The F- Files: The War on Men

Today's F- for crappy crapitude goes to...:

Suzanne Venkner's "The War On Men" at Faux News.

ZOMG, that's some crap right there. There's a non-zero probability that it's a parody...but I'll bet it isn't.

See, men don't want to get married because women suck because...they're...I dunno...I think they're trying to be like men or something...  It was so awful that I kind of rushed through it. But anyway, whatever it is that women are doing, it forces men to "pick up their slack" at work, because...something like: women want to be men but aren't very good at it. So then men--and let me stress that they are entirely justified in this--get annoyed and don't want to get married.

Punchline:

"Fortunately, there is good news: women have the power to turn everything around. All they have to do is surrender to their nature – their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs."

See? Just "give into your nature." This is roughly: abandon your autonomy and the rational control of your actions. Just do whatever you are inclined to do without thinking about it. In short, be more like an animal and less like a human. It'll be way better!

Jeez this stuff.

You could write a lot of stuff about that.

But let me settle for this:

And let me stress, I disagree with contemporary academic feminism about almost everything, and I think that the term 'socially constructed' is approximately the most confused phrase of all time.

However.

I think Ms. Venkner'd be pretty surprised at what men and women would be like if they weren't shaped/guided/influenced by ideals of masculinity and femininity, and by the idea that the former is proper only to males and the latter only to females. I think she thinks that if we'd all just "give in to our natures" in this respect, then the world would be like Leave It To Beaver or Mad Men or some other '50's show about a time that more-or-less never was. That would not happen. If everybody were left to his or her own devices in this respect, the correlation between sex and gender would be a whole lot weaker than it currently is. Masculinity and femininity are something like ideals. Oh, sure, they're largely abstracted from or grounded in actual tendencies in the sexes, but those fairly weak statistical regularities are then turned into ideals and imperatives. From males tend to be less emotionally forthright than females (or whatever) we, via the magic of social irrationality, get males ought to be less emotionally forthright than females. And then weak statistical tendencies aren't enough, and social sanctions get put into place to enforce things and make damn well sure that there ain't, for example, any sissy-boys running around crying and stuff. Without these strange ideals and irrational sanctions in place, the world would be a lot less like Ms. Venkner wants to be.

Anyway, not only is "give in to your nature" advice that's dumb at least as often as it's not, taking that advice in this case would get us a world less congenial to conserve views of sex and gender roles, not more congenial to them.