Men Without Daughters

Just when you think that gender equality is more the norm these days, James Brown’s It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World screams its abiding chauvinism. 

A Phoenix country club has expelled a male member for expressing his opinion to the New York Times that most men who belong to the club are indifferent to the club’s policy forbidding women from going into the club’s exclusive men’s grill or against it altogether. 

The club’s board, being already upset with the growing controversy over this policy, invoked its expulsion procedures in light of another policy prohibiting “derogatory or otherwise injurious comments in the media.”  Are these men from the Phoenix in Arizona or the one on Mars? 

The men’s grill, known as the Phoenix, is a well-appointed center of business dealings for those who are allowed admission.  It’s understandable, therefore, that women in business would want an opportunity to be part of what goes on in the grill.  But they’re relegated to a “smaller room with a hot plate down the hall.”

The Phoenix country club is a private club, and private clubs can still have policies about members that employers can’t have about employees.  So a male CEO of a Phoenix employer can’t segregate the company’s cafeteria, but he can leave the premises and be in his man’s world at the nearby country club.

Surely, the men who run this club have only sons.  They couldn’t have daughters, because today’s daughters have no time for worn-out discriminatory policies that would prevent them from becoming successful leaders in whatever profession, occupation or business they choose.