Fox News Makes Odd Use of Lesbians Kissing

Traditional gender roles get an ironic twist in a Fox News column.Screen shot/Fox News

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


The culture wars are as American as apple pie. According to Suzanne Venker, author of “How to Choose a Husband and Make Peace with Marriage,” one of the more pressing issues in modern culture is the dissolution of traditional gender roles. The culprit, Venker argued in a recent column for Fox News, is feminism.

“Feminism didn’t result in equality between the sexes,” Venker wrote, “it resulted in mass confusion. Today, men and women have no idea who’s supposed to do what.”

The most immediate irony of the piece as originally published was its inclusion of an image of a newlywed lesbian couple, apparently by accident. The photo was of Lela McArthur and Stephanie Figarelle of Anchorage, Alaska, according to Buzzfeed. The image has since been removed, but Venker’s arguments against sexual equality deserve their own response.

To illustrate her point that men and women are confused in their currently nebulous gender roles, Venker looks at the wreck of the cruise ship Costa Concordia. After the disaster, dismayed passengers talked of the lack of a “women and children first” policy, describing men pushing past them on their way to safety.

I will grant Venker this: Men and women are indeed different, biologically at the very least. Few people believe otherwise, even while acknowledging that gender itself is a social construction. While some gender roles, such as giving birth to a child, are defined by our biology, most are defined by our culture. These roles shift over time; they evolve and adapt to the realities of our economy and technology and worldview.

According to Venker, while men and women are often capable of doing the same things, they don’t necessarily want to. “That we don’t have more female CEOs or stay-at-home dads proves this in spades,” she argues, blithely ignoring the historical factors at play in this division of labor.

Venker argues that this confusion stems from a population raised on divorce. Marriage is no longer a priority, she argues. Instead we are now taught to “honor sex, singlehood, and female empowerment.”

Divorce may be a problem in its own right, but Venker conveniently leaves out the darker history of marriage, including the legality of marital rape. Raping one’s spouse wasn’t fully outlawed in the United States until 1993 when North Carolina removed an exemption from its rape laws for spouses. (Finland didn’t make marital rape illegal until 1994, and it is still legal in some parts of the world.)

If divorce has become a problem, it’s a problem which stems from a much longer history of women treated as property rather than as equals. If we truly want to strengthen marriage, we’ll need to do so precisely by honoring “female empowerment.”

If men and women are confused about their roles in today’s society, it’s because we’ve been forced to reconcile the history of inequality with a future we hope will be better for both sexes. Masculinity may indeed be undergoing a crisis of its own, but that’s just a symptom of growing pains, not some nefarious illness brought on by the advent of feminism.

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate