"The Women's Movement; The Spoils of Victory"

                                                                   

There's no use arguing about the women's movement that began in the 60's. Women won. I was prompted to think about it after reading a report this week that said more American women are being hired and employed than men these days, and despite what many charge, are making more in salary and benefits than ever before.

And, when one looks at the overall picture, greater than all the material and societal gains, women today command the high ground in every societal flareup that arises today.

For example, one reads a lot about spousal abuse. And, whenever that nasty subject comes up, one's first thought is about battered women. And yet, I was amazed to learn recently that men make up a healthy 40 percent of spousal abuse victims! Who knew?

Thanks to gender equality legislation women, by statute, enjoy preferential quotas for employment. Thanks to Title IX women's collegiate sports are entitled to the profits from football...to subsidize women's collegiate sports that mask none. Thanks to Roe vs Wade women are entitled to abort half a million children every year, essentially using abortion as a form of birth control when a liberated sexual lifestyle goes a bit awry.

Women are now free to practice a liberated sexual lifestyle, in or out of marriage, and charge off their mistakes at an abortion clinic or in the divorce courts.....or simply breed any number of fatherless children and fund their upbringing with other people's tax dollars.

And women have exercised an expanded "right to free speech" these days...now free to call other women "whores and sluts", equally with the men.

In the last forty years of my planetary residence I've been sneered at for opening doors for women and I've been reprimand on several occasions for ascribing to the notion of putting the women I love on a pedestal.

I guess I'm like that Japanese soldier who was found in 1974, wandering around the jungle wilds of the Philippines, having failed to surrender in 1945. He didn't give up until receiving a mandate from the Emperor.

I don't need a royal mandate to affect my surrender...but it does come with a sense of sadness about the aftermath of the American woman's victory. I would have wished for a finer product...a finer female victor than the one who has earned...and practices..the art of vulgarity equal to the worst of man.

Let me confess now. I am a dinosaur in the era of the "free woman". I miss putting them up their on a pedestal. I lived in a time when women made men better human beings. And they achieved that wondrous thing by making us want to be better. A man who truly loves a woman always wants the "white knighthood"...the fellow who swims the moat, rappels from the castle walls, and rescues the damsel.

And I contend that, at least in America at the mid-point of the last century, women were always "in charge". Oh sure, they made us feel like we were...but every woman I knew and loved, in the end pretty much got what they wanted. Were there exceptions? Of course there were, just as there are exceptions today.

But I loved those women, born in the last century. They were rounded and softer than males. Those women did not strive for biceps (or "guns"), they did not aspire to stick figure physiques, and they did not use the vulgarity that so many women feel free to express today. Those women were stronger than women today; they were strong enough to raise their kids with good manners and good morals, they were strong enough to keep families together, and they were smart enough to do that with feminine guile that is totally lost today.

It seems to me that so many women today suffer from a schizophrenia; they want their men to be swashbuckling pirates in bed, have six pack abs, prepare gourmet meals in the kitchen, do the laundry and fold their "dainties" just right....and mow the lawn, plumb the sink, change a tire, and do all the "guy things"..or else!

I'm all for women aspiring to rewarding careers. And I'm all for the abolishment of practices where women were assigned narrowly defined roles in society. And I don't believe any American men would opt for the horrible sexual castes of China, or India. But I do long for those women we once put up there on pedestals, and, in loving them, catching them whenever they fell...and put them back up there where we felt they belonged.

Maybe the sexual revolution is not over. Maybe the female evolution is not yet over. I don't know what women will be like in 2070 but I can't believe today's woman is totally happy with the spoils of her victory.