Wordsole

Last week, PETA launched a new ad campaign claiming that going vegetarian will help you lose weight. Whether or not that’s true isn’t why I’m writing about PETA. The billboard they chose to run with the campaign is:

Dear One-A-Day Imbeciles,
Women have muscles. Men have skin. I know this, and I’m not even a doctor or anything. Also, men and women are not from different planets though I’d be happy to check with an astronomer—or an 8-year old—if you’d like. Congrats on creating 15 seconds of pure sexist crap.

Sincerely,
B.

Satoshi Kanazawa, a “scientist” of epically stupid proportions wrote an article recently, and I just had to respond to him. My comments are in italics.

Why modern feminism is illogical, unnecessary, and evil

It’s good to know that as a scientist you don’t speak in broad generalizations or hyperbole.

Although it is not Susan Pinker’s intention in writing it, reading her excellent book The Sexual Paradox: Troubled Boys, Gifted Girls and the Real Difference Between the Sexes cannot help but further reinforce my view that modern feminism in the 21st century is simultaneously illogical, unnecessary, and evil.

Seriously, I love you. You obviously don’t have an agenda. Nope. None at all.

First, modern feminism is illogical because, as Pinker points out, it is based on the vanilla assumption that, but for lifelong gender socialization and pernicious patriarchy, men and women are on the whole identical. An insurmountable body of evidence by now conclusively demonstrates that the vanilla assumption is false; men and women are inherently, fundamentally, and irreconcilably different. Any political movement based on such a spectacularly incorrect assumption about human nature – that men and women are and should be identical – is doomed to failure.

Hey, guy. Let me start with something called basic reading. Open up a dictionary and turn to feminism. “The doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men.” Equality does not mean men and women are the same except for the naughty bits. I’ll explain it another way. 2+2=1+3. See that? Both sides of that equation are equal, but they are not the same. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to lie down. Doing math hurts my lady brain.

Further, modern feminism is unnecessary, because its entire raison d’être is the unquestioned assumption that women are and have historically always been worse off than men. The fact that men and women are fundamentally different and want different things makes it difficult to compare their welfare directly, to assess which sex is better off; for example, the fact that women make less money than men cannot by itself be evidence that women are worse off than men, any more than the fact that men own fewer pairs of shoes than women cannot be evidence that men are worse off than women. However, in the only two biologically meaningful measures of welfare – longevity and reproductive success – women are and have always been slightly better off than men. In every human society, women live longer than men, and more women attain some reproductive success; many more men end their lives as total reproductive losers, having left no genetic offspring.

Can you buy groceries with shoes? Pay rent? Fly to Vegas for Celine Dion’s triumphant return to the stage? No? I’ll take the money, thanks. And as a woman who happens to love some pretty awesome men, I’m not thrilled with the statistic that men live shorter possibly less reproductive lives. One possible reason that’s been bandied about for that fact is that men work harder, more dangerous jobs which not only lead to injury and death but also stress. This is not a good thing. Patriarchy and inequality hurt men too. Feminism is about gender equality. That works both ways.

It is also not true that women are the “weaker sex.” Pinker documents the fact that boys are much more fragile, both physically and psychologically, than girls and hence require greater medical and psychiatric care. Men succumb to a larger number of diseases in much greater numbers than women do throughout their lives. The greater susceptibility of boys and men to diseases explains why more boys die in childhood and fail to reach sexual maturity and why men’s average life expectancy is shorter than women’s. This, incidentally, is the reason why slightly more boys than girls are born – 105 boys to 100 girls – so that there will be roughly 100 boys to 100 girls when they reach puberty.

I’d love to know how this has anything to do with feminism. Feminists are fighting the same stupid ass idea. Women are not the weaker sex. There is no such thing. Weaker is a relative term that can mean anything when applied arbitrarily. Now, why boys are more susceptible to disease, I have no clue. But it’s a specious argument, and you, sir, are making me mad. So, I’m moving on before I start to sound all hysterical and shrewish.

Another fallacy on which modern feminism is based is that men have more power than women. Among mammals, the female always has more power than the male, and humans are no exception. It is true that, in all human societies, men largely control all the money, politics, and prestige. They do, because they have to, in order to impress women. Women don’t control these resources, because they don’t have to. What do women control? Men. As I mention in an earlier post, any reasonably attractive young woman exercises as much power over men as the male ruler of the world does over women.

Ah, yes. The issue of power. According to you, men may have the guns and the money and the prestige and the titles and the countries and the means of production, but women have their pretty, pretty faces. Well, some women. The women who fit the narrow definition of beauty that says you must be young, thin, blonde, and white. And even if you are all of these things, you’d better be acne-free at all times, completely hairless except on that empty head of yours, and dressed in clothes that are revealing but not too much. So, what are the 99% of women who don’t fit this beauty standard supposed to do? Become emasculating bitches who whine about equal pay and the end of domestic violence.

*Side note: There is nothing that bothers me more than the tired notion that women control the world with the power of their vaginas. The vagina isn’t a GPS guiding men down Dictator Lane and President Road. Seriously, you need to stop being an asshole for your health, because it can’t be good for you.

Finally, modern feminism is evil because it ultimately makes women (and men) unhappy. In a forthcoming article in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania show that American women over the last 35 years have steadily become less and less happy, as they have made more and more money relative to men. Women used to be a lot happier than men despite the fact that they made much less money than men. The sex gap in happiness (in women’s favor) has declined in the past 35 years as the sex gap in pay (in men’s favor) narrowed. Now women make as much as, sometimes even more than, men do. As a result, today women are just as unhappy, or even more unhappy than, men are. As I explain in a previous post, money does not make women happy.

DUDE. You just said a few paragraphs above that men make more money but women have more shoes. Do you have an editor? Or a functioning brain? And, the pay gap still exists. It is real. You are a liar who is so desperate to make a point that you don’t mind being intellectually dishonest. Asshole.

The feminist insistence that women behave like men and make as much money as men do may not be the sole reason for women’s rising levels of dissatisfaction with life; a greater incidence of divorce and single motherhood may also contribute to it. At any event, the culpability of modern feminism in making women steadily unhappy, because it is based on false assumptions about male and female human nature, is difficult to deny. Men’s happiness has not declined in the last 35 years, because there has not been masculinism; nobody has insisted on the radical notion that men are women, although, as Christina Hoff Sommers documents, this may be happening in our current war against boys. For anyone who is looking for an effective antidote to modern feminism, I highly recommend Danielle Crittenden’s 1999 book What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Women.

I don’t want women to behave like men, because I don’t believe men are some monolithic group of beer-swilling, boobie-loving idiots whose sole purpose in life is to conquer countries so they can impress chicks. I can’t even comment on the rest of the paragraph, because I can’t get past such blatant feminist baiting.

Look, I know that you think you’re helping. If men and women would just go back to their simple, delineated roles and never question anything the world would be made of cotton candy and string cheese. But it doesn’t work that way. It may be a bumpy road on the way to equality, but it’s a road worth traveling.

like stale Oreos? You know how when you leave the package open or when they’ve just been in the house too long, they get a little soft? Yeah, perfection. Seriously. Cookie nirvana. That crunchy Oreo nonsense is fine if you like your sweet snacks obvious. Me? I’ll take my dessert stale, thanks.

On my drive into work this morning, I listened to a story about the rush to extend Cash for Clunkers, an expensive but popular program in which people can trade in crappy cars for more fuel efficient ones and receive money back, as much as $9,000 at certain dealerships. The program was supposed to run until November 1, 2009 or until the money dried up. Guess which came first? If your answer is the chicken, please re-read this paragraph.

I’m not in the mood to debate the pros and cons of this bill. I know that Republicans hate it and Democrats love it, and I’m sure that there are arguments to be made on both sides. What made me shake my head this morning (besides the random driving stylings of Rhode Island citizens) had more to do with the way the government likes to run things. Apparently, the Senate is not a fan of being “pushed” to pass bills by the House. And that’s just what is happening, because the House went on their August break and won’t be available to alter or modify the bill to guarantee passage through the Senate. Oh yeah, and the money dries up this Friday, so if the Senate doesn’t pass it by the end of the week, oh well. Let me repeat that. During our current economic crisis and while a bill that the House really wants to get passed sits in the Senate, they all went on break.

Here’s the thing. When I worked at big, soulless bookstore chain, we closed our doors most nights at 10pm. But every once in awhile, some hapless parent whose kid had a book report due the next day came racing in at 9:59 desperate for anything on the book list. And we always stayed. Always. Which tells me that employees at a bookstore care more about getting little Johnny his copy of To Kill a Mockingbird than the congress cares about passing a bill worth billions of dollars. Awesome.