There are many out there – I once thought I numbered among them – that will tell you that the March of the West and the post-Enlightenment world, what with its science, its rule of law, and its progress, has reversed the historically diminished returns of life as a woman. Suffrage. Contraception. Microwave ovens. Miatas. I feel like I am only stating the obvious when I say this is a crock of shit.

Any self-styled 10th-grade feminist, hell, any moderately self-aware 10-year-old girl, should be able to point to 90% of the images of women in media and advertising, to MTV, and to the pink aisle at Toys’R'Us and say, “This is keeping us down.” Sadly, I don’t know how many 10th-grade feminists or self-aware 10-year-old girls the West is producing these days. Besides, self-awareness and feminism don’t usually occupy the same curriculum. Just check your local Smith alumna for a sense of humor.

One thing that I find absolutely reassuring is that this, my vehicle, the Internet, is no longer merely a repository of underage smut and a haven for stained-sweatpants pedophiles. It is, as the younger generation discovers its wily charms, a platform of social-reinforcing pedagogy, wherein MySpace.com is not only a mire of sexual predators, but also a day camp for producing over-sexed, under-achieving girls who cherish the planned obsolence of 15-minute celebrities with the same alternating veneration-vilification once simply reserved for, say, last seasons clothes. Mana from heaven! Another tool to stunt the minds of the fairer sex!

Case in point. One of my nieces has recently discovered the joys of email cc: and fwd:. Now, I’m patient, or at least I pretend to be, so I won’t chide her for it and just send the chain letters and whatnot straight to trash. Sometimes, however, I’ll take a peek at the packets of information that pass through and have, in a sense, made her brain (and, sigh, all of ours) yet another node in the artificial unintelligence of Der Web (I wonder what language and/or generic accent indicated “sinister” before the Germans got a bad rap? Probably Roman Latin. Maybe Bush’s faux-Texan will replace it for my generation?). Here is one jewel that she sent me. I censured her, not for sending it to me, but for sending it to anyone, for promulgating such an insidious ideology. To wit:

flip flops bellytops

lemonade in da shade

blue skies hot guys late

nites wata fight ice

cream sweet dreams

party time lookin fine

sleepin in sneakin out

that’s what Girls are all

about

This, of course, needs no explanation. I just want to point out that, even though TV is a 24-hour bootcamp for Whoredom, girls are sending each other shit like this. “Oh,” you would say, “that’s just girls having fun.” To which I would respond, “Kitsch 80s pop references are not a response to criticism.” I’m a childless 27-year-old American male. I look at porn, guiltlessly and often enough. But I find this kind of thing appalling. If the messages “our” girls are getting from the top down aren’t bad enough, now they have to contend with this sort of e-enabled mutual reinforcement.

So apparently I have woken myself up with a rant. That’s fun. What precipitated all this? The “flip flops, belly tops” has been itching at me for a while, but it was really something else, a very stupid, easy conceit which I will lay out right now:

Yesterday I was flipping through the one women’s magazine in our bathroom. (Mathilde, bless her, does have the excuse of needing to keep up on such press for her PR job, and I have not know such mags to be a vice of hers.) Reading it, I couldn’t help but think Holy Shit! There is a massive conspiracy to make girls stupid! Then it occurred to me, if that was the case, what a hypocritical bunch of bastards we, The West, are, to criticize cultures where women are still subordinated. For God’s sake, they just do away will all the nonsense and keep them locked in doors or appropriately covered when out. Does that just mean that the culture industry, having subsumed identity, warred against society, and marginalized the family, is now waging a campaign of gender oppression in lieu of that good-old-fashioned-barefoot-and-pregnant-(and-niqab) we thought was gone? Oh, wait, we all already know that? There is no end in sight.

I was going to say, “This is why I want boys.” But then I remembered Stuff magazine, and why I didn’t go to a state school.