RUSH: UK Daily Mail. This story ran on the 3rd of April, so it’s about two weeks ago old. I found it yesterday. Before I give you the headline here, can I remind you of Undeniable Truth of Life Number 24? These are the 35 Undeniable Truths of Life, written by me in the eighties, ’86 or ’87. I was in Sacramento. I had a weekly column at a local paper, and one day I was under deadline, and I was having writer’s block. I couldn’t think of anything to write. So I just started writing down single-sentence, single-thought ideas trying to spark an idea. And after a while I said, “You know what? I’ve got a column right here. Every one of these things undeniably true.”

So I kept going until I got to 750 words and that was about 35 undeniable truths. Number 24, one of the most controversial Undeniable Truths of Life: “Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of American life.” Well, you can imagine why that’s controversial. It may even be controversial to you now if you’re hearing it for the first time. Regular listeners of this program who’ve been with us here for decades have heard it over and over again and understand it. But, if you’re new to the program, just hearing about it, I can imagine you think that’s what somewhat controversial, ’til you stop to think about it.

And, of course, remember it was written back in 1987, which was just 18-or-so years from the birth of the modern era of feminism, which I trace to 1969 or ’70. The modern era. Not the suffragette gang and all, but the modern era can be traced to the late sixties, 1970. It was then that if you open a car door for a woman it was a bad move. “I can do it myself, thank you.” To comment favorably on a woman’s appearance was a bad move because it was “objectifying” the woman and denying her mental acuity and so forth. These were touchy times.

It was touch-and-go with virtually everything one said or did with a woman back then, especially the young women who were all caught up in this, who believed it like it was the new Bible. It was tough going. And so at the time, 1987, the truth was: “Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.” If you go back to those days and look at the leaders, you’ll see what inspired that. I know it’s controversial, but truth often is. So keep that in mind and here’s the story here from the UK Daily Mail, about two weeks ago.

“Do Girls Only Want a Career Because They Can’t Attract a Man? Provocative Study Casts High Fliers in a New Light — Forget ambition, financial security and that first-class degree. A controversial study has concluded that the real reason women pursue careers is because they fear they are too unattractive to get married.” (interruption) We’ll get to the pretty ones in a second. That’s not who this is about. This story… (interruption) That’s the whole point, Dawn. This story is not about the, quote, unquote, “pretty ones.” Ah, look.

See, Dawn has been here for years and even she’s getting mad now. You can’t avoid it. It’s one of those things. It’s a real risk to bring this stuff up because people have knee-jerk emotional reactions to it. They don’t want to think about this. Everybody’s primed to be offended every day, looking for reasons to be. It doesn’t take much to offend anybody these days. But I didn’t write the story, and I didn’t do the study. The author of the story is a woman, Fiona Macrae. (interruption) Yeah, that Fiona Macrae. The Fiona Macrae, exactly right.

“A controversial study has concluded that the real reason women pursue careers is because they fear they are too unattractive to get married.” So are we to conclude, then, that the job market is the place unattractive women go to access men? Back in your young teenage, early twenties, thirties, when everybody wants to meet Mr. or Ms. Right, there were books written about how to do it. The Sensual Woman, Sensuous Woman, all kinds of books about it. The best advice I ever got on where to meet a woman was to go out and buy all the magazines that women are reading about where to meet men, find out where you’re supposed to be, and go there. It wasn’t museums. It was work. It was bars. It was social places.

So a controversial study’s concluded that the real reason women pursue careers, is because they fear they are too unattractive to get married. So we might conclude here that the job market is the place unattractive women who think they’re unattractive — and this is the key, too — I mean, who’s to define “unattractive”? Potter Stewart, when asked to define pornography, said, “I can’t, but I know it when I see it.” The same thing here. The key here is not what everybody else thinks, but what the particular woman thinks. If she thinks she’s unattractive, this study says she’s gonna go find a career. So the job market is the place, according to the study, that unattractive women, or women who think they’re unattractive, go to access men.

Is this the real reason liberal women insist on working? I’m just asking questions based on the study. I didn’t do any of this. I’m just reacting to it as America’s Real Anchorman. “The research team, made up of three women and two men, said that when men are thin on the ground, ‘women are more likely to choose briefcase over baby’.” “Thin on the ground” meaning not very many of ’em, not physique, just not very many of ’em. So women are more likely to choose briefcase over baby at that point. The plainer a woman is, they claim, the more she’s driven to succeed in the workplace. I give you Undeniable Truth of Life Number 24 here, folks. I mean, people often ask me, “Does it ever get boring being right?” And I always say no. It’s like when I play golf with a golfer. “Does it ever get boring hitting it straight right where you intend to?” “Nope. It’s the most fun thing in the world.” Well, it’s the same thing about being right; you never get tired of it. You just don’t.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: By the way, this story from the UK Daily Mail is a survey of American women. I should have pointed that out. “Central to their argument was the idea that women have evolved to become homemakers and men, providers.” They evolved and that’s central to the argument, and that’s the baseline from which everything else is judged and measured, if you will. “They said this means that when men are scarce in a particular area, women, and particularly less attractive ladies, may decide they need to provide for themselves with a well-paid career.” And they’re out there.

“The researchers carried out several experiments to come up with their startling argument. The first looked at the number of eligible men in an area, which they called the ‘operational sex ratio’. After collecting data from across the US, they found that as the number of eligible men in a state decreased, the proportion of women in highly paid careers rose. In addition, the women who became mothers in those states did so at an older age and had fewer children.

“The final experiment tested the researchers’ suspicion that less attractive women would be more interested in careers because they might find it difficult to secure a partner. The 87 young women were given mocked-up newspaper articles describing the sex ratio in nearby university campuses and were asked about their views on family and career. They were also asked how attractive they believed themselves to be to men. Those women who saw themselves as being less desirable than average were highly likely to be career-orientated.”

So this is a scientific study that took place, and I just ask you to remember Undeniable Truth of Life Number 24 which was written in 1987, that’s 25 years ago. Well, I don’t know if it’s ever gonna be a consensus. This kind of stuff is always gonna be so controversial. You’re just not supposed to talk about this kind of stuff. These guys go out and they do the research, well, three women and two men did this research.