Dumb and Dumber: An Essay and Its Editors

[struggle4progress]

The question is not why Charlotte Allen wrote her silly piece -- it's why The Post published it.

By Katha Pollitt
Friday, March 7, 2008; 6:30 AM

... In a casual essay of 1,700 words, Allen manages to stir together a breathtaking mishmash of misogynistic irrelevancies and generalizations ...

... Allen claims that the misogynist canard is true: thanks to their superior visuospatial abilities, men (although maybe not gay men?) are better drivers, with 5.1 accidents per million miles compared to women's 5.7. "The only good news," she adds, is that because they take fewer risks, women's accidents are only a third as likely to be fatal. That's a very interesting definition of ability behind the wheel: the better drivers are the ones who take more risks and are three times as likely to end up dead ...

Why did Allen, by accounts a good reporter on religion in a previous life, write this silly piece? ... I suspect that Allen, who works for the right-wing anti-feminist Independent Women's Forum, is just annoyed that so many educated middle-class women are cultural, social and political moderates and liberals. Democrats, in other words ...

Here's a thought. Maybe there's another thing women can do besides fluff up their husbands' pillows: Fill more important jobs at The Washington Post. We should be half the assigning editors, half the writers, and half the regular columnists too (current roster of op-ed columnists: 16 men, two women). We've got those superior verbal skills, remember? ...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/06/AR2008030603240.html

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. The online session with readers was something to behold

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2008/03/04/DI2008030402153.html

The woman basically seems to be trying to be Ann Coulter without the direct insults. She doesn't care that what she said was wrong, and when someone points out another mistake she made, or a useless argument she put forward, she just laughs and says "lighten up!"

But as this article says, the real qestion is why the Washington Post bothered printing it in the first place. It was a third-rate piece from a RW blogger. Newspapers won't survive the age of online ads and blogs if they don't keep some quality control.

[fasttense]

2. Woman like her and Ann Coulter give even

misogynists a bad name. It's seems it is now fashionable to hate your own sex. There is a lot of self-loathing in those women, I wish they would keep their self-hatred to, well...themselves.