Thursday, November 06, 2008

Echidne The Career Advisor Auntie (Viewer Advisory: Ranting)



Here comes your pretty lead parachute for your career (not pink, not blue, not golden: lead): Become a writer who advocates for women's rights! It's a wonderful life, full of interesting debates and battles and you can piss off your nearest and dearest without any effort. You will stay in excellent mental shape, because your enemies are always looking for a way to take you down.

And those enemies abound. Let me count the groups:

1. Misogynists. Self-explanatory.
2. Religious fundamentalists. Self-explanatory.
3. The male-dominance-is-natural-and-impossible-to-change crowd among evolutionary psychologists.
4. Men who like women the way I like spaghetti with pesto. I don't want the pesto to get up and demand a plate and a fork, either.
5. Women who like men who like women the way I like spaghetti with pesto.
6. Men and women who are oblivious to the anti-woman aspects of our society and who don't want to be made to see it.
7. Men and women who benefit from the anti-woman aspects of our society.
8. People in the feminist movement who don't find you adequately feminist.
9. People in the feminist movement who find you feminist in the wrong way.
10. People in the feminist movement who find you far too feminist, thus ignoring the awful lot of male human beings.
11. The Independent Women's Forum gals.
12. Guys who want to talk about tits and cunts and to tell sexist jokes without getting told off by a prissy feminist. (Why is PMS the name of the premenstrual tension syndrome? Because mad cow disease was already taken.)
13. Almost anyone you pester by bringing up unimportant and stupid special interest topics about women when the Whole World Is Collapsing. Also anyone you appear to be blaming for the lot of women in this world. Anyone you give feelings of guilt.


Now isn't that list great fun? You get to debate them all! AND you get the honorary title of a Man-Hater.

What about the money, some of you might wonder. Don't you at least get rich doing all that work?

Well, at least I got a good belly laugh from that last question.