Womenfolks is stoopid

Whenever I see something like this, I remember my high school days, when I was vying for Geek of the Year and was on the speech team, the school paper, and various other Geek extra-curricular activities. Anyway, one of those activities was an academic event called current events, and basically you went into a room, took a test on current events and whoever got the best score won.
Alot of debate and speech team geeks were in this event, because we read the paper alot so we had pre-prepared opinions and stuff. Most of the debate team and speech team participants were boys, and so were most of the current events participants. Girls were generally not recruited by the schools' coaches for the teams and those of us who made the cut were treated rather shabbily by other participants (though not by judges, to be fair). Teenage boys, who really should know their place better, all but patted the few females on the head and called them cutie-pies.
My team was the only one at most, if not all, events we went to that had nearly as many girls as boys, which made us kind of a spectacle, which we thought was funny. (That and we had a HUGE file cabinet that we had to wheel around that housed our clippings instead of the usual small Rubbermaid-looking one most teams carried around.) But it was funny because we won--alot. For the three of the years I was in it, the top 2 speakers in the district and the top current events participant were girls on our team. So every event went the same way. We showed up in a haze of make-up and hairspray and bright clothes and miniskirts (the girlier you played it, the funnier it was), had all the boys snicker at the girls who thought they could they could hang with the big boys, and kicked their asses. It happened everytime, and the boys never seemed to figure it out. Well, our teammates figured it out, and there were always a few guys on other teams that we were friends with who figured it out.
Lifelong lessons were learned. Girls are pressured to stay out. The few who get in are mocked or treated like freaks. In reality, the few who get in are brave and usually funny enough to take knocks very few of those boys could handle. But the boys never seem to get that. Except of course for the boys who learn to pay attention, either because they are close to aforementioned smart, brave girls or just because they happen to be smart enough to pay attention.
Everyone is complaining about going through this every three months or so, and I just laugh because I remember going through it every other weekend 10 years ago.
Of course, my teammates in high school were the ones who were in it because they were smart, brave, funny girls. I am just stubborn and pig-headed, I think. And possibly I was too dumb then to realize that the mockery from the boys in academic competition was their efforts to make us feel bad for being girls. I just thought it was a hormonal problem.