The Anti-Feminist Movement is Derogatory…to Men.
Long gone are the days where one can tell a woman to get to ‘get back into the kitchen and pop out some kids’ is considered acceptable for a serious conversation, although still widely acceptable in the ‘joke’ form. So those who are opposed to any type of women’s liberation movement must be much sneakier when condemning those females who happen to have an occupation or *gasp* kids and a career.
They have to now go through the tedious task of wrapping up their their stereotypes in pseudo-science. This is what Dennis Prager tries to do in his article Why Are So Many Women Depressed? Part 1.
Prager starts off by stating:
It is widely reported that women suffer depression at twice the rate of men.
Widely reported but please don’t ask me to state an actual source. I’ll do his work for him. How about “Depression and gender: An international review by Culbertson, F. American Psychologist, 52 (1997)” However the real answer is he doesn’t actually want to research these things otherwise he’ll run into pesky contradictions.
See his whole point is that women are unhappy because they been told they can achieve both a family and a career, which is simply too much to handle. This of course is feminism’s fault. We get to watch him squirm as he tries to come to an absurd conclusion that he isn’t calling feminism bad but women can’t live happily in a feminist world because feminism is a great big lie. Follow?
Now if he actually did research he would have to point out that Jewish men have the same rates of depression as women (American Journal of Psychiatry, 154 [1997] 941-947). He also might have to mention that rates of depression are not just increasing among females, they are also increasing across the board for people of Native descent and among homosexual youth (American Psychologist, 48 [1993] 155-168).
Hmm, women, Jews, Natives, and homosexuals, all groups that have been oppressed by the Conservative Christian Male. Well, we wouldn’t want that little connection to be made would we.
So why is this offensive to men? Well first of all Jewish men are men… go figure. And approximately fifty percent of both Natives and homosexuals are also men. Of course all of these groups could be experiencing higher depression rates for different reasons, that does not however change the fact that these groups clearly show that high rates of depression are not simply a ‘women’s problem.’ To say so dismisses the issue of higher depression rates that these communities face.
Secondly some of the comments Prager makes are just so incredibly offensive to any man that have worked to build both a career and a happy home. Such as…
Most men will work their tails off outside the home, but won’t inside the home.
See, it’s simple; men are just lazy sons of bitches. They don’t care enough about their home to work at it.
Men’s very identity is predicated on their answer to the question, “What do you do?”
As a job that is. Loving father? Fuck you, nobody cares. I also don’t care if you enjoy watching the game on Saturday night or a nice round of golf. You’re not a personality, you’re a job description.
It’s completely unrealistic. Need proof? Just walk through any random cemetery. It’s amazing how basically none of the gravestones say anything about occupation. ‘Beloved Bank Teller of 45 Years’ ‘Loving Junior Executive at Top Advertising Firm.’
You can’t say women are at fault anymore, so now it’s OK to say that the expectations are just far too great. You can’t have both a career and a happy family, to try is to fail and to be unhappy. To say that is a slap in the face of every man who has worked hard at both their careers and their families, especially the single fathers out there.
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