Admitting you’re an idiot does not help your argument
March 3rd, 2008, 2:42 pm · 2 Comments · posted by fsherman
Charlotte Allen, writing in the Washington Post on female supporters of Obama: “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.”
Allen then goes on to discuss women in general: “The theory that women are the dumber sex — or at least the sex that gets into more car accidents — is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence … I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies. I can’t add 2 and 2 (well, I can, but then what?). I don’t even know how many pairs of shoes I own. … 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. … 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.”
In other words, the same thing the Independent Women’s Forum (from which Allen sprung) and other antifeminist groups always say: Women aren’t qualified to be the boss! Or to do anything other than stay home and bake cookies! They’re silly little emotional things, just like all the girls back on those old sixties sitcoms (Allen argues the old stereotype that women are innately worse drivers than men, even though men apparently–I don’t trust her figures–have three times as many fatal accidents)! Any woman who contradicts this theory is an “outlier” and an exception to the rule, so they don’t prove Allen wrong!
Of course, given Allen’s acknowledgement that she’s a moron, I suppose it’s silly to pay attention to her … except that she’s being published in a major national newspaper. And that they’d never publish a column rehashing old stereotypes that, say, Jews are greedy, money-obsessed and hate Christians or that African Americans really find it hard taking charge of their own lives and wish they had some white people to boss them around and tell them what to do.
Sexism, as I’ve noted before, is acceptable in ways no other form of bigotry is.
March 4th, 2008 at 9:08 am
You’re taking Allen a little too literally. She’s taking a poke at the feminist groups who are supporting Obama, saying they’re acting like the women they ridicule - not that women are stupid.
March 4th, 2008 at 9:37 am
No, I don’t think so. Allen’s not just commenting about “Obama mania,” she’s mocking women’s taste in TV, books and pretty much everything.
It’s possible she’s just an inept writer but I read it several times and didn’t see any signs it was satire (the Washington Post now claims it was tongue in cheek, but that’s the standard response when someone gets a hailstorm of criticism). And the idea men are innately qualified to run things is in line with the kind of bilge the Independent Women’s Forum usually churns out.
In fact, I’ve seen a couple of other right-wing women do similar “women are stupid” anti-feminist pieces and the only difference is that the others don’t throw in that “oh, I’m kind of dumb too” bit at the end.