I love that The Washington Post's editorial response to people being pissed that they ran an article about how women are stupid was to slightly tweak the online teaser to make it a piece about why women "act so dumb." Also, it's now a tongue in cheek piece of woman-bashing by a professional anti-feminist. "Tongue in cheek," it seems, is newspeak for "poorly reasoned."
« Iran and the IAEA | Main | Good News for People Who Like Bad Predictions »
Good Save
03 Mar 2008 01:41 pm
Comments (20)
Speaking as a man, why would I want to put my investment, as that's what a marriage is, into the hands of someone too dumb to handle it?
Also, this writer must lead a very sheltered existance, as I can't imagine how she'd handle being married to a spouse with a dangerous occupation or profession. Not to mention that one can "go" at any time.
Well, I'm sold. Great decision by the Post's editorial board! Bring on the "tongue in cheek" uninformed lunacy!
I think the furor over this article is missing part of the point. The whole first half of the article is a hit piece on Obama & Clinton. Obama, for being just a silly heart-throb rather than a real leader, and Clinton for being an example of why women are dumb and incompetent. But by wrapping it up in an "anti-feminist" piece the political component becomes practically subliminal. Everyone will argue about whether women are dumb or if the article should have been written but meanwhile everyone will have read and processed this smear of the two Democrats. It's no worse than a Maureen Dowd column, but I think it helps to explain WHY it was published in the first place.
So, Matt, what percentage of _your_ readership is female? 15%? 20% on a good day?
Steve, wtf does that have to do with anything? Are you trying to hint at a point of some sort, or are you just trying to taunt Matt?
How can she have her tongue in her cheek when she has her head up her....
Well, I'm not sure the internet allows one to track the sex of your readership with any accuracy, but we can say ONE thing for sure - his readership has a nonzero percentage of vengeful misogynist yahoos.
APS
As for this being a joke, well, some things just aren't funny. I know that I have a low tolerance for being patronized, and having a professional degree as a mediator I know it when I see it, and this essay simply reeks of it.
"Steve, wtf does that have to do with anything? Are you trying to hint at a point of some sort, or are you just trying to taunt Matt?"
The strong suit of Matt, the magna cum laude Harvard philosophy major, is logic. His interest is applying his outstanding logical skills to public affairs. Not surprisingly, he attracts an overwhelmingly male readership.
OK, so your point is that women (and blacks, presumably, given your other views) don't read Matt Yglesias on account of their inherent inferiority? Or that politics and logic is dorky male stuff, like playing video games and reading science fiction?
You know, 100 years ago, far, far fewer women, blacks, and Catholics graduated from college than do today. I wonder how they managed to become so much less inferior in such a short span of time. It must be vitamins.
Right on, DCreader. The Post, major party to both the Whitewater hoax and the 20-month War Against Gore, saw Democratic politicians being smeared and loved it.
I didn't know Chris Matthews was working for WaPo now.
Elvis,
It's always amusing observing the conflict between the "reality-based community: and reality. All this stuff about the different interests of males and females has been studied to death by social scientists and market researchers and it always comes out the same way. For example, when it comes to public affairs, women are equal to or slightly more interested than men in local affairs, such as school board elections and zoning. But as you go outward from local affairs, women lose interest relative to men. By the time you finally arrive at the subject of Matt's upcoming book, foreign policy, the relatively small percentage of Americans who are interested is highly dominated by men.
Similarly, thinking logically is just more fun for males on average, especially at the far right edge of the bell curve (where there are more males than females, anyway). Take a look at, say, university philosophy departments or computer science departments.
Now, you can make up any reason you want to explain these facts, but Charlotte Allen's op-ed is a humorous take on a huge body of factual knowledge. Matt's response is both ill-humored and ignorant -- which is pretty much the working definition of political correctness.
Now, this certainly doesn't mean men are necessarily better foreign policy decisionmakers. Testosterone dementia has caused most of the trouble in human history. Fewer women than men spend time looking around the world for countries to attack (although Obama's adviser Susan E. Rice, who wants America to militarily attack Sudan, would seem to be an exception).
You are very eager to conflate "is" with "ought."
"The strong suit of Matt, the magna cum laude Harvard philosophy major, is logic. His interest is applying his outstanding logical skills to public affairs. Not surprisingly, he attracts an overwhelmingly male readership."
Well. if women are illogical (which I don't believe, BTW), given Matt's incredibly bad reasoning abilities, this blog should have a 90% female readership.
I think Sailer is more correct vis-a-vis public policy interests. Women don't find hunting around the world for people to attack particularly pleasing, for the obvious reason that women don't have the testosterone or evolutionary development that views physical fighting as a criteria for survival ability. For females, sex is power and survival. For males, fighting is power and survival.
Women in general are probably more interested in domestic policy issues than foreign policy - unless of course they're AIPAC stooges like Hillary or neocon stooges like Condi Rice. But even in domestic policy issues, I suspect they don't find the politicking and bickering itself pleasing.
This is one area when the roles are reversed in the current Democratic campaign. Obama, the male, is perceived as someone who "brings people together" while Clinton, the female, is perceived as "divisive". This role reversal must be confusing to Clinton's feminist supporters.
So Yglesias readers constitute a veritable master race?
I love it. Washington Post editorial board as 4chan trolls: "We were just doing it for the lulz!"
"So Yglesias readers constitute a veritable master race?"
I think the term "foreign policy nerds" might be more accurate.
Comments closed March 17, 2008.
| 
Heads in the Sand
Well, not just for "poorly reasoned," it's newspeak for "getting caught acting stupidly and offensively."
It's the equivalent of "I was only kidding" among five year olds.
Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | March 3, 2008 1:52 PM