“Women aren’t women anymore. To say gender relations have changed dramatically is an understatement. Ever since the sexual revolution, there has been a profound overhaul in the way men and women interact. Men haven’t changed much – they had no revolution that demanded it – but women have changed dramatically. In a nutshell, women are angry. They’re also defensive, though often unknowingly.” She writes.
What Venker refuses to grasp amidst all of her “research” is that the anger and defensiveness she chastises women for, is frustration and wariness at having to constantly be on alert to ward off the belligerent barrage of attacks on our civil rights and agency. Lest she, and that subculture of men whose chauvinism she insists on affirming, forget, this election year was filled with Welfare Queen Tropes about Black women, pro-rape rhetoric, anti-reproductive rights agendas, and an attempt to footnote us in a narrow binder of foolery; not to mention that this current cult of personality seems to relish upholding abuse culture and physical aggression towards women and young girls. Then there are those of us who're derided and made to feel less than, because we've opted not to choose motherhood and/or marriage as a path towards fulfillment.
The politics of respectability that Venker defers to dictates: women need to know their place and if we would just step in line, stop being successful, “act like ladies” and be the docile lambs we’ve been designated to be and allow men to have agency over very beings, they won’t be so angry at us or resort to
“Contrary to what feminists like Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, say, the so-called rise of women has not threatened men. It has pissed them off. It has also undermined their ability to become self-sufficient in the hopes of someday supporting a family. Men want to love women, not compete with them. They want to provide for and protect their families – it’s in their DNA. But modern women won’t let them. It’s all so unfortunate – for women, not men.“
“[…]So if men today are slackers, and if they’re retreating from marriage en masse, women should look in the mirror and ask themselves what role they’ve played to bring about this transformation. Fortunately, there is good news: women have the power to turn everything around. All they have to do is surrender to their nature – their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs.”
I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that Suzanne Venker wrote this piece from the perspective of a White woman with privilege, so not only does she try to reinforce the illusory big, bad, man-destroying feminazi, she also doesn’t take intersectionality into account, since she also posited: “... [W]omen pushed men off their pedestal (women had their own pedestal, but feminists convinced them otherwise) and climbed up to take what they were taught to believe was rightfully theirs."
As a single Black woman on a tireless quest for respect and recognition of my humanity, I don’t recall ever being at the head of the line to be placed on the proverbial pedestal.
For all of Suzanne Venker’s coddling of those men who undoubtedly couldn't care less about my place on the social hierarchy, yet expect me to permit them the right to continue marginalizing me, I’ll show up at a quarter past never for that whine and cheese party and stay righteously indignant towards attempts to silence my voice. I'll continue to take advantage of opportunities that a mostly patriarchal and racist system would rather I not have. Playing the mule in an age where I don’t (legally) have to, has never been an aspiration of mine.
No comments
Post a Comment