Sexual Stereotyping
by Carey Roberts

It's about time that we probe an assumption that has insidiously worked its way into our culture -- the notion that women are the guardians of goodness and grace, while all those male neanderthals are emissaries from the dark side.

I will freely admit that men indulge in a number of vices, those including gluttony, greed, and of course forgetting to put the toilet seat down. Growing up in the halcyon days of the Patriarchy, I was treated to my fair share of ribald humor. But nothing quite prepared me for what I saw a couple weeks ago.

Strolling at the local mall I spotted a young lass, maybe 13 years old. She was sporting a white T-shirt with an unusual picture. The shirt depicted a girl cold-cocking a boy. Above the how-to diagram were etched these words: "How to Drop a Boyfriend."

For the last decade, we've been hearing the mantra, "There's no excuse for domestic violence." So how could anyone even think of wearing a shirt like that?

Of course the Lavender Ladies have long scorned traditional notions of feminine virtue. In her book Feminist Morality, Virginia Held haughtily dismisses the ideal of the unselfish, nurturing, and non-aggressive woman as "the whole female stereotype."

So now we must ask, What happens to common morality when selfishness, aggressiveness, and all-around oafishness are held up as the cultural ideal for newly-liberated women?

I'm not going to dwell on the abortion issue. That's because no one, not even the most rabid feminist, will claim that baby-killing is a virtuous action. Their excuse is that we must allow abortion so as to not put a crimp on a woman's lifestyle options.

Let's agree to put that one in the "selfish" category.

And what about our epidemic of hyper-aggressive females?

Our society is reeling from stories of sexually-assertive school teachers who prey on their male students. We find it incomprehensible that teenage girls would form into gangs and lurk in the alleyways. And research now shows that female-initiated partner violence is more common than the male variety.

Think of Xena the Warrior Princess with premenstrual syndrome.

Which brings me to another one of my favorite T-shirts: "Girls Lie."

Our society has become inundated with so many feminist prevarications that it has difficulty separating truth from falsehood.

Here goes: the oppressiveness of marriage, the stifling effects of childrearing, the gender wage gap, the epidemic of domestic violence against women, the exclusion of women from medical research, the shortchanging of schoolgirls, the catch-all insensitivity to women's needs, and much, much more.

Which makes you wonder, How did the Nervous Nellies ever get through college without a Take Back the Night rally to steady themselves?

This is my personal favorite: "Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat." That insight comes to us by way of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Now visit any of the radical feminist websites -- they seethe with anti-male diatribes and epithets. I've seen outright bigotry in my life, but nothing that quite compares with the rants of Andrea Dworkin, Catherine McKinnon, or Kate Millett.

Then there's the fairness gene -- or lack thereof.

Feminists squawk and fuss about "gender equality," but once men become an endangered species on college campuses, all of a sudden the message shifts to "female empowerment." When men die five years sooner than women, why does the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services fund Centers for Excellence for the ladies, but not the lads?

And if the women's libbers want true equality, why aren't they burning their bras so they can win the "right" to trek over to the post office on their 18th birthday to register for government service?

And now for the dirty little secret -- feminists are the most intolerant people on the earth!

Last week the flap was over the Screen Goddess calendar that was adorned with 16 IT vixens. Naturally the Champions of Choice became apoplectic. "Girls are often excluded from the possibility of the profession by its cultural maleness," one woman shrieked.

And remember Larry Summers? He said there was a slight possibility that discrimination was not the reason for the small numbers of female physicists and rocket scientists. Even though he became a serial apologizer, the red-fems tarred and feathered the poor man and sent him packing from his Harvard U. presidency!

There's a lesson to be learned here: You can never appease a feminist.

Napoleon Bonaparte once observed, "Female virtue has been held in suspicion from the beginning of the world, and ever will be." That's why as feminism gains, virtue wanes.

Carey Roberts is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, a nonprofit national coalition of writers, journalists and grassroots media outlets.