Securing Yourself a Man

I must say that the timing of my engagement was very serendipitous, since I snagged a man just before this helpful op-ed piece on foxnews.com created a run on husbands. In this op-ed piece, women are scolded for their efforts to be financially independent from men and encouraged to go find a man to support them, while being reminded that it will be difficult to find a supportive man because a generation of financially independent women have offended men.

Your Aunt Slugger loves columns like these. There is nothing I enjoy more than a white columnist waxing nostalgic about the "good ol' days" when women stayed at home, men were the breadwinners, and black people were lynched for using the wrong restroom. Those were the days, weren't they?! Things were great back then.*

Now, your Aunt Slugger is not here to judge straight couples where each gender takes on a traditional role. My own mother, for example, was a stay-at-home mother for much of my childhood, begrudgingly taking on some of the most awful tasks imaginable, like being a Brownie troop leader, presiding over the PTA, and helping me haul a giant barrel of overgrown impatiens to the county plant fair. Being a parent is like being a sewage diver without the pay or mandatory hepatitis vaccinations. It is a necessary, disgusting, and important job, but people do not have enough respect for this role.

But I digress. Our Fox News opinion writer cites a whole bunch of studies indicating that women value work-life balance and comes to the natural conclusion that the only way to achieve this is to find yourself a husband who will take care of you. After all, ladies, "you can't take your paycheck to bed with you."**

Obviously this solution makes sense. The fact that women cannot easily achieve work-life balance is NOT because of things like incredibly inadequate maternity leave, the wage gap between men and women, or a lack of quality state-sponsored programs for parents. No, you idiot women, it's because you aren't married to a man. But not just any man, ladies! You need a man who can support you if you leave your job or reduce your hours, which means you should NOT look for male social workers or male teachers (these men are probably not real men anyway, since they have eschewed money and glamour for women's work).

And of course, if you cannot find a man, "ask yourself why, and I bet you know the answer," says our delightfully offensive Fox News op-ed writer. It's because you are a repulsive trollop, with your own bank account and your career and what we can only conclude are loose moral standards.

So ladies, let's do ourselves a favor and set the women's movement back about a hundred years. I for one am going to change the focus of this column to be exclusively about housekeeping and matrimony, with upcoming topics like, "Can you recommend an alternative to PineSol?"*** and "How do you properly iron a man's dress shirt?"****

Sincerely,
Aunt Slugger

*False.
**$10 to the first person who knows what that quote means.
***Who the fuck even knows what PineSol does?
****You don't.