Gender Follies

‘Femdom’ blogs are so often full of batty twaddle about gender. Then there are real cultural critics and scholars.

When Bacall came into the limelight the war was still on, and women were still self-sufficient, bouncing around in short skirts and chunky heels, talking loud and drawing a crowd.

I remember finding Lauren Bacall sexy at sixty in a fashion ad. She had one of the sexiest voices this side of Earth Kitt. Catherine Deneuve I recall as a women of exceptional loveliness - except I can’t remember what she looked like.

Which is sort of one of Germaine Greer’s points in contrasting the two in Siren song

Oh my - could it be that female managers are more likely than guys to impede other women in advancing up the corporate ladder?

The study found that when presented with applications for promotion, women were more likely than men to assess the female candidate as less qualified than the male one.

They were also prone to mark down women’s prospects for promotion and to assess them as more controlling than men in their management style.

Office queen bees hold back women’s careers

And look at “facile biologism” and other forms of intellectual confusion and ideological dishonesty that muddy current discussion of gender and education.

It is never a biological question of whether we are “hardwired” for some behavior; it is, rather, a political question of which “hardwiring” we choose to respect and which we choose to challenge.

A War Against Boys?

And there are the sad women who become cosmetic surgery addicts:

… women are deluded if they believe getting breast implants is expressing sexual freedom. Because it’s not freedom so much as it is a slavish obedience to the womanly caricatures found in celebrity gossip magazines and ever-proliferating pornography. “We want to be wanted — by our husbands, by our lovers,” Kuczynski writes, as if to mean these men won’t love these women unless they have a D-cup. Some of the women Kuczynski writes about have taken their habit to such an extreme that they get labiaplasty.

Consumerism and Its Discontents