The "war on men" essay: a surefire way to make your moderate friends rant until they and you are flecked with spittle

Hey kids - here is the article tearing up those Facebook charts. Shiny and new, hot off the presses! I'm sure conservative odes to Good Old-Fashioned Gender Roles are clogging up blog servers all over the place, but for some reason lots of people seem to be reading this thing, and now we all have to read it.

Feministing wrote a snarky rebuttal and Jezebel has an even snarkier one, but the prize goes to the Washington Post (WashPo?) for its piece, "Straw Feminism 101". I am fried from my new job, so all I can do is repost large portions of the original and snort into my soup.

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But let us return to the words of the article. How have women changed?

In a nutshell, women are angry. They’re also defensive, though often unknowingly. That’s because they’ve been raised to think of men as the enemy. Armed with this new attitude, women pushed men off their pedestal (women had their own pedestal, but feminists convinced them otherwise) and climbed up to take what they were taught to believe was rightfully theirs. Now the men have nowhere to go.

Aha. Well. There you have it.

How is it that women have changed? More visible ankle? Fewer hope chests? More voting and owning property?

No. It was the pedestal. We got off our own pedestal.

That was our first mistake.

Unexamined, the idea of being on a pedestal sounds pleasant. People lay wreaths at your feet. The view is nice. But after a while the stylite’s existence pales. You discover what being on a pedestal entails: remaining decorative and immobile.

Stop climbing and taking the men’s things. Shoo! Back! Back to your pedestal! Possibly women weren’t angry until they read this article, but now, if I am anything to go by, they are practically irate.