Shovel this, Kathleen Parker

Hey, remember when Kathleen Parker was cool because she was a conservative writer who stepped up and said that Sarah Palin maybe wasn’t ready to be president? Yep, those five minutes are long over. Check out today’s column, about how men want to shovel, but women do it only from necessity:

What do men want?

The simple answer is well-known, but a more nuanced answer has presented itself the past several days during Washington’s “Snowmageddon.”

Shovels. Men want shovels, the bigger the better.


Lest I be accused of sexist stereotyping, let me tweak the record to reflect that many women were also out clearing sidewalks and unearthing cars no longer identifiable as such. But most women do these things because they must, while men apparently can’t wait to do them.

Parker bases this on an anecdotal observation that her neighbor, Craig, started shoveling early and kindly offered to shake the snow off her bending trees. I’m not clear on how Parker read Craig’s mind and divined his motives to be some manly desire to be shoveling. My own suspicion is Criag looked over and thought, Jeez, that lady is gonna let those trees break right onto my lawn if I don’t do something about it. But hey, that would mean he’s shoveling out of necessity, not masculine desire to break shit up. Silly me, using Occam’s Razor to come up with a simpler explanation than “Craig genetically wants to shovel stuff because he has a penis.”

In case you’re wondering, Parker doesn’t just talk shovels. She also takes some time to stereotype working women as ball-busting feminazis who are more responsible than the recession for making men feel like they have no purpose in their jobless lives:

Women can’t be blamed for wanting to be independent and self-sufficient, but smart ones have done so without diminishing the males whose shoulders they might prefer on imperfect days. Add to the cultural shifts our recent economic woes, which have left more men than women without jobs, and men are all the more riveted by opportunities to be useful.

They prefer those shoulders… to cry on, when they think of how the Washington Post used to have a more respectable opinion page? Because they’re appropriate shovel-lifting width?

I am thinking right now about some shoulders I particularly admire, and since we’re comparing anecdotal evidence, I’ll go ahead and share: I like these shoulders because they are attached to arms that will reach out and hold me back when I decide I want to take a shovel to Kathleen Parker.

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