Posted March 2nd, 2008 at 12:10 pm
It’s literally hard to believe that the Washington Post published a 1,700-word opinion piece about women being dumb. This is, after all, the 21st century, and reasonable, sensible people like to believe feminism has made at least some strides towards equality between the genders.
And yet,
there it is, in black and white. Charlotte Allen, without a hint of irony or parodist tendencies, makes the case that women are dumb, shallow, and generally kind of pathetic.
As proof, Allen kicks off her discussion by pointing to women supporting Barack Obama’s campaign, some with great enthusiasm.
“Women ‘Falling for Obama,’ ” the story’s headline read. Elsewhere around the country, women were falling for the presidential candidate literally. Connecticut radio talk show host Jim Vicevich has counted five separate instances in which women fainted at Obama rallies since last September. And I thought such fainting was supposed to be a relic of the sexist past, when patriarchs forced their wives and daughters to lace themselves into corsets that cut off their oxygen.
I can’t help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women — I should say, “we women,” of course — aren’t the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women “are only children of a larger growth,” wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?
She goes on, at great length, to answer that question in the affirmative. Indeed, Allen insists that women are “embarrassing.”
I kept waiting for the punch-line. I thought, “There has to be a paragraph in here somewhere in which Allen actually defends women from vapid accusations she couldn’t possibly mean.” Alas, it was not to be. This WaPo piece, which Scott Lemieux
accurately described as “the dumbest thing published in an American newspaper in many moons,” is a lengthy treatise that hopes to convince the reader that adult American women are generally worthless.
In addition to “swooning” over Obama, Allen went on to insist that the proof of women’s flaws is evident in their tastes: “What is it about us women? Why do we always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental?” Yes, according to Allen, women who like Oprah, Celine Dion, romance novels, and “Grey’s Anatomy” are helping to prove the entire gender’s flaws as human beings.
moreby hilzoy
About once a month, I read something that makes me think: this just might be the dumbest thing ever written. Usually, it isn't, of course. But
this piece in today's Washington Post might be the genuine article:
<...>
Note to Charlotte Allen: if you find yourself having to argue that you are an idiot in order to make your case, you might consider the possibility that an idiot like yourself is unlikely to get much right about women, or for that matter about anything. You might therefore ask yourself what earthly purpose it serves to have idiots like the one you take yourself to be publishing their thoughts. Is your gig at the Post noticeably different from those game shows in which we get to watch people humiliating themselves on national TV? If so, how?
moreedited punctuation in title.
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