You Speak the Truth, Kemo Sabe...

Maureen Dowd, from her recent NYT Magazine article:

At a party for the Broadway opening of "Sweet Smell of Success," a top New York producer gave me a lecture on the price of female success that was anything but sweet. He confessed that he had wanted to ask me out on a date when he was between marriages but nixed the idea because my job as a Times columnist made me too intimidating. Men, he explained, prefer women who seem malleable and awed. He predicted that I would never find a mate because if there's one thing men fear, it's a woman who uses her critical faculties. Will she be critical of absolutely everything, even his manhood?

Craig Bierko, a musical comedy star and actor who played one of Carrie's boyfriends on "Sex and the City," told me, "Deep down, beneath the bluster and machismo, men are simply afraid to say that what they're truly looking for in a woman is an intelligent, confident and dependable partner in life whom they can devote themselves to unconditionally until she's 40."

Taking these quotes into consideration, maybe we better understand why white middle-aged men feel compelled to:

• Refuse to fill legal contraceptive prescriptions for women
• Deny women complete access to health care (including a safe and legal abortion)
• Rule from the bench that a woman must obtain permission from her husband if she wants to obtain a legal abortion
• Up until recently, allow Viagra prescriptions to be covered under Medicaid and Medicare
• Appoint a man to a government post who has a history of anally raping his wife.
• Refuse to approve medication to prevent cervical cancer because it might encourage women to have sex
• Refrain from appointing a smart, experienced, capable woman to the Supreme Court