A famous Les McCann jazz riff goes: “Tryin’ to make it real — compared to what?” It’s a question that needs to be asked, early and often, of the women’s movement. The answer reveals the selfishness and misandry at feminism’s dark heart. Because the truth is, for every female pain there is an even worse one for males.
The movie Gone With The Wind begins with Scarlett O’Hara being laced into a corset in preparation for a cotillion. Let’s assume it’s a whalebone corset. Feminists insist that such undergarments constrained women physically and socially. That such contraptions also made women more attractive to men is omitted or downplayed. As is the considerable power Scarlett’s sexuality gave her, employed to get men to do her bidding…including dying.
In short, feminists tell half the story. They fail to note that Southern men, not women, fought and died in the Civil War. Nor do they admit that wives ran plantations when husbands heeded the call-to-arms (so much for women not being racists!). But worse, they neglect to say just how that whalebone corset came to be.
I doubt many Moby Dicks swam amongst the catfish in the Mississippi River. So how, exactly, was the bone obtained? Did Scarlett’s maid, Mammy, order some from LL Bean? Or did her father, when visiting New Orleans, walk to the end of a pier and whistle for some whales, like calling his hunting dogs?
Poor bodice-stuffed Scarlett suffered so. What male travail could ever compare?
Well…imagine you’re Ishmael, a male peer of Miss Scarlett. Only you live in New Bedford, Massachusetts. To maintain your patriarchal stranglehold over Ms. O’Hara, all you have to do is ship out on a whaling boat. That’s it. Then you can lord it over her and women worldwide while maintaining your sea-legs on constantly rolling flotation device.
Alas, there are a few flies in the patriarchal ointment. Instead of Antebellum juleps and Southern-fried chicken, you savor rancid water and hardtack-avec-weevils. You don’t get a nice warm shower and Internet connection at night, either. Instead, you sleep in a back-breaking hammock surrounded by snoring, farting, fetid males. No Mammy brings you buttermilk pancakes in the morning. In fact, there are no women on board at all, though you’re young and horny, ripped and ready.
And your days? Unlike Scarlett (who rides horses and pinches her cheeks to impress her oppressors), you get to climb 60-foot masts to endlessly furl and unfurl thick canvas sails. You are privileged to do this while the boat tosses and turns: in storms, at night, in bitter cold. When not doing such easy-peasy things, you haul anchors, scrub decks, pump bilge. All by hand. Labor-saving machines (created by other merely mortal males) have yet to be invented.
Plus you can be flogged for all sorts of infractions.
You also get to have fun rowing small boats. Not for exercise or pleasure, though; you have to catch, kill, and haul huge fish. Huge fish that can kill you.
You can also die slicing-and-dicing said whales, not to make sushi, but so landlubber Susie-the-Oppressed can read about evil men by lamplight at night. Oh, and you risk falling into rendering vats stoked by flames that can easily set the ship on fire.
The point is, feminists never compare the lives of women to their male peers. Nor do they provide context.
Take the right to vote. It’s a huge deal to feminists. Yet they routinely omit that throughout most of history no one voted. Kings rarely give a toss what serfs thought. Plus men only got universal suffrage in Great Britain when women did. Before then, only the moneyed/propertied folks voted. Even today, though, voting women don’t have to protect that right with their lives. Men must.
Feminists also complain that, until rather recently, women didn’t go to college in equal numbers. What they fail to say is that until the modern era, most people (male and female) didn’t go to college. Most humans were farmers or other subsistence-living beings. When colleges were created, only the wealthy could afford and attend them. Even so, travel was dangerous. There were few roads and not a few robbers. So how many women, realistically, would have ridden on horseback through dark forests to get an education? Meanwhile, today’s crop of courageous coeds yammer, on well-lit, manicured, police-patrolled campuses, that they feel “unsafe.”
Suppose women did get degrees back-in-the-day. What would they have done with them? Work for IBM in the 1600s? Recite Greek to cows while milking?
What do soldierettes do in today’s military compared to men? Mostly complain about being “sexually harassed” (which can, and does, mean everything under the sun…from being looked at to not being looked at). Does she meet the same requirements to join? No. Does she do the same jobs? No. Does she do the one thing all militaries do: close with the enemy? No. Yet despite all that inequality, feminists still brag (or is it “bray?”) that fierce, feisty, feminists do what men do, and better.
It’s like listening to a delusional Boy Scout brag about serving with Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Patton. You don’t have the heart to burst the bubble.
The difference, of course, is that Boy Scouts aren’t constantly on the march, attacking half the world with lies, delusions, and feminist claptrap.
Finally, when forced to admit they lie, feminists play the “women give birth” trump card. It’s meant to silence further comparisons. Yet what does it mean, really?
Women no more “give” birth than they give themselves heartbeats. Unless actively stopped by abortion, birthing continues as an autonomic process. It requires no will, just like breathing and moving bowels. So basically NOW wants international kudos for women who…poop.
As for it being a skill, females have birthed while brain-dead (some would say that’s always the case!). And all mammals, including mice, reproduce. So are we to celebrate wimmin for doing what cows and rats do?
Plus, absent the “magic beans” testes provide, a uterus could be considered (were we to be as mean-spirited as feminists) a barren field.
Now, regarding the dangers of birthing: millions of women reproduce with no problems at all. And men have done much to make bearing children safe and painless. As for the “labor” itself, try suffering from prostate cancer; or being gut-shot during battle; or having an arm ripped-off in a factory.
So enough mewling for undeserved uterine accolades! While I’m sure birthing (“pooping a pumpkin”) is not always a picnic, it’s far less painful than many things men regularly endure. And endure silently. It just seems more horrific because women are allowed to air their suffering while men are not. In fact, women are often the biggest suppressors of male emotional expression. Why? Because it benefits their half of the world (the one supposedly kinder, gentler, and more intuitive). It makes it seem like only women suffer. But just like you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, you shouldn’t assess the degree of pain by the shrillness of shrieks.
The next time feminists lie (which is nearly every time they speak/write) about female suffering, ask them and yourself what comparable things males suffered. It will keep things real when you ask, “Compared to what?”
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzvlivbptXk
Listen to the lyrics. They begin about 2 minutes into the music.
