Not to be missed, Katha Pollitt has a response to the inane Charlotte Allen piece last weekend that generated so much well-deserved outrage. In her rebuttal, Pollitt manages to point out the absurdities of things Allen claims as "facts" about how dumb all us broads are:
Allen claims that the misogynist canard is true: thanks to their superior visuospatial abilities, men (although maybe not gay men?) are better drivers, with 5.1 accidents per million miles compared to women's 5.7. "The only good news," she adds, is that because they take fewer risks, women's accidents are only a third as likely to be fatal. That's a very interesting definition of ability behind the wheel: the better drivers are the ones who take more risks and are three times as likely to end up dead.
While at the same time putting the blame for the piece where it belongs – not on Allen, who gets paid to advance the anti-feminist agenda, but on the Post for publishing this load and not having women in positions of power to tell people like Allen to take a hike:
I can't imagine a great newspaper airing comparable trash talk about any other group. "Asians Really Do Just Copy." "No Wonder Africa's Such a Mess: It's Full of Black People!" Misogyny is the last acceptable prejudice, and nowhere more so than in our nation's clueless and overwhelmingly white-male-controlled media. I can just picture the edit meeting: This time, let's get a woman to say women are dumb and silly! If readers raise too big a ruckus, Outlook editor John Pomfret can say it was all "tongue in cheek." Women are dingbats! Get it? Ha. Ha. Ha.
Here's a thought. Maybe there's another thing women can do besides fluff up their husbands' pillows: Fill more important jobs at The Washington Post. We should be half the assigning editors, half the writers, and half the regular columnists too (current roster of op-ed columnists: 16 men, two women). We've got those superior verbal skills, remember? Drastically increasing the presence of women isn't a foolproof recipe for gender fairness -- Allen is far from alone in her dislike of her sex -- but I have to believe a gender-balanced paper would reflect a broader view of women than The Post does at present.
I'm glad the paper felt the need to counter last week's tripe, but I have to say I'm with Ezra that it's completely ridiculous that they've now convened a debate over at the Post on whether women are, in fact, stupid. There's no benefit to making it appear as if there's really any worthwhile debate to be had on the matter.
--Kate Sheppard
