This Fox News Op-Ed About "Alpha Women" Who Can't Love Might as Well Be Satire
Sorry, "alpha women" (which must mean women with career goals), this Fox News columnist doesn't think you are able to love. Sad!
In an op-ed that could have easily been published half a century ago, author Suzanne Venker argues that women who are not "feminine creatures" are unable to be the wives their husbands wish they were. The entire column is painful to read. It's a revealing look inside the mind of someone who doesn't believe there is a wage gap.
The central thesis is simple: women should be subservient to their husbands. "Women have become too much like men," she writes. "They're too competitive. Too masculine. Too alpha."
Venker's column continues to vastly oversimplify the differences between men and women. "All a good man wants is for his wife to be happy, and he will go to great lengths to make it happen," Venker asserts. "He'll even support his wife's ideas, plans or opinions if he doesn't agree with them. That's because a husband's number one goal is to please his wife."
This paragraph is particularly mind-numbing:
"Men are just so much simpler than women. Not simple as in dumb, as is often portrayed in the media. Simple in that they have far fewer needs than women do. What men want most of all is respect, companionship and sex. If you supply these basics, your husband will do anything for you — slay the dragons, kill the beast, work three jobs, etc. Men will happily do this if, and only if, they are loved well in return. It is when men are not loved well that problems arise. That is the nature of the male-female dance."
Shaking your head in disbelief yet? It gets worse. Venker closes her archaic rundown of "how love works" with another tired metaphor about dieting. Being a docile "beta" is liberating and women should shed their dominance at home, according to Venker: "I set about to become the feminine creature our culture insists women not be."
While Venker is absolutely entitled to her opinion, she fails to recognize that it is actually a good thing that women are "being groomed to be leaders rather than to be wives." Thankfully, we have progressed since the days where women were confined to the kitchen and discouraged from having aspirations other than pleasing their husbands.
Though Venker concedes to being an alpha woman all day, throughout the column she uses the term as if it's an insult — but it sounds more like a title many would wear as a badge of honor.