Reality, per Suzanne Venker.
Prepare yourselves for a bombshell revelation: All this time we've been concerned about how our society treats women—about women earning less than men, states passing laws that target women's health care, women losing their jobs when they become pregnant, the more than 1,000 women killed each year by intimate partners—we've been getting it wrong.
Really, the gender that has it tough is men. So says Suzanne "niece of Phyllis Schlafly" Venker, anyway. Her evidence? It's everywhere!
The most obvious proof is male bashing in the media. It is rampant and irrefutable. From sit-coms and commercials that portray dad as an idiot to biased news reports about the state of American men, males are pounced on left and right. And that’s just the beginning.
What, you were hoping for specifics? Beyond it being "irrefutable" that the media is bashing men? Well, Venker doesn't have any of those. I might note, though, that
just three of 2012's highest-paid media CEOs were women, so apparently men are participating in the war on themselves. Venker gets more specific while railing against Title IX:
Under Title IX, the ratio of female athletes is supposed to match the ratio of female students. So if not enough women sign up for, say, wrestling and ice hockey, well then: no more wrestling and ice hockey.
Um, yes. That's exactly how it works, which is why the only colleges that have football programs are colleges that have women's football programs as well as men's. Also, too, men are being victimized by Title IX not just in the wrestling ring but when they face campus discipline for sexual assault, and this one feminist, a
feminist, even thinks that's bad because her son was accused of nonconsensual sex and it was just terrible. (Actually, colleges and universities do
often have terrible systems for handling sexual assault, but it's not rapists who generally
suffer the most from it.) From sexual violence at colleges, Venker leaps to domestic violence in our society at large:
“If a woman gets angry for any reason, she can simply accuse a man and men are just assumed guilty in our society,” notes Dr. Helen Smith, author of the new book, "Men on Strike." This is particularly heinous since, as Smith adds, violence in domestic relations “is almost 50% from men and 50% from women.”
And yet, oddly enough, in 2005,
1,181 women and 329 men were killed by intimate partners. Which may provide some real insight into where Venker gets her belief that there's a big War on Men. I mean, if 1,181 to 329 looks like a 50-50 split to her, that says a little something about her cognitive processes, right?