So on Sunday, the Washington Post featured Charlotte Allen generalizing from her own characteristics to argue that women are stupid. It's difficult to find anything to say that hasn't already been said in at least one of the dozens of blogospheric smackdowns (including an open thread one by kos) - well, I should say, it's difficult for a mere woman to come up with much.
There's Jill Filipovic's take on the details of the argument:
You know Allen is reaching when the best thing she can come up with to prove female inferiority is "Women are crappy drivers." And she can’t even prove that very well, since men are more likely to be recklessly bad drivers. Although my favorite line is this one: "A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men’s 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women." Except that the study evaluated the accident rate by millions of miles, so it doesn’t matter how many more miles per year men drive. And they big, misogynist results? A difference of .6 accidents per million miles. Someone repeal the 19th amendment, stat.
But the sheer stupidity of the op-ed is not the story here. The story is that the Washington Fucking Post printed it, and then tried to pass it off as a joke. Jessica Valenti and Jane Hamsher point out that Allen is a professional anti-feminist/misogynist/homophobe/racist, which sort of belies the whole joke claim. WaPo Outlook section editor James Pomfret expects us to believe that, in the spirit of comedy, he gave space to someone with a history of quite seriously attacking women?
Yeah, right. It seems that he thinks all his readers, not just the women, are stupid. Which makes him stupid, and I'm wondering if someone smart - maybe a man - could let me know if the logical extension of that is that he's a woman, because I'm getting confused. (Here you'll have to just imagine me giggling and batting my eyelashes. Sorry 'bout that.)
Anyway, Kieran Healy explains why Pomfret would choose a woman as a vehicle for misogyny:
I tend toward an ecological interpretation. If there is a niche in the market it tends to get filled, even—perhaps especially—if it seems like an unlikely niche. Because there’s lots of misogyny in the world, there is a demand for misogynist writing. There’s plenty such writing by men, but that’s by now boring and there’s probably too much supply. If a woman is doing it, though, there are bigger and better returns to it. Occupying a niche of this sort also gives you certain rhetorical advantages in generating controversy and responding to it. (See, a woman admits the truth! Or, how can I be anti-woman if I am one? And if you misjudge the reaction, you can claim the whole thing was a joke.) In short, being able to occupy a niche like this makes you a better troll. Hence, Charlotte Allen, etc.
As Steve Benen and Ezra Klein emphasize, it's important not to allow Pomfret and his fellow editors to imagine that the response to Allen involves taking the piece itself seriously. If this had been published by the Independent Women's Forum or the Weekly Standard, half of the bloggers who have written about it would never have known it existed, and few of those who heard about it would have written anything. Who cares if winger publications say winger things? This is a story because it was in the Washington Post, a newspaper that's supposed to know better than to publish something that manages to be so laughably, insanely bad on the way to making an offensive argument.
What about the precedent when this newspaper runs a piece that offends people? Laura Rozen:
His explanation is if possible even more insulting to readers' intelligence than his decision to run the original piece.
And frankly, it doesn't matter. The Post contributor who lost his job for offending Jewish groups with his Post piece didn't mean to offend Jewish groups, but he did and his editors apologized and took other steps to make amends.
Although we might take from this that the Washington Post's official policy is that it's more ok to insult and offend women than Jewish people, it seems that the policy is open to change, with Pomfret now expressing a little more regret, albeit still with lame excuses about provoking rather than offending and the classic "sorry if it offended you" move. Clearly this is a man with significant judgment and professionalism issues. We'll see if Deborah Howell does any better on Sunday.
But really, should we have had to expend so many words to get to that point?