The Washington Post's failed effort at satire?
By Steve Benen Monday Mar 03, 2008 8:00pm
The Washington Post, for reasons that defy comprehension, published a 1,700-word thought piece yesterday on women in America being dumb, shallow, and generally kind of pathetic. The author, Charlotte Allen, made her spectacularly dumb case with the kind of nonsense one might expect from a misogynistic child — women are bad drivers, they have physically smaller brains, they’re awful at math, they have bad taste in entertainment, etc.
The problem, it seems to me, is not Allen. Her foolish attack on women is easy to dismiss as petty nonsense, best suited for a He-Man Woman-Hater’s Club blog. Instead, the fault lies with Washington Post editors who thought Allen’s anti-feminist hit-job deserved to be published on the front page of the paper’s Outlook section.
The WaPo’s Outlook editor took a moment to respond to criticism.
“If it insulted people, that was not the intent,” Outlook editor John Pomfret told me this morning, calling the piece “tongue-in-cheek.” […]
Pomfret said that being an opinion article, he’s not surprised readers reacted to it strongly. But added: “Perhaps it wasn’t packaged well enough to make it clear that it was tongue-in-cheek.”
I found it hard to believe Pomfret would publish such tripe. I find it even harder to believe this is his explanation for such poor judgment.
Obviously, humor can be hard to define. “Funny” is in the eye of the beholder. But calling Allen’s bizarre opinion piece “tongue-in-cheek” is just insulting. “Tongue-in-cheek” is defined as, “Meant or expressed ironically or facetiously.” Allen wasn’t kidding. There was nothing in the piece intended as humor, and at no point was the reader led to believe the entire 1,700-word piece should be taken as satire. And since when is the front page of the Washington Post’s Outlook section the proper place for “edgy” humor that attacks women as dumb?
“Just kidding!” is something children say when they’re caught saying something they know was wrong. But for editors at major newspapers, it’s hardly an excuse for publishing a piece that should have offended everyone who read it.
Ezra also had a good item that’s worth reading.
I don’t want to engage with the article because, sometimes in Washington, editors take controversy as a sign of success. “The response is heated, but that just shows we hit a nerve, forced people to discuss an important issue. Namely, whether women are idiots.” So instead, I’ll say this: They should be ashamed of publishing an article of such poor quality.
Quite right. The controversy should not be taken by Post editors as evidence of having published something thought provoking. One of the nation’s leading and most respected dailies ran a lengthy item on the stupidity of American women. The outrage they hear isn’t discussion about the merit of the article; they outrage is the offense that reasonable people have taken to such abject garbage masquerading as a thought piece.
The Post owes its readers an apology.
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Yep, that's why this here blog treated it as an April Fool's joke from a person without a calendar or a clue.
What effing year is this?
Tongue in cheek?
Even if that were so, the point would be....what?
Too many in the MSM are just to stupid to live, and I'm looking right at you Pomfret....if that really is your name.
meh, i read the article and as a woman wasn't much offended. then again, i don't think much of wapo either.
Charlotte Allen aka Ann Coulter aka female hating fundie xtain
Tongue in cheek? More head in ass I thought.
This can’t be good for the subscription dept. This also highlights the irony in how they fail to see the reasons why they loose subscribers.
Journamalism, like the domestication of the dog, continues on its merry way.
"Give me the high sign!"
I hate to admit it, but I kind of agree with the Post (Flame on). The piece starts with one of these articles constantly being churned out about all the women passing out at an Obama event. Even I've found the subtext of these articles to sometimes be "look women and minorities are getting involved in politics; the only way the can of course is by shouting haleluja and passing out." It isn't the best opinion piece, a bit too long, and should have made the point a bit more sharply (I found it too boring to read all the way through the first time), but I don't think it was honestly intended to suggest that women are really stupid. It was intended to parody the media narrative that they are stupid. I also doubt the Post thought anyone would walk away from this piece thinking that way.
Ok, flame on. I'm not exactly an apologist for the Post, but on this one I think they're right.
This is another example of editors and reporters in trouble. The standards of journalism, once upheld in high esteem, are now subject to constant criticism for the lack of ethical and intellectual judgement.
Why stop with women?
I think that many 'Americans', way to many if you ask me, would fit their description of 'women' to a 'T'.
Americans are generally 'dumb, shallow and generally kind of pathetic'...
I sometimes have to apologize when I travel to other countries for the way that the 'average American' treats people and things in other countries.
Looking at America from aboard is a hoot. We are a caricature of the ignorant, rude, hard drinking, loud and obnoxious gun totting red neck hick from the old times western movies... Yippee...
I guess we can look forward to tongue-in-cheek WP pieces on Italians and crime, Irish and alcohol, African-Americans and natural rhythm, and Jews and money. I usually look to the people that the Post covers for humor--who knew that it was contagious?
They can polish that turd all they want...it's still a turd.
And the excuse is just the flatulence after the turd.
Oh toughen up everybody! If the genders in that article were reversed no one would have cared if it was putting men down. Whats good for the goose etc.
Really? Democrats are really unable to read the satirical tone?
Whether or not this is effective satire (of media reports of women "swooning," of descriptions befitting Victorian era "hysteria," of the inane mind-numbing spectacle of Oprah) is up for debate - but the idea that this is misogynistic or meaningfully sexist... come on, my fellow Democrats. We're supposed to be literate. Read for tone. In fact, actually read the article rather than just the posting off the cited, misrepresentative blurb. I suspect you'll see how silly any condemnation of the Post here is.
What's offensive is how the Post and, especially, Times make you feel like you're never a good enough American consumer. The Styles section, Dining In, stories about how 200K is the new 100K - THAT'S offensive. And, certainly, it ain't "news."
dcwp @ 9:
Nope. Pure bullshit. I've read the article and she clearly believes in the innate inferiority of women in too many respects to allow this as tongue in cheek. I sure wouldn't let a daughter of mine to be exposed to that crap without clearly explaining that it's author was full to the gills with fecal matter.
BTW we all prefer House.
#14, I would have cared, and I'm a woman. Stereotyping is simplistic, misleading and harmful whenever and wherever it happens.
It's satire.
And Swift didn't really think eating poor children was good for the country.
Chicks, cannot hold dey smoke. Dats whut it iz.
Lister said:
"It’s satire.
And Swift didn’t really think eating poor children was good for the country."
For the record, Swift's satire "A Modest Proposal" suggested that English people eat Irish children, and of course it was meant tongue-in-cheek. He was born in Ireland himself. That this Washington Post diatribe against women appears when a women is FINALLY running for President is peculiar timing.
I suppose this is satire too.
Martyr or moron?
He dared to question feminism's big lie, Saturday, April 2, 2005 By CHARLOTTE ALLEN
Wouldn't it be preferable, rather than pretending that the sexes are identical and interchangeable and blaming society for women's problems, to talk openly about men's and women's strengths and weaknesses (as groups, not as exceptional individuals) and explore rationally the reasons relatively few women seek scientific careers? The reasons probably range from slight variances between the sexes in the extremes of intellectual ability to the likelihood that some gifted girls find science and math just plain boring.
Of course what she means is women as a group are inferior but she's exceptional.
dcwp @ 9:
Were it not for the fact that they run this sort of woman demeaning piece nearly every week, I would shrug it off as failed satire.
That and the fact that the non satire pieces Allen writes read exactly the same as this purported satire piece.
I read the article.
It stunk to high heaven.
It was not Nora Ephron style irony.
The only good thing about it is that it expressed out loud the prejudices that are being expressed by the national media. For months they have been acting as if Clinton doesn't even exist.
I hope it galvanizes women behind Senator Clinton.
Women have as much right to want a woman to represent them as black Americans think that Obama might represent their interests.
It would be interesting if women began to consider themselves as a bloc vote.
dcwp @ 9:
Sure some women might faint. They think they are at some event.
But men are even stupider.
They are in love with Obama.
He's on GQ.
He lectures parents on child rearing.
And you know that the whole spectacle of Obama is orchestrated and conceived by men.
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?
Un-fucking-believable.
Can you give me some links or a link for a misogynistic Washington Post piece?
I guess I'm not as familiar w/the paper as I thought.
In fairness, I haven't read other Allen pieces, so it's a fair and good point to bring in what #22 does. I'll check out the linked piece right now.
Until then, I stand by my argument. And, for the record, A Modest Proposal is organized around class difference (apologies for the anachronistic register) rather than national difference.
Here's the reason why I make a fuss about all these wonderful liberals jumping on this admittedly ineffective satirical piece. For all the desperate antiracist and antisexist and antihomophobic fury that the good old liberal body politic can muster, I hear silence or whispers about the most problematic injustice of American society, which is continuing and unassaulted - severe and intensely deleterious economic inequality and injustice. The liberals and the conservatives are basically making the same argument through inverted versions of it. The exclusive talk about race and gender is and has been at the expense of unaltered levels of poverty and human suffering.
Can you imagine if the United States - for two hundred plus years had only women as presidents?
And a man came along who finally caught the attention of the electorate - and that man received the treatment from the media that Senator Clinton is getting?
Would it be so difficult for men to figure it out?
The paper gets to have its cake and eat it, too. Not only are women dumb, they're too dumb to understand satire! This kind of game-playing is some evil sh&t...
Lister, it was not just children of "the poor" that were to be eaten but specifically Irish Catholics. Protestant England owned most of Ireland at that time, poor Irish people were "tenants" and the rich English were their landlords:
"In A Short View of the State of Ireland, first printed in 1728, the year before the publication of A Modest Proposal, and reprinted in part in the crypto-Jacobite Tory Mist's Weekly Journal in London, it is England and the Hanoverian king who are the slave masters. Ireland is denied liberties enjoyed by 'the meanest Prince in the German Empire' and the Irish are imaged as the Israelites suffering under their Pharoah... The Modest Proposer regards the Irish as slaves and speaks of the 'Collateral Advantage' of his cannibal scheme in 'lessening the Number of Papists among us'."
http://www.unh.edu/english/swift/2003/higgins.htm
Charlotte Allen writes stuff like this all of the time. Here she is castigating the Amazon book reviewers for their treatment of a book entitled, "Women Who Make the World Worse: and How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports."
Kate O'Beirne's Troll Attack, by Charlotte Allen
The left can't mount reasoned arguments anymore, so it's resorted to online name-calling and flame campaigns. The latest is the assault of "reviews" on the Amazon website of our friend Kate O'Beirne's new book "Women Who Make the World Worse: and How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports." Some 493 people, mostly trolls, have signed on to give Kate one star and write semi-literate drivel, like this from one "Ranmasan":
"The book is filled with misrepresentations of facts, and out right lies. Though at least she has a lot in common with the Bush Administration on this one.
"Her grasp of Statistics is non-existent. So her whole chapter on income disparity is moot. (You can't just pick a few random occupations and average the salaries together!)."
And Kate's National Review colleague Kathryn Jean Lopez points to this act of online vandalism of the cover.
Aren't lefties witty and cultivated?
By the way, I love the delightful, feminista-caricaturing cover of Kate's book, except for one teeny thing: What is the winsome Sarah Jessica Parker doing with the likes of professional harpies Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Hillary Clinton, and Jane Fonda? Parker is shown as "Sex in the City"'s Carrie Bradshaw pecking away at her laptop and daydreaming about....shoes! Of course she's daydreaming about shoes! That's what all women daydream about, don't they? We're women after all--and isn't that Kate's very point in the book? I'm confused.
But go over to Amazon anyway, do battle with the moonbats, and give "Women Who Make the World Worse" five stars. Who cares if you haven't read it--do you think many of the trolls have?
So some say if you reversed the genders in the Post article no one would have made a fuss. Fine someone should reverse the genders.
The man bashing article could start with how McCain supporters are dumb guys who vote according to their testosterone levels and that they talk their electoral choices over with their guy god, via their pastors of course, instead of just using the brains that god gave them. The article could also discuss their sad nostalgia for a war hero and then add somthing about their dumb entertainment choices, like the WWF. After all that it could wrap up with how the average guy should just accept the fact that he is best qualified to be a Wallmart manager...kind of dim. Especially if he, you know, voted for Bush. I'm sure that would go over really well.
Peter G @ 5:
Excellent! Charlotte Allen... man in woman's body or woman with head up her own ass... or woman-hating woman... what a c_nt! You fill in the blank, Charlotte... you effin' LOSER!
Oh yeah... Charlotte... STFU!
Jenn @ 14:
blah blah blah... I'd be equally pissed at that too. Wapo... bullshit in a rag and not good enough to line the parrot's cage!
So let's put the speculation to rest then, oh Post ombudsman. Let's have a statement from Charlotte Allen that her article was not meant to be taken seriously, but was only a satire. Someone other than the writer making interpretations of a writer's intent is at best inconclusive. Let's hear from the author.
In case anybody's interested, I address this in my recently resurrected blog.
http://braintree.blogspot.com/
.
LOL
Sexism...
A defining characteristic.
http://www.oldamericancentury.org/14pts.htm
.
Pomfret has been an embarrassment and he should go.
Bad taste in entertainment?
Women don't see movies with Swartzenegger, Van Damme, Seagal, Pauly Shore, Stallone, etc.
Men do.
Worse than that, men voted in droves for Swartzenpecker to make him governator.
I'd say women, by far, make better entertainment choices then men.
The Washington Post should have known Ms. Allen is not a satirist, she believes this stuff. She is a contributor to Independent Women's Forum, a "non-profit, non-partisan"
research and educational foundation whose underwriter include Richard Mellon Scaife's Sarah Scaife Foundation, and whose past directors include Lynne V. Cheney, Midge Decter (PNAC signer and mother of Norman Podhoretz), Wendy Lee Gramm (wife of former TX senator Phil Gramm and on the board of Enron), Kate O'Beirne (no wonder Allen flew to the defense of Katie's book on Amazon). Their current director was part "of Bush's 2000 inauguration committee. So much for the non-partisan part.
Here's a portion of their mission statement, brimming with GOPisms:
"Our mission is to rebuild civil society by advancing economic liberty, personal responsibility, and political freedom. IWF builds support for a greater respect for limited government, equality under the law, property rights, free markets, strong families, and a powerful and effective national defense and foreign policy."
Steve Benen:
Thought piece? Is that what we're calling brain farts now?
.
It was just a poorly written "opinion" piece. Who cares what's on the opinion page? It is wasted space in any newspaper.
Two words: Plausible deniability
How come so many women are math teachers?
I'm not laughing.
Would a Jew endorsing the Holocaust be funny? Or a black endorsing slavery? Or a Native American endorsing forced resettlement and genocide of her entire nation?
As the Nazis did to the Jews, American's did to the Indians, Australia's immigrants did to their aboriginals - all were ridiculed, oppressed and belittled in the media of their day. So it is in this article.
This article is reminiscent of nothing quite so much as the "humor" campaign the Nazis used to get Germans used to the idea of belittling Jews to the point where their vitimization - and eventual elimination - was acceptable. 18th cenury American papers and magazines used the same tactics to further the subjagation of blacks and the genocide of Native Americans. Papers of the time were full of humorous anecdotes about the laziness, drunkenous, animal charateristics and other derogatory dehumanization, (the only good Indian is a dead Indian), of anyone not a white male, all done on service of claiming moral, natural, God-given supremacy.
Any editor defending this today is a bigoted ass who doesn't even have the claim of ignorance as an excuse. They know what they're doing. They are culpable. It is done intentionally to create an atmosphere where oppression can be justified. Calling it humor doesn't excuse them.
We use the term 'mysogyny', (which literally means "hatred of women"), too lightly. We trivialize it. It's so much easier to stand by and allow atrocities when the victims are seen as being not quite as human or important as those who believe they are the rightful heirs of God's dominion over others. And, just as with any slavery and genocide, this systematic trivializing of a specific group's oppresstion, in this case women, has resulted in reinforcing cultural acceptance of their brutalization, often to the point of legalized oppression and murder.
It has been so accepted in our culture that we are not even aware of it's pervasiveness, even in our language. The common term, "rule of thumb" originated as the unit of measurement by which a man could use a weapon as big around as his thumb with which he could legally beat his wife into brutalized submission, after which he could fuck her as often as he liked, both were his legal right. The woman had no legal recourse against this, because God had made her less than the man - in all the ways this article so humorously listed.
Hilarious, isn't it?
The ultra-conservative WaPo editorial page is assisting the ultra-conseravtive right-wing Christian base's attempt to return to that past and put women back where they think they belong: subserviant, submissive, and breeding lots of little right-wingers to serve their vengeful God. One of Fox's paid bigots, John Gibson, recently called for white Americans to start breeding more, before non-whites outnumber whites. Just as Hitler did, even to the point of giving "Mother's medals" to good fraus who popped out at least six little nazis for the Reich and the Homeland.
This is the American Talliban, the WaPo editors are their Mullahs.
If it was suppposed to be comedy, it was extremely badly written, by a self-hating author. Kind of like the faux daily show on fox. They joke about others but it doesn't mask their hatred and fear. God major newspapers have become so irrelevant it's just sad.
" 'Just kidding!' is something children say when they’re caught saying something they know was wrong."
Right. Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and others of their ilk have been spitting out that defense for years. Cruel, pathological children who aren't the least bit interested in discerning the difference between right and wrong.
After going to the site I was ONCE AGAIN NOT SURPRISED to find that the misogynist apologetic editor was a small ugly bald headed man who couldn't get a woman in the sack unless he paid her A LOT AND SHE WAS BLINDFOLDED.
Why is it that the woman haters of the world all wear the BALD LOOK?
Could it be to disgust women?
IT WORKS.
Sorry, I couldn't bring myself to finish reading it because it was just so, well, stupid...
Where's Darla?
She was a little hottie.
http://mysite.verizon.net/res0qaye/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpicture...
right on! @ 34:
They didn't specify which set of cheeks.
The name of the WaPo editor is what jumped out at me, through a high-school French filter:
'Pomfret' looks & sounds like 'Pommes frites,' which is French for what we call french fries.
Appropriate? Well, based on his explanation, I'd say greasy and a little fried describe both.
Ad hominem attack? No, just giving back what they gave.
PS: (and boy, does this joke apply to our current President) Menstruation gives women an excuse, five days a month, to act... like men do ALL YEAR 'ROUND!
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