Feminist Rants archives
Oh joy. Yet another issue of The Atlantic Monthly lands in my mailbox and yet again - it's been a year now that I've been keeping track - it contains a minimal contribution from women writers.We've come to expect this from "serious" political magazines and newspapers but it's nevertheless annoying.
And this month, in a commission that is breathtakingly insulting on a number of levels, The Atlantic had its marquee female and sometimes feminist writer Caitlin Flanagan discuss one of the more pressing social issues of our time: Teenage girls and fellatio. I am not making this up. In a long, rambling and, in the end, confused piece "Are You There God? It's Me, Monica" Flanagan goes on at great length about what we old folks think teenagers are doing with themselves and each other.
I so wish I were joking about this. It sounds like a Saturday Night Live skit, doesn't it? Picture the pipe-smoking Henry Higgins-like editor, scratching his chin: "We're not stodgy white guys who don't care about women's role in society. We denounce the sexual exploitation of women just like the feminists! I know! Let's write about teenagers and penises! Let's invoke the name of the nation's best known shameless hussy we know - that girl who wanted the president to come in her mouth! - to show how hip we are. And let's have a woman write the, er, piece. No one ever will guess we're indulging our fantasies and fears about our daughters, step-daughters and their cute, sexy friends just to have a bizarre and one-sided conversation about the sexual habits of hot teenage girls. No one will ever guess!"
Oh, I'm so fooled by this thinking. I always fall for it, like a sack of potatoes off a truck.
That's not to dismiss the whole effort out of hand. Flanagan's story on how and why Baby Boomer parents have come to believe that their children are engaged in mindless "anonymous" oral sex (versus what Flanagan quaintly calls "romantic relationships" that involve sex) with their schoolmates is interesting and worthwhile. She does us all a favor in showing that the fears that many parents have are overstated and in tracing the root causes of this weird hysteria. But she doesn't do a very good job telling us why it's grown so quickly and become such a firm belief among Boomer parents.
Why? Because Flanagan is, in the end, lost. A smart comment about gay porn and its resemblance to a teen fiction classic about kids and blow jobs is dropped too quickly; Flanagan doesn't take that insight for what it could be, a chance to talk about gay culture's sexual openness and its effect on the straight world. Why? Because these Boomer parents don't have gay kids - do they? Flanagan - whose previous pieces for the magazine include one on how married folks aren't getting it on they way they did before they had kids (hmmm....think that has anything to do with their fantasies about their children's sex lives?) and how feminists exploit their nannies and housekeepers - wanders into the same poppy field as every other Feminist Prude who has come into this territory. The sex - it's over powering, that smell - must lie down...
Continue reading "Beating (off) a Dead Horse" »
As you might expect, "Sarah," the young mother-to-be whose work I highlighted here last weekend, wasn't too happy to see the ways in which Josh Trevino responded to her essay. So she's written in at some length. I'm not going to post her entire note. This is a controversial topic that we, as writers, as readers, and as people who are interested in the issues of the day, will visit again and again. We can take small steps in considering large issues.
So here, after the jump, is an edited version of her response to Josh Trevino who I think - speaking here as a pro-choice advocate - was rather callous in labeling her a "killer." That remains Josh's perspective and he has told me he intends to respond to me and Sarah a bit later.
Continue reading "Sarah Speaks For Herself" »
One of the real tragedies of the debate over whether a woman can legally end her pregnancy - as Josh Trevino points out - is that we don't use clear language; we don't say what we mean. We resort to pretty euphemisms and appeals to emotion that, increasingly, have little basis in reality.
The signs that appeared over the weekend at protest rallies marking the anniversary of Roe v. Wade - my eye-rolling favorite was "Keep Your Laws Of My Body and I'll Keep My Hands Off Your Throat" - provide fine examples. This sort of nonsense only helps make Josh's point: For the Left, abortion is a call to arms that's become less about choice and more about the rhetoric of being superficial and, as a result, irresponsible.
But I don't think that's the sort of Lefty knee-jerk argument that Sarah - who is facing down the wrath of her family as I type this - was trying to make in her Sunday post. And I think Josh misses her points in being so harshly dismissive of her eloquence and by ignoring a key part of her argument. So let me take a stab at defending her.
First, no one is suggesting that the freedom to choose to end a pregnancy is a "surpassing good." What is being suggested is that decision should be made by the individual most intimately involved - the woman bearing the child - and that decision, once made, should not result in further harm, medical or otherwise. This is not, intrinsically, a statement in favor of one course of action or another; it is a statement - and a legal position - that gives full respect to the person who will be in charge of this child's health, safety and upbringing. In addition, Josh fails to address one of Sarah's most important points: The need for better sex education and education about how contraception actually works. That the Right continues to insist that ignorance about sexual practices means the ignorant won't have sex is stupid false. And this can, for most of us, be demonstrated emprically, practically and personally.
No one I know - and I know plenty of women who have ended their pregnancies with medical procedures - denies that abortion goes to the very heart of their beliefs about life, when and how it starts, and where and how you feel you can interject yourself in the process of bringing another human into the world. That may strike some - Josh - as arrogant and possibly immoral. But I don't think that's correct.
Continue reading "Common Sense About Choice" »
This weekend marked the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision to allow a woman to legally terminate a pregnancy. This year may well mark yet another when the full rights offered with that court decision are trimmed, edited and curtailed.
I've said plenty about abortion and choice and my feelings that Democrats in the party - that's mostly the boys, truth be told - would just as soon throw most feminist issues off the wagon in the name of victory. I'm not going to add to that today.
Instead, I'll point you here to this post I read after Roxanne Cooper pointed it out. As eloquent as anything I have read this weekend, this post explains why the right to choose to end a pregnancy - a decision no one makes lightly - is one that should continue to be guaranteed under the Constitution.
That the author, Sarah, is a young woman - young enough to never have known a world without Roe v. Wade - and that she is pregnant after believing for some time that she could not conceive only adds to its power and depth. Her husband has also written on the issue and the anniversary.
Is porn everywhere?
A few weeks ago when I wrote about Maureen Dowd and her dated take on dating, an editor at Times Books offered me a copy of a new book, "Pornified:How Pornography is Transforming Our Culture, Our Relationships and Our Families 
.
It's by Pamela Paul, a Time magazine correspondent and well, it's interesting but not in the way Paul or her editor envisioned. With the, er, Time-honored technique of anecdote/lesson/professional analysis to tell the story, Paul sets up - you guessed it - the Internet! as her fall guy. The book purports to be a report from the trenches but really, it's the findings of a woman just realizing that Internet porn is very popular with men. And that it's easy to get.
As Homer Simpson would say: Duh.
Paul spends a lot of time on how porn distorts men's view of women and how it annoys women and makes them feel bad about their bodies and how the idea that consuming porn for couples is hokum and how there are - amazingly! - men who don't like the stuff. All of which leads - again, in that Time magazine tradition - to the not-particularly revolutionary idea that porn is generally bad and not good for you. Most of which I agree with. But what I don't agree with: Her basic idea that the Internet is the source of all this grief 'cause it makes porn so easy to see.
This is just another take on the Feminist Scold that Dowd likes to trot out with a nice techno twist. My God, say the feminist scolds, SEX! It's everywhere! Aren't we past that? Haven't MEN learned? No. They haven't. And what's more, many young women are copying what we like to think of as "masculine" behavior when it comes to sex. What the feminist scolds are missing is that idea that economic and sexual parity are difficult to negotiation in any - actually, depending on your age, almost all - situations. That's the challenge of 21st Century feminism and it's one the old "girls" prefer to ignore. It's easier - for them - that way.
There certainly a lot more porn out there. And a great deal of it hides coyly behind the freedom many men feel they now have to sexualize women in the name of "feminism." But I’m a lot more bothered by Maxim - which calls itself a mainstream men's magazine - or the Victoria's Secret "special" on CBS with those undernourished but oddly buxom waxed and buffed "super" models or scrawny-ass Paris Hilton posing with a car, a hose and a dripping sandwich (yeah, like she's ever eaten a 1,000-plus calorie hamburger) than I am by the idea of Internet porn and who's consuming it. I can and do avoid porn. This other stuff, I gotta tolerate when it appears on broadcast television, on billboards and magazine racks. And in its coy attempt to pretend to be something else - a restaurant chain ad, a "backstage look" (Oh, I'll bet!) at a world-class fashion show or an excuse to put a Hollywood starlet in a leather bustier - it strikes me as pornographic. (That's another problem with Paul's book, she doesn't really define "porn." And one of the reasons you really do know it when you see it is because porn is almost always pretending to be something else.)
Continue reading "Knowing and Seeing" »
This is as good a time as any to visit an idea - a bad idea - that's been kicking around in Liberal circles about abortion and Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that made surgery to end a pregnancy safe and legal.
Just after the New Year, the U.S. Senate will begin considering Judge Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court. And Alito is no pro-choice advocate. But in many other respects he may well be qualified to become a member of the court. Which has Liberals in a bit of a twist. If they vote Alito down on abortion alone, they look like hacks. If they don't, they look like patsy.
So there's a little bit of rose-colored revisionism going on in Democratic circles. The chat - Roxanne Cooper pointed to a good example here on her site - got a full public airing in last week's New Yorker when the magazine's legal affairs reporter, Jeffrey Toobin, revisited the "state's would have done it, anyway" canard in this conversation.
The piece certainly covers the waterfront. It starts by making the Dredd Scott comparison - one loved by conservatives who believe that misguided court ruling equates to Roe - and ends with the observation that Roe has withstood a variety of challenges. In the meantime, Toobin spends some time lingering on the idea that if Roe hadn't gone before the Supreme Court, the political bloodbath that passes for debate on this issue might have been avoided.
Instead, say those who endorse this point of view, we might have ended up with what we have today: A series of state laws that sort of contradict on another but, for the most part, allow abortions to take place for most women. The argument is that state legislatures were going in this direction anyway - New York and California had enacted legislation before Roe - so the Supreme Court decision wasn't as vital to abortion rights as supporters (and NARAL fundraisers) would like us to believe.
Now, I'm not fan of the pro-choice movement's hysteria. And it's unwillingness to confront the backwater and eddies in this conversation. Those girls have gone to DEFCON 4 over small stuff and - as Toobin points out - Roe stands. But we're not talking about "most" women when we talk about abortion; we're often talking about poor women, abused women and girls. Or the simply desparate. In others words, those who need help the most at a time when it can be the hardest to come by.
Which is why the idea that state legislatures in the early 1970s would have passed legislation allowing women to end their pregnancies is laughable. It may well be great legal or even political theory. But it's not realistic.
First of all, most state legislatures in 1973 were made up of men. White men. White men who, between the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War and the social turmoil of the 1960s, were feeling pretty disoriented. Remember Phyllis Schlafly? Sure you do. She's the woman - who in this same point in time - was warning of the dangers of enacting the Equal Rights Amendment, preying on that disorientation and fear. My God! What's next?
Schlafly's scare tactics seem quaint these days: Warning of co-ed restrooms! (Just like my local Starbucks) Women in combat! Just like this Sunday New York Times story details. This is the sort of talk that kept state legislatures from enacting an amendment to the constitution that would have, well, it would have offered a few much-needed protections, among them the right to get paid fairly, that might have made women's lives a little bit easier.
Nothing like the right to end a pregnancy. And yeah, of course, Roe contributed to the popularity of Schlafly's cause. But that's the point. She played on fear. And she got away with it. That's the consequence we're living with today.
So take off those rose-colored glasses. The fight to give women legal parity has never been easy and it's silly for anyone - male or female - to pretend otherwise.
The first clue - like you need one - that something's seriously wrong with Maureen Dowd's piece in Sunday's New York Times Magazine is the title, "What's a Modern Girl to Do?"
Mo, honey, you're over 50. You're not a girl. You haven't been one for quite some time. And, by your own confession, your idea of modern romance dates to about 1935, some 10 years before you were born.
No offense, Mo, but as an Irish-Catholic raised in Washington, D.C, you are an unusual creature to speak for the "girls" of the 21st Century. You are a woman who really has lived at a time and in a place where it is possible to think that femininity was best, and perhaps only expressed well, in the movies of the 1930s. Of course, everyone was drunk (just count the cocktails in the Nick and Nora movies).
It's understandable. That sort of romantic hindsight was encouraged in the face of all that distasteful overt feminine sexuality displayed in the 1970s and 1980s. That feminism stuff - and the strident dyke-y trapping that came with it - upset authority figures. It upended their view of how the world should work - men in charge, women doing their bidding - and replaced it with an awkward set of compromises: Men make more money so women choose to do their bidding.
The photo accompanying the story only underscores the distance between Dowd and her putative subject: The women's movement. It manages three wildly out-of-date "bad girl" ploys: An attractive woman alone at a bar, an attractive woman wearing fancy red shoes and an attractive woman alone at a bar wearing red shoes and fishnet stockings.
I know Mormon girls who dress like that. For church. These days, red shoes are, to paraphrase Freud, just a pair of kicks, not a sign of sexual availability. I'm amazed we don’t get a look at Dowd's pierced ears or an ankle bracelet, two other signs of what her late mother might have euphemistically called "cheap."
These are cosmetic issues. There's actually some interesting territory to cover here. Too bad it's in the wrong hands. Dowd thinks that by writing about herself and her dissatisfaction in having made it to the top of her industry and finding herself still single, she can explore the short-comings of the feminist movement. Well, she can. But it's not that interesting.
If Dowd had started her pretty-much first person take on the state of Modern American Womanhood in the aisle of, say, Good Vibrations, trying to work out why a cadre of women have decided to elevate feminine sexual experience to some kind of wacky cult that needs lots of equipment (not to mention lube) I'd have a lot more sympathy for her. That, it seems to me is a kind of feminist intimidation tactic - legitimized, by the way, by Sex and the City's Samantha - that really gets in the way of honest discourse. But for the right sort of girl, it can also be a nice way of leveling the field. There's interesting stuff going on here - just ask Dan Savage - and a feminist perspective might have been a good place to start talking about it.
If Dowd had perhaps taken a shot at trying to work out the tattooed Suicide Girls thing, I'd have been interested, too. I mean look, nuns with no hair to girls with...uh, oh, nevermind. Maybe if Mo, the ultra-protected nice Irish girl - had taken a look at the porn industry and what impact its aesthetics were having on modern culture (Brazilian, anyone? Boob jobs?) and relations between the sexes, I might have gotten interested.
Those are the symptoms of our modern cultural divide, not who pays the check and if he really means it.
Continue reading "Who's Lonely Now?" »
Here's something that's been bothering me for months now. So I decided to keep track.
The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine that styles itself as one of the nation's more thoughtful periodicals, has steadfastly avoided running a major feature by a woman writer since the beginning of the year. I'm not joking. And I'm not over-reacting. I have the past four months – that's the past six months of editorial planning, a half-year, a substantial amount of time – sitting on my desk. I saved them for just this reason.
None of the magazines printed since mid-December carry any substantial written, by-lined contributions by women. What does appear is brief, usually in the back-of-the book critic's section or in "The Agenda" at the front. And to add insult to injury, the magazine's one featured female writer, Sandra Tsing Loh, a self-styled celebrity Mom who you may know from NPR, has dwelled for two months in a row on her kids, on her kids' schools and books about women like her. What's worse, the headline on this month's piece makes a joke about schools and "breast-milk-curdling." Dudes, when your kids are ready for school, most of them have stopped breast feeding.
The Atlantic is a dying institution. And as much as I love and cherish the idea of an intellectually driven, well-written periodical, I'm happy to say "good riddance" to what this once-fine magazine has become. With its run of Big Boy Harvard writers – and Little Lord Fauntleroys on the make – The Atlantic, in its current incarnation, is providing a sad example of what James Wolcott describes below: A self-involved, self-satisfied look at a country that doesn't exist once you drive more than a few miles west on U.S. 50.
The absence of women's voices in our political culture is a bias against changing one of the most powerful aspects of our society. That's why it's happening here on the web. And, girlfriends, it's about time.
Reading the headline of James Wolcott's June column in Vanity Fair, "Caution: Women Seething," I started getting a little ginned up. And you know what that means.
Argh. Here. We. Go. Again. Like most of you, I think this issue is done. For now, anyway. And like most of you, I think much of the important conversation that took place took place here on the web, on sites like this one. Just what we need, another white guy "explaining" it all to us.
I was getting all ready to beat Wolcott over the head with his late timing – not to mention the fact that he's got a web site he calls a blog which he could have easily used to take part in this conversation two months ago – but he makes it hard. Instead, he gives me a chance to reinforce some of the points I made earlier in this debate. Along with the opportunity to ask, once again, the ever-present (at least for on-line folks) question about Big Media's self-satisfaction. Not only that, I get an excuse to beat on The Atlantic for its egregiously sexist sins.
Continue reading "Shanks Pony Express" »
How come all the people talking so earnestly about Jennifer Wilbanks – her emotional state, her future plans, her decision to flea not just her gigantico wedding but the very town in which it was to be held - are men?
Early last week, Wilbanks was just a woman with big – really big – wedding plans to marry. Today, of course, she's the "runaway bride" who was going to get married to John Mason in Duluth, Ga. before 600 invited guests with 14 attendents. That's until she went running and kept going until, well until she ended up in Albuquerque, New Mexico with no money and a bad haircut.
If you believe the news reports, the good people of Duluth, Ga., are angry. Someone got the bright idea to press charges against this woman for making a false police report and her husband-to-be has gone on Fox News to say he still wants to get married. A member of her family told the press she had some issues to work out. Her father-in-law to be said the wedding wasn't off, it was just postponed. But no one's really heard from the bride or her family. Which makes you wonder: Who exactly was – or is – getting married?.
A few days ago I got a nasty-gram that might help us – indirectly – address this very point. "Feminism, like Marxism (from which it arises) is simply wrong and evil," my correspondent said. "You are failing (and feminist webloggers are failing) because you are wrong and your ideas are evil. You are lost in the dead Marxist past."
Continue reading "Wedding Bell Blues" »
There's something in the water over there at The Chron. Girls, girls girls!
Today's entry is just as maddening as last week's account of Joe O'Donoghue's gang of concerned misogynists.
"Who killed Social Security overhaul?" writes The Chron's Carolyn Lockhead. " A: Harry Reid. B: George W. Bush. C: AARP. D: Monica Lewinsky. Answer: D."
Huh?
Continue reading "Blame the Girl" »
Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle offered up a great illustration of why I have such increasing contempt for the movement that styles itself as "progressive." In this most self-consciously progressive of cities, it's a movement – actually, it's a fashion statement – run by hypocrites who tailor their politics to suit their needs all the while claiming higher moral ground because, well, because they're good people.
During San Francisco's last mayoral election – the one that featured art-loving hipster Matt Gonzalez against slick rich guy Gavin Newsom – there was a lot of talk about how Gonzalez's progressive "values" would be good for the city. This was a joke. All you had to do was take a look at where Gonzalez money and support was coming from. To fund his campaign, Gonzalez picked up some interesting friends, among them head of San Francisco's politically powerful Residential Builders Association, Irish tough-guy Joe O'Donoghue.
Continue reading "The Blarney Stone of Misogyny" »
Best April Fool's blog. Hands down. No question. Lauren and Roxanne are two clever – and funny – girls.
Hey, I did a podcast!
You can hear my feminist rants from the past few weeks live and almost in person over at The Vision Thing. Generally, I try not to sqweak when I'm interviewed but this time I couldn't help myself.
I also spent an enjoyable couple of hours late last week with Demo Godess Chris Shipley. We were chatting about future of this on-line stuff. You can read Chris' generous take on what I'm doing.
Katha Pollitt has written in, responding to my post yesterday. Here's her letter. My response follows.
A friend directed me to your website, which I had not read before. I appreciate the urgency of your concern about the issue of women, writing, magazines and blogs. However, you make a number of assumptions about me which are quite unfair. In my Nation column, to which I link on Political Animal, I do discuss blogs, and the invisibility of women's blogs to male bloggers. The Washington Monthly discussion is supposed to last all week -- why assume that because my first post discusses print, that is all I plan to discuss?
More important, you suggest, on the basis of no information at all, that I do not promote women writers at The Nation, and may even prefer to be a solitary voice. Fact is, I have written about the paucity of women (and African-American) writers in The Nation and elsewhere for YEARS, including columns in The Nation about The Nation's own lack of diversity. Although I do not have ANY POWER at the magazine to hire staff or assign pieces, I have worked hard to put this issue on the front burner. (When I did have a little power, as the literary editor for two years in the early l980s, I reviewed books by women constantly, and assigned pieces to women constantly, and did a special issue on feminist books -- a first at the magazine. The only columnist I was permitted to hire was a woman, the wonderful dance critic Mindy Aloff). I raise this ancient history only to suggest that I have been plugging away at this for a very long time! We now have equal numbers of male and female columnists and much more coverage of feminist issues, and --not to take away from the gifts of the writers or the commitments of the editors, who are almost all women now by the way -- I do think I get a little credit for putting the issue on the table and keeping it there.
Continue reading "Letters, We Get Letters" »
I'm no Katha Pollitt. I've never met Katha Pollitt. Katha Pollitt is no friend of mine. But I can tell you, Katha Pollitt is channeling my website.
Pollit, a writer for The Nation, takes up some space on the Washington Monthly to rehash – again – the disparity between men and women writing political opinions.
Only I said it – almost all the women writing on the web said it – last month. And again last week. She says it today.
Continue reading "Sister, We're Doing it For Ourselves" »
If the "blogosphere" is an individual medium as Jeff Jarvis says today on his site in response to comments about women going unnoticed by their (okay, our) male colleagues then how come he's always on TV? Isn't that a mass medium?
And how come he rounds up comments and links from other sites to talk about on TV and presents it as a public service – which it surely is – for readers as well as those writing on-line? Because TV is a great way to spread the word about individuals to a larger number of people, that's why. This is indeed a medium of individual voices, but it has a few gatekeepers.
UPDATE: Proving there's nothing more charming than a little old-fashioned honesty, Jeff Jarvis answers my question and make several good points. Oh, and he makes a nice comment about the New York Times' Maureen Dowd, too. She'd probably get a lot more dates if she spent a lot less time gleefully writing up "scientific" evidence of men's stupidity.
Kevin Drum has girded whatever it is that cat-bloggers gird and wandered – gracefully this time – back into the on-line gender war. Drum has written the column he should have written last month and he deserves a lot of credit for doing so.
I still quibble with his world view but that's just going to be the way things are. It's not a point worth hashing out here. The man means well.
The larger, more important point Drum makes about how conversations about women's status become marginalized – we've had more than one on-line demonstration of this technique from Jeff Jarvis (patronizing and cavalier), Dave Winer (hostile and condescending) and, earlier Drum himself (dismissive and a bit clueless) -- is a good one, generously made. And it's more than worthy a little discussion.
The problem with women writing on-line isn't the barrier to entry: Getting a site, getting it up and running is inexpensive and technically easy. The issue is barrier to popularity, which leads to influence and power. That leads, eventually to advertising revenue, freelance gigs and more influence and power, authority even. We do not live in a culture where those at the top of our social and economic pecking order – that's white men – share these things willingly and happily. There are exceptions, of course, but they are few and far between. And many women have fought very hard to get the small little pieces of real estate we have because so many men think that sharing means there's less – a lot less – for them. And they don't like it.
Continue reading "He's Baaaaaaack" »
Newsweek's Steve Levy said he wanted to generate discussion on the boy/girl blogger breakdown. Looks like he got his wish.
Lots of folks, from the Columbia Journalism Review to a colleague from Personal Democracy Forum have pointed readers here. Dave Winer is giving me a hard time for calling him stingy. And Jeff Jarvis is in some kind of smack-down with Juan Cole that I don't have the time to really understand. On top of that, a lot of men keep calling me "him." (For the record, I am not a man. Even though I live in San Francisco, I have no plans to become one). And, in keeping with what Levy intended, there's a plan afoot to have a meeting of female on-line writers, probably this summer here on the West Coast.
Some good, some bad. All in all, a good day's work. But let's step back for a sec because some of this conversation is getting confused between the on-line and off-line worlds. Levy made his somewhat off-hand remarks against a background of on-line debate – mostly heatedly between me and Kevin Drum -- and mean-spirited flame war that's being conducted by LATImes editor Michael Kinsley and USC professor and pundit Susan Estrich. Levy couldn't know, of course, that Maureen Dowd would focus on Kinsley and Estrich to write something similar to his column on the same day. That makes me less certain he should get all the credit for this discussion and some of its after-effects. But that's a small point. We are where we are.
Continue reading "Gender Bender" »
Reasons why people – er, men – wonder why there are "no" women bloggers. This post is in response, partly, to Steven Levy's musings on Newsweek's site. For the record, Levy wrote a better version of the column Kevin Drum tried to write a few weeks ago; he made some phone calls, however.
1)This medium was first taken up by techies. Most of them are men. It's not worth going into the statistics on men and women in tech, and the reasons and whyfors. There are more men, that's all you need to know for this conversation.
2)Those men prefer to link and read men like them. As it was in the beginning so shall it ever be. When they wonder where the women bloggers are what they're really saying is "I don’t read any women bloggers."
3)Even though the "blogosphere" has gotten much larger, most of these men are still reading the guys they started out with three years ago., linking to them and talking among themselves. There's talk of broader horizons, but it's pretty much that: Talk. Glenn Reynolds, however, is an exception to this trend. And since he got slapped around last month, Kevin Drum has started to link to more women. Josh Marshall rarely links to women writers. Dave Winer is also stingy.
Continue reading "Today's Top Ten" »
In all the to-ing and fro-ing these past few weeks about the League of Extraordinarily Stupid Gentlemen, I noted that it took an act of Congress to get women parity at a place like Harvard.
Now comes the Wall Street Journal's Karen Blumenthal saying yup, the Ivies resisted admitting women as hard as they could as long as they could. Harvard and pretty much every place else fought hard to keep Title IX from becoming a law that would require them to admit as many women as men. It's an interesting read. Have at it.
Continue reading "Blaming Harvard" »
In the East, it's Larry Summers. In the West it's Kevin Drum, proudly holding up the "Girls Keep Out" sign for on-line political writing. That's no surprise for anyone who knows The Washington Monthly and its founder Charlie Peters. Peters refused to hire women for years, a fact that – when I called it to his attention last year – Drum didn't acknowledge last time he hashed over this issue.
CORRECTION:Kevin Drum reminds me that he did cite my comments about The Washington Monthly when we discussed this issue last year. I had sent him a more pointed note than what he posted on his site. He chose to identify the fault as the magazine's. I pointed to its editor. The links above take you to the note I sent Drum, which I posted here, and to his post describing our correspondence.
This week, Drum thinks there aren't enough women bloggers because women aren't comfortable with the "food fight" atmosphere that's part and parcel of blogging. Girls, as we all know, don't like to fight.
Continue reading "The League of Extraordinarily Stupid Gentlemen" »
One of the more depressing problems that American feminists have always faced is the sad reality that, as British novelist A.S. Byatt once said, there are always women ready to join forces with the other side.
Byatt – who is a woman -- didn't mean that in pop-culture Venus/Mars which is, sadly and maddeningly, what feminist principles have been reduced to in American culture. No, Byatt – a keen observer of the similarities between the real and the formulaic in life and in fiction -- is saying that there will always be women happy to support the status quo and to accept the small gains given them in the name of peaceful, gradual protest. Because, at heart, they really aren't interested in change, only in negotiated settlements. They got theirs. The rest of us are on our own.
Continue reading "Oh, Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?" »
