Since time immemorial, men have wondered What Women Want.  But we ask the wrong question.  The question is not what women want; it is what they expect.  The fundamental thing about women is that they expect to be protected.  They had a cute little excursion in the 20th century, imagining themselves as "independent women" in the manner of Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir.  And they demanded that we hear them roar.

But now that is all over.  What Women Want, What Women Expect, is protection.

It is also what they need.  Go read A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous, the story of what happened to German women in 1945 when the conqueror's soldiers come into town and the men were absent.  If the men are absent, then the women lack protection and must submit to the conquerors, hoping against hope to become the creature of an educated officer rather than an uncouth peasant.

Today, of course, the message of the Gender Studies women and the university administrator women is that women must be protected from "microaggressions" and must be provided with "safe spaces."

Now we have the women of the New York Times and their expectations.  In the wake of the Glenn Thrush non-dismissal, the "Women At The New York Times Feel Neglected, Frustrated as Paper Stands by Glenn Thrush."  They are enacting the universal women's Culture of Complaint, saying, "Are women welcome here? ... Is anything going to change?"

Don't be afraid, you ladies.  Daddy will be here in a minute with your blankie.

It's a funny thing, but I doubt if the priapic Glenn Thrush ever felt neglected and frustrated.  Nor is he wondering if he is "welcome here."  Glenn Thrush is a man, and a man understands that a media career is a zero-sum game.  There are only a limited number of slots for Bigfoot media guys, and you have to fight to the knife to get there and to stay there.  No safe spaces, no teddy bears, and no princess movies.

But the women of the New York Times seem to be living on a different planet.  They are "not really sure what the message is here."  They complain that there are "loads of women struggling to get help with flat-lining careers inside the newsroom" and that "the Times is failing its female reporters."  They want to be primped and pampered by a kind father.

For some reason, I do not think that the pierced and tattooed women that cut my hair at Rudy's Barbershop up the street are asking if anything is going to change.  These lower-class white women are doing the best they can with what they have.  They know that it is a cold hard world out there and that the well born women at the New York Times already swiped all the blankies.

Man or woman, if you work in a big corporation, whether it is Google or the Times or a government university, you are living as a subordinate, a subject of a patriarchy.  The whole idea of a modern corporation is to provide protection for credentialed, mild-mannered people to live and work in a neo-feudal estate, a shelter provided from the unhampered market.  But, it hardly needs saying, those getting protection from a powerful patron – the noble Slim or the latest Sulzberger scion – will likely find that, in the words of Blanche from A Streetcar Named Desire, they have to "put out."  Equality has nothing to do with it, girls.  A corporation is a hierarchy, modeled on an army.  When H.R. tells you that you are a valued member of the corporate community, H.R. lies.  What you are is a feudal retainer, a subject of the patriarch.

At The Other McCain, they are highlighting another 21st-century problem, the feminist rage at the transgender phenomenon, which is giving feminists a cold likely to ruin their filibuster.  But hey, girls, once you raise the banner of equality and demand to erase the differences between men and women, then you have already willed the transgender phenomenon and the idiot that decides to be "a lesbian trapped in a man's body."  Didn't you realize that, back in the day?  You mean to say you just wrote down what your Gender Studies adjunct told you and what they said on NPR and didn't really think through what it meant?  If so, then maybe you are a woman who needs protection from the cold cruel world, and maybe you should take up sewing, like the well protected ladies in a Jane Austen novel.

What women want, what they expect, is a patriarchy.  As the song goes:

My heart belongs to Daddy
So I simply couldn't be bad

It is blankies all round, and the sooner the patriarchy gets its act back together again, the better the girls will like it.

Whaddaya say, fellas?

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on U.S. government finances, usgovernmentspending.com.  Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.