'America Is "Saturated With Misogyny"? Oh, Please'

Article here. Excerpt:

'I don’t which infuriated me more: Bob Herbert’s sanctimonious Sunday column describing American society as “saturated with misogyny,” or the unusually thoughtless, “right-on” commentary that followed it. Herbert’s thesis echoes the drumbeat of self-pity that has been coming out of paleo-feminist groups and women’s studies departments for decades: America, in their view, is a country where “barbaric treatment of women has come to be more accepted,” where we are all so inured to the victimization of the female half of the population that we don’t even notice it anymore. ...

What on earth is he talking about? Having lived in several allegedly more progressive European countries, and having visited many far less female-friendly parts of the world, I can testify that American society is, at this point in history, one of the least misogynist on earth, one of the few in which real female achievement is possible, and perhaps the only one where women can and do succeed on a large scale. We are now on our third female Secretary of State; in Afghanistan, three women running for parliament have been chased out of their houses in the past few weeks. We consider it normal for women with children to work; at the school my children attended in Germany, this was considered borderline socially unacceptable. The majority of American university students are now women; in Saudi Arabia, women can’t even leave the house without a male relative.'