Washington Post Takes Another Bite At the Feminist Bookstore

I was settling down to read my Sunday dose of aggravation, also known as the Washington Post’s Outlook section. I was actually quite pleased with the selection of essays this week. There is a very poignant and frankly heart-rendering story of former Guantanamo prisoner number #261, Jumah al Dossari, who details in an understated manner, his 5 ½ years of detention and torture. It’s a Russian novel in 1,600 words. Everyone should know Jumah al Dossari’s story. Just like we should know Maher Arar’s. Or Dilawar who was 22 years old and killed by the U.S. by torture. We should know these names the same way we remember Emmett Till, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, all killed for being the wrong people in the wrong place.

But just as I’m about to figuratively pat the Outlook editor John Pomfret on the back for a good line up this week I find this column by Leonard Sax called “'Twilight' Sinks Its Teeth Into Feminism.” Oh great, here we go again. Yet another Sunday Outlook author who is selected to tell us feminism doesn’t work -- this time its because women’s genetic code tells us we love baking cookies.

Leonard Sax is interested in discussing the Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, which despite being incredibly popular, I know nothing about it. So I can’t evaluate his summarization of the series and it passive female heroine. But I don’t need to be an expert on teen fiction to get to the burning straw woman of Sax’s argument. Which is “hey you feminists, despite all your indoctrination, girls still want to read about passive victims and boys still want to watch porn and play video games. So take that!”

Here’s the key passages:

Yet on some level, it seems that children may know human nature better than grown-ups do.

We really should just make children tenured faculty until they grow up and their education ruins their unspoiled nature.

Consider: The fascination that romance holds for many girls is not a mere social construct; it derives from something deeper.

Boys however do not ever care about romance. That’s why they never understand why all those video games and Star Wars have “rescue the princess” as plot points. Or why Harry Potter had a girlfriend. And feminists truly believe that little girls shouldn’t even know what a romantic fairytale is until they’ve gone through an intensive Womyn’s Studies program in college.

In my research on youth and gender issues, I have found that despite all the indoctrination they've received to the contrary, most of the hundreds of teenage girls I have interviewed in the United States, Australia and New Zealand nevertheless believe that human nature is gendered to the core.

Because, as we’ve shown, if kids believe something, then it is demonstrable fact. Also did you know that candy makes a good lunch?

They are hungry for books that reflect that sensibility. Three decades of adults pretending that gender doesn't matter haven't created a generation of feminists who don't need men;

Feminists, when we say “we want equality” what we really mean is “you are no different from men, in fact you don’t even need men. In fact, we actually hate men.”

they have instead created a horde of girls who adore the traditional male and female roles and relationships in the "Twilight" saga.

Because no other vampire series has ever been popular, ever. And no other book is also popular amongst teens.

Likewise, ignoring gender differences hasn't created a generation of boys who muse about their feelings while they work on their scrapbooks.

Damn it! That means the feminist movement has failed! I mean if little boys aren’t playing with dolls then what else could feminists ever possibly want to achieve?

Instead, a growing number of boys in this country spend much of their free time absorbed in the masculine mayhem of video games such as Grand Theft Auto and Halo or surfing the Internet for pornography.

Yeah, I wondered why at the NOW national conference the panel on "How to Separate Men From Their Video Games and Porn" was so poorly attended. I guess every video game out there (and porno) is just more proof that our national goal of emasculation isn’t working. Why! Why must we always fight these losing battles against HUMAN NATURE instead of trying to achieve tangible successes like getting equal pay for equal work and getting access to contraception? I’m sure glad we never tried to go after sexual harassment in the workplace either, because god knows it’s just in men’s nature to be assholes and you can’t change that either.

For more than three decades, political correctness has required that educators and parents pretend that gender doesn't really matter. The results of that policy are upon us: a growing cohort of young men who spend many hours each week playing video games and looking at pornography online, while their sisters and friends dream of gentle werewolves who are content to cuddle with them and dazzling vampires who will protect them from danger. In other words, ignoring gender differences is contributing to a growing gender divide.

So starting back in 1978, little girls who were told “you can’t be anything you want to be,” really should have been told “but really all you want is to be the princess rescued by the cuddly teddy bear.” I can see now why that section I was taught in primary school called “WHY IT DOESN’T MATTER IF YOU ARE A BOY OR A GIRL” was invented. To beat out of me any inherent genetic ideas I had about loving teddy bears and unicorns, and Princess Leia in an iron bikini. Little girls who want to be the hero of their own fiction? Sorry, it’s just in your HUMAN NATURE to have limited fantasies. Oh and stop bothering the boys for a turn on the Nintendo Wii, you know video games are only for boys.

--crossposted at Feminist Underground

Washington Post Once Again Tries to Divide Women

I really wish I could understand the minds of the editorial page editors of the Washington Post when they picked up this column by Charlotte Allen. But really Charlotte Allen is just a prop for the Washington Post to once again try to start a fight between women. After all, why not elevate a writer who doesn't know what she's talking about as a way to lambast "feminists." So what exact was their thinking?

Does The LA Times Op-Ed Editor Hate Women?

Sometimes editorial judgments can’t be called into question until you notice a pattern. Publish one widely-criticized questionable woman-hating op-ed, and maybe you can just say it’s a goof.

But I’ve been reading the Los Angeles Times op-ed pages for a month now as part of my job’s Women’s Monitor project (wherein we encourage people from across the country to monitor their newspapers op-ed pages and count how many women are published on any given day. Hint: The answer is always few if any) and the LA Times editorial pages really are making me questions if they know how much their editorial choices reflect how much they hate women?

Is any one particular op-ed? Like the one on February 24 by Heather MacDonald that says basically “rape crisis? There’s no rape crisis…its just women having one-night stands and regretting it.” Which wasn’t all that different from (the unfortunately widely reprinted) Meghan Daum’s column which should have been titled “Sluts, I see sluts everywhere! Damn you feminism!”

Or its staff columnist Rosa Brooks who decided to get angry at Hillary Clinton over Elliot Spitzer’s behavior? (But not McCain or Obama…just Hillary).

Or Patty Kelly who seems to think that the model for decriminalizing prostitution is Mexico?! And absolutely not Sweden (which actually might have the best solution for balancing women’s rights and safety). Everything she wrote makes me wonder if actually spoke Spanish to the women she interviewed. Sample bit of cluelessness:

Of the 140 women who worked at the Galactic Zone, as the brothel was called, only five had a pimp (and in each of those cases, they insisted the man was their boyfriend).

I guess she doesn’t know its pretty common for women to think of their pimp as their boyfriend.

Or maybe its having that Elizabeth Wurtzel write about feminism. Here’s a sample:

Feminism, which was meant to be fun, has lately started to seem so sour. Men, particularly married men, often dislike Hillary Clinton, and I suspect that it's because she represents the unsexy wing of the women's movement. She comes across as nearly neutered, as the woman whose husband would cheat on her -- and, in fact, we know he did. But it cannot be the case that we went through all that bra-burning and consciousness-raising to be left choosing between, yet again, the madonna or the whore.

Because feminism today is all about herself and what she can write without doing any research. And, no, having someone write a “Blowback” response column isn’t the right response either. Now it become a pitted debate: “Feminists, do they suck or actually do some good? You decide!”

And sometimes the editorial choices are just stupid. Like the University of Washington professor who felt the need to argue that expecting men to be monogamous is like asking them to be like worms or something. And yes, here’s the rebuttal column they ran several days later.

This seems to be the pattern. Run some terrible outrageous column that discusses some aspect of femaleness or women’s sexuality, and then, as the outraged letters appear, run a response column. Presto! Now you have balance. Something shitty said about women and something said to refute it. Great. I guess as long as you run a response column everything is okay.

It wasn’t until I started counting the day’s columns for the number of women authors (which many days there weren’t any, and many days the only woman printed wrote something derogatory about women’s behavior) that I started to get really angry at the LA Times and what they think their Op-Ed pages are for. What kind of debates and ideas do they want discussed on them and frankly, who qualifies to talk about what subjects.

Sure, Joel Stein writes a really shitty column about women, but if you look at the Op-Ed pages over time you figure out that’s just par for the course at the LA Times. He’s not an outlier, he fits right in.

How Do You Define Your Feminism?

To any of my friends who've asked me about feminism lately I give you this bit of awesomeness (hat tip Feministing).

My only quibble is that it should have also said "Feminists sometimes have cats but not always."

Oh yeah, and I also love this quote because I feel it gets at the heart of what most people mean when they refuse to call themselves feminists.

“(Because) someone somewhere once said something in the name of feminism I disagree with, so I’ll call that Feminism, and distance myself from it rather than acknowledging that there are huge disagreements within feminism and re-envisioning my own place within that.”