Heather MacDonald had an interesting piece in City Journal last week about the NYT’s ongoing obsession with gender-and-country-club-amenties. Here’s the latest situation that’s outraging the Times:
The Phoenix Country Club has male and female members and a common dining room. But like many clubs, it has separate men’s and women’s grill rooms-an innocuous arrangement to which members agree by joining the club. The Times points out darkly: “Women at the club are not permitted to have lunch in the men’s grill room with their husbands after a round of golf.” It could as justly have observed that after the same round of golf, men at the club aren’t allowed to lunch with their wives in the women’s grill room.
The Rosa Parks role in this break-down-the-barriers battle is played by the Van Sitterts, a couple who, two years ago, wanted to eat eggs together in the men’s grill room rather than in the club’s formal dining room. Having failed to persuade the board to change its policies-presumably because most members are happy with the single-sex socializing options-they did what any self-respecting aspirant to victimhood does today: they went whining to the government. Instead of resigning their membership and joining another club, they petitioned Arizona’s attorney general to intervene. The AG was only too happy to comply, brushing aside the legal nicety that private clubs are in theory not subject to antidiscrimination laws and ruling that the club was violating those laws, since (pending renovation) the women’s grill room has neither a television nor its own bar. Television and booze are available elsewhere in the club, and women can bring drinks into their grill. But in the spirit of angry young wives who tally every pair of socks that they and their husband fold, the absence of absolute tit-for-tat equality in one room’s appurtenances means that women occupy an unbearable position of inferiority.
More here.