Mommy's boys?

Feminists are mad because, as usual, they're wrong.

Posted January 14, 2005 5:00AM PST

In The Cave Girl, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan, a rich but weak young man is castaway on a lost land populated by prehistoric critters and varmints, where he is rescued from a certain and grizzly death by a primitive hottie in scanty garb. This prehistoric babe lets the wimp die to be reborn a man.

My grandfather had a first edition of The Cave Girl in his collection, which also included first editions of The Moon Maid and A Princess of Mars. In my grandparents' house, I found a world that made sense in their books.

Safe from the prejudice, violence and unpredictability of progressive white liberals in the Seattle suburb of Normandy Park, where, as in most of urban America, they love dead Indians but despise the living remnants, I immersed myself in Burrough's tales of powerful women and the men they empowered.

From these, I graduated to Edward E. Smith's Lensman Series, starting with Triplanetary. The entire genre of space opera—from Star Trek to Star Wars, Babylon 5 to Dune—began with the Lensman series, which matched powerful men with powerful women, who, together, faced daunting challenges to create communities where morality was respected, and tradition danced in careful tension with progress.

This is evident in Robert Heinlein's books, too, especially Time Enough for Love, my favorite, which spans some two thousand years.

In the space opera genre, which captivates the imagination of millions of women and men, one of the most common images is of women and men, intelligent and strong, standing shoulder‑to‑shoulder. Few subordinate one to the other. Which is why I always laugh at sweeping misandristic generalizations, such as Maureen Dowd's recent rant against men:

Women in staff support are the new sirens because, as a guy I know put it, they look upon the men they work for as "the moon, the sun and the stars." It's all about orbiting, serving and salaaming their Sun Gods. — Men Just Want Mommy, by Maureen Dowd, New York Times, January 13, 2005

Dowd cites studies to demonstrate the dilemma: a University of Michigan study concludes that men are more likely to marry subordinates than supervisors, while a study "by researchers at four British universities" reported that a higher IQ improves marriage prospects for men but lowers them for women.

Men are weak of ego and eager to control their role in the reproductive process, while women, being more egalitarian, find love where their heart looks, regardless of the station or status of the man:

The hypothesis," Dr. (Stephanie) Brown said, "is that there are evolutionary pressures on males to take steps to minimize the risk of raising offspring that are not their own." Women, by contrast, did not show a marked difference in their attraction to men who might work above or below them. — Men Just Want Mommy, by Maureen Dowd, New York Times, January 13, 2005

The problem is that men are too shallow. Yes, as usual, we are to blame:

Women want to be in a relationship with guys they can seriously talk to—unfortunately, a lot of those guys want to be in relationships with women they don't have to talk to. — Men Just Want Mommy, by Maureen Dowd, New York Times, January 13, 2005

That's a laugh. Some women want relationships in which they can engage in serious conversations. But too many just want someone they can talk at. And that's what sexist sows ignore, the role women play in all this. It's not about shallow men and deep but despairing women. It's about human nature.

As most men know, the quickest way to separate a woman from her panties is flash and cash. Whether that woman is a tycoon or a trollop, a man's status, relative to the woman's, matters most…most of the time.

What most women also know, is that the quickest way to gain a man's attention and separate him from said cash and flash, is to be doe‑eyed, pretty, a little bit slutty, and very attentive.

There are studies to back this up. Author and lecturer Warren Farrell has cited many of these, in such books as Why Men Are the Way They Are and The Myth of Male Power. But from common experience, most men and women know these things to be true.

Which is why feminists are mad. Like Marx's utopian nonsense, their fantasies are idealistic and wrong. So they bitterly rail against reality, and, with well‑paid professional whiners like Dowd, find ways to blame it all on men.