Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Choices, Choices... Condescension Or Contempt Towards Women?


Those seem to be the two realistic choices American politicians offer us wimminfolk.  The Republicans are all about contempt towards women, as women or as people.  Women are only of value as the potential or actual aquaria for egg-Americans.  Now, egg-Americans are of intrinsic value!

And what about Democrats?   Or, let's say,  the current president*?  According to Campbell Brown, Obama condescends to us poor wimminz:
WHEN I listen to President Obama speak to and about women, he sometimes sounds too paternalistic for my taste. In numerous appearances over the years — most recently at the Barnard graduation — he has made reference to how women are smarter than men. It’s all so tired, the kind of fake praise showered upon those one views as easy to impress. As I listen, I am always bracing for the old go-to cliché: “Behind every great man is a great woman.”
Some women are smarter than men and some aren’t. But to suggest to women that they deserve dominance instead of equality is at best a cheap applause line.

Mmm.   I was once told that I'm a very smart woman;  even smarter than the average man.  Now that hurt.

Still,  nobody in their right minds can possibly believe that women are on their way to world domination, just because more women than men go to college.  That's the case even in Saudi Arabia...

If the conditions of the majority of the world's women applied to people in general and not just women we'd call it something like serfdom.   We don't like to talk about that so instead we discuss the possible end of men, a future of the monstrous regiment of women and other similar red herrings.

But whatever.  If* Obama sounds off in some of his comments, well, almost all politicians do when it comes to talking about (or to) that weird and mysterious species: women.

Campbell Brown continues her piece by arguing that the proper safety net for women is the family, not the government.  That works out very well for all the women whose families belong to the one percent, of course.

She then suggests that people can't chew gum and walk at the same time.  Or at least that politicians can't do that.  Women must choose between jobs and reproductive freedom!  Or between jobs and insurance coverage for the contraceptive pill.   And women overwhelmingly choose jobs when offered that false dichotomy as a choice!  At least those women she has personally quizzed on that topic.

I wonder what she would say if someone asked her what it is,  in fact, that the Republican Party is offering women in this election.  It's not more reproductive choices, that's for sure, and I'm extremely skeptical of the idea that some kind of a confidence fairy would pop up with a Republican administration and suddenly turn all those business people hoarding their money into "job-creators."
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*A different question is whether Obama, in fact, said that women are smarter than men or that women will soon dominate this country if not the world.  I don't think he did.