← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Walter Yannis
Thread ID: 16852 | Posts: 3 | Started: 2005-02-20
2005-02-20 08:28 | User Profile
More bitter feminist bile from my favourite girl, Maureen Dowd!
She's really ticked off about life, my Maureen. The immutability of sex roles as (Nature inevitably trumps Nurture) just galls her. She won't accept that "girls will be girls, and boys will be boys."
How did she such a naive little waif get to be a featured columnist in the newspaper of record?
Walter
[URL=http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/opinion/20dowd.html?th]New York Times[/URL]
Where's the Road Beef? By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 20, 2005
There have been a lot of gaffes about women lately.
And as Michael Kinsley trenchantly observed, a gaffe occurs not when somebody lies, but when he says what he really thinks.
We got a brutal glimpse into the thinking of a certain segment of the male species reading the transcript of the condescending musings of Harvard's president, Lawrence Summers, on the "intrinsic aptitude" and "variability of aptitude" of women.
Whatever point he was trying to make, he ended up making this one: It's not female aptitude that's the problem, it's male attitude. He confuses the roles society assigns to women with what women might really want. The "different socialization" Dr. Summers talks about may be getting worse, thanks to goofballs like him. How did he get to be head of Harvard anyway?
We also got a scalding peek into the locker room mentality in Jose Canseco's new book, "Juiced." In a segment called "Slump Busters," Mr. Canseco writes: "As everyone knows, baseball players are very superstitious. Players who are struggling start talking about how they need to go out and find something to break their slump. And often enough it comes out something like this: 'Oh my God, I'm 0-for-20. I'm going to get the ugliest girl I can find and have sex with her.' "
Mr. Canseco nobly points out that he never stooped to this tactic. "I'd rather go 0-for-40," he protests. But he tattled that many of his fellow athletes did seek out "slump busters." What a lovely term used by our sports heroes, our boys of summer.
"It could mean the woman was big, or ugly, or a combination of both," Mr. Canseco explains. He said that golden boy Mark Grace, the former Chicago Cubs first baseman, who seems like the kind of nice guy and good sport you'd want to bring home to mom, defined a slump buster as making out with the "fattest, gnarliest chick you can uncover."
Mr. Grace has talked about slump busters himself in interviews over the years, telling the sports radio talk show host Jim Rome that if a team was enduring a losing streak, the guys would persuade one player to break the curse by going out and rounding the bases with an ugly woman. Mr. Grace called it "throwing himself on the grenade" for the good of the team.
Mr. Canseco agreed: "However you slice it, it was bound to be unpleasant."
With steroid-infused sensitivity, the former Oakland A's slugger also explained a couple of other words in the baseball argot: Any girl you met on the road and went to bed with was referred to as "road beef," and any "road beef" you flew in was known as an "import."
Even some men I know felt awful for the unwitting slump busters who would now read "Juiced" and realize that the best night of their lives was actually the worst. That really cute baseball player they thought liked them just the way they are, as Bridget Jones likes to say, was really holding his nose to break a curse. Way harsh.
At the dawn of feminism, there was an assumption that women would not be as severely judged on their looks in ensuing years. Phooey. It's just the opposite. Looks matter more than ever, with more and more women spending fortunes turning themselves into generic, plastic versions of what they think men want, reaching for eerily similar plumped-up faces and body shapes.
Pretty soon, we'll be back to the era when flight attendants - or should I say stewardesses? - are canned if they gain a few pounds. The New York Post reported that the Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa in Atlantic City would start weighing all its waitresses, and "Borgata Babes" "who gain more than 7 percent will lose their jobs unless they lose the weight."
Consider this gender differentiation: A gorgeous, fit guy who sleeps with an overweight, unattractive woman is "throwing himself on a grenade" for the team. A gorgeous, fit girl who sleeps with an overweight, unattractive man is lucky to have found romance in "Sideways" and "Hitch."
In Neil LaBute's play "Fat Pig," Jeremy Piven's character drops an overweight woman he likes - even after she offers to staple her stomach for him - simply because he can't bear his friends' mockery. TV is full of "Beauty and the Beast" pairings, with fat, lazy husbands and foxy, impressive wives.
One thing is for sure, though. Guys who look at fat women as "slump busters" are fatheads.
2005-02-20 14:25 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]
How did she such a naive little waif get to be a featured columnist in the newspaper of record?
[/QUOTE]
At one time, Dowd was a contributing writer for [B]GQ[/B] , which always seemed to love exploiting female writers like her to appeal to pussie-whipped men.
Like her previous rant, "Men Only Want Mommy" (paraphrasing), which was discussed here a while back, Dowd cannot adapt to post-millenial female life. The brooding kuhnts on "Law And Order" have given way to the [I]desperate[/I] housewife. Maureen, girl, go wallow in self-pity and self-misery with Naomi Wolf ("The Beauty Myth").
2005-02-20 15:00 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Robbie]At one time, Dowd was a contributing writer for [B]GQ[/B] , which always seemed to love exploiting female writers like her to appeal to pussie-whipped men.
Like her previous rant, "Men Only Want Mommy" (paraphrasing), which was discussed here a while back, Dowd cannot adapt to post-millenial female life. The brooding kuhnts on "Law And Order" have given way to the [I]desperate[/I] housewife. Maureen, girl, go wallow in self-pity and self-misery with Naomi Wolf ("The Beauty Myth").[/QUOTE]
My girl Maureen really needed a healthy white man with a job and a bunch of kids.
It's too late for her to get those things that the Creator designed her to want down to the atoms of her cells, and she knows it's too late. She traded in the things she really wanted for a bunch of empty Jewish promises.
And she's bitter about it, but not (yet) honest enough to admit it.