UM, EW. I have to say, reading Charlie Pierce's commentary below on a progressive web site is the kind of thing that really makes me wonder about the left today. So Michael Richards's reprehensible and hate-filled rant was the expression of a condemnable authentic Seinfeldian Id, which was hateful in any event because if was a milquetoast alternative to Sam Kinison? I'm sorry, but Sam Kinison -- whom a recent reviewer called the embodiment of a "regressive politics which mainstream America finally got the sense to denounce" -- is the favorable point of comparison here? Seriously? Why is it that misogyny is the only hatred still defended by men of the left? Seinfeld soothed the "maidenly vapors" people had around Kinison? My recollection was that Kinison was a disgusting, hateful, hate-filled boor and those "maidenly vapors" he raised were genuine feminist objections to him, by women who were, for example, trying to create a situation so that girls like myself were not, in the 1980s, subjected to his rants (and those of the equally gross Andrew Dice Clay) by our older brothers and their friends.
Of course, tweaking the feminists is the most common of media sports, an easy way of garnering masculine pats on the back, even among men of the left, for there is nothing so universally approved of as ragging on women for being such sissy little girls about things. The African-American subjects of Richards's foul rant didn't particularly like being targetted -- and yet here, a man who spoke of women as offensively is recalled with fondness as one of those on the side of "all the real stuff," and his critics dismissed as having "maidenly vapors." Richard Goldstein had some useful stuff to say about the political impact of such attitudes in a smart piece of cultural history in The Nation a few years back. People could do worse than read it again.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
