The following comes from an Aug. 9 column by Florence King in The Spectator (U.K.).
I have come a long way with feminism. When it first hit the fan in the early 1970s I was living in a thin-walled apartment next to a woman who held assertiveness-training workshops that included bloodcurdling shouts of ‘This steak is tough! I demand to see the manager!’ Now, 40 years later, assertiveness is all about careers. The new steak is the glass ceiling that women can’t cut through because they are still too ‘nice’ to ask for a promotion and a raise, and the new shout is, ‘This job doesn’t pay enough! I demand to see the company president!’ Books by female executives have given them their marching orders: stop apologising, remember the new swear word is ‘sorry’, and above all, forget about being ‘nice’.
Above all, they certainly have done that. Niceness is the eighth deadly sin for any self-respecting feminist. Women protesting the establishment stances of male politicians routinely hurl challenges of ‘Man up!’ or ‘Put on your man-pants!’ and even ‘Grow a pair!’ Moreover, they make sure their own pairs are on view when they go on TV. The plunging neckline, once strictly reserved for after six, can be seen on the morning news, the noon news, breaking news, cooking shows and the weather report. The cleavage is not intended to be seductive but competitive, and it has caught on so fast that nobody feels self-conscious about it. A ‘nice’ girl would rather die than expose herself on TV, but who cares about being ‘nice’ when there are viewing figures to think of?
Niceness is also under assault from the raucous guffawing now being heard from women on talk shows. Big, loud, forced laughs, like men at a stag party intent on proving how comfortable they feel in the in-group. Nothing irritates a woman more than overhearing this kind of male laughter in public places because it ‘sounds dirty’, but frantically competitive women are even willing to irritate themselves. There is nothing they won’t do to get rid of niceness, which explains why the subject of bullying has become almost overnight the latest bandwagon in the endless parade of American cultural crises. Why the sudden fascination? Bullying is male in that it is a search for hierarchy; it is also American in that it is a twisted plea for leadership to bring order out of our run-amok equality; but best of all, it is a niceness-ridder that can’t be beat. The next guffaws you hear will come from ‘Women and Bullying’, a news special in which the all-female panel regale us with confessions of what they did to other girls at school and what the other girls did to them because — wait for it — ‘Women bully too!’
Euphemisms are a form of niceness that women invented so as not to seem crass. About the only euphemism left nowadays is ‘pro-choice’. It really means ‘pro-abortion’ but you can’t say that because a feminist demands the right to combine career and motherhood and that requires motherhood.
Even during pregnancy, there’s no relaxing for a modern girl — no lapsing back into niceness; no retiring for a while from the fray. A modern girl must make sure that she displays her bump to the world aggressively, to show it’s never once interfered with her life or her chosen profession. A lot of the showing takes place on TV, which is starting to look like an obstetrician’s waiting room. The real ‘get’ nowadays is the pregnant guest who is combining career and motherhood in some astonishing way, like a heavily pregnant marathon runner….
To read the entire story, click here.
What is truly missing, is training, from childhood– in VIRTUE, MORALITY and GOOD MANNERS!! Part of this training also includes strength of character, to stand up for what is right, in a mature manner! The Church needs to teach these things, and so do all the mothers and fathers, in America!
IN CA it remains a governmentally punishable offense to even Recommend the establishment of an Equal – Commission for Men & Boys (personally experienced in full ‘tolerance’ mode), which would be too unhood to consider anyway:
HOWEVER – There is one, for Womyn Only, and it promotes MISANDRY (Hatred of Men & Boys, Masculinity & Normal Heterosexuality) with a true passion:
SEE
California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls names new Executive Director, Nancy Kirshner-Rodriguez
SACRAMENTO Californias Commission on the Status of Women and Girls has named Nancy Kirshner-Rodriguez as the Commissions new Executive Director.
From 2008-2012, Kirshner-Rodriguez served in senior positions with the City and County of San Francisco. In her position as Director of Government Affairs for Mayors Gavin Newsom and Edwin Lee…
– During the Clinton Administration, Kirshner-Rodriguez served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Relations at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in Washington, DC from 1997-2001 and before that held a similar position at the US Department of Labor. She also served as a federal agency liaison to the White House Womens office….
The Commission on the Status of Women and Girls is an independent, non-partisan state agency working to advance the causes of women and girls as an issue focused, centralized research and information hub.
For more information on the Commission and its members go to http://www.women.ca.gov
Punishable? Really? Like how?
I do not want a sodocracy to establish a commission on Men and Boys. Yuck!!!!
Ya got a point Ski – As with the Larry Brinkin Racist Pederast Toddler Rape-Porn rung run out of the ‘In-Human Rights’ comm., so too the democrat legislature with leaders like “Senator Mark “Kiddie Porn King” Leno.
Any Commission would mirror the takeover of the Womyn’z Comm. by Radical Twysted Systers as a means of promoting Government Subsidized Misandry, and probably become just another 900 lb Mozilla Gaystapo Gorilla teaching all the ‘tolerance stomp’.
However – the notion of ‘Equal Rights’ never quite extends beyond the female majority in CA and elsewhere – although Males make up @ 90% of workplace fatalities and severe injuries and die years earlier than their counterparts.
Remember – as the Twysted Systers of the democrat machine say: “Dead Men Don’t Rape – Or Vote”.
Bullying is not allowed under mores of political correctness because its existence affirms a hierarchy of persons; i.e., one person, a bully, having some capability superior to another person that is manifested in the bullying. PC does not allow persons to be different. Instead, PC strives for a nation of victims, with no echelons of persons or leaders. This way, no individual is distinguishable from any other individual; no individual has any unique characteristic or value. Ultimately, stripped to the lowest common denominator, all individuals become equally virtually indistinguishable from animals, and they can all be oppressed, or even killed, at the whim of the governing elite, because there is nothing of value in any of them. That’s the real reason why bullying and any form of discrimination is not allowed in the New World Order – we’re all being stripped of our God-given differences.
I totally disagree with the word nice to describe what is being lost to radical feminism. The word nice has historically had negative connotations of being finicky, overly particular or fake ‘sweetness’. In Jane Austen’s time, “she’s certainly nice in her manners’ meant she was probably bourgeoise and trying to impress or overly fastidious. These days nice can mean someone is really sweet, but it’s rather lackluster and people who are nice tend to be very ordinary and bland.
The word I would choose is ‘lady-like’. When I was a girl it was not an insult to be called a lady…au contraire! If a girl wasn’t a lady, she was a slut. Ladies knew how to be ‘women’ but women didn’t always know how to be ladies. We were taught not to be loud, boastful or vain. A lady carried herself with poise (much practice with books on our heads as we walked), was to be kind to people of all walks of life, respectful to adults, honor parents, and never, ever was a lady to be vulgar or cheap. We expected doors to be opened for us, and we were to open them for those who were old or handicapped. A lady dressed modestly, cleanly and simply…over ornamented clothing, or anything too tight or too short was avoided. A lady knew her worth and didn’t have to flaunt her body to prove she was sexy. (Sexy was vulgar) We could be very athletic but NEVER muscly..ugh! What these unfortunate females the author describes are trying to disassociate themselves from is being a lady! They want to be little men…and uncouth, vulgar men, at that.
All I can say is, poor, poor things. I’ve always felt so thankful to be a woman and a lady, as I”m sure all the other ladies who contribute here would agree. Good manners, good grooming, good deportment, et al, are totally missing in these mini-male-wannabes. I’d like to think femine women are in a tradition as old as time…this new type is totally out of sync with anything that’s gone before…very sad, really!