Will The Real Sexists Please Stand Up?
Some perspective on society’s unfair sexist attitudes against women…
The ACLU, NOW, and other civil rights activists and organizations, speak loud and clear in defense of the oppressed. Why is it, then, that they don’t step up to the plate to defend men wrongly accused of rape? Divorced men who are denied child visitation rights without just cause? Men whose female partners abort their unborn children without their consent? Why is that, I wonder?
Why is it, that in the age of equal rights, 18-year-old men are required to register for the draft, but women are not?
We hear a lot about advances in breast cancer care and research. News programs focus on the issue all the time, making recommendations to women, and expressing the need for more funding in this area. When is the last time you saw such a story about prostate cancer? Is that not as important? Men have a significantly lower life-expectancy than women. Is there any research being done to determine why? I wonder what attention that issue would get if women were the ones with the shorter life expectancy.
Three years ago, CBS News did a story about falsely accused deadbeat dads in Los Angeles. These people were wrongly accused through mistaken identity, and they proved with DNA tests that they were not the fathers. Some were accused, not by the mothers, but by the city of Los Angeles simply because their name happened to match the name of a legitimate deadbeat dad. Yet they were forced to pay child support, because they didn’t have the resources to prove their innocence within 30 days of the accusation. That’s the law. Did any civil rights groups step up for these wrongly accused men? Nope. Imagine NOW and the ACLU if a story broke about women forced to pay child care for children that weren’t theirs.
Well, certainly there is blatant sexism against women in the workplace. To help resolve that, NOW recently tried to claim a portion of the 9/11 charity proceeds to research the reasons why women are underrepresented in the fields of law enforcement and fire fighting. Even putting aside the extreme inappropriateness of this request (actually, demand, because they threatened the city of New York with a lawsuit), I have a question: Are they researching other fields where women are statistically underrepresented, such as garbage collection, coal mining, and ditch digging? We really should stop denying women these jobs, sexists that we are..
You know what’s funny? According to network television, and the women who watch it, crude jokes about men are. NBC’s Katie Couric once asked a jilted bride if she “considered castration as an option?” ABC’s Meredith Vieira asked baseball player Mike Piazza “who has the biggest wood on the team?” and “Who’s your favorite player to pat on the behind?” Harmless fun, perhaps? Well, imagine NOW’s reaction to a male reporter making similar inquires about women and their body parts. Ah, I’m sure they’d have a sense of humor about it.
Man, it sure feels good to be a… man. |
