Well, I generally don't check out MSNBC.com much, mainly because its layout is highly annoying, but also because every time I look at their "Opinion" page, the lead story is always from some whiny liberal.

Anyway, I've decided I should visit more often, if only because the New York Times' Paul "Line 47" Krugman needs a rest from the twice-weekly beatings I've been forced to administer.

You see, I've decided that Anna Quindlen also needs to be taken to task on a regular basis. In fact, she needs it, mainly because she's been kept down by "the man" for all of her professional life. Quindlen's latest claptrap is an ode to "Take your Daughters to Work Day."

Not long ago I spoke at a meeting sponsored by a company�s women�s networking group. Like most other American corporations, this one had a lot of women in entry-level jobs, a fair number of women in middle management and a few women in the top ranks, in a pyramid configuration that has become commonplace.

Wow! So women can be found at all levels of this big company. But wait, there's something amiss here!

COMMONPLACE, TOO, WAS THE response of the majority males at the top to this particular evening event. It rankled, this meeting, closed to them in the same way the ranks of management had once been closed to their distaff counterparts. It rankled, even for one night. Apparently none of them saw it as a learning experience, the possibility of imagining for just a few hours what it had been like to be female for many, many years.

What? Men are "rankled" by the formal creation of a "good ol' girls club?" I mean, it's bad enough when women go to the bathroom in groups. We men know they're plotting something, but that seemed mostly innocuous. Once women get equality in the boardrooms, they start acting just like the pig-men that they decried so many years before.

Our Daughters to Work Day, which comes around again at the end of this month in what is its 10th anniversary. It�s amazing how the event has become an institution in only a decade, with thousands of companies and millions of girls participating. And it�s amazing how, almost from its inception, the opponents were all over it, complaining that it sent a bad message about female victimhood, that it was based on false research about girls and low self-esteem, above all that it was gender-biased, that the boys were not invited. The same people who weren�t the least bit bothered when boys got the only decent school sports programs�or, for that matter, the entire Supreme Court�were flipping out about a bunch of 13-year-old girls eating in the corporate cafeteria for one afternoon.

Well, 13-year-old girls do have a tendency to giggle a lot and they have these high-pitched screams. So I can understand how that sort of behavior could be cause for alarm in the low din of the average corporate cafeteria. Actually, opponents are still all over this contrived "institution" for one simple reason. (No, it's not because we think women should aspire to being in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant.) We genuinely want equality. Equality regardless of skin color. Equality regardless of age. Equality regardless of gender. Mothers want their children, both boys and girls, to grow up and be successful. This just in: Fathers want the same thing.

�What will we tell the boys?� parents agonized. I never had a bit of trouble explaining: I just remind them that the Senate is still 87 percent male. Boys have issues and problems, too, but they�re not the same as the ones girls have. We just don�t start from the same place; otherwise it wouldn�t be called �helping� when a man performs tasks in his own home, or �baby-sitting� when he looks after his own children. That�s why the most famous remark about Take Our Daughters to Work Day is the one from Eleanor Holmes Norton; when asked why there was no such day for boys, she said it was for the same reason there�s no White History Month.

Yeah, that'll work for a 7-year-old. You don't get to go to work because most senators are men. There's two problems with mothers like Quindlen using that response: First, little boys won't make the connection between getting to go to work with their mother and the percentage of male senators; Second, though they love their mothers, they'll think that women aren't smart enough to do the demanding jobs because they come up with lame explanations like that one. No parent in their right mind wants to explain why one kid gets to take off school and go to work with mommy (or daddy?) while the other one has to go to school. ("Why do I not get to go to work with you mommy?" "Because your a boy. Boys don't get to go to work.")

Women still agonize over balancing work and family; lots of guys still assume they�ll balance work and family by getting married. Boys don�t have to be introduced to the office. They�re old acquaintances. In a survey done for the Ms. Foundation for Women about changing roles, 61 percent of the respondents said they believe men and women are treated differently in the workplace.

Quindlen really goes out on a female-chauvinist pig limb here. The first sentence is just stupid on its face. No one, male or female, has to worry about balancing "work and family" until they get married and have one. (The exception, of course, is single-parents and that institution knows no gender.) And what about this "Boys don't have to be introduced to the office line?" Is that Y chromosome that boys have the "office chromosome?" That's just stupid. Oh, and the Ms. Foundation for Women, yep, that's really unbiased sourcing.

You can talk all you want about improved access for women now, but it�s a recent development, and it still stops several steps from most executive suites.

Well, it may be relatively recent, say the last 20 years or so. (Making it twice as old as "Take your daughters to work day.") But it doesn't stop several steps from the executive suites -- not anymore. My first editor was a woman. The publisher emeritus of the Union-Tribune -- a woman. The former publisher of the Washington Post -- a woman. The current editor-in-chief of the Union-Tribune -- a woman. My current boss -- a woman. And it's not just the newspaper industry, the CEO of Hewlett-Packard is a woman by the name of Carly Fiorina.

There are only a very few places in the real world where a woman's gender can affect her -- the military and perhaps the fire department. And in these two it is for good reason -- the safety of others. Men and women are different. Men are generally stronger and faster then women. But those women who can meet the same requirements as men are required to make, should be allowed in those professions.

That�s not victimhood, it�s history. And maybe that�s what Take Our Daughters to Work Day has become, a living monument to recent history, to the peaks we�ve struggled up and the plateaus we�re often stuck on. Some of the critics of the day insist darkly that it�s part of the feminist agenda, which is always made to sound like a cross between a coven and a communist cell. (I prefer to think it is dedicated to justice, equality and comfortable shoes.) Ironic, isn�t it; some of those up in arms about the program are women professionals who, if not for the very movement they decry, might have wound up plowing their ambition into casseroles and no-wax floors instead of punditry and sociological research.

I'm sure that Quindlen will get some ripostes from some of the women over at the Independent Womens Forum, but this idea that all women owe allegiance to Gloria Steinem and should not question "the movement" is like a communist cell. The fact of the matter is that many of these women love their sons and daughters equally, and want both to succeed. For women to succeed doesn't require that men be labeled as evil and the enemy.

Today there are 199 women judges in the federal system; when I was 11, there were three. ... Every time a girl plays Little League, every time a father assumes his daughter is as likely to go to college as his son, every time no one looks twice at a female cop or balks at a female surgeon, it�s a moment in history, radical and ordinary both at the same time.

It's good not to forget where we as a society have come from, but what Quindlen describes is normal -- and every American should take pride in that.

Critics say that we should talk to girls about their marvelous opportunities instead of taking them out of school and promoting that pesky �feminist agenda� once a year. Pooh. Gavels speak louder than words. Besides, kids are always getting pulled out of school to go to Monticello or chocolate factories or Six Flags. How come there�s an uproar only when the field trip takes girls to a place in which girls were fairly recently unheard of, unwelcome? I remember fondly my daughter toddling around my office during the first Take Our Daughters to Work Day 10 years ago with a pencil in her fist, roaring, �I�m working!� whenever anyone tried to talk to her. There are girls now who are second-generation Takers, who went to work themselves when they were teenagers and are now inviting others. The Ms. Foundation for Women has found a group of those women who say that the event had a major impact on their lives, on the way they saw themselves and envisioned their futures. One day seems a scant investment for that sort of return.

First, kids are not "always getting pulled out of school." I had to be throwing-up major organs and on the verge of death to get held out of school. Second, while I may mock Quindlen, I hardly think my blog or any other columnists are causing a huge "uproar" over this silly exercise. I'm only addressing the issue is because I want to see true equality. Not the contrived "equality" of Quindlen and her ilk.

But it will be a long time before we can truly judge the full effects of the program, just as it has taken us decades to appreciate the effects of the feminist revolution. The assumption of access based on ability and not on gender that seemed utopian when we were young has now become the guiding principle of the mainstream, even when it is honored only in the breach. Take Our Daughters to Work Day is as much about our successes as it is about our continued striving. How could it not be? Our successes have remade the world. Welcome to it, girls. The boys may complain. But that will teach you something, too.

If it's become the guiding principle of the mainstream, then why is it necessary to bar boys from participating. It's necessary because it's not really equality that Quindlen, Steinem and Betty Freidan want. They want equality with special consideration.

In one of my college journalism classes, the instructor asked the class what our opinion was on women serving in the military in combat units. The class was overwhelmingly in favor of the move. I too voted in favor, with an evil glint in my eye and but one requirement: I wanted women to have to register with the selective service. One woman, who last I heard teaches journalism at a small college up in Washington State, replied: "What's that?" I responded: "Every 18-year-old man knows what the selective service is...it's the draft." The woman countered that women should only have to serve if they want to, they shouldn't be forced to do it. There are rights and there are responsibilities -- I hope that women lay claim to both.

All people are equal, even the boys. I hope Ms. Quindlen someday realizes that.