Man, talk about being obsolete

                             If men are obsolete, then I have a question: What are all those urinals doing in restrooms?
                            Well, boys, that's it, we're done.  Punch your time cards, grab some underwear, and head for the hills.  Women, at least according to feminist author Hanna Rosin, can go it alone from now on.
                            Rosin essentially swept men out the door in a Time magazine piece last week:  "Men Are Obsolete: Five Reasons We Are Definitely Witnessing the End of Men."  Her reasons include: Men are failing in the workplace, men as the household breadwinners are vanishing, men are failing in the working and middle class, men have lost their monopoly on violence and aggression and ----- now get this ----- men, like women, are obsessed with their body hair.
                            To support her contention, Rosin, as expected, ignored the good men among us, those who love our wives, provide for our families, are involved with our children, volunteer our time in our communities and don't fixate on our hair as we once did.  Instead, she leaned into the bottom of the man barrel and scraped up Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, the crack-smoking cartoon character who's hardly the poster boy of men, and anointed him as "a shining example of modern manhood."
                          "How do I know men are finished?"  Rosin wrote. "I'll read you a quote (from Ford) that says it all: 'Yes, there have been times when I've been in a drunken stupor.'"
                          Rosin claims men are obsolete.  This is the type of nonsense we've come to expect from the author, who tripped all over her tongue following the death of beloved Bucks County children's author Jan Berenstain in February 2012.  A critic of the Berenstain Bears series of books, Rosin's reaction to the woman's death was "good riddance."
                          Good riddance?   Speaking of drunken stupor, how could she write such a mean-spirited comment after the death of a woman who, with her husband, Stan, delighted millions of children with their books.  And man, did Rosin ever catch hell from readers for that.  She later apologized for her insensitive remark, but the bell had been rung.  In her cobweb-draped soul, good taste and manners are what are obsolete.
                         "Literally obsolete?" the 43-year-old married mother of three continued about men.  "Of course not, and if we had to prove that, we could never win.  For one thing, we haven't figured out a way to harvest sperm without them being, you know, alive.
                         "But in order to win this debate, we have to prove that men, quote unquote, as we've historically come to define them ---- entitled to power, destined for leadership, arrogant, confused by anything that isn't them ----- are obsolete."
                         Rosin reduces men to little more than Secretariat servicing fillies in the barn.  To her, we're basically typewriters and phone books, rotary phones and Edsels.  Fellas, the world has basically passed us by.  We're bell-bottom jeans in a Jeggings world.
                         While Rosin has her share of supporters, there are detractors.  Self-described dissident feminist Camille Paglia, a university professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, rescues men from the dung pile on which Rosin deposits them.  She points out men overwhelmingly drive the world by building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, building homes, bulldozing land for housing development, welding steel beams for office buildings, installing plate glass widows on skyscrapers and more.
                          "Indeed, men, are absolutely indispensable right now," Paglia wrote, "invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible.
                          The irony here is unmistakable: A feminist like Rosin labels men as obsolete, but does so using technology created by men ---- the computer, hand-held electronic devices, the Internet, social media all aspects of everyday life built, maintained and improved upon by men, not just old men, but young men who tap the delete key on Rosin's assertions.
                          Men are not obsolete as much as they've simply, and rightfully so, made room for women in the world.  But there are women like Rosin, who after taking their place on the couch beside men, giddily write on the edge of the cushions.
                          Rosin may create a firestorm with her views on men intense enough to spark her home to blaze.
                         The question is, would she have the audacity to phone those obsolete firefighters who stand at those urinals to put it out?