My friend's boyfriend pointed me in the direction of this article in the Washington Post entitled "We Scream, We Swoon, How Dumb Can We Get" written by a woman ... against women.
I don't know who this Charlotte Allen is, but she clearly has serious penis envy. And I don't know what's wrong with the Washington Post that they would publish such total drivel. If you can't be bothered to read the article, it's all about: the idiocy of women who support Obama; Clinton as a poor candidate because of her poor choices - chalked up to her being a woman, of course; and the supposed biological differences between men and women. I actually read the article twice because I thought she was being ironic at first. But on second read, I realized that this chick was totally serious.
I don't know what makes me angrier. Her idea that the stupid things men do are rooted in some kind of ancestral "save and protect" mentality or that women are biologically preprogrammed to be nurturing mothers and make a home. Clearly I must be some kind of genetic anomaly because frankly, children annoy me and the only thing I am truly nurturing towards are my fish and my cat.
Her arguments don't even hold up - she claims that women have been verbal skills because we had to be able to "remember where the berries were" during our hunting and gathering days and men have better math and spacial relationship skills because "they had to be able to map out the trajectory of a spear." Um, remembering the locations of food patches is a cognitive mapping skill and would also fall under navigating spacial relationships.
She ends her article with this:
"So 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. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can 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."
Even if that is meant to be ironic, it still validates all of the ridiculous, outdated stereotypes present today against women.
I am so angry I can't even continue to articulate. Read the article. Be outraged.
EDIT: Apparently it is tongue-in-cheek. But it should have been clearer.
http://jezebel.com/363215/
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Charlotte Allen is a blogger for the anti-feminist Independent Women's Forum. She has written all kinds of appalling things.
ReplyDeleteThe "tongue-in-cheek" is just the Washington Post's unbelievably lame attempt to cover their asses after all the letters they received. She was, in fact, being serious. So yeah, be outraged.
You know, even if it WERE tongue in cheek, the fact is that this kind of stuff shouldn't be printed. The way that it uses supposedly "scientific" facts to uphold totally anti-female points of view is terrible. Plenty of people would read this article and allow it to validate the patriarchy.
ReplyDeleteIF articles like that are to be "tongue in cheek", they need to be even more exaggerated and preferably contain some kind of information that indicates in what way the article is ironic.
What is also depressing if that you would NEVER see the post publish an article doing the same thing to people of minority backgrounds. Why is it okay to make fun of women?
Agreed!
ReplyDeleteI am so sick of these people writing such crap and then claiming that it was satire. It took me awhile to find this post because it was about something else, but I think it says it quite nicely:
http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2008/02/so-so-true.html