To follow up on Addie's post about the world-historically stupid Charlotte Allen piece that John Pomfret inexplicably (or, perhaps, all-too-explicably) decided to print on Sunday, Pomfret is now claiming that the piece was "tongue in cheek." Laura Rozen is right that this is an insult to the reader's intelligence. I would think this would be obvious, but satire can't involve a column expressing the same views that the writer earnestly expresses on a regular basis. If someone who wasn't a professional misogynist submitted a dismal combination of crude anachronistic stereotypes, long-discredited junk science, selective comparisons, and non-sequiturs as a satire of IWF hackwork, then maybe you'd have something. Allen's piece, alas, was merely self-parody, something that the Outlook section of the Post has descended to all-to-often in recent years.
--Scott Lemieux
