Yesterday, I noticed a comment zed wrote that reflected my thoughts on the matter of this unending stream of vapid, clueless and/or provocative articles we’ve been seeing from female journalists for years now. Forbes, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and now even the Wall Street Journal are publishing them regularly.
Here’s an excerpt from zed’s comment:
I would be slacking on my job as wingman and coach if I didn’t point out to a guy when he had been hooked by a neg and his hamster was going like it was having an epileptic fit.
If she and her publisher make money on this book, they will put out another one. If that one makes money, they will put out another one after that.
This is just another type of emotional porn for women. It makes them all tingly in anticipation of all the attention they are going to get from it.
Would men with options waste one second of their lives responding to a woman who treated them this way in real life?
It’s a good point, and one that’s been going through my head recently. I used to think they were simply writing this stuff to make a buck, but it seems that there’s more to it than that. As zed points out, these women really get a kick out of our responses. And in the meanwhile they are getting paid a lot of money to pleasure themselves by pushing our buttons. There’s no doubt that they are paying attention to the men’s blogosphere, and one can only imagine the happy little feelings they get from seeing us worked up and indignant — over them! Women, particularly of the exhibitionist type that characterizes female journalism, absolutely love it when someone makes a fuss over them.
A friend sent me another horrible article published in the WSJ a couple days ago that followed close on the heels of Hymowitz’s disingenuous article about how men are refusing to grow up. In this article, a youngish woman writes about how she had a great honeymoon because her new husband couldn’t find his passport and was stuck behind for a few days. She lustfully describes the Italian men she met, and suggests that she’d love to do it again, hinting at a divorce before she’s been married for even a season.
I took a water taxi to my hotel and the driver, a gorgeous man named Davide, insisted I take command of the boat, although I explained that I was from New York and didn’t even know how to drive a car. “I teach you,” he said and sort of slapped my butt and also touched my stomach while shifting gears. He gave me his number on a scrap of paper.
“I’m married,” I said for the first time. “I’m on my honeymoon.” He thought this was very charming and American and pretended to look overboard in the murky brown water for a groom. “Call me,” he said.
She goes on to describe the shopping, the food, the joys of being without one’s husband, and of course the men again:
The next day I bought five hand-tooled leather journals from a bookbinder named Ustino and began writing in one of them at Locanda Cipriani, a restaurant in a quince orchard on a tiny island called Torcello. I ordered cannelloni again and wrote, “I’m eating cannelloni all aloni.” I wandered that night over bridges and bought a silk jacket with rats painted on it for $500.
[...]
I had dinner that night at Vino Vino on Calle de la Rotonda where you order from three dishes at the counter. It would have been perfect except for the waitress ignoring me during my lemon cake—and oh yeah, I remembered, my husband not being there.
Waiting for him, I took gondola rides and drank wine with beautiful men. I soaked my feet in the bidet, listening on the phone to my husband complain about how he’d taken Metro-North to the county clerk’s office in White Plains to get his birth certificate. I went to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Accademia, lounged on my king-sized bed, got chocolate on my trousseau.
She ends the piece with a little line she probably thinks is guaranteed to upset men:
The scrap of paper with Davide’s phone number on it is still on my refrigerator. In case I ever want a second honeymoon.
We could get indignant, point to this woman as another example of a naughty wife, and make a fuss over her. But the thing is, this kind of bad behavior is no longer shocking. These Cosmo-style themes are so common and pervasive in every form of mainstream media that they’ve begun to dull people’s outrage, and now it’s just starting to look embarrassing — like a national shame of some sort. Our women are acting out in public to such a degree that I wouldn’t be surprised if other societies felt some pity for us, just as one would pity the family who had to deal with a mentally-ill daughter who repeatedly exposed herself in public.
But despite how bad it makes us look as a society from the outside, the most important matter is the change within. The reason this shamelessness has gone on for as long as it has is that it has been effective. The women have succeeded in getting our attention. But it’s reached a saturation point, and now the question is what’s next?
It seems that men are approaching a psychological tipping point where they will no longer respond to each new outrage with much more than knowing resignation. The women of our society have invested so much effort into provoking and testing us that we’re developing a cultural immunity to it, which is unprecedented in the history of modern Anglo civilization. For a couple of generations, our women have been unraveling centuries of carefully constructed myths and facades built around the feminine, and from all indications it appears that they will not stop until the job is entirely complete. Perhaps we should consider that although there have been a lot of bright guys far ahead of the curve in recent years pointing to the gaping holes and craters on the facade, the real credit for its destruction should go to women themselves. In all likelihood, without the wrecking ball of feminism, men would have plodded on and on in blissful ignorance, accepting all the pretty lies without a second thought.
Some conservative women may be nervous about the implications, but Hymowitz and the like are no different from their less circumspect sisters in the most important matters. These conservative women crave the same attention and fuss as Lady Gaga; they simply go about securing it in different ways. Even if they were the only ones making noise the end result would be the same, because they are all looking for the same thing.
We can’t predict exactly what the effect will be of the vanishing of these illusions built around women, but women have certainly sown the seeds of their own disempowerment. When enough men react to these provocations with nothing more than a roll of the eyes – and that time is almost upon us – it’s going to take the steam right out of this aging feminist movement. In a way it’s too bad, because when women were mysterious and venerable, they had a certain charm about them, and it’s going to take a long time for that to come back.
