Fox News tells iPhone users: Most men just want a woman who's nice
Fox News sent a strange and simple push alert to its users on Thursday morning: "Most men just want a woman who's nice."
It turns out the alert, which was only sent to iOS users through Apple News, was referring to an op-ed on the site of the same title, but the push alert was not in quotation marks, generating confusion on social media.
Ben Reininga, editor-in-chief of Vocativ, tweeted that Fox News alerts were "like if 1950s could text you."
The alert was particularly noteworthy because of the network's history of harassment allegations. Host Bill O'Reilly was recently fired after a New York Times investigation revealed that five women were paid out a total of $13 million made by O'Reilly and Fox News' parent company, 21st Century Fox. Moreover, two of these settlements came after former Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes resigned from the company after a former Fox host, Gretchen Carlson, sued him for sexual harassment. Later, Megyn Kelly also said that Ailes harassed her. She explained to Gayle King on CBSN that she decided to add a chapter about the harassment in her book because she didn't want any more women at Fox to go through what she endured.
As for the op-ed on Fox News' website, the author, Suzanne Venker, encouraged women to be "nice" in order to attract men.
She explained what she meant: "'Nice,' to a man, means being soft, gentle and kind. It means asking your husband how his day was and really listening. It means doing something nice for him with no expectation of getting something in return -- you know, the way you did when you were dating."
She also explained that some women are not naturally nice, so they need to work on it -- and that includes the author: "The truth is, I've had to exercise my nice muscle," she wrote.
Venker also explained that women have misunderstood why men want to be with nice ladies.
"Most husbands have no desire to lord over their wives, but they don't want to fight with them either," she wrote. "All they want is peace. And the nicer you are, the more likely they are to find it."
Venker's Twitter bio reads, "I help women think outside the feminist box." She is the niece of late conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly.
