I have to admit that I do often listen to public radio and watch public television. It’s an old habit, and probably a bad one, but it’s hard to break. However, although I should be accustomed to the programming by this point, NPR still manages to find ways to annoy me on a frequent basis.
In the latest offense, NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” with Neal Conan did a show on how lame guys are these days, featuring Hanna Rosin, of course, who opines about women’s superiority and better aptitude for the “new economy.” Fortunately, a fellow named Guy Garcia, who makes some decent points from a men’s perspective, also participates, but he loses points for calling guys who accept subordinate status “evolved,” which suggests he’s another one of the “men are the problem” crowd.
Above all, the show is characterized by a smug attitude — a sort of victory discussion in which the conquerors pretend to have some concern about the vanquished. The real problems men face – institutionalized discrimination chief among them – are dismissed as though irrelevant. As usual, NPR is willfully ignorant and strongly biased toward a very particular, liberal and elite American viewpoint.
The transcript and a link to the audio can be found here.
Check out this passage to see how Rosin dodges the affirmative action issue:
CONAN: There’s another email, this from Cameron(ph) in St. Louis: I’m a married father of two, an electrical engineer by profession, married to a physician. I am supportive of women in the workplace.
However, men are being unfairly discriminated against by affirmative action. For men to be happy, they need to provide. If women take that from their husbands, they undermine the success of the family. And there is a lack of positive role models, family leaders, providers, for males in the media. Instead, we have men being portrayed as less intelligent and subservient. Ray Romano and Homer Simpson come to mind.
I’m not sure anybody takes Homer Simpson too seriously as a male role model.
Ms. ROSIN: But that is an interesting point he makes. I had a large response to my story from the Christian community. It was debated a lot in churches and sort of on online Christian sites, essentially trying to defend the traditional role of masculinity.
It’s the old notion of wives submitting to their husbands but more broadly this idea that, you know, there is a traditional role for men, there is a traditional role for women, and it’s extremely threatening when that’s upended. So I think that’s a common response to this.
She simply won’t talk about the biggest reason women are doing so well these days: they have legislation, police, and lopsided domestic law behind them that puts men in a socially and legally inferior position — a modern day Jim Crow for the benefit of women. No, instead she runs off in another direction blabbing about those creepy Christian fundamentalists (maybe she’d just watched Grayson’s attack ad and that’s all that popped to mind). Of course, Neal Conan lets her get away with it. What a soft touch. That’s probably the worst thing about NPR: you can always count on them to stroke their ideological comrades with a velvet glove.
