Dear Reader:
Mr. Manners is Jewish. But then with a last name like Manners, what else could he be? I relate this fascinating piece of information, because with COVID-19, Jewish people were not able to celebrate Passover in the normal way. Part of the tradition is citing the four reason why the first night of Passover is different from all other nights.
Mr. Manners has amended the four questions and invented the game, Why This Year in Gender is Different than Other Years. Play the game with the whole family and feel free to amend the game to your liking.
- In every other year, we don’t hear about which sex dies more on the job. Why should we, after all 92% of those who die on the job are men. Who cares? In this year we hear about women being at greater risk than men because most caregivers are women, ignoring the fact that men are more likely than women to die of the virus.
- In this year, a man, Jussie Smollet, was indicted by a grand jury, as a reaction to the outrage of his only getting community service for falsely claiming he had been attacked. In every year, men are falsely charged with rape and nothing happens to women making the charge and there is no outrage. A case with similarities to Smollett’s, was the accusations by Crystal Magnum against the Duke Lacrosse team. Both Magnum and Smollet are black people who charged white men with assaulting them and both stories received national attention.
There the comparison ends. Magnum’s charges named actual people, plus the Duke Lacrosse team was charged with the more serious accusation of rape. The Duke students were maligned at their own college. They endured things such as, signs saying to castrate them displayed on their campus. They were condemned by a large number of their school’s faculty. Their potential nations championship lacrosse team had their season cancelled, just to name some of the things they experienced. Four of the players were indicted for rape. Unlike Smollett, Magnum was not charged with anything and few seemed to care. That was until Magnum killed a man a few years later. No doubt the family of that victim cared.
- In most years, we hear only occasionally, that not only are black men more likely to be killed by the police, but so are black women, with no mention of how many men overall are killed by police. In this year, we hear all the time about the greater risk of black women, but not about men overall. Ms. Magazine quoted a tweet from now Vice-Presidential elect Kamala Harris, in an article about women killed by police. Harris tweeted: “We can’t forget about black women in our quest for justice (Ms. June 5 2020, “#Say Her Name: Happy 27th Birthday Breonna Taylor”). On the other hand, ignoring the fact that men of all races are far more likely to be killed by the police than black women, is apparently the thing to do. So far this year, men are over 25.5 times more likely to be killed by police than women. Let me add, that all the good work by police is generally being ignored by the mainstream media.
- In most years, we hear from feminist’s and others, that if women are not considered for important jobs, we are eliminating the talents of half the population. In this year, Joe Biden pledged to nominate a woman as his Vice President, thus eliminating half of the eligible population. The same advocates for diversity, either applauded his decision or remained silent.
Bonus Question-Candidates. Sorry, I was going to stop at four, but once I get started it’s hard to control. Not unlike women who hit a man who they know won’t hit back. It’s hard to stop at four.
- Sexism was charged, when Elizabeth Warren’s age was cited as a reason, she should not be President. After all, her competitors Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden were considerably older than her. In fact, concern about the ages of Sanders and Biden were mentioned a number of times. In this year, we heard the age of both Trump and Biden being discussed but not Trump’s omnipresent rival Nancy Pelosi, even though she was already serving as Speaker of the House.
Pelosi was selected for her current term on Jan 3 2019. She was born on March 26th 1940. Biden was born on November 20, 1942, making Biden about 32 months younger than Pelosi when she started as Speaker of the House. Trump was born on June 14th 1946. If he was elected for a second term, he would have been younger than Pelosi is now.
Wasn’t That Fun and There is More to Come.
MOVIE TO WATCH DURING THE PANDEMIC
Anyone who thinks anti-female films are a thing of the distant past, should check out a movie script I read. The movie is titled “Thelma and Louise” (www.raindance.org › scripts> Thelma & Louise script PDF). In a scene from this misogynistic film that should live in infamy, Thelma is forcefully guided out of a bar and into a parking lot, by a guy named Harlan. He proceeds to try to rape her, but her friend Louise pulls a gun on him. While Thelma and Louise are walking towards their car, Harlan yells a sexual obscenity and Louise shoots him dead. Thus performing the noble act of second degree murder. All fine and good you say! Well wait for what happened next.
Thelma suggests calling the police. Then Louise comes up with perhaps the most disempowering reply in the history of film. She explains that the whole bar saw them dancing cheek to cheek. Therefore, if she claims the guy tried to rape her, “Whose gonna believe that? We just don’t live in this kind of a world.” Later in the movie, Thelma concurs with Louise’s version of what would have happened as “probably” correct. After all, Thelma observed: I “was dancing with him (Harlan) all night. And they wouda made out like I was askin for it.” To add to the nonsense, based on what we saw on the screen, there most likely would have been significant information that Thelma had been attacked. In addition, the two women had strong evidence that people at the bar knew Harlan had a bad reputation with women.
Now the obvious question would be, not just what year, but what country is this supposed to be. The answer: the movie is current day (it came out in 1991) and the country, get this, it’s the USA. Hollywood’s reaction, it received six Oscar nominations for the 1992 Academy Awards.
As it happened, 1991 and 1992 were the years of two big celebrity rape trials. The first involved a Kennedy, William Kennedy Smith. Like in the movie, Smith met a woman in a bar. He didn’t just go outside with her, he took her to the Kennedy compound where the crime was alleged to have happened.
Being part of the American royalty was not enough from keeping Kennedy-Smith from going to trial. But with the help of what was perhaps the best defense ever given to a person charged with rape, he was found not guilty by the jury on December 11th 1991.
In the other case, the defendant, recently dethroned boxing champion Mike Tyson, was not so lucky. On February 10th 1992, Tyson was convicted of rape. In this case, the women went back to Tyson’s hotel with him around 2:00 in the morning. Despite the fact that witnesses who did not testify in the trial had evidence that contradicted part of the accuser’s testimony, Tyson was denied an appeal.
But let’s back to the misogynist script. There is more outrage. Louise committed a murder, while Thelma had done nothing illegal. Yet Louise did not offer to take responsibility for what she did. Instead she tells Thelma to “get in the car” and “get back to the interstate.”
You might expect Louise to at the very least, immediately suggest that Thelma should part ways with her to protect herself, or even go to the police. Wouldn’t a man who behaved like Louise be considered a misogynist jerk? After all, Louise had shot Harlan with Thelma’s gun, thus making Louise the primary suspect. I mean even in the movie “Bonnie and Clyde”, Clyde was far more concerned about Bonnie’s welfare than Louise was for Thelma’s. This is despite the fact that in the movie, Clyde was shown to be not just a serial bank robber, but a violent and sadistic man.
I’m not claiming the film did not have its moments of female empowerment. For instance, the delightful scene where a nice policeman was locked in a car trunk in the desert by Thelma and Louise. Or the blowing up of a truck of a man who made unwanted, sexual innuendoes they found crude. Still, where is the anger? Why weren’t feminist pointing out how preposterous it is to claim that if your seen dancing cheek to cheek, a rape charge won’t be taken seriously?
Besides best screenplay, the film received five other academy award nominations. You might expect that feminist were there picketing the awards ceremony. The Academy awards were on March 30th, 1992, with the Tyson and Kennedy cases still fresh on people’s minds. Citing these two trials might convince nitwits that a woman can dance with someone in public and still charge rape. Yet there was no protest and I know of no feminist or any member of the media that addressed this idea promulgated by the film.
What did happen? The movie received one Oscar, awarded for best screenplay. I wonder how the women hater that wrote it, a dude named Callie Khoury, sleeps at night?
Eventually, the National Organization for Women did address the movie, showing it at the organizations 25th anniversary convention. One can only imagine the venom expressed about the movie by members of NOW.
