Women have babies and men provide the support. If you don't like the way we're made you've got to take it up with God.The last noxious quote was from the one and only Pat Buchanan, who also wrote:
The real liberators of American women were not the feminist noise-makers; they were the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the freezer.What a swell guy.
11 comments:
Sorry - didn't realise google was discouraged so didn't wanna ruin it for someone who actually knew!
heh.
As an aside, it was remarkably similar to my local MP who thanked men for the vacuum cleaner at my school's prizegiving. The school in question was a girls' school.
Every time I see comments like this, I wonder what the hell people like him think non-upper-middle-class women were doing with themselves for the past, you know, existence of humanity.
Hint: it wasn't cleaning the hovels.
Why thankyou!
Was it Buchanan or Jerry Falwell who condemned the Teletubbies for promoting homosexuality? I get my neo-conservative mega-Christian nutters mixed up from time to time.
No worries about the Googling Nikki :-)
I think it was Mr Falwell but I could be wrong.
When I first read the quote in the post I thought "Who is this God and how can I get his phone number?" And if we do take it up with God, by prayer presumably, how do we get a response? Maybe we are supposed to wait until we die and talk to him directly then??
Well, in Buchanan's defense, things like dishwashers and freezers have contributed greatly to people's quality of life in the western world in the 20th century. Where he's wrong, I think, is in identifying them as solely contributing to the wellbeing of women - or rather, not seeing a problem with the fact that they have.
I dislike Buchanan for a whole separate set of reasons, so after thinking for a couple of minutes, I think he's right. Just imagine no supermarket or car or dishwasher or washing machine. The supermarket's a biggie - all the food you could possibly want in one place. In days gone past it was up to the woman to prepare enough food for the family, and that took a lot of time and hard work. Women needed men around in order to be able to physically grow and catch food, now we just need a job or a dpb payment.
L-M, you're right in that all these things have made the lives of people easier, particularly the lives of those who carry out the domestic work. But the fact that it's women who continue to do the vast majority of this work - a fact Mr Buchanan clearly has no problem with - that's objectionable. So long as women get little or no help with domestic work, and have their life choices restricted by bearing sole responsibility for this work, modern labour-saving devices are only a very partial 'liberation'.
Of course increasingly, in an era where sustainability is a concern, there are many who feel that appliances and supermarkets are dangerous, and that we should increase the ammount of labour we use to perform basic household tasks in exchange for lower power consumption and fossil fuel emission.
In other words, many people see a world without supermarkets or dishwashers as the only option for the human race.
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