Very quickly, I also want to chime in about the ridiculous op-ed piece in the Washington Post this weekend. The first was Charlotte Allen’s piece about whether “women aren’t the weaker sex after all.” She then goes on to speculate whether women are the stupider sex as well. No, I’m not joking. Via Atrios, I read this observation by Laura Rozen that hits on an important point:
Here’s how the Post dealt with another recent controversy, when an online contributor’s essay offended some Jewish groups. The contributor lost his job at his home institute and the editors of the section apologized to readers, and then some. And that was apparently an online essay that had not even been edited by someone on the paper’s payroll before it went up, as was this piece in the Post’s Sunday print section front page. Can the Post Outlook editor promote the slurring of women (in the name of “voice”) but not other groups as something that generates lots of discussion? Or can he commission articles to denigrate the intelligence of other racial groups as well in the same spirit of a lively and provocative debate? What’s the Post standard on which groups can be legitimately denigrated on which page? Let’s watch and find out. I bet the reaction will lean towards “tsk-tsk” in next week’s ombudsman column and a hearty self congratulation from the Post to itself about generating such an important discussion about whether women are in fact dumb. At the very least, we can hope a few of the fine Post reporters who actually do journalism will professionally humiliate Outlook editor John Pomfret and whoever else in the chain of command is responsible for this piece internally at the Post in the way they deserve. That there is not already an apology on the Post site is pretty surprising.
Atrios makes the same point, but imagine if the paper had published a piece that casually discussed whether African Americans are stupid, or whether Catholics have too many kids. The world would’ve flipped out. It really seems like sexism isn’t as reviled as the other -isms. Heidi and I debate this when it comes to particular situations (e.g. Why is Viagra covered under insurance but not birth control), but the fact that this article got published really does argue quite convincingly that sexism is more OK than racism or anti-semitism. And to think, this one affects more than half of us.
There was another piece that got many up in arms. This second piece was by Linda Hirschman and it was about how “women are fickle” because they’re not voting for Hillary Clinton in the same percentages as African American voters are voting for Obama. This could’ve been an interesting column, addressing some of the questions raised by my point above (e.g. whether one’s racial or religious self-identification is stronger than one’s gender self-identification, and in what situations, etc.). But, no, we got women are fickle.
In fairness, the Hirschman column wasn’t as bad as Allen’s. Those intro paragraphs were pretty ridiculous, though. Hilzoy has more on this.
), I can’t refer to a woman with the word “girl.” This usually turns into a debate about gender bias, language, and the state of feminism, the glass ceiling, and random assorted goodness. For the record, I think American English lacks an informal word for woman that would be the equivalent of the word “guy”… Heidi doesn’t disagree necessarily but finds “girl” loaded with connotations about women as helpless or immature compared to men.