Conservatives are tending that way, these days, out in the open. That many of them have always been sexists inside their private minds goes without saying. Tboggs noted an interesting Townhall column on this coming-out of sexists and the logical fallacy its author, one Mary Grabar, fell into. She begins like this:
After watching The View and following the inane statements made on the program, I've come to the conclusion that it really is true what Aristotle, Saint Paul, and John Milton said: Women, without male guidance, are illogical, frivolous, and incapable of making any decisions beyond what to make for dinner.
Right-o. As Tboggs noted, this would be the time to stop reading Grabar's column, given that she is a woman. Unless there is a Mr. Grabar somewhere in the background pulling her strings, of course.
The problem for the women who have drunk patriarchy's KoolAid has always been the schizophrenia of looking down on all women yet being one of that despised species. How to solve this dilemma? The obvious solution is to ask for an exemption: Though women are headless hens cackling away and good-for-nothing but taking care of children (funnily enough, the Most Important Job in other conservative contexts, yet something that can be trusted to cackling hens), the woman stating these opinions is NOT a cackling hen. In fact, she is not a woman at all, but a miniature version of the Calm and Always Logical Great Man:
I admit I'm not a typical woman.
When I was a graduate student, for $50, I participated in the Psychology Department's study and took the Myers-Briggs personality test and came up, not surprisingly, as an INTP. My type is the absent-minded professor, which I learned was very rare among women.
And will this let you use the men's public toilets, hm?
Sigh. Grabar goes on to say that women's suffrage was a Big Mistake. I'm sure she'd be willing to take one for her (male) team by not voting herself, ever again.
Do you know what I found most interesting about Grabar's column? The comments. All the sexists and misogynists and believers in the innate inferiority of women saw a green light and crawled out from under that slimy rock to pipe in their approval of this courageous act of going along with the powerful in this world. And by doing so they proved themselves indeed not just anti-feminists (the so-far accepted version of misogyny) but true sexists: people who find women stupid, over-emotional and all those other things that no man is ever guilty of. People who stereotype wildly and quite illogically all over the place. And people, if female, who want to be given the exemption certificate from their sex.
One of my recurring themes has to do with the return of sexism in much public discussion, a return which hasn't happened for racism to the same extent. If you translate the message of this column into terms of race you might notice that Grabar is advocating (even if only to annoy us feminists) the disenfranchising of a whole group of people, indeed, the majority of people. Just imagine if a black columnist had advocated disenfranchising all blacks.