I must have missed something with this Charlotte Allen thing. I mean, I read the essay or whatever it was, and came away largely disinterested, thinking that this sort of thing was more amusing back when Sam Kinison, Andrew Dice Clay, and 2Live Crew were doing it.
But that's about it. I don't get the outrage. Someone in the media wrote something ineffably stupid and pointless. Alert the med....ah, it seems kinda par for the course. Even my wife (who has no interest in any of the shows or movies mentioned, for the record) read it and was mildly amused, but not put off by any of it. Silly people write silly things, and silly newspapers publish them. So it goes.
Look, the real story is that, when it comes to undermining women, nobody does it like other women. Look at your garden-variety pro-life rally. Roughly 10:1 female, right? Sure, the organizers and media reps for the activist groups are male (if only technically), but all the foot soldiers are wimmins.
It may be sexist to say so, but so be it. It's the truth. Men certainly do their part to push women around, keep them down, disempower them, blah blah blah, but in free modern societies, it takes another woman to actually cobble together an "article" out of hoary borscht belt schtick. And get paid for it, no less! The marvels of capitalism are wondrous and manifold.
The other problem here is one that obviously permeated political writing long ago -- the idea that anything that whiffs "provocative" is worth printing. Hell, didn't that she-toad Coulter call for the disenfranchisement of her own (former, I assume) gender last summer? And one half of the commentariat goes batshit about it while the other half says, "oh, that Ann". Either way, she gets paid and she gets the attention she craves.
WaPo has figured out by now what riles people up, and they're happy to print it, and point to the surging click-through traffic from angry cyberprotesters. Allen's schtick seems to be that of the bourgeois contrarian, picking out this or that hornet's nest to whack, regardless of its accuracy or even coherence of point. Perhaps the Post and its readers might be better served if standards for publishing, rather than the content itself, were addressed.
1 comment:
Yeah, I know what you mean - I have a few females in my life, friends, acquaintances, relatives, whatever, who make it a point of pride to distance themselves from "feminism", even though, when pressed, they can't exactly say what it is they disagree with about it; maybe just that Gloria Steinem or Patricia Ireland said something once they didn't like. As if they would have ever gotten to a point where they could be so blase about it if the "shrill and strident" hadn't been so aggressive. But I digress.
It seems to be a typical American reaction to want to distance yourself from anything that seems clearly defined so as not to look like another sheep or lemming ('cause image is everything here, really); here I'm thinking of the people who insist they're "spiritual", not "religious", even though in practice, they have all the exact same metaphysical assumptions and beliefs as any Christian. They're just more relaxed about the rules and boundaries. People don't want to be seen as belonging to a group when they can claim to be some kind of freethinking individual with only a little semantic effort.
So I see this kind of thing as being in the same vein; some idiot trying to cultivate a contrarian image by attacking an easy target (and all in hopes of pleasing the very kinds of people who would be more than happy to stick her personally right back in an apron and hand her the mop).
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