This book by humoristrix (“conservative columnist”) Kathleen Parker has a somewhat half-assed cover design (using stock photography, no less), but it had me crying with suppressed laughter for the first 60 pages. Then she started talking about sexual assault, sending men off to war, and other deadly serious topics.
There are a couple of oddball copy-editing errors, such as the sentence that begins “Not only that, tasking attentively stimulates the female pleasure cent[re]s, hence 42 of the National Organization for Women.” The answer to life, the universe, and gender equality? (There’s another flub like that on p. 180.)
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En tout cas, what was wrong with Take Our Daughters to Work Day?
We browbeat our kids about the importance of sharing and being nice, then one day the gender fairy flits into their lives and sprinkles cootie dust on all things male…. Getting out of school for a day… is otherwise known as playing hooky – while staying behind with a female teacher, most likely a feminist herself, to have his brain chip tuned must be a little boy’s idea of hell. I know it is mine.
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Parker dared to volunteer as a Cub Scout leader, “which mysteriously seems to have prompted my son’s decision to abandon Scouting forever.”
My co-Akela (Cub Scout for Wolf Leader) was Dr. Judy Sullivan – friend, fellow mother, and clinical psychologist. Imagine the boys’ excitement when they learned who would be leading them in guy pursuits: A reporter and a shrink – two intense, overachieving helicopter mothers of only boys. Shouldn’t there be a law against this? […] [T]rust me when I say that seven-year-old boys are not interested in making lanterns from coffee tins.
Old Saturday Night Live commercial for Homocil: Apron-wearing boy triumphantly bursts into sitting room and exclaims “Who wants crème brûlée?”
They want to shoot bows and arrows, preferably at one another, chop wood with stone-hewn axes, and sink canoes, preferably while in them.
At the end of a school day, during which they have been steeped in estrogen and told how many “bad choices” they’ve made, boys are ready to make some really bad choices. They do not want to sit quietly and listen to yet more women speak soothingly of important things. Here’s how one memorable meeting began: “Boys, thank you for taking your seats and being quiet while we explain our Women’s History Month Project.” […]
Akela Sullivan and I put our heads together, epiphanized in unison, and decided that we would recruit transients from the homeless shelter if necessary to give these boys what they wanted and needed – men. As luck would have it, a Cub Scout’s father was semi-retired or between jobs or something – we didn’t ask – and could attend the meetings. He didn’t have to do a thing. He just had to be there and respire testosterone vapo[u]rs into the atmosphere…. I suspect they would have found coffee tins brilliantly useful as lanterns if he had suggested as much.
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And did you know Jodie Foster was a single mom? Well, that can’t be right, can it, Parker asks – isn’t it “[m]om, dad, baby”? “Foster became one more imprimatur stamped on single motherhood by choice while the message was clear: Single moms aren’t just good. They’re glam!”
But this one was never actually single, having lived with her lesbian partner for a decade and a half. (They’ve been photographed together, and the partner, a civilian, has been photographed with one of the children.) Please, Kathleen: If your book dissects how the Culture lies to us about men’s and women’s true natures, don’t lie to us about a married lesbian with a couple of kids.