The covers of the two leading newsmagazines usually feature the same ideas or trends, as seen by different editorial writers and photographers, which is to be expected since their mission is to report the news of the week. It was a striking contrast earlier this month, however, when Newsweek’s cover story headlined Vice President George Bush as “Fighting the Wimp Factor” while Time featured the new Shere Hite diatribe against all men.
Giving credibility to the charge by his political opponents that George Bush is a wimp is such a cheap shot that it belongs only in a gossip rag. Bush’s lifetime record of courage and competitiveness proves he is a real man; he was an authentic hero at age 20 as a World War II pilot, and was even elected captain of his Yale baseball team despite his slight frame and low batting average.
There are, however, all too many wimps around today. Leading the list are the men who allow themselves to be insulted and kicked around by the feminists. A case in point is the way Time gave a cover and seven pages to promote the new $24.95 Shere Hite book called Women and Love, a Cultural Revolution in Progress.
Shere Hite is an ex-model who posed nude for Playboy and Out. She then proclaimed herself a “sexologist” (a sort of female Kinsey) and made several million dollars on two books (1976 and 1981) allegedly revealing inside information about women’s sexuality. Naturally, this made her a darling of the media, who accorded her the free publicity that sold enough books to enable her to live in a million-dollar Fifth Avenue apartment decorated like an Italian palace.
Her latest report is built on the thesis that men are to blame for all women’s problems. Specifically, she accuses men of committing “emotional and psychological harassment” and of failing to cultivate “verbal closeness” with women.
The extravagant free advertising given to Hite’s new book is a wonder to behold. The men who manage the newsmagazines and the network talk shows, and who decided to give Hite all this promotion, must be gluttons for punishment. What else, except masochism, can explain the way they feature such feminist furies?
Hite’s book is a compendium of the views of 4,500 frustrated and disillusioned women who blame their emotional troubles on men and now announce they are “fed up with men.” Hite elevates their personal sob stories to the status of a societal problem and calls their cumulative complaint a “large-scale cultural revolution.”
Hite is sure men should be blamed because they are treacherous troglodytes and women are socially conditioned to serve them. “It’s the men’s attitudes toward women that are causing the problem,” according to Hite, because men have condescending, judgmental attitudes.
Wasn’t the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s supposed to cure that condescension and promote equality of men and women in factory, office, kitchen, and bed? Hite says it hasn’t worked out that way. She says that, despite women’s liberation and the sexual revolution, women remain oppressed and are expected to play the traditional nurturing, love-giving roles while sharing the breadwinner role, too.
Since Betty Friedan’s opening blast two decades ago, the feminist propagandists have preached the notion that we must redesign society to become gender-neutral, and that men must shed their macho image and remake themselves to become house-husbands at least half the time. Men must be able to cry, cook, and accept women who are career-oriented, competitive, and unfaithful.
So, the feminists succeeded in making a large percentage of the new generation of men into a bunch of wimps who have a guilt complex and acquiesce in a daily diet of male-bashing. The “new man” is unsure of his role, his mission in life, and even himself.
These young men now feel no responsibility to provide their wives with a home and financial support (they expect their wives to have jobs and share the mortgage payments, as well as do the dishes and the diapers), and they feel no obligation to remain faithful or stick around for a lifetime. Employers are tongue-lashed into indulging their female employees with special privileges that would never be accorded to men, and preachers are intimidated into permitting the rewriting of the Scriptures and the hymns to suit the strident feminists.
Shere Hite, the paradigm of women’s liberation and sexual liberation, now proves out of her own mouth that feminism is a failed ideology which produces women who are burned-out and bitter. Men who accept the blame for this result are, indeed, wimps.
Maybe the Hite book will be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back and encourage men to say THEY are fed up with the foolish feminists. Maybe then we will start to hear from some real men.
