John Leo wrote an op-ed piece a few weeks ago (Anti-male bias increasingly pervades our culture) claiming that increasingly there is an anti-male bias present in popular culture. He repeats a couple of well-known incidents, most notably the brief controversy over an American Greetings Cards ad campaign which featured a greeting card that read on the outside, “Men are always whining about how we are suffocating them,” and then the punch line on the inside goes, “Personally, I think if can her them whining you’re not pressing hard enough on the pillow.”
Switch the gender on the card and you’ve got an instant boycott by the National Organization for Women, but at the time American Greeting Cards saw nothing wrong with the message of the card, noting that “we’ve heard no protests from consumers who are buying and using this card.”
While these sorts of things are a bit annoying, I tend to think some of the reaction to the male bashing cards, calendars, etc. is an overreaction. Yes, the feminists are complete hypocrites on this issue, but on the other hand there are more important things to worry about. Near the end of his column, however, Leo highlights a disturbing case of the kind that does deserve more attention.
Barbara Wilder-Smith, a teacher and research in the Boston area, was recently quoted in several newspapers on how deeply anti-male attitudes have affected the schools. When she made “Boys Are Good” T-shirts for boys in her class, all 10 of the female student teachers under her supervision objected to the message. (One, she said, was wearing a button saying “So many men, so little intelligence.”)
“My son can’t even wear the shirt out in his back yard,” she said. “People see it and object strongly and shout things.” On the other hand, she says, nobody objects when the girls wear shirts that say “Girls Rule”…
That is extremely bizarre, but very typical of the attitudes from radical feminists in academia. This reminds me of an online forum my wife and I participated in that included feminist college students. After a particularly heated debate over some issue, one of the feminist decided to insult my then-pregnant wife with the worst insult she could come up with at the moment — “I hope have a boy!”
It turned out we had a very bright, beautiful daughter, but I would hope that whether they are boys or girls all children in schools are treated with the utmost respect and as individuals, rather than being singled out for special treatment and disdain because they are members of a politically incorrect sex. Unfortunately this sort of equality now seems entirely at odds with the feminist desire to ghettoize people by sex.