HUMANS CONTINUE TO DISAPPOINT ME

I read a blog post. I will not link to it here; its author does not deserve the recognition or the free advertising, but it was about the inherent falseness of the idea of female self-esteem. Apparently, women should have absolutely no good feelings about themselves beyond the bare minimum needed to “prevent them committing suicide” (interesting, it’s never been my self-esteem but rather my awareness of reality that makes me want to reach for the pills). He says self-esteem should be earned through accomplishment – a sentiment (the only one in the entire article) with which I can wholeheartedly agree. What is so truly baffling, though, is that he follows this statement with the automatic assumption that women do not or cannot accomplish anything worthy of respect or merit.

The author then delivers an underhanded remark about women “barely squeaking through” colleges with low admission standards and earning their “masters in puppetry”. Hardly. It was at this point that I stopped reading; the gentleman (and I use the term verrrry loosely) was clearly no longer presenting an argument but merely baiting female readers in the hopes that one would reply and he could call her a rabid lesbian or something of that nature. (Hmm, maybe that should be the title of this blog – Rabid Lesbian: I Will Bite You In The Leg. Well, it’s a working title).

Of course he was American; he was possessed of the incredible hubris that only the young white American heterosexual male can really pull off. He encompasses an enormous part of what I find distasteful about Americans (and I generalize, of course; I refer mostly to those who embrace the American ethos, not specifically its geographical inhabitants) and what I find distasteful about men’s rights activitists the world over. The rhetoric is always the same and perpetually ignores the fact that there is no evidence other than mere cultural construction that women are inherently inferior to men. Different, yes, but inferior, not in the slightest. I am not so much angered as I am saddened, to see how “education” and “enlightenment” are shaking out in the global West. Not well, it seems; perhaps the author would have been better off getting his masters of puppetry instead.