A very common sexist stereotype is that women are absurdly hypersensitive. Funny enough, these days that stereotype persists mostly due to the absurdly hypersensitive real-life behavior of feminists. Supposedly it’s feminists’ job to defeat anti-female stereotypes rather than validate them, right? Perchance they changed the rules when I wasn’t looking. But we live in an age where nothing needs to make sense anymore. Feminism has morphed into an ideological form of nymphomania—despite every new conquest, they’re never satisfied. In their insatiable lust for power, they’ve hand-knitted an insane new world where everything is sexist.
When a black rapper recently said he’d rather dress as a Nazi than as a woman, the women were outraged—not because he chose the Nazis, but because he chose them over them.
When Dan Aykroyd began sketching out his plans for yet another Ghostbusters sequel that stayed faithful to the original in the sense that the title characters are all males, the project was smeared as “sexist.”
If you’re a small woman who buys a large dog as a pet, gird your loins, adjust your codpiece, and get ready to be bombarded with sexist comments.
Even seemingly innocent items of clothing are sexist these days, although I’m sure you already knew that.
“Were you aware that merely being nice to women is sexist?”
But were you aware that merely being nice to women is sexist, too? Did you realize that it’s possibly the most insidious, dangerous, and possibly even reptilian form of sexism known to womankind?
According to a study released last month in the journal Sex Roles, the mere act of smiling at a woman while playing a board game with her is laced with poisonous patriarchal condescension and an ineffable yearning to oppress the fairer sex.
The study’s male coauthor, a Ph.D. student named Jin Goh—which sounds like my name if I were Chinese—said without blinking:
While many people are sensitive to sexist verbal offences, they may not readily associate sexism with warmth and friendliness….Unless sexism is understood as having both hostile and benevolent properties, the insidious nature of benevolent sexism will continue to be one of the driving forces behind gender inequality in our society.
Great. I’m sure you’re a real hit with the ladies, fella.
According to study coauthor Judith Hall:
Benevolent sexism is like a wolf in sheep’s clothing that perpetuates support for gender inequality among women at an interpersonal level….These supposed gestures of good faith may entice women to accept the status quo in society because sexism literally looks welcoming, appealing, and harmless.
Preach on, my prickly sister. There’s nothing more traumatizing on Earth than gestures that are warm, welcoming, appealing, and harmless.
This idiotic term—“benevolent sexism”—was allegedly coined in 1996 by a pair of sad sacks named Peter Glick and Susan Fiske:
We define benevolent sexism as a set of interrelated attitudes toward women that are sexist in terms of viewing women stereotypically and in restricted roles but that are subjectively positive in feeling tone (for the perceiver) and also tend to elicit behaviors typically categorized as prosocial (e.g., helping) or intimacy-seeking (e.g., self-disclosure) ….[Benevolent sexism is] a subjectively positive orientation of protection, idealization, and affection directed toward women that, like hostile sexism, serves to justify women’s subordinate status to men….
Are you following that, lads? There are two types of sexism. Both types are hateful toward women. One is openly hateful toward women. But the other is even more hateful because it hides behind smiles and affectionate gestures to mask its truly hateful intent. Even if nothing hateful ever happens as a result of it, trust us—it’s at least twice as hateful.
As if it has anything whatsoever to do with science, Scientific American published a 2013 piece about benevolent sexism:
If pressed, I doubt whatever “scientist” wrote that would be able to remotely establish an “objective” definition of “gender equality.”
In a 2013 article for Psychology of Women Quarterly—I always keep a stack of ’em in the bathroom—a pair of chicks named Julia C. Becker and Janet K. Swim encouraged women “to see the unseen”—in other words, to imagine they’re the targets of sexism and racism even when all the evidence points to the contrary.
In a hairy-vulva’d nutshell, what we’re looking at here is the feminist version of the racial ideas of “white privilege” and “institutional racism.” Once you’ve scared the living daylights out of everyone alive to the point where they’re terrified that even their own shadows will be deemed racist, you start imagining racial microaggression” popping up everywhere around you. Soon thereafter, your fevered brain begins conjuring racial nanoaggressions. They preach from a gospel claiming there’s a ubiquitous, culturally institutional fire-breathing epidemic of racial hatred that threatens to eat the nation’s soul alive. When this prophecy fails to deliver again and again, the true believer is forced to start making shit up.
Same goes for the idea of “benevolent sexism.” Are the ladies these days so utterly bonkers that they’re trying to argue that being nice to them is a way to suffocate them?
Fine, then. Let the ladies breathe. Do not, under any circumstances, be nice to them. Never compliment their looks, because everyone knows that women are not fundamentally vain creatures who if given a choice would rather you find them incurably ugly. Do not buy them gifts, because by doing so you are mocking their subordinate role in the economic food chain. Do not shovel the snow from their walkways nor rake the leaves from their yards, because you are implying that they’re too weak to do it themselves. And above all, if they want you to move the TV to another room, turn them down, because gender roles are socially constructed and there’s no natural reason she shouldn’t be able to lift a 140-pound television set over her head as easily as you can.
Basically, if you want to prove you’re not a sexist, you should avoid being nice to women as often as possible. Warmth and fuzziness begone!
Hmm. In hindsight, that doesn’t sound too bad. You know, this new wave of feminism is starting to grow on me.