raise boys without men? Sure. Is it right? You may find your answer by imagining a male-authored book titled: “Raising Girls Without Women.”

Returning to Dowd’s original question, yes, the feminist movement was a hoax inasmuch as it told only half the story. As even feminist matriarch Betty Friedan eventually noted, feminism failed to recognize that even smart, successful women also want to be mothers. It’s called Nature. Social engineering can no more change that fact than mechanical engineering can change the laws of physics.

Many of those women who declined to join the modern feminist movement learned the rest of the story by becoming mothers themselves and, in many cases, by raising boys who were born innocent and undeserving of women’s hostilities.

I would never insist that women have to have children to be fully female. Some women aren’t mother material — and some men don’t deserve the children they sire. But something vital and poignant happens when one’s own interests become secondary to the more compelling needs of children. You grow up. In the process of sacrificing your infant-self for the real baby, you stop obsessing and fixating on the looking glass. Instead, you focus your energies on trying to raise healthy boys and girls to become smart, successful men and women.

In the jungle, one hopes, they will find each other.



Kathleen Parker’s e-mail address is kparker@kparker.com.

[Noumenon]

"Dowd, herself unmarried and childless, wonders whether being smart and successful explains her status."

What's the ugliest part of your body?
Some say it's your nose.
Some say it's your toes.
I say it's your mind.

Choke on it, Dowd.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

"Dowd, herself unmarried and childless, wonders whether being smart and successful explains her status."

She's not smart, she's mindlessly smart-aleck.

And that alone explains her status.

[Tax-chick]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1513945/posts

Under discussion here.

[billhilly]

When "brilliant' hertosexual women fell for the lesbian driven women's movement forty or so years ago it might arguably be said that a few points could be deducted from their IQs.

[Kenton]

I remember back in the late 1970s when I was working in a department run by the Feminist Mafia. At some point, these anti-males realized something was missing from their lives, and a common complaint heard was "Where have all the good men gone?".

I took great pleasure in informing them, "why, they're with all the good women".

[Jaidyn]

Dowd, herself unmarried and childless, wonders whether being smart and successful explains her status. She observes that men would rather marry women who are younger and more malleable, i.e. less successful and perhaps not so very bright.

Women who are not successful, in the sense that Dowdy calls successful, are just as bright, if not smarter than she is. Success does not always mean smart. Michael Moore is an example. Maybe she should clamp her claws in someone who matches her IQ, rather than someone who matches her paycheck. Her emotional IQ appears to be quite low. That turns men (and women) off.

[wickedpinto]

“Today, women have gone back to hunting their quarry, with elaborate schemes designed to allow the deluded creatures (men) to think they are the hunters.”

What man wouldn't love that?

I got an idea miss, how about you talk to the men in your life, rather than down at them? How about you stop thinking of whats twixt your nethers as a weapon with which to slay your enemy, and start thinking of men as . . . I don't know People? But I might be deluded.

[KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle]

SO WAS THE feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? Do women get less desirable as they get more successful?”

Trust me, MoDowd: you will never, EVER become any less desirable than you are right now, no matter how many more books you peddle.

[wickedpinto]

Oh, also, good collumn

[dirtboy]

Dowd, herself unmarried and childless, wonders whether being smart and successful explains her status.

Uh, no, Maureen, being a self-absorbed liberal feminist twit who throws herself at men explains your status.

[thulldud]

"Dowd, herself unmarried and childless, wonders whether being smart and successful explains her status."

I can't believe that this thread has got this far without pictures of >you-know-who<.

[LongElegantLegs]

Dowd, herself unmarried and childless, wonders whether being smart and successful explains her status.

No, the words 'insufferable bitch' explain your status, Maureen...

[cubreporter]

Dowd, herself unmarried and childless, wonders whether being smart and successful explains her status




If she really made that statement then it speaks for itself.

[edcoil]

Dowd recently lost her mother without Down to be able to provide her a grandchild.

Maybe Dowd is just angry that she treated men badly and they simply walked away from the anger she carried all her life.

We are pretty simple creatures, if you treat people nice, they treat you nice. Dowd may now see her life as incomplete and like everyone, blames everyone else.

[Jim Noble]

This is really a very simple problem.

Women look upon success in men as men look upon big tits in women.

All other things being equal, women want a successful man.

It's not that men DO NOT want a successful woman-it's just that worldly success in a woman is so far down on any man's list of priorities that it might as well be irrelevant.

But women like MoDo, who are made so hot by a successful man, assume that their own worldly success should rightly make men as hot as it makes themselves.

But that's just not how men are put together.

It's not this, Maureen:

It's THIS:

[junta]

Feminism is a fraud concocted by some old rich priveleged harpies who wanted to "get and to have" and nothing else.

[Eepsy]

Why do these writers always portray it as older men chasing the younger women? I foften find it's the other way around. What self-respecting, intelligent, mature 21 year old woman in her right mind wants to spend her time with a 22 year old frat boy whose sole interests in life are sponging off his parents while getting as drunk as possible three nights a week?

[Annie Gram]

I say it's your mind.

I'd say it's her mouth. Like most feminists, the mouth never stops long enough for the brain to rationalize any data it might receive.

[Jim Noble]

What self-respecting, intelligent, mature 21 year old woman in her right mind wants to spend her time with a 22 year old frat boy whose sole interests in life are sponging off his parents while getting as drunk as possible three nights a week?

Your prototype frat boy is also interested it getting it often, but he doesn't know his way around down there, and his idea of a good time is fifteen minutes or less.

Older guys are better, sez this old guy.