Laura Bennet Falls on Her Face Rooting for Girls |

Jan 30 2009

Laura Bennet Falls on Her Face Rooting for Girls

Published by Jennifer at 12:06 pm under Off the Press

Let me preface this by saying that I quite like Laura Bennet. She’s the best damn thing that ever passed through the annals of Project Runway. But in her most recent contribution to The Daily Beast, she falls down the all too familiar slippery slope from pushing for gender equality to pathetic grrrl power irrationality.

Beginning with the perfectly reasonable question of how men came to surpass women in power, she attempts to prove the ridiculousness of such a disparity by comparing her daughter and sons. Writing, “My daughter, Cleo, was self-sufficient and independent from the time she could walk; my boys can’t take a piss without my help, and even then they can’t manage to get it in the toilet bowl. My boys have been slow to walk and talk, impossible to potty-train, and refused to give up breast-feeding. I had none of these problems with my daughter,” Bennet fails to consider that her sons are a very small minority of the male population and that, well, they may be a little dumb. Yes, it’s hard for a mother to admit that her kids may be sub-average, but well, you don’t see Mike Huckabee’s mom running around making remarks equivalent to “Girls Rule, Boys Drool” just because her son is a bit slow (to accept republican primary defeat.)

Bennet again goes the unpersuasive route via anecdotal evidence, writing, “The multitask gene is obviously linked to the X chromosome, because I know of no men who carry the trait. My husband will get off of the sofa to get something from the kitchen and yet it never occurs to him to bring his empty coffee cup with him.” Laura, Laura, Laura. We’ve heard the spiels about men and multi-tasking before. We’ve heard other women discuss how their husbands can’t be bothered to do two things at once. But, honey, there’s something you need to know: men have the X chromosome too, so this rhetorical logic really isn’t working. There, there, Laura. I’m sure your daughter is much smarter than your boys. And I’m sure your husband leaves his coffee mug by the sofa all the time. But that hardly means that women as a whole are superior to men as a whole, so much as that your daughter may be the most capable member of your family.