Women

As you might notice, my blog role starts heavily feminist. Why? I'll touch on that later, maybe a little story about how the matriarchy saved me from being a wimp and made me a "real" man.

But two things popped up that I thought made for great "road" signs on this thoughtway.

The first was mention of the following story on one of my favorite blogs.
The story was about a village in Kenya, called Umoja, the blog was BitchPHD.

The story of the village is interesting, from WaPo:

Ten years ago, a group of women established the village of Umoja, which means unity in Swahili, on an unwanted field of dry grasslands. The women said they had been raped and, as a result, abandoned by their husbands, who claimed they had shamed their community.
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They became so respected that troubled women, some beaten, some trying to get divorced, started showing up in this little village in northern Kenya.
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In other stories I've seen, attacks against the village are mentioned, like the article that BitchPHD points to in the Telegraph:
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Gangs a dozen strong have mounted daytime raids through the thorn fence circling the village, chasing the women into the bush, beating them with clubs and threatening to torch their stick-and-dung homes.
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Which is what she was responding to when she wrote:

It's stories like this that tempt one to swear off men forever. What assholes.
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When I first saw her post, I didn't think about her statement that much, I had already read the articles, and seen some comments in various corners of the "blog 'o nets". I took her comment as a rhetorical device, a sign of her frustration. When I first heard about Umoja, it just confirmed some longstanding beliefs that most men I know are defined by their (pitiful) fear, and the violent reactions that fear stimulates. Bitch herself points out in her comment section that she didn't expect any serious comments, at least not of this variety, and she also points out the title of the blog does use the word bitch.

BUT...then her comment section blew up...you should check it out...you get a sense of just how afraid men really are, here are the first two comments that crack me up:
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I'm sorry... did you just make a generalization to ALL men based on the actions of a bunch of guys who live in dung huts??

Nice.
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Probably the better resolution would be to swear off assholes forever, whether they be men or women. The actions of the guys as described in the article are indeed those of assholes (except, perhaps, for the guys willing to gather firewood for money), but to jump from that to saying that all men are assholes is quite a jump. And the implication that no woman is an asshole strikes me as wrong, too, given Ann Coulter and the like.
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I'm not buying it. If you read her blog (as I and many others do), if you read the news, etc...etc...
and still are offended by the good Bitch's comments, than you must be delusional. Really, one would think men are an endangered minority.

And just to make the point on how thick the double standard pulled on women who don't tow the standard patriarchal line is, here is the second thing I saw, just a day or two after in our local papers: Two writers for the Chicago Sun-times, and a third "face" from our local CBS affiliate, come out with some of the worst kind of sexist drivel.

Here is a link to a Chicagoist post, You Guys Would Be Sexy If "Neanderthal" Was Considered A Turn On, by Erin that does a much better summary than of this than I can.

But, I'll hit it anyway: It's about the new Dove ad campaign. Basically, no less than 2! (1 & 2) articles in the Sun-Times and a blog entry at CBS in Chicago have come a rallyin' against the ugliness of "real" woman. (and I need to say here right now, I found the ad appealing when I first saw it).

I mean they are really offended by the ad. I mean my gawd, these woman don't look like porn stars or hookers, they all seem to say. Really though, all of it is worth reading. Richard Roeper (1) even shoots out a staple of his before he takes aim at the Dove ad, his "why do women do that" shtick. (it's weird, because his example is about phone messages, how woman supposedly call you back without listening to them, but in my life it's only the guys I know who do that, so I don't know what the hell to make of his mewling, except what I've always made of it, that he doesn't like women very much).

And Bill Zwecker, from over at CBS, with his "CBS 2 Morning Team's Blog" blog post, actually decries that showing average shaped women (who are not Obese, look at the ad) somehow endangers public health, no really, that's what he said:
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"In this day and age, when we are facing a huge obesity problem in this country, we don't need to encourage anyone -- women OR men -- to think it's okay to be out of shape."
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Yea right, Um, Bill, lets see you in your underwear, it looks like you're more out of shape than these women, but of course he said this first:
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"Advertising is all about creating a fantasy -- an illusion. As Roeper put it, if I want to see a "real" woman, I can just go to Taste of Chicago, or frankly just walk down Michigan Avenue."
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Which is really funny, 'cause frankly, you can see, it doesn't occur to Billy that maybe, just maybe these ads weren't aimed at him. And really Bill, are woman's ads supposed to be your pornography? Or are they made to sell things to women. How much woman's underwear do you buy?

(by the way, anyone remember the Seinfeld episode where George gets caught by his mother in the bathroom? Was it a copy of Cosmo? Does anybody remember?)

Oh well, oblivious sexism is alive and rampant among my fellow men, fear, shallowness, and mewly privileged whining is still the order of the day.

What amazes me most is how just afraid all these men are of women. Telling, isn't it?

Oh, and I should mention, even though I stop by BitchPHD a couple 'o times a week, I hadn't even noticed the dust up in her comments until Twisty over at I Blame The Patriarchy pointed it out.