from wonkette....

ok, so this piece is bywayof wonkette, bywayof focusonthefamily.........The Soft Sexism of Low Expectations

I've been reading Boundless, this webzine by Focus on the Family, and it's pretty fantastic. The editorial formula: Take a rote, sexist stereotype, dress it up with the personal voice and namedrop brand things and places (to connect to "you" and "your life") and punch it.

Now, I'm not such a humorless literalist that I don't think the differences between the sexes aren't ample ground for humor. Women's complete inability to grapple with even simple arithmetic, for example: hilarious! But when an organization publishes—with a straight face, apparently—a guide called, "Husbands and Wives: How a Husband Should Handle His Wife's Submission," well, that organization will be sleeping on the couch tonight. There's no good humor to back up this jokey column about how men are too goofy, too labrador retriever-y to shop for groceries and succeed and so women should do the shopping. Under any circumstances I'd avoid ending a piece like that with the line "women should do the shopping," but it's especially suspect coming from the folks who believe that "women should do the everything men tell them to."

The tired lines follow the predictable ones (the Hunter-Gatherer emerges!), but along comes this:

John is a kid in a candy store when he steps through Safeway's automatic doors. He pounces on the very items most female shoppers avoid: dried fish, mint chutney, coconut ginger rice and banana-strawberry kefir.

Really? That's what guys eat when their women aren't nagging them? Coming from a place where people really buy into this stuff, Focus on the Family has always struck me as being awfully similar to Focusing on a Bag of Pork Rinds, at least as far as culinary ambitions go. Chutney, coconut ginger, kefir? That's not Family Focused—John's shopping at Whole Foods!

Listless men return from shopping trips energized by their ingenuity. Noodles are replaced by artichoke hearts, milk exchanged for broccolini, the sought-after turkey traded for a single hairy coconut.