Dumb quote of the day: wait, what am I angry about again? edition

Contrary to what feminists like Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, say, the so-called rise of women has not threatened men. It has pissed them off. It has also undermined their ability to become self-sufficient in the hopes of someday supporting a family. Men want to love women, not compete with them. They want to provide for and protect their families--it’s in their DNA. But modern women won’t let them.

It’s all so unfortunate--for women, not men. Feminism serves men very well: they can have sex at hello and even live with their girlfriends with no responsibilities whatsoever.

- Suzanne Venker, "The war on men"
FoxNews.com, November 26^th, 2012.

Hey, yeah!  That's a really good point--that really does piss me off, now that I think about it!  How dare women rise up and... agree to casual sex... and to move in with me and I end up with no responsibilities whatsoever.

Speaking of which, the ScatterKat and I need to have a talk.  I believe we need to have a conversation about how she's not enough of a feminist, seeing as how I seem to have all these responsibilities and stuff, and what the hell is up with that?   I mean, okay, so the mortgage is in my name, but the way I'm seeing it now, thanks to Ms. Venker, my mortgage really needs to be kept between the ScatterKat and the bank--there's no reason it needs to be any of my business.  And as to everything else?  Well.

Also, she needs to understand that if another woman says "Hello" to me, well, it's helllll-ooooh.  I have been horribly confused and misinformed all these years, by the way.  Here I was, thinking that a woman who says, "Hello," to me was simply greeting me in about the most generic manner possible, when it's very possible what she meant was, "That's feminist for 'Let's have the sex now!  It's sexytime!  Sex!  Sex!  Sex!'"  And I have thus missed hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of opportunities to gain firsthand knowledge of all kinds of venereal diseases and the painful treatments thereof, which would stand me in good stead as an aspiring horror or dark fantasy writer.  Not to mention all the sex I would have been having.  And could be having: like I say, the ScatterKat and I need to talk, first about all the sex I now expect to be getting and second about her overcoming and squeamishness she might have helping me with any antibiotics that have to be intravenously administered.

What does have me just a mite confused, though, is the one-eighty in those two paragraphs from Ms. Venker.  I am supposed to be pissed off.  Because I can't provide for my family if I'm competing with a woman.  Somehow.  Okay, that part confuses me all by itself.  Because it seems to me that my ability to provide for the ScatterKat and myself, or to share in our providing for ourselves, is independent of any female coworkers I have.  And I'm certainly not competing with the ScatterKat; actually, it would be nice if she made a lot more money than I did and I could quit this soul-crushing job and live an indolent life of leisure as a lethargic, possibly alcoholic writer (by the way, can I adopt a cigarette holder as an affectation without actually taking up smoking? because I have a hard time puffing on a cigarette without either coughing or just sucking the smoke into my mouth without inhaling, like some kind of dork).

But aside from that: it seems to me that all the bonus sexytime resulting from handshakes, passing people in the hall, going through a checkout line at the grocery store, etc., etc., plus the lack of domestic responsibility at home would be utterly liberating and something to be happy about.  Something, indeed, that would more than make up for whatever stress I'm supposedly having as a result of competing with women.

Of course, it occurs to me that I may be weird.  Ms. Venker says she's talked to "hundreds, if not thousands" of the United States' 228,882,864 adults over the course of the past thirteen years, and discovered "a subculture of men who’ve told [her], in no uncertain terms, that they’re never getting married" because "Women aren’t women anymore."  And that's a lot of people.  When you accumulate that massive a quantity of anecdotal anecdotes--a subculture of men who don't want to marry hidden amongst hundreds (maybe even thousands) of adults--you just have to be on to something, you know?  We're not talking about some reclusive tribe of tree-people in Borneo, unless we are, but (even then) this shy and retiring, gentle people would be in the United States, and not Borneo.  I think.  Actually, Ms. Venker neglected to say whether she met these angry, single, eligible-but-not-playing men in the United States or while on an international book tour to promote one or more of her works; I just kind of assumed, foolishly, and I withdraw the assumption and admit that it's possible, albeit it seems unlikely, somehow, that all of these men live in Borneo.  And in a tree.  Though I don't know why you'd visit a tree on a book tour.  Unless that's where the Barnes & Noble happens to be.  Do they have Barnes & Noble in Borneo and do they build them in trees there, and if they do, where do they put the Starbucks?

Oh dear.  I seem to have lost my train of thought.  Listen, forget all the bullshit about feminism and greetings sex and my weird lack of rage over women in the workplace.  More pressing issues are upon us.  I think, really, you would need a really large tree in order to fit in two storeys, one containing a variety of popular fiction, non-fiction, self-help works, calendars, etc.; and then another storey where you have a small but varied selection of CDs, DVDs, board and card games, and a coffee shop that might be an ersatz Starbucks but definitely smells nice.  I'm not even entirely sure you could get the Young Adult section into a tree, much less a Young Adult section and a table full of remaindered Glenn Beck titles.  So I really must know, now, if such a thing is possible.  What I'm thinking, maybe, is if some loyal reader in Borneo could take a picture of a tree with or without a Barnes & Noble, or maybe take a picture of a Barnes & Noble itself, or, maybe pictures of both taken to similar scale, I could line them up and try to figure this problem out.  Or, you know, I wonder if I could possibly set up a Kickstarter project to have myself sent to Borneo, to do research on Barnes & Nobles and also ask any lost tribes of tree-people, if such exist, why they hate women so much and do they ever regret the arboreal life, especially when they wake up in the middle of the night needing to pee.