Bullshit Roundup

Watch out girls, trying to compete with the big boys in Washington will make you a haggard, insecure, ho-bag, or so says Janice Shaw Crouse of Concerned Women for America in her recent piece, "Washington's Working Women."

She begins her "report" like a Lifetime movie script:

When I saw her, as she headed to work on the train early one morning, her hair was still damp and she looked slightly worn and only half awake. Nonetheless, she was quite beautiful. Not beautiful in the dewy, fresh-faced way she probably looked when she arrived in Washington a few years earlier, but very attractive all the same. In spite of her still hard-body figure and smart, slightly provocative clothes, there was a hint of vulnerability in her body language---a certain tentativeness. She was obviously "with" the young man she sat beside, but there was something missing. And it was not just the wedding rings that neither of them was wearing.

Gasp! Living in sin! How dare that hussy! From there, Crouse takes this vision of some girl she saw on a train and then extrapolates this marmish sermon on the state of all unmarried "career girls." They're all unhappy because some man hasn't proposed to them yet, most likely because they've been doing it, and why should he buy the cow if he can get the milk for free, right Janice?

Not only is Crouse purely insulting, she doesn't even pretend to use facts or evidence or anything but some woman she saw on a train! The title of her article, "Washington's Working Women" is not subtle. She clearly tries to link women who work with "working women" or prostitutes. She more clearly gets to this point at the end of her piece:

It's for sure; she is not hoping to join the ranks of the women who are only indispensable to their boss at work; that's not the kind of indispensability most women dream of, unless, of course, they're having an affair in hopes of morphing a professional relationship into a personal one.

Not only does she admonish women with careers, she even rips away that one power by diminishing women's ability to become indispensable without sleeping with her boss. And, of course, Crouse assumes that "the boss" is a man.

It's an old line: women REALLY don't want anything but a marriage and children. There's absolutely no satisfaction to having a career and money or your own, having the freedom to do what you want when you want to do it, or having time to spend with your family and friends. None. In fact, you better get married right quick and start pumping out babies, or you're going to end up a dried up old spinster:

But when a girl hits 30-ish, she begins to sense things slipping away from her. If she's not stupid, she sees that not as many men notice her as once did, and she becomes aware that her biological clock is ticking. If she is not blind, she takes stock of the 40-ish women who arrived before her and likely isn't happy at the thought of ending up like so many of them.

You have to feel sorry for the older ones who played the game and lost; they've made their beds and now they lie in them, alone.

Hmmm, I don't know, better than waking up at 30 with three kids and realizing the guy you married when you were "so in love" at 22 is not the best life partner at 30.

As we age, we (most likely) make better decisions, and choosing a person to spend the rest of your life with is a pretty big decision. People are just learning how to be adults in their twenties; they're moving out of a college/student mentality and are finding out what it takes to survive (or thrive!) in the world. Some people figure that out earlier than others; they get married and are happy. But why pressure people into making such an important decision?

What Crouse wants us to do is settle. She wants to scare us into believing that if we have a career (and, shock of all shocks, premarital sex) we will end up old and alone. She even goes as far as to say that girls who "play the Washington game" are "scarred up and used up." That's right ladies, keep those hymens fresh and clean for the marriage bed! Your vagina doesn't belong to you!

Though, there is humor in this piece. There's humor in the horrible writing and in the uppity, after-school special tone. But by far, the funniest line is the last:

What is foolish is the lousy deal that today's women are choosing when they miss the fact that sex belongs within the bonds of marriage where it was intended to be and where, as many women and men attest, it can make its magic.

No she didn't! "MAKE IT'S MAGIC!" Based on that one line alone, I believe I can safely infer that Janice Shaw Crouse shuts her eyes, thinks of Jesus, and waits for it to be over. Unless her husband is David Copperfield, I can guarantee that no sex she has ever had could be described as "magical."