Fatmammycat takes exception:
Vox, you should hang your head in shame for some of the things you have said about women, surely you have a mother or sisters, maybe even an aunt or two? Is this how you think of them? I wonder what ever happened to you to make you so full of venom.
There are two reasons one is contemptuous of another. One is a conscious belief in one’s own superiority. As I do not believe in inherent male superiority – men have their own, very different set of weaknesses and problems – this does not apply. The other reason is that one observes contemptible behavior.
My affection for the women I love and my positive relationships with them has little to do with the behavior and thought processes I witness in them and others around me. They have long been aware of what I think and they are likewise aware that there is nothing that I have said on the subject which cannot be supported conclusively, in both anecdotal and more substantive statistical manner. As Carolus noted, I barely even need to articulate my case, a simple selection of quotes from various female leaders and references to their actions suffices to speak for me.
Many fail to understand that “respect” is not a synonym for “like”. Nor are such things all-encompassing. One can greatly respect Terrell Owens for his toughness and his football ability while disliking him personally and harboring a total lack of respect for his selfishness and lack of character. And a predatory male player doesn’t hate women, he loves them, otherwise he would neither have such interest in them nor understand them well enough to win them over with such ease. He does not, of course, respect them or he would not use them as he does.
Let me share with you an example that might illuminate what Fatmammycat wrongly calls my “venom”. Now, Aunt Anne is a highly intelligent woman, very verbal and witty, who worked as a corporate executive when I was a teenager. One day when the extended family was having brunch at the golf club some years ago, the subject of my company’s lack of female employees happened to come up. I answered that I was not about to hire any women, as our location and the complete absence of educational training for our industry meant that we had to hire untrained people straight out of college and the last thing I wanted was to hire someone who’d require a year to train, then get married and quit two years later.
Aunt Anne took this response very personally as a serious offense to all women in general, to professional women in particular, and therefore to her. She was so furious that she stormed away from the table and out of the club, preferring to march angrily homeward rather than spend another moment in the vicinity of her mysogynistic young relative. Her husband, who is a fairly placid fellow, was a little taken aback by my response, which was not to apologize and humbly beg forgiveness, but to howl with uncontrollable laughter instead.
You see, he’d apparently forgotten that her experience as a corporate executive was as a human resources officer. And the individual who had originally brought the problem of hiring women recently graduated from college to my attention was none other than my aunt, who for years had often lamented the high rate of turnover she’d experienced in employing them. In fact, she’d even instituted a similar policy of refusing to employ them at her company, instead hiring only women in their late thirties and older.
As it turned out, I was well served by paying attention to Aunt Anne’s professional opinion rather than her personal feelings. In the seven years Big Chilly and I ran our development house, we never once had a single employee voluntarily leave our employment.
I don’t control women’s behavior and I have no influence over their thought processes. If you have a problem with my observations of them, you have three reasonable alternatives. The first is to take issue with the accuracy of my statements, something a few women have tried, mostly with embarrassingly ineffective results. The second is to bury your head in the sand, pretend that you never encountered them and wish them away; this appears to be the favored response. The third is to acknowledge their unpleasant reality and determine if they describe your own behavior and tendencies, then attempt to make the requisite adjustments.
It makes no difference to me what anyone reading this thinks or subsequently does with the information. The truth is what it is, and if my observations happen to accurately reflect a small part of it, then I am pleased.