In Which Fred Reed Channels Camille Paglia

Back on Wednesday, I posted about Camille Paglia's recent essay to defend men against the accusation that we have become obsolete, due to women's advances in the "equality", except for our sperm production function, which technology may well vitiate:

After the next inevitable apocalypse, men will be desperately needed again! Oh, sure, there will be the odd gun-toting Amazonian survivalist gal, who can rustle game out of the bush and feed her flock, but most women and children will be expecting men to scrounge for food and water and to defend the home turf. Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall.

Today courtesy of Smitty at The Other MCain, news that Fred Reed, professional curmudgeon, has taken on the suggestion of male obsolence by the odious Maureen Dowd, who took the pro side in the same debate with Camille Paglia: Gender in the 21st Century - Be it resolved, men are obsolete…

“So now that women don’t need men to reproduce and refinance, the question is, will we keep you around? And the answer is, ‘You know we need you in the way we need ice cream….you'll be more ornamental.”

Fred Reed Encounters Maureen Dowd; Demolition Ensues

Don’t misunderstand me. I have nothing against ill-bred viragos—feminism has its place, though I’m not sure where. But let’ me be clear, Buttercup. I don’t want to seem rude—nothing could be more alien to my character—but I do think that you and your littermates might essay a civility exceeding that of menopausing catamounts. In fact, Sweet Potato, if it were not for my innate courtesy I might say that being at once useless and insupportable is stretching things.

A jot—an iota, a tittle, a scintilla—of gratitude might be in order. Should you look around you, you will note that everything that keeps you and the sisterhood from squatting in caves and picking lice from each other’s hair was provided for you by—the horror—men.

Is it not so, Rose Bud? Can you name one thing, with a moving part, that was invented by a feminist?

It seems to me that you gals are like African bushmen, but without their dignity. A bushman looks at a television (Invented by Men: IBM) in astonishment, and says, “Wah! Bad juju! Spirits inside!” He knows he doesn’t understand it and does not presume. His degree of understanding, I suspect, is exactly yours.

But I suppose the shrewery are so busy honking and blowing about socially-constructed this and gender-roles that and patriarchal the-other-thing that you don’t understand that there is anything to understand. Is it not so? When you sit at your computer spewing bile like a legged gall-bladder, are you aware of 2500 years of mathematics, chemistry, solid-state physics, engineering, information theory—all invented by men, the bastards—that go into the blinking screen? Your vituperative ingratitude, Sugar Britches, is undignified.