Following her book, "Are Men Necessary?" I shouldn't have been surprised at Maureen Dowd's most recent New York Times column.Here are a couple of quotes from it:
"You simply operate on the assumption that no man matures after the age of 11."
“Most marriages that founder do so because of money — she’s thrifty, he’s on his 10th credit card."
That flips the reality on its head. American Demographic reports that women control consumer spending by a wide margin in nearly every consumer category. An Inc.com article states that women make "over 85% of the consumer purchases (in the United States) and influence over 95% of total goods and services."
The column listed criteria for a good husband and concluded that no men met the criteria.
This column is currently the #1 most-emailed New York Times column or article.
Would a major publication such as the New York Times publish something equally anti-woman, let alone anti-Black?
7 comments:
What you have to love here is how Dowd is hiding behind the quotes of the lecturer. By letting them stand on their own, without any counterpoint, makes it even more obvious how much she hates men.
The one saving grace was that after this atrocity it says in the bottom "Thomas L. Friedman is off today." As in, "Please excuse this garbage for the time being."
Here's the last line of the column:
“After I regale a group with this talk, the despairing cry goes up: ‘But you’ve eliminated everyone!’ Life is unfair.”
When I saw this, I couldn't help but wonder if the 79-year-old priest (who is the last person I'd ask for marriage advice, by the way) had just played a joke on all the readers, and perhaps Ms. Dowd herself (correction: SHE is the last person I'd take marriage advice from).
I say this because he is right about that. Life is unfair, and nobody is perfect, so there is no ideal mate. There are good ones and great ones, but none of them are perfect. Also, he uses the word "regale," which means "to give pleasure or amusement to." Perhaps his talk is, as those psychic infomericals say, "for entertainment purposes only"?
But it looks like others are taking it seriously. When I did a Google blog search for "ideal husband" and "Maureen Dowd," I came across many blogs (mostly from women, I noticed) that agreed with the column, some of them wholeheartedly. Many of them called the advice "common sense."
There were others that disagreed, including this blogger:
http://rexpatriarch.blogspot.com/
I suspect that there are many more men like him who are just as angry but not as vocal, and even more women who are emboldened by people like Ms. Dowd. I hope that these are not representative of relations among the sexes.
Maureen Dowd's writings srike me as a weird, counter-productive form of psychotherapy in public.
As Steve Sailer has commented:
"Maureen Dowd's siblings and the Baby Gap: Nicely illustrating my new article "The Baby Gap: Explaining Red and Blue," snippy NYT columnist Maureen Dowd lets her ultra-Republican brother write her column for her. Maureen, of course, is an unmarried 52-year-old liberal woman who lives in Washington D.C.[...]. The underlying theme running through her writing is her desperate effort to silence the little voice in her head that tells her she has wasted her life by not getting married and having babies."
I’ve just listened to the podcasts of your intriguing show reviewing “Why women should rule the world”, and while I am a male, and I am certainly not a feminist in its traditional sense, I have to admit that I think all in all the world would be a better place without the present male genotype. As you, I find helpful to generalize, and it is obvious to me the strong link between possession of the Y chromosome, and propensity not only to commit rape, but also major fraud, burglary, robbery, gruesome assaults, murder, gang violence , acts of war, terrorism & genocide. Also I believe economic recession we are now in (as well as most other economic recessions & depressions in the US history) has been caused by too much testosterone, coded by the Y chromosome, among housing industry insiders & investors.
Of course there is a strong link between possession of the Y chromosome, and transforming, life-saving, discoveries & achievements. And, since statistically men’s IQ bell-curve is much flatter than that of women, men have a much greater share of geniuses (and idiots) then women. Of course statistics can lie, but there are very good socio-biological reasons for why men can be both so brilliant & depraved, of which your are probably aware about, and which can be summarized in a statement abhorred by classical feminists : “Sperm is cheap. Eggs are expensive”. (By the way I wish you do a show on sociobiological aspects of gender, and perhaps how it relates to the workplace and job market. My former psychology professor from University of Washington, David P. Barash, author of many books on sociobiology, including the “Myth of Monogamy” and more recent “Natural Selections: Selfish Altruists, Honest Liars, and Other Realities of Evolution”
, is quite a maverick, and I am sure would be happy to talk on your show (by the way I don’t necessarily think he’ll share all my views or vice versa))
So to avoid the Y chromosome induced nuclear holocaust, that I am afraid is more likely than not to occur within next thousand years, if not sooner, should we consider “producing” babies with genetically modified Y chromosome ? Perhaps by subduing male aggressiveness we’d inhibit the major drive force of the progress, but I’d rather see the humankind’s “candle” slowly lighting over many millennia & maybe million of years, than have it burst into a big flame of progress and burn everything around it in centuries, due to uncontrolled male aggressiveness. (which, as coded by the current genotype, might prove uncontrollable, when WMDs are involved).
This may surprise the readers of this blog. As you know, my blog advocates for men, arguing that today, boys and men are, on average, treated unfairly relative to their merit.
So, you may be surprised to know that I consider Serge's post an extraordinarily thoughtful and bold proposal. I just might agree with him, especially if there was a gene therapy that would retain men's goal-orientedness without his proclivity to violence.
You know, I don't think the article was that bad.
It was clearly written from the female perspective but you could flip the genders and still have relevant advice: don't marry a woman who doesn't use money responsibly; don't marry a women without a sense of humour; don't marry a woman thinking you can "save" her...
If anything, it's a bit obvious but then again, I know plenty of men who could do with the repetition. Which is not to say I don't know plenty of women who could also do with hearing the above advice repeated, I only say men because... you know, context of this blog blah blah blah.
Unless there's some other subtext I'm missing...
You could not flip the genders. If you did, the article would never get published. Can you imagine an article published in the New York Times that claimed that you had to assume that all women stopped maturing at age 11 and that no women were worthy enough to be married to. It wouldn't get past the first screening.
The double standard is the big problem. For the past 30 years, we see endless male-bashing, even in prestigious publications, not to mention movies, sitcoms, etc. But it is virtually impossible to get even polite criticism of women published. The result is ever increasing unfair sexism against men.
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