Feminism Hits a Road Bump

Let me begin by asserting that I love women. Young women and old women...blond women and brunette woman...MBA women and homemaker women. Furthermore, I think Gloria Steinem is equally bright, beautiful and blessed. However...!!

This month the hard-earned feminist movement hit a big speed bump on its way to the promised land. It came by way of a nationwide poll. Granted, you can find a poll to say pretty much anything you want, because there are so silly many of them. Still, this was a poll whose results were published in USA Today, and thereby anointed as something to take seriously.

If we do, two of its results are stunning. More than that, they just may be correct. If true, every inch of over-due progress by the feminists suffers a great blow. And every chuckle-headed guy in every male-only gym or country club gets to make some cheap, nasty jokes.

First, the poll found that 25% of the young women questioned would prefer winning first prize on America's Next Top Model than the Nobel Peace Prize. Second, 50% of them said they would marry an ugly man if he were rich.

One is left breathless. Not necessarily surprised, but breathless. Could these be the same admirable young women who are rising so rapidly in the ranks of business, education and government these days? The same women who are lately scoring higher than men in scholastic achievements and athletic accomplishments? The same magnificent women I call my daughters?

Well, I told you -- there are polls and there are polls! Perhaps not one in a hundred is worth taking to the bank. (Come to think of it, we'll have to change that cliche too won't we?). However, granting this poll some credibility, we are left to wonder what today's headline-making neuro-biologists would say. What evolutionary gene or brain lobe helps to explain such results.

Personally, I still have some trouble with these studies insisting that we all are -- young polled women included -- essentially the sum of our recently-dissected physiological parts. In my scientific ignorance, I still like to feel that we all are -- young polled women included -- a mystic total greater than this physiological sum. And therefore what makes us tick and click is considerably more and more mysterious than any pollster can quantify.

That being said, here's an un-polled conclusion of my own. Young women, just like young men, are a complex galaxy of little whirring emotions and aspirations that very often have little to do with reason or logic.Therefore when they say unreasonable and illogical things like some of them do about prizes and mates, maybe it's just something silly that washes across their sensorium at that particular moment.

Sorta like the way the giddy freedom and fragrance of another new spring does. Oh, if you haven't felt that lately, then just possibly you're being much too reasonable and logical for your own good