A lovely thing happened in the year 2012. There was an
election campaign in the United
States of America during which two hot
subjects among others were debated. They were taxation issues and women issues
that included healthcare. To be clear, I have not sat down with women lately to
discuss these issues because there are only 24 hours in a day, and there is
only so much you can do in this span of time. Thus, I base the discussion that
follows on the memory of the interactions I had with women sometime ago,
contrasting my recollection of that time with my perception of the women I see
and hear today in the print media and the audio-visuals.
In my long life, I met women and worked with them on the
shop floors, in the offices and in the boardrooms. I was doing maintenance in
the shop when I met women that operated production machines. I was designing
industrial projects and doing cost analysis when I met women and interacted
with them in the office. And I sat in the boardrooms of private companies with
women who contributed to the decision making process.
That was the time when the movement to liberate women in North America was gaining steam. It started a few years
before it caught my attention but some people say it started decades before
that. In any case, because I had been interested in communication since I was
very young, I developed the tendency to study the people's responses to the
message of the media. Fascinated by the phenomenon, I sought to explore the
connection between the way that the media handled an issue and the way that
people responded to it. The hottest issues at that time being those which
related to women, they saturated the mass media and rendered each of my days a
field day to explore and to enjoy.
I still remember the women I met at the time because I kept
thinking about them as I began to withdraw from the active life I led then.
Watching the world, I saw it evolve and saw the media transform into something
different from what they used to be. What happens now is that when I read
something interesting in the newspapers or I see something fascinating on
television, these women come to mind. And I ask myself: How would this incident
have affected the woman I sat with in the company cafeteria long ago, or the
woman I sat with in the restaurant around the corner? And how would either have
responded to the incident I just learned about?
Before I get into specifics answering those questions, I
need to make a general observation. It is that I can tell the following with
confidence: the relationship that exists between women mirrors the relationship
that exists between men. That is, you will find that the more physical the work
is that people do – be they men or women –
the more tightly they bond together. For example, you will find that the
people who work in the shop bond more tightly than those who work in the
office, themselves bonding more tightly than the people who sit in the
boardroom. This is so true, it is not unusual to see men and women in the shop
bond (in a purely platonic way) more tightly than they would with individuals
of the same gender from a different job classification. In the shop they view
each other as sisters and brothers; in the office they are rivals; in the
boardroom they are enemies.
An outcome of this is that the men and women who work in a
shop can sit together in a cafeteria, have lunch at the same table and talk
openly about anything without the fear of being derided by a colleague. More
than that, you will find that women can be the most blatant critics of other
women, especially the ones they consider to be phoney. There were a few of
those in the media when the women liberation movement was going full throttle
and I had the chance to sit with women who worked in the shop. I remember one
special woman who had no fear of using the forbidden four letter words of which
she commanded a rich lexicon.
The women at the table would call ugly duckling the not so
attractive women who went on television and spoke angrily about the men that
treated women as sex objects. The special woman with a rich lexicon would say
these women hated men because they were frustrated and could not find someone
to f**k them. But time passed and what
happened after that was that a crop of attractive women began to take up the
cause. They popped up in from of the television cameras with full makeup on,
but they too spoke angrily about the cause. Their complaint this time was not
about men viewing them as sex objects; it was about landing a more rewarding job,
the chance to be promoted, to shatter the glass ceiling and to have a higher
pay. But the women at the table were not impressed with this argument either;
and they called them painted dolls that got more than they deserve already yet
were asking for more.
In fact, the discussion around the table dealt with more
issues than those pertaining to women only. The most favored ones dealt with
money such as pay levels, inflation and taxation. As the discussion progressed,
you could sense that what was said came out the daily experience of the people
who spoke. Knowing little or nothing about the central bank's balance sheet,
its open window or its overnight bank rate, they painted a simple and lucid
image of the situation as they saw it. They knew about the expression “another
day another dollar” and so they spoke of an economic system in which people go
to work and get paid for the day. They thought in terms of people who produce
goods and services, and of people who print money. They explained that the printers
give the producers a little of what they print, and give themselves the rest of
the money. The printers then share that money with people that produce nothing
yet go on television and complain about everything.
Far from being envious of the ugly ducklings or the painted
dolls that pop up on the television screens, the women at the table sought the
kind of social justice which says you cannot shortchange someone time after
time. Thus, they wanted equal pay for equal work but while this concept loomed
large in the minds of the office women and those in the boardroom, it did not
loom as large in the minds of the women in the shop. Yes, they sweated as much
as the men while standing in a 120 degrees heat in front of a plastic machine
and yes, they felt the same level of discomfort doing a repetitive work from
eight to five, but they knew something that the office and boardroom women did
not know.
They knew that if something happened in the office – be it a
big emergency or a small one – for which physical intervention was required,
the women will not step aside, and the men will not rush to help. But this will
happen in the shop because the bond between the men and the women there is as
strong as it is in a family. The truth is that in the case of an emergency, the
women in the shop will instinctively step aside, and the men will rush to
contain the situation risking their own life if necessary. For this reason, the
women who do manual labor will accept a difference of as much as 10% in pay
between the sexes. They will begin to ask questions if the difference goes
larger than that. A stance like this would be unthinkable in the office or the
boardroom.
With time, the women's movement evolved further and spawned
the phenomenon of the supermoms. These were women who had it all in every sense
of the word. They were highly educated, physically attractive, married with
children and holding a well paying job with a fancy title to boot. They were
the quiet and confident type with nothing that was nervy about them. I had
retired by then and did not have the opportunity to see the women at the table
react to this phenomenon but I can imagine their reaction. I can imagine them
express respect and appreciation for the supermoms. I even say they would have
wanted their daughters to grow up and be like that. But this is not what
happened in real life because the opposite is what did happen.
It happened that the daughters of the supermoms may have
grown to look confident but they did not grow up to be the quiet type. Instead,
they transformed themselves into the sex objects that their forerunners used to
frown upon. In fact, as soon as the little ones pass the age of puberty, they
make themselves look every bit like the sex playmates that make the boys their
age salivate. Not to tease them for long or seek to be chased by them, the
girls wear the T-shirts that openly advertise their readiness to be laid. To
them, liberation means the liberty to solicit sex and have it when they want
it, which they confess they enjoy as much as the boys. They consider this
attitude of theirs to be the expression of real equality between the sexes.
The question now asked by the parents is this: How did we
get here? To formulate a sense of what the answer might be, we need to go back
to the beginning of the women's movement. It started when the women of America
realized they were not being treated as equal. But so did the other minority
groups, a reality that gave the “white” women the opportunity to make common
cause with them, and to advocate a level playing field for all. But by the time
that a generation or two had passed, most of this history was forgotten.
The white women who won the fight began to identify more
readily with the white men that their forerunners had battled against and
defeated. Some of these women – mostly young and physically attractive ones –
turned against the colored and hyphenated men and women of America ; the
very people with whom their forerunners had allied themselves against the white
men they feared and loathed.
Currently, these women show no inhibition in flashing their
newly acquired identity which is unmistakably white. However, knowing that
their species is dwindling in America ,
and seeing the need to attract members from the other groups, they and their
male counterparts shy away from specifically identifying themselves as a racial
group. And so, to make their movement look genuine and sincere, they have
ascribed to themselves the political label of Conservative, the religious label
of Christian and a concocted label they call Judeo-Christian.
This done, they whipped up a political doctrine and an
agenda they admit are severely Conservative. But they say this was done
deliberately to counter the tendency of America to drift toward the
severely Liberal and European style Socialistic state that the country will
become if nothing is done to rescue it.
The healthcare law known as Obamacare being what these
people dislike the most, they made it the target they love to attack most
vociferously when discussing politics or economics or anything else. To this
end, you see the painted dolls – now wearing blonde wigs – pop up in the
studios of Fox News (their favorite network) to angrily discharge loads of
shrill insults; a ritual they perform all day long, day in and day out,
fifty-two weeks a year with no respite, no breather and no easing on the hate.
This is the sort of thing that the little girls begin to see
even before they reach the age of puberty. It is what confuses them about life;
what confuses them as to what is real and what is not. This is why they grow up
distrusting everything and rejecting anything that does not yield instant
satisfaction. And so they behave the way they do to immerse themselves in a
permanent state of a gratified existence.
One particular woman who goes by the name of Ann Coulter
causes me to wonder how the special woman at the table who commanded a rich
lexicon of four letter words would have reacted to her. I imagine that woman
sitting with a dozen people of both genders talking about Coulter and yelling
in dismay:
What's this c**t bitching about now?
Nicely said, sister, nicely said.