Lands' End Bashes Men in Recent Catalog

Equalitarian62 writes, "There is a story titled "When Rosie Rolled 'Em Up" (by
Charles Hirshberg) in the June Lands' End catalog.
Instead of simply describing the contribution of women
to the war effort (which in itself was commendable),
this story goes on to portray men as bigoted and
lecherous. As I couldn't find a link to the full story
at the Lands' End site, I will summarize the anti-male
parts here." Read on for the full submission.The story describes the experience of a young woman who
is hired as a welder at a shipyard in California. She
encounters a man at the Union Hall who repeatedly tells
her that they don't hire women or blacks. She gets
hired anyway. The instructor at the welding class is
described as a "little goat bearded man who thought that
teaching girls to weld was the funniest thing ever."
When a supervisor gets "fresh" with a female coworker,
the coworker clobbers him with her "stinger." And when
her father finds out that she is earning more that him,
he gets mad and tells her to either quit or leave the
house (neither of which happens). At the end, the young
woman's mother gives her the moral that "them men needs
us a lot more than they're willing to admit."

I'm not sure why it was necessary to put a gender-
feminist twist on a Norman Rockwell character that was
originally intended to portray the contributions of
women during World War II. While the contributions of
several thousand women were valuable in their own right,
it was the 16 million men who served overseas that bore
the brunt of the sacrifice during the war. Over 400,000
of them died, and many more were injured. Surely this
generation of men deserves better than to be portrayed
as boorish and prejudiced, based on the actions of a
minority of individuals.

I have received the Lands' End catalog for several years
now, but will cancel it if I see anything more like
this. It isn't necessary to market clothing to women by
putting men down in this way.

If you want to contact Lands' End about this story,
their web address is:

www.landsend.com

"You don't build women up by tearing men down"

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