Wednesday, January 09, 2002

Zenpriest #9 - The 90's were the Make It or Break It Decade and I Don't Think We Made It

Looking back, I regarded the 90s as the "make or break" decade - the time when men and women either successfully negotiated a changing and rebalancing of male and female roles, or didn't. I don't think we made it.
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But, I think we would have except for the efforts of two women - who I would dearly love to see publicly hanged for crimes against humanity: Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf.
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Coming out of the 80s, the Reagan years, people were beginning to adjust to a lot of the changes in roles. Most men had good naturedly made room for women to take their places next to men with their noses to the grindstone and shoulders to the wheel trying to climb up the career success ladder - except those men at the top whose purpose in life had always been to make it as difficult as they possibly could for those below them to advance, so they could retain their positions at the top.
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I'm sure that if real social research could have been done, that women who really did work hard and well really did advance as quickly as their male counterparts. There were just proportionally fewer of them and they started later, so naturally there were fewer of them at the highest rungs of the income ladder. This was the way that business worked then.
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We stupid men assumed that women would realize what it took to be really successful, and that we would benefit from their appreciation of the fact that "careers" were not as much fun as they looked from the outside, and that men who were successful were actually sacrificing a huge amount for the sake of their families. What fools we were.
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Faludi single-handedly turned this natural process into "The Backlash" and ignited the fire of victimhood in women's minds. Even at the time the public was aware that feminism was dying. There weren't any real causes any more, men and women were getting on with their lives as men and women always have, and even the rape hysteria being cooked up by Mary Koss and the witches as MS was getting a "ho-hum" reception from most women.
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But, Faludi re-ignited the fires of righteous indignation and female rage by replacing her stupid victim-centered view of the world for the evolutionary "achieve and earn" one. Then Wolf added her part of the 1-2 punch, by blaming men for the fact that women want to and try to attract them, with her "Beauty Myth."
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From then on, "feminism" became about "women are weak, women are helpless, women are stupid, women need to be rescued from men, all men are rapists and abusers, all men are jerks, all the evils of the world are due to men."
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Oprah, Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones, and all their clones, Anita Hill, Lorena Bobbit, and the Duluth Model dumped millions of gallons of gasoline on the blaze, and the entire culture erupted in flames.
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In the late 90s, that queen-bitch Susan Faludi came out with a companion book to her screed that kicked the gender cold war into a full-fledged shooting war. Her second book was called "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Male."

The entire premise on which millions of middle class men were convinced to move over and give women equal space on the wheels and grindstones to place their shoulders and noses, was that the entire structure of gender roles would be redistributed. The lie was that when women were allowed to make their own money and have success in their own careers, that they would become less obsessed with male success as criteria for a partner, not to mention that they would become more sexually open and giving and less inclined to use and withhold sex as a bargaining chip for power in a relationship.

And, if you believe that, as the old saying goes, I have a really fine bridge for sale in Manhattan.
What women actually did was not change their expectations in the slightest. They still only considered men "eligible" if the man made more than she did, so they simply raised the bar and shrunk their pool of "acceptable" mates.

The wannabe-princesses never once lowered their gaze from "prince" Charming, and considered "mechanic" Charming, or "fry cook" Charming, but instead continued to focus exclusively on the top 10% of all men.
Think about this the next time some bitch says that there are "no good men" left. Tell her there are plenty of good men, but that all she shows them is nose hair.

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“Looking at how easy it is for women to treat men in cruel ways is oddly liberating.” – Naomi Wolf, in her 1993 book Fire With Fire

"I personally am livid... Have you considered castration as an option?" -- NBC co-anchor Katie Couric to a bride who was left standing at the altar, The Today Show, November 25, 1997

"The more famous I get, the more power I have to hurt men." -- Sharon Stone

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