at the demise of the Soviet Union, I wondered aloud to friends what could replace the "Soviet Menace" as America's pretext for ever greater military expenditure. The answer that came to me was terrorism, but I immediately discounted that as being insufficient to the task of justifying the expenditure of hundreds of billions of tax dollars. Oh well.

I would never argue that defense alone wins anything. Obviously all teams have both, but a team with a very good defense and an average offense can win it all while the reverse is almost never true. Again, there are exceptions, but that's the rule.

that Maureen Dowd does the same thing as Glenn has pointed out in previous pieces. Hers takes the tack of dissing Dems for being wimps as opposed to fawning over Reps, but it amounts to the same thing.

because the articles were so bad, but now I've changed my mind. The article here is disgraceful, but the posts are quite informative. For some reason I didn't get that earlier. Thanks posters for the information and generally well-stated views.

that TC-F recognizes that men are not animals, at least not pigs. Too bad Planned Parenthood doesn't get it. There are plenty of pop culture depictions of men that disagree with her such as Career.com commercials depicting men and not women as chimpanzees. Geico must be more advanced since it sees men and not women as "cavemen." It's amazing that more feminists don't speak out against the rampant misandry of popular culture. If they really believed in gender equality, they would. That said, thanks to TC-F for doing just that.

Or even better, you could have a bar with both sexes depicted as pigs suggesting the accurate information that not all women any more than all men practice safe sex. That would further indicate that women are not some form of more highly-evolved beings than are men. But, as with the Career.com ads, accuracy is sacrificed to the higher imperative - misandry. You see, it's perfectly possible to create an effective, enjoyable ad that also avoids male bashing, but they chose not to. It's a very common phenomenon in this culture which is why so many men are so pissed off about it.

Do you notice your use of the passive voice? "...female creativity has not been valued or recognized..." I ask this not for semantic reasons, but because it seems to reflect a passive mindset. If men failed to recognize female creativity, why didn't women? They've always been half the population. Why didn't they create organizations, schools, libraries, museums, awards, etc. to recognize and promote female creativity? They're doing that now, so why not before? You write as if women were in some way absent from the social scene for the first few thousand years of human history. Men didn't wait around for women to tell them it was ok to make art, literature, music, science, technology, etc. and a fair amount of that was done in the face of the murderous hostility of one powerful institution or another. So why the passive mindset? I see it in a lot of what women say and write.

I've noticed that a lot of the male-bashing commercials are for products used mostly by men, like beer, and shown on TV outlets viewed mostly by men, like sports shows. Since belittling your audience would seem to me to be a poor way to market your product, I have to say I just don't get it, but it certainly bears thought. The best I can do is that (a) male-bashing has been going on long enough that men have come to think of themselves in those denigrating terms, so the ads don't offend them, and (b) the ads serve a continuing pedagagical function. I am 57 and can tell you that the pervasive misandry of popular culture is entirely a product of the last 30-35 years, so men of my generation may not have been appropriately educated to view ourselves as a subspecies while younger men may have absorbed the message. Some of the posters to Broadsheet certainly have.

Thanks for your thoughtful response. Of course there were many instances in which women were persecuted, tortured, executed, etc for thoughts, words and deeds. For every woman who suffered in that way, there was a corresponding man and my guess is more so. So that doesn't appear to answer my question. If women were considered prostitutes or whatever for wanting to be on the stage, why not just let society think what it may. Some women did. Again, plenty of men suffered the same or worse fates.

And the fact that women were busy doing other things doesn't ring true either. So were men. Men were mostly doing the backbreaking labor of farming and doing mechanical work on farm tools, etc. It's not like they led lives of leisure.

As to my placing 20th century values on past behavior, I'm not doing that. I completely understand that people were entirely different in centuries past from what we are today. I'm saying that gender roles grew out of social needs and were tacitly agreed to by both sexes. Until roughly the early 19th century, there's no evidence that either sex thought a thing about rights based on sex. They thought a lot about the nature of the sexes, but almost nothing at all about rights or oppression of one sex by the other. So many people these days are willing to believe that, because the sexes weren't equal, men oppressed women. I don't think that's true. The main reason I don't think so is that, for almost all of human history, women haven't seemed to notice their "oppression."