Sunday, July 4, 2010

Support in Unexpected Places: Gloria Steinem in The Colbert Report

I must confess that I am huge fan of Comedy Central, the cable channel dedicated exclusively to comedy shows. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, with my neighbor from Montclair Stephen Colbert, are my “must see TV.”

Last June 22nd, Stephen interviewed Gloria Steinem (March 25, 1934), the icon of American feminism. Steinem, journalist, social and political activist, was a leader and spokeswoman for the Women's Liberation Movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, and still is a prominent figure and an important referent of the movement.

During the brief although interesting interview, Stephen asked her to comment on her statement that it was unfair to women to ask them to have careers and to raise children too. In her comments, and to my pleasant surprise, Steinem argued in favor of shared parenting responsibilities, pointed out as a social advancement the fact that the men’s rights movement is fighting so that men have a more active role in the raising of children, and complained that the US laws make difficult to men participate as equal parents as women.

I have said before that regarding family law, some forms of feminism are not real feminism, but feminine supremacism, kind of an “inverted machismo” where women want to have over men the same control that men used to have over them. These false feminist want equality in everything but in family matters, and when they divorce, they want to deny men their right to be parents of their children. If these so-called feminist were so, they would have understood that putting on women all the responsibilities of raising children is just a way of preserving gender inequality, and they would be fighting for equal parenting rights for both genders. And if someone asks who said this, you can reply: Gloria Steinem did.

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