Ah, the Craigslist screed. The philosophizing of sages who don’t care that their inadvertent audience really only wants a free couch, or an adult encounter, or a cleaning gig. The sociologist in question today has ideas about “women.”
We could not hope to do justice to this manifesto, but of its 1214 words, here are a few “highlights”:
The “modern American woman” debate here on CL lacks cogent analysis. I am here to supply it. Here is everything you need to know about women in less than five minutes. Man or woman, if you take this to heart it will serve you the rest of your life.
and
Feminism encourages women to change. The prize of equality appears enticing: more money, a greater role in running society, and personal independence. But women face two big problems:
• Just as citizens of the old Soviet Union who envied capitalism actually only craved the material goods that were the dividends of capitalism – they were horrified to learn of the personal risk inherent in a market economy – most women recoil from genuine equality. Responsibility, as men are required to shoulder it, is not much fun. Women want equal pay for equal work, but want (and usually get) the option of not working, or getting someone else to subsidize their good times. Women are infuriated by the proposition that they are inferior to men, but equally infuriated by the prospect of men not paying for dates. There is no grown-up way to reconcile these two points of view; this too infuriates women.
• Women achieve more security as perpetual victims than by actually acquiring power. (Most married suburban women would rather avoid working – and keep complaining about the “boredom” of their subsidized, self-indulgent, coffee-and-yoga lives – than join their husbands on an equal professional footing and shoulder equal risk.) Women keep imagining themselves aggrieved and oppressed by dark, male forces. But there is almost no real evidence of this. Feminist interests derive endless mileage and sympathy from complaining that the “male-dominated” academic world is biased against women, but you will not see them hurrying to point out that far more women than men are enrolled in college today; that fact undercuts their “victim” status.
Feminism as a pragmatic program for living remains in an infantile, arrested state because these fundamental contradictions remain unresolved.
and
The cherry-picking strategem, in which women pivot in nanoseconds from Ms. Boardroom to Daddy’s Little Girl and expect to be congratulated for each fresh self-indulgence, is not only irrational but morally reprehensible. As a practical matter, few men can retreat at will from risk and responsibility, but most women can do so anytime they like.
Then there’s something about our “female agenda,” and “devaluing our currency” and how we need a taste of our own medicine and can’t “get away with it.” But really, the coupe de grace, as it were. comes in the form of this gentleman’s chosen illustration:
He rests his case.
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