No Girls Allowed

It's true that I occasionally style myself as the Typical Gay Misogynist™, but I'm still reliably shocked by the depth of heterosexual male insecurity as concerns Women and Power. Maybe the howlers on Fox News and the like are really right to lament the decline of the White Man, beset on all sides by recipients of special privilege, criticized for his essential being in a manner that would be totally unacceptable if aimed at any other demographic cohort, friendless, loveless, etc. I guess the prevalence of erection potions on the TV is evidence enough; the popular rhetoric is just confirmation: the 30+ Straight White Dude is a almost bottomless well of psychosexual inadequacies. On the Right these days, we find the Ripperian fear that the West suffers a collective loss of essence. The only marginally--but only marginally--steadier Kristof of the first linked article above, is more modestly invested in constructing a chop-logical edifice that tries to build some Theses on How Women in Democracies Are Undermined by sui generis Popular Sentiments that Make Women Bad, positing an inevitability to these innate, inherent, inherited terrors of Women-in-Charge, even as his on-the-other-hand is prestodigitating a litany of lousy chick politicians because that, like, um, QED, man. Notable about this list: you would be pressed to name any good prime ministers of any gender in the countries in question. India came closest. But Pakistan? The Phillipines? Indonesia? It seems awfully tendentious to note that these countries had bad women leaders without nodding to the fact that they've had uniformly bad leaders of both penile and vaginal persuasions. How embarrassing: To write--for public consumption!--a column so self-evidently seeking a rationale for one's own prejudice.