We are becoming a nation of cowards, and much of it is, in fact, being driven by white, middle-class women, particularly suburban mothers. I have never seen a group of people who are simultaneously so sheltered, and so frightened, as well as being delighted to take their neuroses and spread them around.

In my opinion.

I had a chance to take my eight year-old daughter up flying in a small plane a couple of months ago. The pilot:

Had forty years of experience.

Was rated to fly anything up to a DC-3

Had flown 150 combat sorties

Had a total of over 3,000 hours of cockpit time

Is a Major in the California Air National Guard

Wife said "no". Reason: vague, emotional beliefs about safety. This guy was about as good as it gets, but in our society, when facts go up against female emotion, facts lose out almost every time. As did my daughter. This kind of attitude virtually guarantees fearful children.

It's not about who Obama is as a person, nor is it about who his wife is, as a person. It's not about their marriage, and it's not about the alleged integrity of being a "strong woman" -- whatever the hell that is.

It's about understanding that this is a game of perceptions and marketing, and the election is won by the person who can create the most effective perception. Kennedy was a terrible president, but was a tremendous marketer -- hence, his election.

If Obama wants to win, he will reign in his wife. He will not let her give the Republicans the ammunition they need to paint him as a wimp, a coward, or anything else. Fair or not, right or now, moral or not, that is how the real world actually works.

I'm a man. I work in marketing. Would the editorial staff of this blog please, please, please actually think once in a while before publishing junk like this? Here's how the world really works, ladies:

1) The problem: If you're female, and you have large breasts, high-impact sports cause your breasts to flop around, which is eventually painful. Here's a concept: maybe if you're built like this, you should find some other form of exercise. I'm in my forties, and when I run, my knees are beginning to give me trouble. Solution: I don't run as much. The reality here is that if you're built like Pamela Anderson, you don't have the physical assets you need to run. You just don't. Where exactly is it written that you ought to be able to?

2) Overlooking Point 1, there are already several companies that I would guess make hundreds of different kinds of sports bras that address this problem. However, that's not good enough.

3) The reason there aren't even BETTER sports bras on the market is that: "Plus, as Scurr told the BBC, "Sports science has always been dominated by men and for them, studying breasts is seen as slightly laughable."

Right. Blame those men, again. This story reminds me of that joke news headline: "World comes to end: Minorities, Poor Suffer Most."

Women, especially the white, upper middle-class women who buy sports bras are the biggest consumers and the most brand-conscious humans the world has ever seen. It's breathtaking. If there's a market for it, we men will happily manufacture, market and sell you all kinds of useless shit, and you will lap it up. Cigarettes, makeup, fashion, the list is endless. And you buy it by the hundreds of billions of dollars.

The reason there aren't better sports bras out there is that THERE ISN'T ANY DEMAND. Believe me, if we thought we could sell $100 space-age sports bras in quantities sufficient to make a healthy profit, we would have done so, long ago.

But in the real world, where most people who don't work for Salon spend much of their time, women with large breasts don't tend to engage in high-impact sports. My girlfriend is a runner, and she's built like a 14 year-old boy -- almost no breasts at all. Long legs. Hence, she runs.

Is there no problem or situation you shrieking harpies will not try to blame on us? Give it a rest.

"What power can any of us -- moms and daughters, adrift in the cultural mainstream -- have against the hugely seductive, hypnotic machine that has brought us Paris, Miley, Lindsay and more?"

Oh, boohoohoo

Sob.

Those nasty MEN.

That terrible CULTURE!

We're VICTIMS. Again. Won't you just DO WHAT WE WANT? We're SUFFERING.

We're HELPLESS. If our daughters turn out to be little whores, or idiots, it's not our fault. Those men, and their nasty culture did this to us. Save us!

What a load of self-indulgent crap. Grow a spine. Take responsibility for being a mother. Oh, and you might also include fathers in this daughter-rearing project -- I understand they have something to do with this. Whiny, repressed, self-loathing little piglets. God. Grow up.

Okay. let's get this straight. On one hand, you have research done by academic psychologists, who interviewed almost 60 children, and reported their findings in a peer-reviewed academic journal.

On the other hand, you have some writer for Salon, who writes about what she seems to see going on in her progressive San Francisco nursery school. She's not a pscychologist. There's nobody reviewing her conclusions. She's incredibly biased. And she has absolutely no data.

She's done absolutely no work, or thinking. Instead, what she's doing is basically gossiping. And this is given equal weight with the study. It's the intellectual equivalent of some 12 year-old girl's MySpace page. And then she has the incredible arrogance to draw conclusions -- it's the culture. It's the media. God forbid, it's the mothers. It's absolutely fascinating how the absolute last thing any mother who Salon writes about does is actually take actual responsibility for her actual behavior. You can do anything -- murder your husband, lie, spread hatred, steal -- and if Salon has anything to say about it, it's not your fault. It's someone else's.

Really sickening.