Of Masculine and Feminine

Neil Cavuto of Fox News reports on a run-in he had with a feminist who got bent out of shape when he held the door for her. Here's the whole sad tale, but I really liked this part:

"Excuse me," I asked — now feeling every bit of my offended macho Italian roots — "but exactly what bug got up your butt?"

"Treating me like I have to be coddled," she said.

"By opening a door?" I asked.

She went onto explain the door thing was part and parcel of a bigger thing: An attempt by men, she said, to make women feel like they're lesser.

This is part of a big problem we have. Oh, not the whole ages-old women vs. men thing. No -- I'm talking about the one where we've gotten so damn wealthy we can now take normal everyday things and make them crises.

This particular one is akin to the argument over the third-person singular pronoun. That's the one where the feminists have ruined good English by insisting that we're all sexist thugs for using male pronouns (he, him, or his) in general cases, such as, "An activist makes a complete ass of himself when he insists we change our language to cater to his idiotic and ignorant opinions." Their argument is that we favor males by defaulting to their pronouns. And the rest of mankind (oh boy, there's another can of worms -- the synecdochic use of "man" to refer to all humans) is supposed to ignore the flipside argument, that we belittle men by making their pronouns multi-purpose, while women have theirs all to themselves.

What it comes down to is that we have whole classes of people now who have too much time and too much money, and spend both by making themselves a thorn in the side of humanity. But what I wonder is why the rest of us even listen to them, much less change our freaking ways to try to make them shut up. Because you can count on this: such pathetic, whining (actually I prefer the British "whinging"), find-something-to-bitch-about-at-all-costs wastes of space and air will never, ever shut up.

Ever.