Intemperate Overblown Rant No. 2

In which Miss Josephine Asher expresses her wish for a simpler time.

I am going to come right out and say it: Josephine Asher is RIGHT.

Yes, the pursuit for gender equality IS sucking the life out of relationships.

Just the other day, I was about to go out hunting, when my wife said, "Don't forget to vacuum", and I was reduced to a blubbering wreck. "Stop sucking the life out of our relationship!" I screamed, putting down my crossbow and going for a good lie-down.

It seems these days that all I ever do is wear aprons, push trolleys, do my own ironing. It's so humiliating for a man like me, who has such masculine potential if only he were allowed to express it instead of being constantly forced to do the washing up and arrange flowers attractively in vases. Like Josephine's friend "Dave", I feel like I have surrendered my balls. Surrendered them to a vast and evil army, made up of feminism allied with housework and armed with sharp, pointy equality-spears that are stabbing me right in the balls, except they're not because I surrendered them, so they are stabbing me right in my smooth, sexless groin.

Are you happy, feminism? Happy you have reduced me to a Ken Doll with an open wound? Me and "Dave" both?

To be blunt, feminisn:



Thanks to feminism I have failed to master basic masculine skills, which has caused a catastrophic decline in my self-esteem. Thank God I found out. For years I felt bad because I couldn't change a tyre or put up a shelf or kill a jaguar with my bare hands. I thought it was a failing in myself. Only now do I see: it was FEMINISM all along. Those accursed harpies insisting on equal status just drove the usefulness right out of me, and now I am good for nothing save baking scones and braiding hair.

Why, Feminism? Why do you insist on making me less of a man? Why can't it be like it was in the old days, when men were men and women were women and everyone was happy with that, and if they weren't they took powerful anti-depressants and repressed their feelings in a healthy and socially lubricative way, and there were never any arguments over who was going to go out and earn a living at the steelworks or merchant bank and who was going to stay home tending to the children and honey-glazing a ham? Don't we all yearn for those days? I know I do.

Just think of how it makes us feel, when we see a woman, say, build a house, or fire a gun, or drive a car or wear long pants. It makes us feel small. It makes us feel insignificant. It make us feel weak and effeminate. Let's not beat around the bush here: every time a woman picks up a briefcase, a man's penis turns to dust.

I yearn for a time when I wasn't surrounded by independent women. When the females in my circle were not constantly giving me migraines with their carping insistences on having "lives". When relationships were based, as David Deida points out, on "sexual polarity" and we weren't all mixed up and confused by all this sexual equality. Why can't I have a "ravishee", dammit? It's been so long since I felt like a ravisher, like a powerful, confident man making love to a reluctant woman who wasn't really into it. And isn't that what every man wants, in the end?

I'm so grateful to Miss Asher for saying what we were all thinking: independent women abandon their femininity. And what we want are truly feminine women. There is no greater turn-off than a woman who, instead of making herself pretty for you, spends all her time having opinions. What's feminine about that? What's the point of a woman who you can have an intelligent conversation with, if her demented pursuit of equality has caused her to get all mannish on you? What's sexy about a woman who challenges you, who engages you, whose company you enjoy? Why would any man want a woman whose personality delights him? Why would any man want a woman with a personality at all? When did "personality" become so important?

And yet feminism has conned us into thinking we could be happy with this arrangement; that we could be happy with women gadding about the place "independently".

Today it seems the only way you can form a relationship with a woman is by treating her as an actual human being, and frankly, we're not wired for that, ladies. Men are not designed for equal partnerships. We are not predisposed towards mutual respect. We are not genetically structured so as to be capable of acting in a remotely decent manner towards fellow human beings of the opposite sex. When you try to force us to do it, society breaks down, as it is doing right now. Men are reduced to poor, ghostly imitations, hollowly doing household chores and contributing towards the maintenance of the home and family until eventually, they grow vaginas. And all because feminism objected to the ways of life that had served us for so many years, where the man earned the money and protected the family, and the woman took care of home life and didn't get too lippy unless she wanted a black eye.

Not that I advocating violence towards women, obviously. It's just that back in humanity's halcyon days, women were much happier because they didn't have all the pressure of careers and thinking and stuff, and so they were able to take the occasional backhander in good humour. After all, we want men to be manly, don't we? I mean, hitting people is part of what makes a man a man. When did we lose sight of this? Thanks to feminism, I hardly ever get to hit people these days. It's no wonder I've started lactating.

The point is this: we had a good thing going, men and women. Men made the money, fought the wars, ran the governments, owned the businesses, wrote the books, participated in the sporting events, taught the university courses, cured the diseases, built the buildings, explored the world, planned the cities, and massacred the natives; and women baked cakes and provided sexual release. And that worked VERY well. Look at the pyramids. Could they have been built in a world with maternity leave? Don't make me laugh.

So please, let's all take a leaf out of Josephine Asher's book. Men, reassert your dominance. Women, reassert your submissiveness. If we all work together in a spirit of togetherness I am sure we can build a world where nobody will ever have to work together in a spirit of togetherness again.

Then, maybe, we can get that uppity bint Asher to stop writing and get back in the goddamn kitchen where she belongs.

Yes, WHY?

I have made my debut on The Punch, with my Twitter piece.

The commenters are already out in force, with the usual nice mix of applause and duhhhhh.

My favourite example, from "Colin Campbell"

"why did you spend seven hours on something you hate?"

Colin is SO onto me. Why DID I do that? It's a completely absurd thing to do! It's just stupid! It's like some ridiculous JOKE!

Hee.

Y Bother?

Generation Y: shiftless layabouts or worthless nonentities? A vexed issue, indeed. Perhaps some light can be shed by Sarah Ayoub, who writes an insightful piece on Generation Y, in which she lambasts Employment Minister Mark Arbib for his comments on today's youth, which she then goes on to completely agree with. Canny, Ayoub, very canny. "Disgusting, the way these arrogant politicians are in total accord with my own views".

Or, for an even more irresponsible and bizarre response to Arbib, why not check out my own latest at New Matilda?

Seriously, why NOT?

The Blind Leading the Flamboyantly Drug-addled

In a stunning development, Australian television viewers have been forced to process the disturbing revelation that apparently blind people are not naturally suited to ballroom dancing.

After Dancing With The Stars judge and well-known pants-removal enthusiast Todd McKenney cruelly pointed this out, blind Paralympian and adventurer Gerrard Gosens protested, enlisting the Herald Sun in his public campaign to have people with disabilities treated differently to everyone else. A fighting fund has now been set up to provide support for Gosens in his efforts to be judged by lower standards and be rewarded for inferior performance at every opportunity.

McKenney's "tactless attack" (sic) was one of the most flagrant examples of an arrogant celebrity shamelessly telling the obvious truth that has been seen in this country since Paul Keating famously told John Hewson that he looked "a bit like a sad horse".

Fans of the show have reacted angrily to McKenney's outburst, questioning the judgment of a man who, hired for the purpose of assessing the dancing talent of others, has the temerity to tell someone he's a bad dancer for no other reason than the fact he is very very bad at dancing. The fans have complained that Gosens was "humiliated", an outcome that surely nobody could have seen coming when a commercial television network put a blind man on a celebrity dancing show.

"Oops!" cried Channel Seven executives. "The blind man has been humiliated and made into a sort of horribly compelling freak show! How tragically removed from our original intentions this development is! Woe is us!"

In The Punch, Tory Maguire, taking a break from her usual occupation of informing us on how Telstra is improving all our lives, one completely unjustified fee at a time, has written what I thought was a reasonably sensical piece on this burning issue.

So, what have we learnt?

1. Gerard Gosens cannot dance

2. There is no need to publicly point this out just because he chose to enter a nationally broadcast dancing competition

3. Todd McKenney is a complete bastard

4. Tory Maguire is a more palatable read as a defender of brutally honest reality TV judges than as a morally repellent corporate apologist.

5. Dancing With The Stars is a microcosm of society in ways that we cannot even imagine and are unlikely to try.