The Death of Feminism

For the last several years I have watched countless television news shows without once seeing a woman anchor or reporter. While many professional broadcasters looked and dressed and sounded like women, all of them were referred to by clearly male colleagues as “You guys”! Strangely, even on all-female shows like “The View,” hostesses (or were they hosts?) referred to their colleagues as “you guys.”

It is significant that one of the most impassioned issues of the feminist movement – one that required right-thinking gender neutralists to embrace the term “Ms.” in order to free women from what they perceived of as the tyranny of being stereotyped by their marital or non-marital status and one that Über-feminist Gloria Steinem chose for the title of her magazine – has come to this: All females, both younger and older, are now referred to as “you guys.”

Imagine if CNN’s Wolf Blitzer hosted a televised seminar about media bias and asked his guests – that included NBC’s Tom Brokaw, NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, Slate editor Michael Kinsley, MSNBC’s Lester Holt, CBS’s Lesley Stahl and ABC’s Peter Jennings – “What do you gals think?” You can bet that their answers would not be about media bias but about the preposterousness of Blitzer addressing six men and one woman as “you gals.”

Yet thunderous silence has been the response to this issue not only by Gloria Steinem, but also by the mother of feminism, Betty Friedan, the presidents of NOW and NARAL and other feminists who screech if one girl is denied a place on her local soccer team. So uniform is their failure to protest this travesty that one must ask if the ultimate goal of their advocacy was to have females of all ages perceived, indeed treated, as “guys.”

Recently, a Los Angeles “bias and sensitivity” panel took pains to remove any reference to women who “stitch and sew” for fear that it might encourage them to marry. To them – however misguided their intentions – language mattered.

But not one word from any feminists about “you guys”! As if language didn’t matter, as if Ms., in fact, was equal to Mrs. or Miss or Babe or whatever. As if calling girls and women guys was perfectly okay.

“You guys” is only one example that feminism is in its death throes, particularly American

In contrast, European

Consequently, an entire generation of our country’s women – upwardly mobile and squarely in control of their reproductive cycles – have deferred marriage and babies into their mid- or late 30s or even 40s.

The result has been many millions of women who have had a hard time getting pregnant, who often spend many thousands of dollars on infertility treatments and frequently opt for single parenthood – but only sometimes get pregnant.

Yet when these “guys” do get pregnant and are subjected to weekly sonograms, they hang these visuals on their refrigerators, carry them in their pocketbooks, e-mail them to friends and family, and cherish these embryonic representations as the most precious things in their lives.

And when they have amniocenteses to determine if their fetuses are “normal,” even diehard, so-called “pro-choice” feminists often choose to continue their pregnancies instead of opting for abortion, relegating career advancement and material goodies to the back burner of their value systems when they realize that holding and caring for an “imperfect” child is better than jetting off to the Cayman Islands or buying a new Jaguar.

While I can’t imagine why any female, of any age, would tolerate being called a “guy,” I have sympathy with those who have come to their anti-abortion stance later rather than earlier in their lives.

After having my children young (at 18, 20 and 23), I had an abortion – to my everlasting remorse. But in my early 30s, I became a delivery room nurse and what I studied and later witnessed was that even six-week-old fetuses were exquisitely formed, with perfectly shaped skulls and inside them brains that might one day have found the cure for AIDS and cancer and now SARS, budding fingers that might one day have designed another Sistine Chapel or played Beethoven sonatas, legs that might one day have challenged Mia Hamm’s, the capacity to produce urine and the presence of regular heartbeats and intact digestive and neurological systems.

All that each one of these aborted fetuses needed (including my own) was a little more time to gain weight. But all of them were sacrificed on both the spurious values and sham altar of American feminism.

Is there anything redeeming about our country’s bleak state of feminism? Yes. Every woman in the media (to use but one example of influential females) can start by interrupting anyone who calls her “guy” by simply saying, “I’m not a guy… but you were saying?”

And every woman who contemplates abortion can simply not “go there” by reminding herself that no matter what her goals are, what she hopes to accomplish, what she believes in and what she wants her legacy to be should not be predicated upon denying the child she carries any less chance of fulfilling his or her aspirations.