aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Neanderthal men on women

The dinosaurs of unenlightened gender incivility are out in force this week. For starters, World o’Crap points to this pile of it from John Stossel:

Dov Charney is a fast-talking 36-year-old entrepreneur whose company has a loose, sexy atmosphere. As you might guess, some former workers have sued him for sexual harassment.

Charney pays his 4,000 employees, mostly immigrants, an average $12.75 an hour, plus subsidized lunches, health care, and free English classes. […]

Charney feels free to engage in sexual relationships with staff members. “If it’s a truly consensual loving relationship,” he says, “there’s nothing wrong with it. I think that those relationships can be very healthy and are very much part of living in a free world.â€Â�

Says SZ, “Yes, immigrant women, having sex with the boss is very much part of living in a free world.  Remember that!” She’s got more.

Then Rebecca Traister (from whom I lifted the wonderful dinosaur locution above) reports on the much discussed “Don’t Marry Career Women” piece that has since been pulled and reframed as a ”Career and Marriage Debate.” Another piece by the same author, Michael Noer, titled “The Economics of Prostitution” which compares “wives” to “whores” has also disappeared from the Forbes site:

“The story about careers was taken down so we could put up a new, enhanced package which includes Michael’s original story,” said a Forbes.com spokeswoman in an e-mail late Wednesday. She said that she did not know when or if the “wife or whore” story would go back up. On Tuesday, the same spokeswoman had e-mailed Salon to say that “the piece and its sourcing speaks [sic] for itself. Forbes is known for its provocative opinion and Forbes.com’s readership—both male and female—expects nothing less.” Noer was out of the office this week—it has been reported http://www.gawker.com/news/forbes/remainders-michael-noer-computer-camp-stud-goes-into-hiding-196207.php">elsewhere that he was ironically attending a wedding—and Forbes.com editor Paul Maidment was also on vacation.

On the merits:

Much of the data on which Noer drew came from conservative think tanks or dubious-sounding publications. The National Marriage Project. “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” a 2006 study that even Noer admitted is “controversial.” Sylvia Ann Hewlett. (He also cited more mainstream sources, like USA Today.) But the traditionalist, reactionary bent of many of his footnoted sources only amplified his police siren of a thesis.

An accompanying slide show listed the “Nine Reasons to Steer Clear of Career Women,” starting with the news that a professionally successful woman won’t want to marry you—“you” being Noer’s male reader; he didn’t bother to pretend that he might have any female eyes skimming his work—because high-achieving women “search less intensively for a match,” and “have higher standards for an acceptable match than women who work less and earn less.”

If your working girl should unwisely deign to hitch her wagon to your star, according to Noer, it won’t be long before she’s cheating on you, a quagmire illustrated by a photo of a hussy lounging in red lingerie, barely concealing her adulterous assets. According to Noer, working women stray when a wife ventures outside the home, because a job increases the chances that “[she’ll] meet someone [she] likes more than you.” That surely doesn’t sound like a stretch in this case.

Then there’s this from the cute little baby dinosaur, Tucker Carlson:

MORGAN: I'm assuming
that she is going to make the run, unless she sees polling or evidence
otherwise right up at the year from now.

CARLSON: Rich, the truth is there are so few men left in the
Democratic Party. There are so many wussies at the helm of that party.

MASTERS: Gee, thanks.

CARLSON: Nobody has the huevos to stand up to Mrs. Clinton
and say, you, you can't win, step back,
you're not running for president. Nobody is in charge. So she just bulldozes everybody. That's
the truth of it. And you know it.

MASTERS: It's not
the truth of it.

Those like Tucker who want women back in the 50s where they belong would do well to remember that “the truth of it” is that Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. But backwards and in high heels.