Gender Crap

Ruth Rosen, our favorite womyn's hystery professor turned mendacious San Francisco Chronicle columnist, polishes off the dusty Reagan-era canard of the "Gender Gap". In Thursday's column she asks the irrelevant question: Do people with freckles want war? ( Actually, the headline is "Do women want war?") The answer is: yes, a majority of women do support military action to depose Saddam. But Rosen isn't straightforward enough to say this, instead she reports that more men support the war than women, implying that this is a form of sexist oppression, even though, uh, there will be far more testicles sent to the battlefield than ovaries.

She goes on to argue that women are a force for peace, stating the silly psychobabble that

we [don't] need to prove a manly willingness to engage in international brinkmanship with Third World dictators.

Is Condoleezza's toughness the result of having the right set of clues or due to a well-kept secret? Rosen doesn't say.

The statistical genius that is Ruth Rosen then concludes

any politician looking ahead to 2004 can't ignore a double-digit gender gap. The slim victories that determined the elections of 2000 and 2004 should remind any presidential hopeful that women's opinion just might be decisive.

Yes, Ruth, but the "gender gap" works both ways. If the Democrats want to win next time, they will also have to figure out a way to make sense to more men.

UPDATE Rosen also names George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz as "chickenhawks"

who had no principled opposition to the Vietnam War, avoided military service and now clamor for war

The chickenhawk argument is silly to begin with -- it's like saying that any member of Congress who isn't a pharmacist should exmpt themselves from voting on drug legislation. But the sloppy Professor Rosen doesn't even bother to get her facts straight. Donald Rumsfeld served in the Navy for 3 years and in the Naval Reserves for another 18.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at February 28, 2003 07:01 AM