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THE FECKLESSNESS OF CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS. Garance, Matt and zuzu have already amply demonstrated the bad faith, distortions, and selective evidence of the latest manifestation of Christina Hoff Sommers's feeble "American feminists don't care about the suppression of Islamic women" routine. And, of course, American feminists are in a no-win situation. One might have thought that Katha Pollitt -- who writes a great deal about the suppression of Islamic women and is a columnist for the largest-circulation liberal political magazine -- might have merited Sommers's attention, although of course she didn't. But you may recall Ana Marie Cox's regrettable review of Pollitt's latest book, in which Cox sighed that Pollitt was "fixated" on women's rights in the Middle East. You can't win. In addition, I thought J. Goodrich also made a good point in comments:
Sommers is a a very fascinating example of someone who has not herself written a long book about the situation of women in Islamic countries. She found it more important to write books intended at destroying feminism so that there would then be nobody at all to help those women.If Sommers thinks that more needs to be written about the subjugation of women in the Middle East, well, what's stopping her? She could take some of the time she spends recycling the anecdote about how Judith Butler once won a bad writing contest for the eleventy-billionth time and put a book proposal together. Or perhaps she could write an article about how, despite the disgracefully cynical use of women's rights as an ex post facto war justification by the Bush administration, installing an Islamic quasi-state in Iraq has shockingly turned out to not be a very good deal for Iraqi women. I'm sure Bill Kristol would love to publish it!
--Scott Lemieux
