Memo to Old-Line Feminists

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Appearing on the Colbert Report doesn’t help your cause.

Resurrecting the glory days of thirty years ago doesn’t do anything for anyone but you. The women you’re trying to reach weren’t even born during your heyday, and they found doors already opened upon adulthood, so your somewhat-softened podium pounding is falling on deaf ears.

I was a toddler when you were in your prime protestations, and I want to tell you something: the fight is over, and you won. We have the freedom to go wherever we want, and make a living wherever we want, AS LONG AS WE’RE QUALIFIED TO BE THERE.

You did us a grave injustice by insisting on government-sponsored entitlement programs to usher us into our own. By doing so, you have shown the world that you felt your kind was unable to compete on its own, and needed Uncle Sam’s help for making any kind of progress in the working world. How DARE you insult us so!

Well, here it is 2006, and we have the accomplishments of such greats as Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart, Carly Fiorina, Condoleezza Rice, Madeline Albright, Margaret Thatcher, Sally Ride, Anousheh Anshari (the first woman space tourist), Christiane Amanpour, countless congresswomen, numerous female foreign heads of state, countless female state governors and legislators (even in Iraq), one (down from two) female member of the Supreme Court, and countless other unnamed women to use as examples of achievement, some of which wouldn’t have gotten as far as they did without entitlements—how much more do you want?

We have women in combat positions in the Air Force, women aboard navy ships, women in the Army and Marines, and women in the Pentagon and Department of Defense. We have women running their own empires here and around the world, and women in space, manufacturing, engineering, and science. We also have women who choose not to be involved with the feminist idea of revolution.

Today’s woman doesn’t want any more than she is actually due—she wants to compete fairly, and not be handed a free pass. She goes to college, she lands a job, and she works her butt off JUST LIKE THE MEN. She advances through the ranks and levels by innovating, cost-cutting, streamlining, and opening up new markets JUST LIKE THE MEN. She earns more money for herself through additional skills and education, savvy salary and contract negotiation, adding to the company’s bottom line, creating more shareholder value for her company, and navigating the tax code JUST LIKE THE MEN.

So tell me where the inequality is again?

I’ll tell you: the inequality is where women try to give other women an unearned and undeserved free pass to the boardroom just because they don’t like the predominantly male faces at the table. Our schools, colleges, and corporations are full of people who clearly don’t qualify to be there, and now you want to re-insert the unqualified into positions of power and authority? I don’t think so. You old-liners are like the Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson of women’s issues—all about the establishment shake-down to supposedly defend against a perpetual gender fallacy, and making REAL victims out of invented ones with quotas that even the federal government was hoodwinked into enacting! Your whole feminist industry was built on a false premise, and that false premise serves to support untold numbers of paid torch-bearers in the name of FALLACY and pseudo-science.

If you really want to make a difference to future generations of women, start at the maternity ward—women are having babies when they clearly aren’t fit to be mothers. Unfit mothers raise children “left behind”, and those children grow to become tomorrow’s adults left behind. Be an advocate for stronger and higher education standards, so tomorrow’s women will be properly educated, skilled, and qualified to be in that boardroom, and equipped to lead us into the next century. A free ride only goes so far. Bullying your way into the public eye, through real or threatened legal action, like some sort of female Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson doesn't cut it any more--even THEY abandoned that old "shakedown" tactic. It no longer works.

Be a mentor, and model what it means to be a successful woman in today’s world. Give tomorrow’s women something to point to as an example of what can be achieved when the right foundation is put in place. The accomplished women of 2006 will be long gone by the time the next generation reaches working age, just as you were long gone in 1986 and 1996. Any idea where you’ll be in 2016, or even 2026? Will your achievements be around for them to refer to as gender successes, or will they (and you) become even more irrelevant?

Are there any statues, memorials, awards, or scholarships named for the feminists of yesteryear and their accomplishments? Is there a single thing someone can point to today, or as far ahead as 2016, that says Gloria Steinem or Eleanor Smeal did it? There’s where you need to focus your energies, my dears, instead of re-opening old wounds and trying to get them bleeding again. Jane Fonda will forever be known as “Hanoi Jane” despite her recent attempts to explain herself—and sitting astride a giant gun barrel must’ve been REAL liberating for her, and helpful to women watching back home.

We are becoming a society of button-pushers with no incentive to strive for something better—even Uncle Sam had to install the academic floor of No Child Left Behind to keep us from slipping even further down the achievement scale. You can help by being activists for a better, higher standard of educational excellence, and putting a stop to skating children becoming adult skaters, and eventually ending up at the “great skating rink” of low-wage, low- expectation jobs—especially in light of the global economy, and the huge influx of illegal immigrant “skaters” who will gladly glide for lower pay.

It wasn’t just the American playing field that got leveled, but the entire world!

If left to our own devices, we’d slip into a coma of dull minds, empty hearts, and idle hands, run over by the stampede of well-educated, highly skilled, English-speaking immigrant workers eager to make our mandated minimum wage. Welcome to the Flat World and workforce reality. If we lose electricity, we run the risk of starving to death, thanks to legions of button-pushers and the microwave oven.

The flipside to this picture is that a few generations of us learned how to do well with what we had—by exiting the workforce, we’ve become Home CEOs and have taken over money management, instilled better nutrition, health, and academic ideals into our families, helped our kids develop their talents and skills, navigated the tax code, and created ways to make incoming money work better for us through frugal living practices, careful research, careful buying, and careful tradeoffs by adjusting expectations, lifestyle, and outgo. We have all the power and authority we care to pursue. We didn’t have to go begging for it, or thrust ourselves into places where we weren’t wanted or needed.

Why kick a door down when you can OWN that door, as well as the key to unlock it?

Someday, I hope you wake up and smell the coffee…oh wait—you’re Boomers, so I’ll change that to hideously overpriced, supposedly free trade Frappacino. Does Starbucks have an AARP discount?

It must kill you to learn that plenty of women have made the conscious choice to leave the workforce and return home. They’re finding that health and lives are improved by hands-on nurturing, cooking, administrating, and delegating. I’ll add this barb: I LOVE BEING BUSY IN MY KITCHEN, AND WILL PROBABLY BE BURIED IN MY APRON!

For the record, the internet is now the great equalizer that replaced regulation, legislation, and sanction in race, gender, and intellect, meaning that we can now look things up, decide the truth for ourselves, and vote with our wallets accordingly. We have learned to work SMARTER, not HARDER, for and with our money, and wish you would too.