Letter of the Week: 'Maureen (Dowd), I'm Available' By Graham Strouse

Feminism,Gender,The Zeitgeist

            

The American divorce rate still hovers in the 50-60% range, with women initiating divorces 75% of the time. The divorce rate between American men and foreign women is about 19%.

Funnily enough, a lot of young American men are simply eschewing marriage with American women.

I see a lot of frantic, arrogant, nasty women in the mid-20s to mid-50s range wondering why they can’t find a mate.

Here’s a hint, ladies. According to “Esquire,” the absolute primo number one quality desired by American men who replied to their most recent poll is loyalty/faithfulness (47%). This is followed by intelligence (15%), friendliness, and personality (27% combined).

What this says is that if you’re a bright, good-natured, engaging woman who stands by her man, you have the pick of the litter of about 89% of the available male population.

Testosterone may be on the decline for the time being. But I’m thinking that Femmicommie America has much more to worry about in the long run.

Thanks to the myths and propaganda of Steinemized feminism, all these You-Can-Have-It-All women from the boomer era are discovering, in fact, that what they end up with is nothing at all.

Ladies, we don’t want you stupid. Speaking for myself, I would love to be able to work a satisfying but not especially remunerative second-income job. I like kids—other people’s for preference. I prefer them broken in.

And I’m not that unusual. But I got tired a long time ago of women who expected some combination of Superman and Clark Kent all at once. I’m not from Krypton. I do have some self-respect, however, and I prefer isolation to being the beta half of a relationship.

If Maureen Dowd is listening in here, hey, I’m 33, looking good despite my damage, can do Bohemian chic quite well, and have been both formally educated and self-educated in any number of topics. I scrub well enough for cocktail parties and, oh yeah, I dig redheads.

Just don’t expect me to say, “Ooohhh, nobody scribbles columns like you, baby!” when you toss off some trivial piece of smack. I’m gonna lay it on you if you don’t live up to your abilities. I don’t care if you are making the big bucks.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I rather like the idea of hitching my cart to a woman who makes big bucks. But if you’re working in my field, the world of words, well honey, you better expect that I’ll be the toughest critic you’ve ever faced.

Not because I want to see you fail, but because I want you to succeed.

And if someone asks me to review “Are Men Necessary?” you better believe I’m gonna pan it. I’m gonna wonder what would happen if a columnist working for a major daily wrote a book titled “Are Women Necessary?” or “Are Jews Necessary?”. It’ll be rhetorical, because what I’ll say is that they’d be fired.

But that doesn’t mean I won’t love you in the morning.

Graham Strouse

7 thoughts on “Letter of the Week: 'Maureen (Dowd), I'm Available' By Graham Strouse

  1. graham strouse

    Very nice edit, Ilana. This is just nice, clean work. Wish I’d had you doing the chop-chop when I was with IGN.

    If you ever feel like trying print again, I expect you’d make a fine bureau chief. If you hit the Coastal Florida area (either side), you might actually draw a salary & benefits nominally commensurate with your capabilities. And bureaus are a lot of fun in a Dirty Dozen kind of way.

    [I try all the time. But due to this factor–scroll down to my comment about editors and other mediocre gatekeepers–I’ve had no luck. Send me an offer!]Â Â

  2. Alex

    This is going to sound like a dumb question – and I’m probably off mark here – but when you say, ‘IGN’ do you mean the game site that I frequent a lot, IGN? If so, that is cool.

    It’d be wierd to see Ilana in print, BTW. [Why? I started in print, as you can see from my bio. Here’s my last printed piece in The Ottawa Citizen: A Vacation from Reality. Before demand-driven low standards and boring became a requirement on American op-ed pages, “Creators” even tried to syndicate me. I speak about it in “How Sexist Are Libertarian Men?” If I had you guys then, I suspect the syndication would have worked.]

  3. Sue Bob

    When I was trying churches, I went to one that had a women’s Sunday School class. I tried it for a few months and felt like I was on Oprah every week. I was very disheartened because every week I had to listen to the women gripe about their husbands. One woman, whose face would transform into a hatchet when addressing the subject, would counsel the others “not to to anything for the jerk” until he fell into line.

    I had to quit going to that church as a result.

  4. james huggins

    Don’t do anything for the jerk until he falls in line: I work in an office full of women. This is the general attitude I get from my co-workers.

    It’s all well and good to say that the Femminazis will grow to a well deserved miserable old age but while they’re doing it they are making fveryone around them miserable too. Especially any unfortunate male things who are in their lives.

  5. Alex

    I knew you were in print, Ilana. The reason why it would be strange to see you back in it is other people – people that I know – might see or even read your column.

    The libertarian/classical liberal movement has been forced into the underground (internet) because we don’t support welfare or warfare. We *sometimes* support warfare – there is such a thing as a Just War – but it’s pretty scarce, and we *never* support Welfare, which is becoming institutionalized at a faster degree, even by those who are supposed to be it’s defendes. Who would have thought that conservatives would ever gush about ‘privatizing’ social security? This the dumbest and most cowardly thing; conservatives shouldn’t look to conserve liberal institutions, for one, and secondly, there is no such thing as a private-public institution. Forced savings through the State is a method of the State; it doesn’t matter if these savings are channeled into ‘private’ areas of industry or investment.

    I’d like to see Ilana in print, but I guess there is a little bit of a relief that she is not. Some years ago I ready many books on the philosophy of liberty, taking me from market anarchism to my current state of classical liberal in the Mises tradition. In all the dozens of articles that I read, and books that I perused, I became jaded and quite tired out. I decided to take an extended leave of the liberty movement, because it’s tiring work. I manage to keep my views to myself, because there are so many uneducated people that I would end up butting heads or taking large amounts of time from my day to argue or talk with people. I’m pretty mellow, so this doesn’t interest me.

    Ilana’s writing in print might start some fire around where I work, and I know someone would disagree with her, prompting me to jump in and defend her viewpoint. I can take a pass on not telling people about classical liberalism, but I can’t seem to avoid correcting them when they take stances contrary to the idea of liberty. But it’s tiring work. I’m sure you know. [Oh, God, yes]

    I will now return to my status as the ‘hidden’ true liberal..

  6. Alex

    I’ve seen that sort of thing where I work too, James. Our previous two female coworkers (who are gone, thankfully…) used to talk about how useless men were all the time in our office. I became frustrated and a little shocked when they joked about cutting off or mutilating certain genitals from men who either didn’t call them, or simply dumped them (I wonder why anyone would do that.)

    Some folks seem to think that male genital mutilation and it’s implications is hilarious. I’m not one of them…

  7. graham strouse

    Alex,

    I’m sorry if I jumped on you without warning in one of Ilana’s other posts. It’s just that sometimes I really do feel like a Jew in Germany on the eve of the Night of Breaking Glass.

    I detest my present state & am & will continue to array myself, with whatever assets I have at my disposal, against those who would turn the state’s assets towards destructions of the medically disabled or partially disabled.

    What I have going for me in my favor, metaphorically speaking, is that I’m disabled in a Darth Vader kind of way:

    “I find your domestic policy…disturbing…”

    But it’s still scary & humiliating & a source of rage that someone with my capabilities is persistently passed over for things I can do, with ability & panache, because of extraneous physical limitations.

    IGN bloody near killed me.

    I stuck with those punks because I’d signed contracts, because the checks arrived on time & because the trivial nonsense I did for them made it possible for me to work locally as a reporter, in NJ & PA, covering stuff that mattered, or mattered enough. And my local employers paid me squat.

    My attack was one of experience & principle, sir, and it was not meant to be an attack on your character, Alex.

    If it came off that way, it was a consequence of fear, the sort of fear generated by basically decent but il-liberally educated folks who deconstruct complexities into soundbites.

    I respect you enough, Alex, that I feel comfortable saying this:

    You bring that weak smack into the zone again, baby, and I’ll swat it out into the third row.

    I only do that for friends.

    Boo-YAH,

    G

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