Bill Bennett appeared on The 700 Club today to promote his new book The Book of Man. He and Pat Robertson used the time to lament the rise of women in American society and the supposed decimation of manhood. Bennett claimed that “feminism” and “gay culture” confused and blurred gender lines, and seemed to mourn the fact that women are now taking positions of authority in society once reserved only for men. Robertson cited the promotion of Virginia Rometty, who is succeeding Sam Palmisano to be CEO of IBM, and warned of a pending “matriarchy.”
Bennett: What feminism did I think, Pat, was confuse the debate to some extent by saying those expectations we have of boys, the kinds of responsibilities that they will need to take up as men, we’re not sure we need them anymore because we’re not sure we need men any more, well we do need men.
Robertson: Well you know it’s interesting in the news today was the changing of the guard at IBM where Palmisano is changing off and a woman’s taking his position as head of this great corporation, IBM.
Bennett: That’s right and there’s just a ton of that…fine all power to the women and the girls, as long as we don’t confuse roles and the differences in genders. Boys have to wake up! We got to wake them up!
Robertson: What’s this going to do to society, if men don’t take their places as men and suddenly there’s a gap and women and we have a matriarchy. What will this do ultimately to society?
Bennett: I think it can hurt society, maybe grievously. Interestingly the feminists are not celebrating this Pat, they want men too. They might want to rail against this and they may want to talk about stereotypes of man and male domination and so on, but women want men. They want men for that strong arm, they want men for that protection, they want men for a partner in marriage and so it’s something that has got very blurred and what I try to do in this book is remind people of things that are true. And to the boys, as you very well said, the array of things offered on TV and elsewhere is very confusing, from macho stuff to gay culture to all sorts of things. What I got here is a point of view that is time tested, based in tradition that will get boys to manhood.
