July 18, 2014
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Feminists aren”t good for women anymore. They”re not about empowering. They”re about being catty. When HBO picked up the show Girls, feminists bitched about the privileged kids who got the show and said it was racist to boot. When Tina Fey became one of the most successful women in television comedy, they dug up ugly pictures of her. They complain about the word “pussy” being an insult. So? It’s a word used to insult a man. Men don”t want to be something beautiful and soft that you want to put in your mouth. Should a vagina be something men aspire to be? Is that equality?
For every anecdote about a woman suffering adversity, I can see with my own eyes the preferential treatment that balances it out. I dabble in stand-up comedy and have seen female comedian after female comedian rocket past males because the demand is so strong. Women tend to be less funny than men and I suspect it’s because, as John Cleese put it, “Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.” However, based on the assumption that women must be equally represented in every field, writers” rooms, television shows, and comedy clubs are desperately clamoring for funny chicks.
I”ve seen this happen in TV news too. If you”re an attractive woman, you will get a paying position in a quarter of the time a man will. Men who want to discuss politics on TV are a dime a dozen. Pretty women who do are very rare. The funny part about this one is, I agree with it. I”ve seen women hired past me often in TV news and each time I think, “I”d rather look at her say the news too.”
Film is another area where you see women treated like gifts from God. Directing is tough work because you need to understand the technical aspects of filming while simultaneously wrangling dozens of people to do very specific tasks. If an actor is screwing up, you have to whip him into shape or fire him. Men tend to gravitate to this position more often than women. What’s wrong with that? Everything, apparently. There is a huge push in film to get more female directors. A film student at NYU told me they have a 25% female quota for their department, but because so many fewer women apply, the women who get in tend to be way less qualified than the men. After they graduate, they can attend a program such as The Director’s Lab where Sundance puts a female director in residence for months and works with her for hundreds of hours helping her hone her craft. If she writes a shitty script, they will workshop it, have actors read it aloud, and eventually get it to a place where it could win at, say, Sundance.
The work world may have once been like that Dolly Parton movie 9 to 5, but today everyone tiptoes around women for fear of a sexual harassment suit. I”ve been sued for making a joke twice, been sent to sensitivity training twice, and am currently on a type of Double Secret Probation at one of my jobs for telling a rude joke. I have never hit on a woman at work, ever. Come to think of it, after three decades in the workforce, I have never seen a woman persecuted, objectified, or denied a position because of her gender. Businesses are too dependent on profits to deny themselves qualified personnel based on a hang-up. Prejudice is cost-prohibitive.
When I started my first company back in the early 1990s, I saw lots of unattractive 40-something women in marketing with a lot of money at their disposal and a lot of younger men they wanted to sleep with. I met guys in design who openly told us the only way to get record label contracts is to sleep with the marketing women (I also believe these same guys coined the term “cougar”). We tried it and it worked. I”ll never forget our top salesman’s response when asked how our company got so much business. “We ate our way to the top,” he said.
I”m not saying men are oppressed or our existence is in danger. I”m not saying we can”t survive this caterwauling and the false allegations. I”m saying it’s become annoying and now they”re not just getting on men’s nerves. They”re getting on women’s nerves too.
