Carey Roberts
Women need to speak out on feminism and the hateful ideology it represents
By Carey Roberts
March is Women's History Month. Time to prepare ourselves for the annual Sista-fest of narcissistic victim-mongering, gleeful male-bashing, and shameless prevarication.
How's this for breathless overstatement, courtesy of President Obama's March 2 proclamation for Women's History Month: "Countless women have steered the course of our history...breaking barriers on athletic fields and battlefields."
Countless women on battlefields have altered the course of history?
Yes, by allowing a far stronger enemy force to decimate and despoil their ranks! (But count your blessings — at least the president didn't spell "history" with "her.")
Obama then deplored the fact that men "still receive higher pay on average for the same work." That myth was debunked on the Department of Labor's website, but Obama's operatives quickly censored the document before any damage was done: http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/roberts/090312
Years ago the women's movement stopping working for gender equality and initiated a campaign of intimidation, censorship, and male demonization.
Recently the National Collegiate Athletic Association ran an advertisement on its website depicting a man gently cradling his son with these words: "All I want for my son is for him to grow up knowing how to do the right thing."
Who could ever get upset over something like that?
The Women's Media Center, that's who. The Gender Guerillas got heartburn because the ad was sponsored by the pro-life group Focus on the Family. So last week they forced the NCAA to yank the ad. (Shame on the NCAA for its lame acquiescence.)
Like the beguiling schoolgirl who keeps elaborating on a little White Lie because everyone has stopped listening to her, the feminist claims have become increasingly shrill.
Take a March 2 BBC headline that screamed, "UN Warns HIV/AIDS Leading Cause of Death in Women." The article went on to claim that "up to 70% of women worldwide have been forced to have unprotected sex." (Note the red-meat words designed to summon every chivalrous male within hailing distance: "forced" and "unprotected.")
The BBC article provided few details and didn't even concede the name of the report. So I set out to search out every nook and cranny of the UNAIDS website.
I never did locate the document.
But according to the UNAIDS, there were two million AIDS-related deaths in 2008, about one million of whom were females. And according to the WHO World Health Report, 8.6 million women die of cardiovascular disease each year.
So is AIDS the leading cause of death for women? Not by a long shot.
And the 70% figure? Well, that number keeps making the rounds every few years.
Four years ago the Washington Times came up with this corker, "A 2005 U.N. Population Fund report found that 70 percent of married women in India were victims of beatings or rape."
The claim turned out to be a hoax and the Times was forced to retract its indictment of Indian husbands. But keep repeating the 70% number and one of these days it's going to stick!
One of my favorite columnists, Barbara Kay, recently pondered the lessons from the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Noting that 75% of women, and only one in five men, survived the hellish incident, she writes:
"According to the feminist mystique, these men should have been controlling, egocentric, self-serving bullies, for whom women were nothing more than sexual and domestic conveniences, little better than slaves. They should all have been candidates for anger management, not a chivalry so breathtakingly selfless that they almost to a man went to watery graves in stoic humility so that total strangers might live, simply because of their sex." http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/03/02/barbara-kay-how-patriarchy-ran-into-its-own-iceberg.aspx
So instead of "fetishing the victimhood of women," Kay proposes, Why not celebrate the manliness of men on April 15, the date of the Titanic's sinking?
Such an observance might free ourselves of the foolishness, the excess, and the chauvinism that has become Women's History Month.
© Carey Roberts
March 4, 2010
March is Women's History Month. Time to prepare ourselves for the annual Sista-fest of narcissistic victim-mongering, gleeful male-bashing, and shameless prevarication.
How's this for breathless overstatement, courtesy of President Obama's March 2 proclamation for Women's History Month: "Countless women have steered the course of our history...breaking barriers on athletic fields and battlefields."
Countless women on battlefields have altered the course of history?
Yes, by allowing a far stronger enemy force to decimate and despoil their ranks! (But count your blessings — at least the president didn't spell "history" with "her.")
Obama then deplored the fact that men "still receive higher pay on average for the same work." That myth was debunked on the Department of Labor's website, but Obama's operatives quickly censored the document before any damage was done: http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/roberts/090312
Years ago the women's movement stopping working for gender equality and initiated a campaign of intimidation, censorship, and male demonization.
Recently the National Collegiate Athletic Association ran an advertisement on its website depicting a man gently cradling his son with these words: "All I want for my son is for him to grow up knowing how to do the right thing."
Who could ever get upset over something like that?
The Women's Media Center, that's who. The Gender Guerillas got heartburn because the ad was sponsored by the pro-life group Focus on the Family. So last week they forced the NCAA to yank the ad. (Shame on the NCAA for its lame acquiescence.)
Like the beguiling schoolgirl who keeps elaborating on a little White Lie because everyone has stopped listening to her, the feminist claims have become increasingly shrill.
Take a March 2 BBC headline that screamed, "UN Warns HIV/AIDS Leading Cause of Death in Women." The article went on to claim that "up to 70% of women worldwide have been forced to have unprotected sex." (Note the red-meat words designed to summon every chivalrous male within hailing distance: "forced" and "unprotected.")
The BBC article provided few details and didn't even concede the name of the report. So I set out to search out every nook and cranny of the UNAIDS website.
I never did locate the document.
But according to the UNAIDS, there were two million AIDS-related deaths in 2008, about one million of whom were females. And according to the WHO World Health Report, 8.6 million women die of cardiovascular disease each year.
So is AIDS the leading cause of death for women? Not by a long shot.
And the 70% figure? Well, that number keeps making the rounds every few years.
Four years ago the Washington Times came up with this corker, "A 2005 U.N. Population Fund report found that 70 percent of married women in India were victims of beatings or rape."
The claim turned out to be a hoax and the Times was forced to retract its indictment of Indian husbands. But keep repeating the 70% number and one of these days it's going to stick!
One of my favorite columnists, Barbara Kay, recently pondered the lessons from the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Noting that 75% of women, and only one in five men, survived the hellish incident, she writes:
"According to the feminist mystique, these men should have been controlling, egocentric, self-serving bullies, for whom women were nothing more than sexual and domestic conveniences, little better than slaves. They should all have been candidates for anger management, not a chivalry so breathtakingly selfless that they almost to a man went to watery graves in stoic humility so that total strangers might live, simply because of their sex." http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/03/02/
So instead of "fetishing the victimhood of women," Kay proposes, Why not celebrate the manliness of men on April 15, the date of the Titanic's sinking?
Such an observance might free ourselves of the foolishness, the excess, and the chauvinism that has become Women's History Month.
© Carey Roberts
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