And the sad part is, this is not an Onion article. And I’m not using anything other than this guy’s own words.
So we’ll start with the obvious. Fox News ran an opinion article as straight news. No surprise there, they often blur the line. But this particular article is a trifecta of wrong.
Let me summarize the lead of this “article”.
Painting a boy’s toenails pink? ZOMG TEH GAYZ! BENDING GENDER ROLES IZ THE EVIL!
Not only is this annoying, but it’s factually inaccurate as well. Hell, Ladies Home Journal talks about pink being a boy’s color in 1912. Every male (including our presidents) born before the 20th century – including the badasses Teddy Roosevelt and George Washington – wore a dress and had long hair while growing up. So just a little history lesson quickly tells us that this “doctor” is linking behaviors that simply do not go together. Why would you need to enforce strict gender roles? Could it be… homophobia?1 Something tells me “The Crying Game” really horrified this guy.
That’s bad enough. But really, that’s not the part that pisses me off. I kind of expect that kind of prejudiced crap from Fox News.
Speaking of:
Why not make race the next frontier? What would be so wrong with people deciding to tattoo themselves dark brown and claim African-American heritage? Why not bleach the skin of others so they can playact as Caucasians?
Let me translate that:
We need to know who is “really” White and “really” Black.
The only reason you’d need to know that is if you were interested in keeping your “race” pure. (Seriously. Why else would you care? Anyone?)
But I don’t think that’s the worst. We’ve got homophobia, we’ve got racism. What do we need for a trifecta? Bashing women.
The fallout is already being seen. Increasingly, girls show none of the reticence they once did to engage in early sexual relationships with boys. That may be a good thing from the standpoint of gender equality, but it could be a bad thing since there is no longer the same typically “feminine” brake on such behavior.
Or to translate:
Good girls2 don’t like sex, so it’s their responsibility to keep horny boys from having sex with them.
This is bullshit.
- It’s bullshit because women like sex too – but men used to be so damn scared of that they used to label it a mental illness.
- It’s bullshit because it insults men, since it claims men can’t control their own sexual desires.
- It’s bullshit because it makes rape the woman’s fault.
One of Keith Ablow’s rationales for reinforcing gender roles is that of a rape apologist.
And I’m done.
I wonder if Tufts Medical School knows he’s out there representing them. I imagine Fox News doesn’t give a damn, but I wonder if Good Housekeeping and Men’s Fitness (he’s a contributing editor to both) care that they have a racist, homophobic, and misogynistic asshole representing their brands.
Huh. Funny how those links go to contact pages, isn’t it?
And before someone says it, yes of course Keith Ablow has a right to publicly be a rape-apologizing, misogynistic, racist, homophobic psychiatrist.3
He doesn’t have the right to be insulated from the repercussions of it.
1 And yes, I mean homophobia here.
2 Yes, this portion of the article also manages to slam 2nd wave feminism at the same time
3 I understand that he’s repeatedly defended this article and its concepts on television.