On children, angels, and women

Women will be treated as men's equals only when they voluntary dismount the pedestals and insist on being treated as free moral agents instead of the equivalent of either children or angels. When I say that women aren't presently being treated as men's equals, I mean that by virtually any objective measure, they are treated as better than men. Whether it be the notorious female sentencing discount in criminal court, or the assumption that mothers are by nature the primary parent in family law court, or the thousand double standards that attribute good will to women and a malignant heart to men for doing exactly the same thing -- women are treated as morally superior beings.

This, of course, is bullshit of the first magnitude, and it is ultimately limiting for women. As but one example, angels and children aren't expected to take the dirty, difficult jobs (that, incidentally, pay better than the jobs traditionally performed by angels and children). Those jobs, and the pay goes with them, are for the morally inferior men.

One of America's most coherent writers on these sorts of issues, Chad Hermann, isn't a men's rights advocate at all; in fact his political views are impossible to pin down. Maybe that's because he has the temerity, not to mention the balls, to look at every issue through the lens of common sense instead of ideology. But he frequently cuts through radical gender feminism's bullshit with the well-honed scalpel of a surgeon. You can find his stuff at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on line. Here's an excerpt from his latest:

"Last time, you’ll remember, we had to endure the patently absurd suggestions that drunken driving is a dangerous male habit, that women seem to lack both moral agency and intellectual capacity enough to resist picking up the habit, and that women may even be too stupid to understand that they are just as likely as dangerous and habitual men are to kill or injure someone when driving under the influence. This time, the logical and rhetorical contortions necessary to blame men, and so to excuse women, for this sudden change in behavior are even more fantastic.

"Consider:

"'For women, it’s one of the consequences of being encouraged to do the things that men do,” said Carnegie Mellon University criminologist Alfred Blumstein. “Some are good things, like becoming police officers, firefighters, and so on. Some are bad things, like becoming criminals or being arrested for drinking and driving.'"

Well, you need to read the entire thing here. Trust me, you will like it.