Oh, spare me

Rush Limbaugh mentioned this article on his show this afternoon.  Unsurprisingly, he had a much different take on it than I.

The article is titled "The War on Men" and the premise is fully as nonsensical as that suggests.  I'd try to summarize it, but doing so would make my brain melt, so I'll just quote some of it:

Women aren’t women anymore.

To say gender relations have changed dramatically is an understatement. Ever since the sexual revolution, there has been a profound overhaul in the way men and women interact. Men haven’t changed much – they had no revolution that demanded it – but women have changed dramatically.

In a nutshell, women are angry. They’re also defensive, though often unknowingly. That’s because they’ve been raised to think of men as the enemy. Armed with this new attitude, women pushed men off their pedestal (women had their own pedestal, but feminists convinced them otherwise) and climbed up to take what they were taught to believe was rightfully theirs.

Now the men have nowhere to go.

The whole thing is like this.

She's right on a couple of things.  One, gender relations have changed.  This is not a bad thing.  Maybe men were knocked off their pedestal, but, well, there was no reason for them to be on a pedestal to begin with (it's equally nonsensical to say that women were on their own, feminine pedestal--being property isn't the same as being exalted).  External genitalia do not make you inherently better.  Two, feminism does benefit men who have no interest in marriage, as some wrong-headed women have become sexual playthings for men under the guise of equality.  (This does not benefit women.)

She might even be right to say that some folks have pitted men and women against one another.

However, she is absolutely wrong to say that women are privileged in any way in this society, and that men are assumed to be in the wrong and women to be unassailable in their correctness.

Hell, her own article proves her to be wrong in that assertion.

Need more proof?  Look at single moms.  They are to blame for crime rates, the downfall of American society, and, hell, even the fact that unskilled, poorly-educated single men don't earn as much money as their married counterparts.  All of this, of course, ignores one very important biological fact: it takes two people to make a baby.  For every single mother (well, except for widows), there is a single father, but the media as a whole ignores this.  The headlines don't read "Absentee fathers cause crime", after all, or "Men who walk out on their families leave them in poverty."

Also: rape.  Now, there is starting to be some blow-back on this from women sick of being blamed.  But again, it's because we are sick of the victims being blamed for the actions of the criminal.  Case in point, the 11-year-old girl repeatedly gang-raped in Cleveland, Texas.  As my husband has pointed out more than once, the girl--girl, people, barely in puberty--has been blamed repeatedly for her assaults.  Check out this tidbit from the trail of one of her rapists:

[Defense attorney Steve] Taylor questioned why the underage girl had not been charged with anything for choosing to violate that rule, indicating that she was "the reason" that the encounters happened.

"Like the spider and the fly. Wasn't she saying, 'Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly?' " Taylor asked.

 But women are considered blameless by society.

Yeah, right.