It was Aristotle who wrote: "[A]s regards the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject."
And sometimes you just feel like nodding your head and saying to yourself: "Maybe the old Peripatetic of Athens was right."
Take this breathless bit of breaking feminist news from CNN: Statues don't move!
No! I don't believe it!
Here's the shoe-leather reporting:
On March 7, the day before International Women's Day, the investment management firm State Street Global Advisors installed a bronze statue of a ponytailed prepubescent girl, hands on hips, defiantly staring down that bronze statue of a charging bull that's one of Wall Street's hallmarks. The name of the statue, which looks inspired by Degas's "Little Dancer," was "Fearless Girl."
CNN reporter Danielle Bronner-Wiener just loved the idea:
"Fearless Girl" is designed to call attention to a new initiative by the asset-manager to increase the number of women on their clients' corporate boards.
"Today, we are calling on companies to take concrete steps to increase gender diversity on their boards and have issued clear guidance to help them begin to take action," Ron O'Hanley, president and CEO of SSGA said in a statement. "A key contributor to effective independent board leadership is diversity of thought, which requires directors with different skills, backgrounds and expertise."
Of course defiantly staring down a charging bull–or any bull, for that matter–is a really bad idea. Unless you're a wrangler or a professional matador, your best bet is not to be that close to a bull in the first place. Your second-best bet is to tiptoe the hell out of there and then start running. That little girl in the danger zone looks to me like a case of parental neglect.
And is hiring an 11-year-old girl to sit on your board of directors really a good idea anyway? Wouldn't a more effective statue feature a middle-aged woman in a business suit waving a Harvard MBA degree at the bull?
Then came the Great Northeast Blizzard of March 14–so CNN tweeted:
New York's “Fearless Girl” statue stands her ground against the Wall Street bull, even in the snow
Mmm, hmm. The Washington Free Beacon noted:
Statues apparently do not move, CNN reported on Tuesday. Not even female ones. Not even in the snow.
As one tweeter quoted by the Free Beacon joshed:
I feel like a statue picking itself up and leaving to take shelter would be a bigger story but what do I know about news.
Now what that again that Aristotle said about women?