Forget the War on Women. According to Fox News, there's a vicious war on men going on. Why? "Women aren't women anymore" -- and this decline in ladylike behavior is leading to a whole lot of unmarried women looking for husbands.
In a piece for FoxNews.com, contributor Suzanne Venker poses the leading question, "What if the dearth of good men, and ongoing battle of the sexes, is -- hold on to your seats -- women's fault?"
To answer that question, she cites Pew Research Center research showing that women between the ages of 18 and 34 are more likely than men their age to rate a successful marriage one of the most important things in their lives, 37 percent vs. 29 percent. In 1997, Venker notes, men were more likely than women to say that marriage was important to them. Somehow, Venker sees a cause and effect relationship between these statistics (effect) and increased gender equality (cause, supposedly). Ladies, according to Venker, by working to support ourselves (and our present or future children), we've lost our femininity and destroyed men in the process. And you thought you were just trying to pay your rent.
Venker claims that men feel displaced by women who believe "women good/men bad":
In a nutshell, women are angry. They're also defensive, though often unknowingly. That's because they've been raised to think of men as the enemy. Armed with this new attitude, women pushed men off their pedestal (women had their own pedestal, but feminists convinced them otherwise) and climbed up to take what they were taught to believe was rightfully theirs. Now the men have nowhere to go.
The result, according to Venker, is that women are losing out. You see, that's what you get for pulling ahead economically, educationally and socially, the way that journalists like Hanna Rosin and Liza Mundy say women are.
But never fear, Venker has a solution:
Fortunately, there is good news: Women have the power to turn everything around. All they have to do is surrender to their nature -- their femininity -- and let men surrender to theirs. If they do, marriageable men will come out of the woodwork.
Reactions to the Fox News piece came fast and furious. The Frisky's Jessica Wakeman called the article a "scare piece" and as Jezebel's Erin Gloria Ryan put it, "Venker's piece ... was roundly mocked for being stupid, mindless garbage that paints ... men as delicate babies upset that their feelings aren't being appropriately catered to."
Salon's Aaron Traister chimed in with a (hilariously sarcastic) man's perspective on the subject:
Look, increased competition didn't make America great, America was great because of our freedom. So let's free me of all this hostility and depressed lethargy and allow me to find my true masculine nature by sending women back to the kitchen, so I can turn off this "Boy Meets World" marathon, get off the couch and make America great again.
Meanwhile, we women will quit our jobs, purchase aprons with our last paychecks and bake like it's 1955. A workforce reduced by nearly half? That's bound to get this society headed in the right direction.