Forum: Women good, men bad?

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It's about time we probe an assumption that has insidiously worked its way into our culture -- the notion women are the guardians of goodness and grace, while all those male Neanderthals are emissaries from the dark side.

I will freely admit men indulge in a number of vices, those including gluttony, greed, and of course, forgetting to put the toilet seat down. Growing up in the halcyon days of the Patriarchy, I was treated to my fair share of ribald humor. But nothing quite prepared me for what I saw a couple weeks ago.

At the local mall I spotted a young lass, maybe 13 years old. She was sporting a white T-shirt with an unusual picture. The shirt depicted a girl knocking a boy cold. Above the how-to diagram were these words: "How to Drop a Boyfriend."

For the last decade, we've been hearing the mantra, "There's no excuse for domestic violence." So how could anyone even think of wearing a shirt like that?

Of course the Lavender Ladies have long scorned traditional notions of feminine virtue. In her book "Feminist Morality," Virginia Held haughtily dismisses the ideal of the unselfish, nurturing and nonaggressive woman as "the whole female stereotype." So now we must ask, what happens to common morality when selfishness, aggressiveness and all-around oafishness are held up as the cultural ideal for newly liberated women?

I won't dwell on the abortion issue, because no one, not even the most rabid feminist, will claim baby-killing is virtuous. Their excuse is that we must allow abortion so as not to crimp a woman's lifestyle options. Let's agree to put that one in the "selfish" category.

And what about our epidemic of hyperaggressive females? Our society is reeling from stories of sexually assertive schoolteachers preying on male students. We find it incomprehensible that teenage girls would form into gangs and lurk in the alleys. And research now shows female-initiated partner violence is more common than the male variety. Think of Xena the Warrior Princess with premenstrual syndrome.

That brings me to another one of my favorite T-shirts: "Girls Lie." Our society has become inundated with so many feminist prevarications that it has difficulty separating truth from falsehood. Among them: the oppressiveness of marriage, the stifling effects of childrearing, the gender wage gap, the epidemic of domestic violence against women, the exclusion of women from medical research, the shortchanging of schoolgirls, the catch-all insensitivity to women's needs, and much, much more. This makes you wonder: How did the Nervous Nellies ever get through college without a Take Back the Night rally to steady themselves?

This is my personal favorite: "Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat." That insight comes to us by way of the Human Rights Campaign.

Now visit any of the radical feminist Web sites -- they seethe with anti-male diatribes and epithets. I've seen outright bigotry in my life, but nothing that quite compares with the rants of Andrea Dworkin, Catherine McKinnon or Kate Millett.

Then there's the fairness gene -- or lack thereof. Feminists squawk and fuss about "gender equality," but once men become an endangered species on college campuses, all of a sudden the message shifts to "female empowerment." When men die five years sooner than women, why does the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services fund Centers for Excellence for the ladies, but not the lads?

And if the women's libbers want true equality, why aren't they burning their bras so they can win the "right" to trek over to the Post Office on their 18th birthday to register for government service?

And now for the dirty little secret: Feminists are the most intolerant people on Earth. Last week the flap was over the Screen Goddess calendar adorned with 16 information technology (IT) vixens (www.itgoddess.info). Naturally the Champions of Choice became apoplectic. "Girls are often excluded from the possibility of the profession by its cultural maleness," one woman shrieked.

And remember Larry Summers? He said there was a slight possibility discrimination was not the reason for the small numbers of female physicists and rocket scientists. Even though he became a serial apologizer, the red-fems tarred and feathered and sent him packing from the Harvard University presidency.

There's a lesson to be learned here: You can never appease a feminist.

Napoleon Bonaparte once observed, "Female virtue has been held in suspicion from the beginning of the world, and ever will be." That's why as feminism gains, virtue wanes.

CAREY ROBERTS

A Washington-area writer