Washington Post, I can't quit you, but that's mainly because for the first time in this Charlotte Allen debacle, you've done the smart thing: you brought Katha Pollitt in to explain why Allen was dumber than a box of hammers when she said women were dumber than a box of hammers. It's not firing John Pomfret -- which, as far as I can see, needs to happen tout de suite -- but it's something.As you'd expect, Pollitt's writing alone is exhibit 1A in why women are not inferior to men.
I've never watched Oprah Winfrey's show, bought a Celine Dion CD, read "Eat, Pray, Love," or fainted at an Obama rally, although he is my preferred candidate. According to Charlotte Allen, that makes me an "outlier," an exception that proves the rule that women "always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental." But uh-oh: I used to watch "Grey's Anatomy" from time to time, and I even shed some tears when Denny died. Maybe being female has turned my "pre-frontal cortex into Cream of Wheat" after all. Maybe I'm just another "kind of dim" female, a charter member of "the dumber sex."
In a casual essay of 1,700 words, Allen manages to stir together a breathtaking mishmash of misogynistic irrelevancies and generalizations. One minute she's mocking women who bake cookies for their dogs; the next, she's castigating Hillary Clinton's campaign as "stupidest" partly because she fired her "daytime-soap-watching" Latina campaign manager too close to the Texas primary. (Note to Allen: Hillary won Texas with a flood of Latino votes.) She wonders why "no man contracts nebulous diseases" of possibly psychosomatic origins. (Note to Allen: Actually, they do.) She asks why women have more driving accidents. (Note to Allen: See below.) Could it be because women are mentally inferior, as proved by men's greater ability to mentally rotate three-dimensional objects in space? Unless it's a cute little puppy, that is, or maybe a cookie.
The upshot: we ladies should focus on what we're really good at -- interior decoration and taking care of men and children.
It only gets better from there. Go ahead -- this is one Post link that's okay to click through. I hope they find out quickly that by golly, people actually want to read smart women writing about how smart women can be, and doing so by laying out what Allen appears to be incapable of figuring out: that women and men can both be frivolous and focused, silly and serious, immature and intelligent. You know that, of course, but it's nice to see the Post running an article from someone who agrees with that sentiment.
