Didn’t Curious George know about stranger danger?

At Slate, Hanna Rosin discusses a children’s book for parents who are uncomfortable allowing their children to have the same freedoms they did while growing up. While they have been raised with Curious George, then, George does not provide the type of example they want their children to follow. As Rosin says:

Remember poor Curious George? How every time that “good little monkey” tried to have a little fun, he would get severely punished? Like, he’d walk up to a friendly stranger in the jungle and wind up smuggled across the ocean in a bag, or play around with the phone and end up in jail? This year brings the successor to Curious George, an energetic little monkey named Bitsy who is possibly the most pitiful children’s book character I’ve come across in a long time.

As a result, the book Bitsy Bear solves the problem of parents who want to read their children a story about monkeys (although the book is called “Bitsy Bear,” Bitsy is a monkey and the bear is the antagonist) without the danger inherent in exploring their world or jumping on the bed. Rosin concludes:

Jenks’ appendix is full of helpful safety tips for parents, such as: Keep DNA samples at home and teach kids about safety latches in trunks. She says to discuss “good strangers,” such as a police officer and other family members, and “bad strangers”— “people who try to lure children from public places.”  In fact children are vastly more likely to be abducted or molested by family members and people they know than they are by strangers, but this kind of information is far too complex for Jenks to process. “This book is dedicated to the sweet innocence of every child,” she writes. If you are so unfortunate as to have a complicated child with other, less savory qualities—curiosity, willfulness, mischievousness, even, God forbid, a wicked temper—I’d say it’s not the book for you.

Maybe the man with the yellow hat will buy it for George.

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Men aren’t tough enough for equality

Women’s roles have changed a great deal in the past 50 years while men’s, well, haven’t. Women are attending college and getting jobs in ever-increasing numbers, even if they don’t get paid the same amount as men once they get those jobs. On top of all of this, there has been a decline in the number of men who want to get married. Why? Because women! At least that’s the argument that Suzanne Venker makes in a Fox News opinion post. Apparently, a few men she knows claim that they don’t want to get married because “Women aren’t women anymore.” She writes:

Contrary to what feminists like Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, say, the so-called rise of women has not threatened men. It has pissed them off. It has also undermined their ability to become self-sufficient in the hopes of someday supporting a family. Men want to love women, not compete with them. They want to provide for and protect their families – it’s in their DNA. But modern women won’t let them.

It’s all so unfortunate – for women, not men. Feminism serves men very well: they can have sex at hello and even live with their girlfriends with no responsibilities whatsoever.

It’s the women who lose. Not only are they saddled with the consequences of sex, by dismissing male nature they’re forever seeking a balanced life. The fact is, women need men’s linear career goals – they need men to pick up the slack at the office – in order to live the balanced life they seek.

So if men today are slackers, and if they’re retreating from marriage en masse, women should look in the mirror and ask themselves what role they’ve played to bring about this transformation.

Fortunately, there is good news: women have the power to turn everything around. All they have to do is surrender to their nature – their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs.

To summarize, women have gained equality with men, who have done nothing to change the way they want to interact with women, but this equality is bad for women because no man wants to marry a woman who is equal! Hanna Rosin, the author Venker criticizes, responds at Slate, stating:

Unfortunately, Venker is somewhat enigmatic about how to reverse this problem, beyond a few vague clues. Women, she says, “have the power to turn everything around” (Duh, of course, we have ALL the power). “All they have to do is surrender to their nature – their femininity – and let men surrender to theirs.” Surrender to my femininity. Surrender to my femininity. I get the general idea but what does it mean, like, in practice? Not wear pants so much? Let my hair grow. Ask my boss to pay me a little less? Open to ideas.

Of course, since she is a working woman trying to knock men off of their pedestals when she should actually be raising a family, it is hard to believe that Venker came up with this idea on her own. As you can see below, it actually originated with noted gender scholar Archie Bunker in the 1970s:

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