Forty years after publication of the Feminine Mystique, is it time to pop open the champagne bottle and exclaim, “You’ve come a long way, baby?”
Noticed how Hillary’s been looking so, well, angry?
During his recent State of the Union address, President Bush made a light-hearted remark about Bill Clinton. The camera turned to Hillary for a cameo shot, and all she had to do was smile politely. But no, she shot back her trademark “isn’t-this-guy-an-idiot” expression.
Hillary, I’m afraid you were set up — right in front of a national television audience.
Somehow, Hillary’s ire is emblematic of everything that has gone wrong with the feminist movement since Betty Friedan released her celebrated book, The Feminine Mystique, in 1963.
I’m admittedly mystified that so many persons are unaware of Friedan’s Communist past. And positively stupefied that even fewer understand what the “feminine mystique” really means. Here it is, in Friedan’s own words:
The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity . . . this femininity is so mysterious and intuitive and close to the creation and origin of life that man-made science may never be able to understand it. But however special and different, it is in no way inferior to the nature of man; it may even in certain respects be superior.
Can you imagine some sweaty working stiff taking a smoke break, and suddenly becoming inspired to enlighten his buddies with that kind of narcissistic drivel? Someone would have thrown a tool belt at him and ordered him to get back to work.
But coming from a woman ensconced in a well-appointed New York City suburb, Friedan was hailed as the latest feminist savant.
Mrs. Friedan had considerable first-hand experience with the feminine mystique. Her husband Carl, a successful advertising executive, employed a full-time housekeeper, which allowed Betty to pursue her writing career. Apparently Friedan didn’t like the hired help, because she would later denigrate housework as “particularly suited to the capabilities of feeble-minded girls.”
So 40-odd years later, is it time to pop open the champagne bottle and exclaim, “You’ve come a long way, baby?” To find out, let’s do a quick tour around the country. First stop, your local college campus.
This month, The Vagina Monologues is being performed at 600 colleges around the country. There, smart, ambitious co-eds will look on as a lesbian actress seduces a 16-year-old girl, only to be reassured, “If it was a rape, it was a good rape.” These women are then instructed to reclaim their sexuality by chanting, “My vagina is huggable.”
Wouldn’t Betty be proud?
Now go visit the offices of your local Heart Association. There you will learn about the AHA’s high fashion campaign, “Go Red for Women.”
Of course it’s men who are at far greater risk of dying from heart disease, but the AHA only cares that women wear red dresses.
Somehow that chauvinistic phrase, “may even in certain respects be superior,” is ringing through my head.
Next stop: The Oxygen Network (women can’t breathe in patriarchal society, so they need oxygen –- get it?).
There, we see the Network is airing six animated spots based on the book, Chicks Dig Fries: A Guide for Clueless Men. By any standard, the spots are tasteless and misandrous. But in feminist la-la land, women are always right and men just don’t get it. No wonder men are dropping out of the dating scene.
Once men stop dating, they also stop marrying. This is creating a panic of sorts.
One of the more sorry movies I’ve seen, Bridget Jones’ Diary, recounts the escapades of a slightly neurotic thirty-something who, no matter how hard she tries, can’t seem to find Mr. Right. The movie, based on the international best-selling book, taps into the angst of millions of single women who are chasing after a shrinking pool of willing bachelors.
The last stop on today’s tour is that part of America that never took a fancy to the emancipation agenda of The Feminine Mystique. It’s that place in America where gentlemen still hold doors open for ladies, and young women look forward to balancing careers with marriage and motherhood.
It turns out this segment of America has a much larger following than the mainstream media is willing to admit. According to a 1999 Gallup poll, 74% of American women do not consider themselves to be feminist. And one CBS poll reported that 22% of women said that being called a feminist would be considered an “insult.”
Like Britney, Madonna, and Oprah, The Feminine Mystique has left an indelible stamp on our society. Thank goodness the majority of American women have had the common sense to reject its Trojan horse prescription for gender liberation.
Let’s see. Women already outlive their husbands by five years. Following the AHA’s gender selective prescription, we can expect women to outlive us a few more surviving on whatever scraps liberals have allowed us to keep. They’ll be too old to go back to work and may not have kept up with workplace skills. Inflation, having already eaten their savings, will mean they’ll be deciding between starvation and medications even longer. Their guy will be nicely buried, so there’s no more help from that quarter. But, of course, they can expect the feminist lobby to come to their rescue. … Ladies? Sisters?
This is intended to make women still more appreciative of us right? Or is it the feminist agenda to blame men when that happens also? That must be the mystique part you’re talking about. No logic you can pin them down on, but it sure looks good on ad copy and just needs a little spin to make it go down smooth.
The unfairness of it aside, it would better serve women to emphasize men’s health to the same degree women have enjoyed for the past 30 years. That’s when the women’s movement hit high-gear, and concern for men was relegated to the collectivist dustbin. To be sure, men’s health has seen some improvement, but it is more as a fallout from the emphasis placed on women. It is only for this reason that the longevity gap has not grown much. But, then, we won’t know the real gap until substantial numbers of baby-boomers have died off. The well being of most women is bound up with their men, and not with a movement whose greater concern is to render men as irrelevant as possible.
One last thought. I wonder which has greater impact on women’s longevity and well-being. Good heart maintenance, or a good marriage. The wedges driven between men and women and the huge changes wrought to family dynamics by feminism have resulted in high stress in the home. Divorce is at an all time high. The demand for counseling has resulted in stressful situations being strung out instead of finding resolution, because the difficulty of resolution generally increases with the number of people involved. Evidence for this consists of prescribed mood-stabiilizing drugs being way up, particularly among women. Is this symptomatic of a better life for women? Offsetting this and without reassessing causes, AHA is here prescribing women need to focus on diet, excercise, and medical monitoring to combat the effects of the pressures the feminists pardigm has bequeathed them. What they won’t do is target feminist dicta as stressing men and women alike.
Femisists have the idea that women’s progress is a null-sum game: that is, for women to get ahead, men must be held back. This is the same distortion held by communists and “pay your fair share” taxation-happy liberals; none of whom see that health, like wealth, is something created, and which we create more effectively the more we pull together.
Good catch, Carey.
For what it’s worth,
I remember in the 70′s as a teen boy
reading feminist articles ( well I really wanted to understand women…) about how they were going to make the world better …
And now I’m in my 40′s and as I look around I do see a few successful women that are helping make the world better but I see so many women
– from young girls to women in their 40′s – that are dressing exactly the way prostitutes were dressing in the 70′s, I am wondering what went wrong?
Ah..never mind…it must be men’s fault…
Yes, it is men’s fault. If men had fought back in the 70′s we wouldn’t be seeing such a problem. As a woman who is frustrated with men, it is because the men in my life don’t take a stance for either side. They are confused as to what women want (which, if it all boils down to it, does seem to put us in charge.) We heterosexual women have what heterosexual men want, and the way they can get it from us is to give us what we want, which, in most cases is a solid financial base for ourselves and our children. If they cannot give us this, then it should be no wonder why we disrespect them and belittle them. They say that they are in charge but they don’t prove it by their actions. We don’t need the conservative model of Karl Marx, whom, with all of his hefty thinking, was unable to support his own family.
This mindset that you have works quite well for those of the population with moderate to high ranking incomes. The rest of us poor women are doomed to be “femenist;” And that is why you hear them saying they are insulted. To be femenist is synonymous with being “poor” and “uneducated” which no woman will choose to be.
(note: Those women are Hilary’s constituents, not including myself.)
-From a “femenist” Christian wife and mother of six who is living it.
Jael
Betty Friedan a Communist? Have you no decency, sir? You must be channeling Joe McCarthy. You owe Betty Friedan and her family an apology.
Quote- “We heterosexual women have what heterosexual men want, and the way they can get it from us is to give us what we want, which, in most cases is a solid financial base for ourselves and our children.” What kind of bushwah is this? If this were true, then there wouldn’t be all you women out there shacking up with losers of the first order, all the while proclaiming “He really understands me!”
You’re right in saying that you have what we want; the societal problem is that you women don’t get the idea that you need to stop giving us what we want (which, I assume you think, is sex) until you’re sure you’re going to get what you NEED. But none of you (even you Christians out there) have an inkling of what that need is, thanks to the imperical decrees of feminism.
That need is a partner who sees you as equal, yet different, and whom you must accept as the same. What you NEED is a man (not a woman with a penis), who sees the world totally different than you, yet who is so devoted to you and your marriage that he works 100% for your well-being, as you work for his.