Another farce rolls around

As another International "Women's" Day rolls around, we remain mired in the same-old-same-old.  Frankly, it's embarrassing.  In fact, "celebrating" women's achievements probably turns more people off than on.  I know it does me -- sort of like Secretary's Day, an excuse to take your secretary to lunch and put the moves on her.  Frankly, singling women out and setting them aside with a token day is on a par with making them wear the degrading and identity-erasing burka or hijab.

(As an aside, it's not really "International" because you can't include dumps like Afghanistan, where the movement hasn't exactly caught fire.)  These pictures are just a couple of examples of how one group of women are not exactly treated as poster girls for the "movement":

Naziel is a hereditary chief who has come out in support or gas and oil.  Note how two women of the same rank were treated.  A hereditary chief since 1988, Naziel said, "I'd like to see them try that with me."  Yep, we've come a long way, baby!

The fact that we have to laud achievements that are everyday, ordinary jobs for men is ridiculous and only highlights the reality that women still lag far behind -- often by choice.  I'm talking about the many well-educated women who quit working when they have a kid.  You don't see men doing that, notwithstanding the few "liberated" fathers who take parental leave instead of the mother.  That's another joke statement right there.  "I'm so privileged to be able to stay home with my baby," brag so many well-off new mothers.  Frankly, you're not.  You're betraying those of us who went to the barricades 50 years ago so you could actually continue to work after a short maternity leave.  Face it, daycare provides a much more stimulating environment for infants and toddlers than any "mum's club", ( i.e., "wine-drinking" gaggle) could ever pretend to.

The reason there remains a wage gap between women and men is because women drop out and can never catch up.  You get out of the race and the employer quickly fills your spot with someone else.  For my kids, I took six months off and returned to work to find someone else sitting in my office, doing my job.  But I took on another and caught up, retiring at the executive level with a nice pension.  No so the many women who take a few years off and find themselves being asked, "Jane Doe who?" A few years out of the workforce is deadly, something that hasn't changed in the many years since I had kids, which is why I jumped right back in.

As for daycare, mine went through neighbours, after school programs, live-in nannies, parents and a whole host of child-care solutions and did very well -- in spite of the fact that I wasn't around to provide a "Sesame Street" environment for them.  You do what you have to do, but leaving the workforce was something I never even considered.

The whole "Women's movement" thing has clouded and warped societal impressions of women that impede us today.  "The primaries show that gender equality is a pipe dream," writes Lawrence Martin in 'The globe and Mail'.  Talking about the humiliating defeat and drop out of Elizabeth Warren, Martin says:

"What a washout for women the presidential race has become.  The Democrats fielded the strongest, most impressive list of female candidates for a presidential nomination ever.  They've gone nowhere.  It wouldn't have been so dismaying if the women were(sic) up against some mightily impressive male candidates at the top of their games.  But they were trounced by two men in their late 70s and beaten in the early primaries by a kid mayor of a mid-sized town."

What the public apparently rejected were female candidates, thanks to the women's movement's insistence on special rules, exemptions, considerations and allowances over many years.  The electorate simply saw men as more dependable, less sensitive and less shrill -- unlike the hectoring Warren, who sounded like everybody's nagging wife and finger-wagging mother.  That leaves a contest between two white men pushing 80, which tells you how low public opinion remains for women.

"Ban-Men feminism is a now a trend within the movement that encourages women to play up any 'ugh-men' sentiment we may have experienced," writes Phoebe Maltz Bovy in today's 'Globe and Mail'.  What she is referring to are the sexual predators and overt male chauvinists, like Weinstein and Trump.  Some in the "Ban-Men" movement urge sex strikes, but the problem with the whole mess can be summed up like this:  If we hate men, what are we doing with them and -- with the obvious exception of men like the aforementioned -- why do we find many of them hot?

Thank you Gloria and Germaine. 

p.s.  Has anyone else noticed that blacks get a month, aboriginals a week and women a day?  Not that I care, but who decided that and why?