Now, I have been known on occasion to bury the lede somewhat in my blogs, so let me be upfront about this:
Lou Dobbs and his all-male panel on Fox Business are pretty deluded.
They have clearly watched that scene with the monkeys from the Dawn of Man in 2001-A Space Odyssey a few too many times, and have been struck with a severe case of Monolith Envy. Yes, they cried, Yes! Finally we can use the word "Science" for once, and appear oh so very smart! Hard-working women should have a complimentary relationship to men because Nature says so! And Nature's all Sciency! Right?
Yeah. Not so much.
There are many balanced perspectives on the pros and cons of four out of 10 breadwinners in family households being women, but none are to be found on Fox Business. Watching a collection of supposed experts trying to positively align the idealised (and increasingly narrow) vision of a conservative "nuclear family" and the natural world should be funny, but instead it's just deeply worrying.
True, the natural world and our primal ancestors may not have had to contend with a silly thing like female equality, but then again neither did they have to deal with the religious, theocratic and capitalistic influences upon which the American Family ideal was founded, so to cherry-pick male dominance from such a world apart, simply because it fits with your misogyny, insults not only women but intelligence itself. In the words of John Cleese "I'm suggesting we've made an advance."
We've made advances from human rights to racial equality to not letting children work in factories or imprisoning homosexuals. We have made advances since we first crawled out of the soup, and we have many many more advances ahead of us that we can't even fathom. We're not perfect at it of course, and we never will be, but we will always question our darkest instincts as animals and aspire to overcome our ignorance and our prejudice. That too is in our Nature.
Now, I won't say much more on this, I could point out every gaping hole in the logic displayed by Dobbs, Williams, Erickson and others, but every time I point one out, two more sprout up like a kind of affronted Hydra, so I'll leave that to the other people who were justifiably outraged and let them say it better than I can.
Let's be perfectly honest here, guys. I'm a cartoonist, I'm just gonna draw my doodle and poke a little fun at those who have left themselves embarrassingly open to ridicule, and the nuances and subtleties of exactly how wrong these opinions are will not require my satire to be self-evident.
But that being said, and speaking as someone who knows far from everything, here's my one piece of advice for the Fox Business panel, y'know, just between us blokes:
On behalf of science-lovers everywhere, please please don't say the word Science when your Ideology is talking. It makes you look like an idiot.
