We’re not even supposed to talk about this, I guess, because it proves we’re sexist. Too bad.
When the Flappers painted the town red in the 1920s, we were told women had achieved equality. When women hit the factories during World War Two, we were told women had achieved equality (see the trend yet?). When women burned their bras in the 1960s, we were told women had achieved equality. When the pill came out, we were told that women had finally achieved equality. Women’s suffrage happened somewhere back there too.
A hundred years of non-stop achievement of equality later, we’re being told how sexual harassment is a problem in the workplace, and it’s 99.999% men doing the harassing and women, still, are the victims. Because they haven’t achieved equality I guess. What’s the message to men with ambitions? If you’re going to be running for high office ten or twenty years later, you better keep women out of your workplace so they can’t come back when the time is right and destroy your campaign. Don’t hire women. Don’t work with women, because all it takes for a women to destroy you is for her to point a finger at you.
If men and women were equal, there’d be roughly the same number of men complaining about harassment by women as the other way ’round, or at least it wouldn’t be so overwhelmingly one-sided. A high school aged male I knew was getting rather steamy text message from a far older, married woman employer. It was fairly apparent that sex was happening between them. An experienced lawyer said that maybe he should count himself the luckiest kid in school.
That’s the double standard and it’s everywhere. At the same time we’re being told that women are strong, that they can not only take care of themselves they’re capable of doing anything a man can do at least as well as he can do it, we are simultaneously asked to believe that the slightest gesture can turn a strong, capable, professional woman into a quivering blob of dysfunctional, sobbing, frightened, victimized jelly that only huge sums of money, or certain political outcomes, or both, can cure.
When I was interviewing a college-age woman for a bookkeeping position at my small business, she asked if there was enough work there to actually keep her busy full time. Fair question. In addition to telling her that although the business was small, it was complex, and that furthermore, being small, there were a lot of other things she could do besides keep books. What I meant, and I expected it to be as obvious as the rather prominent nose on my face (she was a business major after all) was that total specialization is something a small business cannot afford, therefore we all have to pitch in with cleaning, stocking shelves, receiving shipments, answering phones, and hundreds of other tasks that are involved in keeping a business running properly that don’t warrant separate employees. Her response caught me off guard. I was accustomed to working in the real world, unaware of just how bat-shit insane the world of leftist political academia had become. Condition white;
“WELL…just what’s THAT supposed to mean…?!!” Gawd. She’d apparently been to one of those “How-to-know-when-you’re-being-sexually-harassed” classes they offer to women on college campi these days as part of the “Women’s Studies” curriculum. Interview over. Don’t call us, we’ll (not) call you. We have enough problems without having to deal with stupid shit like this.
Which is it, then, ladies? Are you capable of standing up for yourselves, strong, and proud to play a vital and dynamic role in all the action, or are you perpetual victims, bent on being perpetual victims for social, financial and political gain? Do you want to be taken seriously or do you want to be a poor little victim, ’cause it sure as hell can’t be both. This bi-polar premise is running rather thin and I for one quit falling for it sometime back in the 1970s.
