Just as I predicted a few days ago, the author who claims there’s a war on men is getting lots of sympathetic airtime on Fox News. This morning, Suzanne Venker – never identified as the niece of anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly - visited Fox & Friends where she offered up her totally unqualified and unscientific opinion that the reason marriage rates are down is because “women aren’t women anymore,” as host Alisyn Camerota summarized.
Last week, Venker wrote a jaw-dropping editorial on FoxNews.com, called The war on men, in which she said, among other things:
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.
Although Fox works overtime to deny there's a war on women, Venker was received hospitably by all three hosts.
As a banner on the screen read, “OVER-THE-TOP FEMINISM?” Venker told the Fox viewers:
The issue is that women have become sort of overdeveloped, if you will, in their masculine side because they’ve been groomed to… number one, for a life in the marketplace as opposed to a life at home. And so, of course, that whole plan is going to be very different in terms of what you’re gonna be, how you’re gonna prepare for it and what you’re gonna be doing with your time in your life.
Camerota sounded skeptical but neither she nor anyone else ever pointed out that Venker appears to have no professional credentials in the field of psychology, sociology or any kind of science. In fact, she boasts about her lack of professional credentials on her website bio:
I am not a psychologist or marriage counselor – which is good. We have plenty of therapists in this country. What we don’t have are enough people willing to speak out about things they know from experience to be true, even if they’re unpopular. Too many professionals tell people what they want to hear.
I tell you what you need to hear.
Venker assured Camerota that women who want careers can get married, too. But she also said, “The reality is that most people do want to get married and have families and so what I’m trying to say is that the roadmap that women are being led to plan out, map out for their life is not going to work for most women if the ultimate goal is to have a family.”
Host Clayton Morris was right with Venker’s program. He joked that in New York City women wait until age 50 to get married and then they “push the envelope of science” in order to have children. He asked if the “traditional idea of marriage” is “suffering because women want to go further and further into the workplace?”
Venker said that traditional marriage is suffering for a “lot of reasons” and that she “tapped into” only one reason.
The whole attitude toward marriage in general, for young people in particular, is such a negative one, and that’s really the premise that I’m concerned about because when you start out thinking so negatively and being taught things like ‘never depend on a man,’ and ‘postpone marriage as long as possible,’ – not that there’s anything wrong with postponing it, but with that attitude going forward, you’re probably going to end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy. We need to turn it around and say this is a good thing. Nurturing, families, marriage, it’s all good.
The funny thing is, she sure sounded like she was trying to be professional and authoritative – in other words, just the kind of woman she thinks there are too many of in this day and age.
Heather caught Stephen Colbert's scathing takedown of Venker this week. Predictably, that was another thing Fox & Friends didn't mention.
