Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
The guidance from the July 1943 issue of Transportation Magazine comes to our attention via FARK…and lest anyone question some shenanigans a-goin’ on, be advised the Oracle of Snopes smiles upon it.
I’m particularly fond of the following selection of bullets…
1. Pick young married women. They usually have more of a sense of responsibility than their unmarried sisters, they’re less likely to be flirtatious, they need the work or they wouldn’t be doing it, they still have the pep and interest to work hard and to deal with the public efficiently.
:
4. Retain a physician to give each woman you hire a special physical examination – one covering female conditions. This step not only protects the property against the possibilities of lawsuit, but reveals whether the employee-to-be has any female weaknesses which would make her mentally or physically unfit for the job.
:
6. Give the female employee a definite day-long schedule of duties so that they’ll keep busy without bothering the management for instructions every few minutes. Numerous properties say that women make excellent workers when they have their jobs cut out for them, but that they lack initiative in finding work themselves.
:
8. Give every girl an adequate number of rest periods during the day. You have to make some allowances for feminine psychology. A girl has more confidence and is more efficient if she can keep her hair tidied, apply fresh lipstick and wash her hands several times a day.
You’re looking to me for further comment? C’mon. I do need a wheelbarrow to carry around my balls — but not a freakin’ minivan. There’s a time to pull the pin, there’s a time to walk away…even if one allows oneself a chuckle or two.
Update 2/24/08: Just an interesting thought exercise.
It goes without saying the above isn’t even close to fitness for reprinting now, so it’s clear we have a “line”; you can step over it — in which case those with “dirty hands” will be compelled to apologize and re-apologize, and probably see their careers ended anyway — and you can fall short of it and walk away clean. And so the thought exercise is to imagine a duplicate of the above material appearing in a modern magazine, Cosmopolitan being ideal, with the genders flipped.
Think about an article within the glossy pages offering a few bullets of advice. Now that women have sought for, and acquired, power, envision a lady in management who supervises an all-female staff, thinking about hiring her first man. Some re-imagining and re-morphing of the Transportation Magazine article is then aimed at that theoretical female-management construct.
Where is the line in that scenario? Way freakin’ out there. The 1943 article is torn to shreds in the time machine that is the web page…simply by, it could be inferred, observing that difference between men and women. “You have to make some allowances for feminine psychology” and all that — definitely over the line. For the female supervisor to be advised that she needs to make some allowances for male psychology…nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all. It has ample precedence. Hand me a stack of ten old Cosmos, chosen at random, and I can prove it faster than you think.
Actually, a quick Google of “male ego” within Cosmopolitan returns six results, all of which appear to be satisfactory examples. So on that side, the line clearly extends well beyond this. I would expect in our imaginary scenario, you wouldn’t even have to worry about it until you got into George Carlin’s Seven Words. Maybe not even then.
Conclusions? Perhaps it’s belaboring the obvious, but we can exclude the possibility that people think for themselves on issues like this. For a gazillion of us to think on it as indepedent beings, and autonomously nurture a bias that remains consistent across so many of us that lists so sharply to the same side, is quite out of the realm of serious consideration.
Our ladies are sensitive. Our gentlemen are poorly organized, thick-skinned to the point of cluelessness. There really aren’t too many rules on how we are to be treated, nor is there any need for such rules. Not unless the gentlemen in question are members of some externally designated hypersensitive class.
There is a bittersweet irony here. We got all these rules about how to treat our ladies when it became socially unsuitable to communicate any comparison between males and females that reached any conclusion other than equivalent. To say men could do anything that woman couldn’t do, was to shoulder the blame for all nasty things done toward the fairer sex, across a variety of cultures, all around the globe for thousands of years — it was to identify oneself as a contributing agent toward the problem. And yet, to infer that women might be able to do things men couldn’t do, was almost equally atrocious. It became regarded, on a social level, as an exercise in calling out “womyn’s work” like cleaning and sewing, nevermind if this was notably different from the speaker or writer’s intent.
And so outside of the smartest and most craven option, avoiding the subject altogether, the only one left was to pronounce women and men as the same.
From that convention, implied but not articulated outright, we dredge up our theatrical apoplexy to be directed toward the Transportation Magazine article.
That’s my explanation for the double-standard, addressed to a space alien, man who woke up from a centuries-long slumber, or some other hypothetical being capable of rational thought but unaccustomed to the social ravages of recent past generations. There may be a way to provide this rational explanation that makes our recent enlightenment look like something other than………self-contradictory and patently silly. But I don’t know what that might be.
Therein lies the intellectual danger of deploring things for reasons that just “should be obvious.” A lot of the time, it leaves so much unexplained, that when reason is ejected few are left in a position to realize this is what has taken place.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.