The girlfriend—let’s call her Katie—and I were sitting in the restaurant at the Adam’s Mark Hotel in downtown Dallas one morning in 2001. I have to say that Katie was one of the sanest people I knew. She seldom made broad-brush statements, and had the knack of standing back and assessing a situation before saying a word. I admired her ability to do so. Thus, I was surprised if not stunned to hear her remark, “I think the world would be a better place if women were in charge.” I looked at her pretty face and awaited a smile or some indication that it was a joke, but not even a qualifier was forthcoming. Katie evidently meant just what she said.
She lived in the liberal bastion of Boulder, Colorado which was really no more liberal than my home of Austin, Texas. I could only surmise that she had been influenced by some of her lesbian friends. Katie and her pals were not alone. The July/August 2010 issue of The Atlantic featured a long article hyperbolically entitled “The End of Men.” It pointed out that women now comprise the majority of the work force in the United States, that women get three college degrees for every two earned by men, that they are in effect taking over the medical and legal professions, that expecting parents now pray for a girl rather than a boy, and so forth. The author—need I say she was female?—insisted that women do almost everything better than men. She may have made an allowance for fields requiring only brawn such as lifting weights, chopping down trees and hauling coal from a mile beneath the earth’s surface. That article was by no means the only one claiming, without the slightest bit of irony, that women are better, brighter and more capable. You can find entire books, many of them, based on the same idea.
I recently got a letter from a male friend who said something along this line. Barry, who has a Ph.D. from Syracuse University and whom I respect deeply, was prompted to do so by the appalling news out of Cleveland about a guy who had kidnapped and enslaved three young women for a decade before being apprehended. I was as shocked and horrified by the story as Barry or anybody else. I acknowledge that a majority of the really "bad" people in human history have been male. Adolf Hitler, Charles Manson, the killer-infidels of September 11, 2001, Vlad the Impaler, this loser in Cleveland—all male, I admit without compulsion.
But, as I asked Katie during our breakfast that morning in Dallas, what are men supposed to do, stand down and take orders from our female superiors? She would have me believe that a woman could have done a better job as the American president than Abraham Lincoln did in the early and mid-1860s, that the life of Albert Schweitzer (theologian, philosopher, physician and medical missionary to Africa) was a failure, that Jesus should have been a woman, and on and on. Vincent Van Gogh was a decent painter, but he was male, and the same for the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Same for Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Edison, Nicola Tesla, Leonardi da Vinci, Yi Sun-Shin, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Johann Sebastian Bach, Shaka Zulu and William Shakespeare. I will stop because this list could go on for several pages.
You would have to search far and wide to find a man who loves and appreciates women more than I do. I have been around for more than six decades, and I have met all kinds of people, and yet some of the dumbest, shallowest and most disgusting have been female. Was it more than 50%? Less than 50%? I do not claim to know. My point is that there is good and bad, beautiful and repulsive among all of us. Man and woman complement each other, and so it has been since the dawn of time.
I have a suggestion for Katie—our relationship ended soon after our conversation at the Adam's Mark—, the author of the aforementioned Atlantic article and other such individuals. Let’s recognize that both genders have a lot to offer, and cease and desist with this self-righteous feminist posturing.
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