Despite what God intended, there is a chance that women may take over the business world, if not the whole, entire world.
Did you know, for instance, that the CEO of the Phoenix-Home Life Formerly Mutual, Sort of Life Insurance But Now Financial Services Co. of Hartford, Conn., is a woman?
And did you ever imagine that the new economic development czar for Connecticut, whose main job is to smoke cigars and slap out-of-state CEOs on the back and attempt to trick them into moving to Connecticut, despite a Democratic majority in the General Assembly that will steal all their money and kill their first-born, is going to be a woman?
Are you aware that the new chief justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, whose main job is to sprinkle court decisions with sports analogies best left to men, is a woman?
The last time that we had a woman crisis this severe was in the 1920s, when women were threatening to do all sorts of jobs. In response, the nation snatched William Howard Taft from his constitutional law teaching gig at Yale — and we insisted that he be both Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and President of the United States. Taft was very large and we thought he could cover almost any occupational threat that women represented.
Many of the women taking over in Connecticut were appointed by Gov. M. Jodi Rell, who, by the way, is a woman. Not that all the stereotypes are true or anything, but after Jodi said she wanted to raise the income tax and spend all the extra money on new curtains in the teacher lounges of every public school in the state, she changed her mind. Like a woman.
Female Logic
There are deluded people out there who are enablers for pushy women. Professors Alberto Alesina of Harvard and Andrea Ichino of the University of Bologna drew international attention and a permanent reservation in Hell for their thesis that women should, as a matter of law and justice and stuff, have lower income tax rates than men.
Part of their argument is that women are more “sensitive” to tax rates than men; women are more likely to stay home and pout, rather than enter the workforce, if taxes are too high.
Well, heck, women are more “sensitive” about almost everything, including whether the dishwasher is loaded the “right way.” If you coddle them just because they are sensitive, women will take over companies and supreme courts and economic development agencies and stuff.
Long before Connecticut had a state authorized and lavishly funded Permanent Commission on the Status of Women Because We Don’t Need a Commission on the Status of Men Because We Know That They Are Pigs, scholars recognized the potential danger of this woman thing.
In an editorial 100 years ago this year, the Journal of the American Medical Association noted that a “section of the general public” believed that “girls brought up with boys will lose some of their feminine charm, while the boys, on the other hand, will take on some feminine characteristics.”
The magazine was very wise. Now, we have movies about gay cowboys who are very sensitive, because the women are all busy running the supreme court and stuff.
One insulting explanation for why women are taking over everything and being named valedictorians and running insurance companies and stuff is that, according to recent research from the University of Pennsylvania, girls are better students because girls are more self-disciplined.
Yeah, yeah. So what? Self-disciplined girls can sit in a chair at a shoe store for 15 hours trying on 17 varieties and 38 colors of the same shoe, while guys are buying 15 ties and a sailboat and a giant, flat-screen television. All in half-an-hour. Is that any reason to elect a woman governor?
Back in the days when guys were guys and girls were girls, Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have been the one wearing the pants in the family. But we’ve forgotten how things used to be. According to the Census Bureau, only 32 percent of the population over the age of 85 are men. The rest are women, dancing on our graves and telling their granddaughters to grow up to be economic development directors.
Women. It’s a hostile takeover.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
