Where the Boys Are

On this website and elsewhere, I have often written that one possible outcome of modern feminism will be renewed attempts to separate the sexes. As of this moment, that prediction seems to be coming true. Separate kindergartens (“in single-gender… classrooms at one elementary school in Western Michigan.”). Separate schools. Separate playgrounds (“Separate Playgrounds up at More Schools”—The Denver Post, 31.5.2008). Separate parking places. Separate taxis. Separate railway- and underground carriages. Separate rows of seats on aircraft. Separate elevators  (“Office Workers Face Sex-Segregated Elevators,” Schmooze, January 2012). Separate floors in hotels (in Tokyo). Separate swimming pools and sports facilities. Separate streets (in the orthodox neighborhoods of Jerusalem, just a few miles from where I live). Soon, perhaps separate queues at shopping centers and entertainment facilities such as theaters, movie houses, and the like.

All these, and many more, either exist already or have been seriously proposed. In a handful of cases, the objective is to protect men against their own lecherous instincts. But mostly it is to defend poor defenseless females of all ages against those wicked, but unfortunately strong and powerful, creatures known as males. Males whose only aim in life is to touch them and fondle them and rape them if they can possibly get away with it.

As the old unlamented apartheid regime of South Africa had it, “separate but equal.” In the process, moves towards gender integration that took decades, sometimes centuries, to accomplish are being reversed one by one. Often the outcome is a regression to earlier arrangements. An excellent example is the recent trend towards what is called “Women only co-working spaces.” No doubt those who came up with the idea see themselves as daring innovators. In fact all they are doing is to put back the clock to the last two decades or so of the nineteenth century. As the first really large corporations made their appearance in the U.S and Europe, management looked for personnel who could do routine, physically not too demanding, work such as bookkeeping, correspondence, filing, and general administration. The normal solution was to recruit the daughters of the lower middle classes and have them work from the time they left school—generally at the age of sixteen or so—until they got married five or six years later. To assure worried parents that their daughters’ morals would not be corrupted, which God forbid, the women in question were concentrated in halls of their own. There they came under the supervision of somewhat older female employees and males were not allowed to enter. Contemporary photographs often show row after row of neatly dressed women sitting behind their desks; hence what one author has called, The White Blouse Revolution.

Unfortunately for feminists, the renewed move towards separate facilities for women is unlikely to empower women. Instead, if I am allowed to venture another prediction, it will result in men and women looking on those facilities, and the women who inhabit them, as second rate. The fact that, in every known society, whatever men do is regarded as the most important has been well documented by female researchers among others. So has the fact that, whenever women enter a field or profession, that field or profession will start going downhill in terms of both prestige and income.

There is a certain logic behind this. Integration or separation, now as ever the worst thing people of both sexes can say about a man is that he is like a woman; the best thing people of both sexes can say about a woman, that (as long as she does not grow a beard and speaks in a bass voice) she is like a man. In the words of the famous nineteen-fifties-vintage singer, Connie Francis:

Where the boys are, someone waits for me
A smilin’ face, a warm embrace, two arms to hold me tenderly

They think they have to go it alone and admitting they don’t have the answer viagra generic sildenafil will permanently mar their reputation. Action of mechanism: Kamagra tablets are manufactured with a chemical or viagra online prescription neurological reaction monitored from the brain that trigger the dilation of the blood vessels, which allow the erectile chambers to become flooded with blood to get firm erection during the sexual encounters. Many people lead normal lives in spite of buy sildenafil uk them. The main difference between the two is that the Kamagra Oral Jelly buying viagra in usa can be purchase from online pharmacies to treat your erectile dysfunction problems and should be used for this purpose alone. Where the boys are, my true love will be
He’s walkin’ down some street in town and I know he’s lookin’ there for me

In the crowd of a million people I’ll find my valentine
And then I’ll climb to the highest steeple and tell the world he’s mine

Till he holds me I’ll wait impatiently
Where the boys are, where the boys are
Where the boys are, someone waits for me
Till he holds me I’ll wait impatiently
Where the boys are, where the boys are
Where the boys are, someone waits for me.

Or in those of the Bible: Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.