Sounds like somebody wants a job at Fox News.

March 2, 2008

In a Washington Post Op-Ed, Charlotte Allen seems to think that women are morons:

I swear no man watches “Grey’s Anatomy” unless his girlfriend forces him to. No man bakes cookies for his dog. No man feels blue and takes off work to spend the day in bed with a copy of “The Friday Night Knitting Club.” No man contracts nebulous diseases whose existence is disputed by many if not all doctors, such as Morgellons (where you feel bugs crawling around under your skin). At least no man I know. Of course, not all women do these things, either—although enough do to make one wonder whether there isn’t some genetic aspect of the female brain, something evolutionarily connected to the fact that we live longer than men or go through childbirth, that turns the pre-frontal cortex into Cream of Wheat.

That’s one of the more reasonable paragraphs, incidentally. Now let’s jump to the thrilling conclusion:

So I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.

I’m not even going to bother critiquing the details of this… insightful look into the female mind. Suffice it to say that it says much more about its author in particular than it does about her gender generally.

I can only assume that this woman wants to be the next Ann Coulter, and needs something truly ridiculous to jump-start her career as a contrarian anti-feminist pundit. Regardless, I find it somewhat astonishing that the Washington Post would see fit to publish such an antediluvian polemic. Is this really such a vital viewpoint that it needs to be articulated (to use that term generously) in a national newspaper? What’s next, a defense of eugenics written by a self-hating gypsy? I really think that publishing this is a mistake. Not because it sets feminism back by a century (although it’s not exactly progressive), but because it’s unfair, it’s prurient, and (to my eyes) it’s a deeply cynical appeal to prejudices we’d be better off without.

Posted in Media, Writing