How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb? That's not funny!
FindLaw offers up a column in that vein. Requiring not one but two feminists lawyers from Hofstra University, they are still in a rage over Schwarzenegger's "girlie-man" crack. Remarkably, they have managed to hear about the origins of the term.
The term "girlie man" came from a Saturday Night Live skit. There, two Schwarzenegger-imitating weightlifters used the term to mock those they considered their physical inferiors - those with less disproportionately huge biceps.
And that is it. These two geniuses (one is listed as a distinguished professor) seem to think that the SNL skit was making fun of men who are not body builders, rather than the other way around. They have no clue that the skit was making fun of Schwarzenegger.
This tone deafness means that have no clue that the effectiveness of Schwarzenegger's dig at the Democrats worked in large part because he was making fun of himself. And so we end up with a long whine about how girls can too be tough. You can see them pouting and stomping their feet. And so they go around, like little bullies, pretending to be insulted.
And sadly, the use of the "girlie men" term isn't the only time that this very message - the message of women's supposed inferiority and weakness - has been sent during this campaign season. Consider Vice President Cheney's convention speech - mocking John Kerry's call for "a more sensitive war on terror."
Cheney barbed sarcastically: "As though Al Qaeda will be impressed with our softer side." Cheney's comment implied, of course, that Kerry's war on terror would be too womanly - and in his mind, too weak and tentative. When a man has a "soft side," after all, it's typically deemed his feminine side.
They put the feminine part in there, not Cheney.
And thus does "feminist" become a well earned term of derision.
