Banning women from college degrees is an achy breaky big mistakey

I try to stay away from politics on this silly blog. HOWEVER: government peoples in Iran just banned women from 77 different college degrees.

I am not making that up. Read the story here: Anger as Iran bans women from universities

Women are about 65 percent of college students now and the men who decided this new policy wanted to drop women below 50 percent. How? By making those degrees — including dangerous stuff like English literature — “single gender.”

Here are three reasons why that’s not wicked smart.

3) You need MORE smart women with degrees, not less

The days where a nation could shut its borders and do whatever is over.

Way back when, women in America couldn’t vote,  get the same education as men or enter the same professions. We figured out those were all mistakes.

This is a global marketplace, and if you want to compete for the best jobs, you need all the brainpower you can get. All of it.

Telling women — half your population — they’re second-class and can’t get the same education as men, well, that sorta kinda guarantees that your national economy is going to stink like ten pounds of trout left out in the Texas sun for six days.

2) “The consent of the governed” actually means something

Even if you’re not a democracy, you can’t run a place for long without the consent of the governed.

Any 18-year-old college kid can tell you this after 30 minutes of rigorously paying attention to his first Poli Sci 101 lecture while furiously texting on his iPhone about the possibility of a kegger on Friday.

When you start oppressing half your population — whether it’s based on gender, race or class — you’re soliciting all kinds of trouble. Dictatorship or democracy, it won’t last. Two more words to look up before doing this sort of stinker: “Arab Spring.”

1) 3,000 angry Iranian women who happen to be deadly ninjas

Actually, that isn’t a joke.

I wrote about this in a post a long time ago on a blog post far, far away: there are a bazillion Iranian women who make Chuck Norris look like a nancypants.

This is ironic because it happens when the government said women in Iran aren’t allowed to do most sports — you can’t run marathons, because you’d have to wear SHORTS and such. So the women channeled a lot of their athletic talent and energy into learning to be ninjas. I kid you not.

Check out the video:

“See? We’re fully covered up. Also, we’re training hard to learn 173 ways to kill a man in less than two seconds.”

What are the chances some of these women wanted to major in English lit (or one of the other 76 degrees) and no longer can pursue that dream? Hmm.

ALSO: Hillary Clinton. I would not mess with her right now. She’s kinda good at this “fly around the world and dismantle oppression” thing.

ALSO-ALSO: We men need a different word for “men who aren’t idiots and think women should have equal rights.” Except in indie romantic comedies and UC-Berkeley seminars, men don’t say, “I’m a feminist.” Let’s get a new thing, something like, “Men who think women are wicked smart, and should run things as a benevolent dictatorship as long as they promise that Sarah Jessica Parker won’t make another movie ever again, so help us God.”

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Guy Bergstrom. Photo by Suhyoon Cho.

Reformed journalist. Scribbler of speeches and whatnot. Wrote a thriller that won some award (PNWA 2013). Represented by Jill Marr of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.

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