What has got into the zeitgeist lately?  It seems every time I turn around there’s another female columnist bemoaning the terrible condition of women in American society.   I wonder, are they living in the same society as am I?

 Susan Antilla of Bloomberg wonders why isn’t anyone creating a show catering to high-income women like the new show, “Velocity”, created by Discovery Communications, Inc., caters to high-income men. 

“Velocity,” as the television network will be called when it begins on Sept. 25, will be available in 40 million homes, and will target guys with incomes of $150,000 and up who are “men, not boys,” as an announcer on a promotional video put it amid the background din of revving engines.

Now I don’t have anything against upscale men, whose prodigious spending can’t help but benefit the less-fortunate little people who wax and buff all those limited-edition cars, or so the trickle-down theorizing supply-siders assure me. What I’m wondering, though, is why nobody has come up with a television network that caters to the wealthy women out there.

Has Ms. Antilla ever heard of “OWN”, Oprah Winfrey’s new network?  It not only caters to high-income females, it has an outrageously-rich female as its czar (i.e., Oprah Winfrey).  And if you dispute it caters to high-income females, then perhaps the definition of “high-income” needs some re-examination.  Being able to afford spending an hour in the middle of the day watching Oprah practically defines the luxurious living that a high-income can support.  If a husband is slogging away at a job to ensure the wife gets a steady dose of Oprah in the afternoon, to whom are the benefits of his income accruing?  In the antebellum South, which party–slave or slave-owner–would likely have spent the afternoon watching Oprah, if the option were available?

If Antilla’s column weren’t silly enough, there’s Caitlin Flanagan’s article over at the Wall Street Journal proclaiming that universities should outlaw fraternities:

The Greek system is dedicated to quelling young men’s anxiety about submitting themselves to four years of sissy-pants book learning by providing them with a variety of he-man activities: drinking, drugging, ESPN watching and the sexual mistreatment of women. A 2007 National Institute of Justice study found that about one in five women are victims of sexual assault in college; almost all of those incidents go unreported. It also noted that fraternity men—who tend to drink more heavily and frequently than nonmembers—are more likely to perpetrate sexual assault than nonfraternity men, according to previous studies. Over a quarter of sexual-assault victims who were incapacitated reported that the assailant was a fraternity member.

Here’s a better idea than dispensing with fraternities:  Make castration a part of the initiation rites of pledging a fraternity.  But then you’d still have all those pesky men that didn’t pledge that still had testicles and still did occasionally assault women.    What then to do?  Just cut ’em all off.  Men are evil.  Sex with anything but a vibrator or another woman is degrading.  If women need sperm, they can buy it from a sperm bank.  Limit the guys in society that are allowed to keep their testicles to only those that have passed a rigorous series of tests proving their sensitivity to female concerns.   Within a few short generations, women would be so pampered with love they’d be disgusted and more despondent than before.  Because enough is never enough with women, until it is too much. 

Ms. Flanagan cites the case of a seventeen-year-old woman who was raped at a fraternity party she attended during her freshman year as justification for shuttering all fraternities.   One of the woman’s assailants contacted her twenty years later to apologize which, his admission being pregnant within his apology, caused his prompt arrest and incarceration.  No good deed, as they say.  Now the woman is capitalizing on the depravities inflicted upon her, having written a book about the experience.  Which doesn’t really square with her claims of having been drugged and unconscious when the episode happened.  Whatever.  The woman was so mentally incapacitated that she didn’t find out until the man’s confession that her rapist was plural, i.e., that several members of the fraternity took part, which supposedly made it even more traumatizing.  But how could that be?  All the woman really knew was that she’d had intercourse without her conscious consent.  Did it really matter that it was with more than one person?  Especially twenty years after the fact?

It had to come to this.  The cultural raison d’être shifted focus, once the whole purpose of these United States of America had been fulfilled with the election of a half-black President.   The culture of victimhood needed another victimized group.  So we’re back to women.  Never mind that women are not a political or social minority.  Never mind that three of the past four Secretaries of State–America’s representative to the world–have been female.  Never mind that women are not officially denied anything because of their gender.  Never mind that women’s suffrage is ninety years old.  Never mind, never mind.   When the culture needs a purpose, it finds a purpose. 

Although Ms. Antilla attempts to make a case out of what she sees as the terrible injustice of women generally making less than men for the same job (but only when the men have a job, which is a different matter), her claims won’t likely stick, because they are easily disprovable or explained away.  Instead, rape and abortion are the donkeys upon which women’s saviors will ride into the Holy Land, because facts don’t really matter in the debate.  All that must be known is that women are always right and men are always wrong.  

Before long, the emancipation of women will require the assumption that all sexual contact is unwelcome on the part of the female until she explicitly declares it to be welcome.  In the throes of passion, men will be forced to stop and pull out protection–their cell phones–to video the female’s acquiescence to the sexual contact.  Any man failing to do so will run the risk of being accused of sexual assault.  The constitution will have to be adjusted a bit to make the accused rapist guilty until he produces the video, but that’s small beer when you’ve got over half the votes, and all the money and all the, well, you know.  Given that the criminal prosecution of rape has no statute of limitations, and hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, the prisons will be jammed with the former lovers of scorned females.  Which is where men should be.  Until women decide to let them out.  Or divorce them, depending on the jail to which they are sentenced.

Pregnancy will be viewed the same way.  Women will have to sign a consent, in the presence of only a doctor and a notary, before allowing a pregnancy to proceed to term.  All others will be assumed to have been the product of mistake or coercion, and will promptly be aborted.

Ms. Flanagan felt forced to withdraw from the University of Virginia because of the sinister “Jeffersonian architecture” of the “august and moldering” fraternity houses.  As she stood on fraternity row looking at the masculine line of houses reeking of musk and beer, she realized what a terrible decision she’d made to pick a college full of horny men.   Ms. Flanagan employed her UVA English degree to reveal something of the internal contradictions bedeviling her soul.  “August” means inspiring awe or admiration; majestic.  “Moldering” means to crumble to dust; to disintegrate.  (The American Heritage Dictionary).  Women will never be free until people like Ms. Flanagan don’t feel so dangerously conflicted between lust and learning.