The WaPo is trying to pretend Charlotte Allen’s “women fucking suck, don’t they?” article was a joke.
If it was a joke, she wouldn’t have used “evidence” that she and other anti-feminists use everywhere else in dead fucking earnest to argue against women’s equality—women aren’t geniuses, women can’t rotate 3D objects, women are more nurturing. If you are satirizing a position, you say things you don’t believe. Allen was saying things she does believe, and using refreshingly straightforward misogynist language to do so. In all honesty, I would prefer it if everyone trotting out her arguments was as honest as she was about how much they hate women. I’m sick of blatant misogyny pretending to be something else.
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“I’m sick of blatant misogyny pretending to be something else.”
Well, we live with blatant racism, blatant political opportunism, blatant anti-LGBT bigotry, and blatant religious bigotry, all pretending to be positives for some bogus reason or other - why not add misogyny to the list?…
the comments following Allen’s article were a delicious smoothie of ALL those things.
Plus, the commenter at Salon who noted, “Iraq is a holy mess because the feminized leadership of the Democratic party failed to control a weak and ineffective president.”
Thus winning my “Good god, how do you even BREATHE when you’re that dumb” Award of the Year.
No see, it’s okay that John Pomfrey thinks women are fuckin’ stupid, because he thinks it’s funny that women are fuckin’ stupid.
I was wondering how long it would take before the Allen essay was officially recategorized as humor, as opposed to editorial commentary.
I guess that’s a small victory…
“If it was a joke….” ….then the WaPo needs to fire their ‘humor’ editor.
Somebody ought to tell these people that if your readers can’t tell it’s satire, and it gets taken to be in ernest, that you’ve utterly failed at satire and should hang your head in shame. Naturally satirising an opionion means revealing that it is incorrect and mock-worthy. These people need tips from The Onion.
Of course, it’s not actually satire, because even the worst satire in the world is more convincing than this column. Face it, Washington Post, you’re cowards. Cowardly enough to publish an intellectually bankrupt piece of writing with no real scientific evidence, or evidence of any kind, that writes off half the population, just because you can. Cowardly enough that when taken to task you can’t apologise and admit you knowingly and willingly insulted half your readership because you think you’re better than them by virtue of having the almighty y chromosome, and cowardly because you tried to change the title to ‘Why do women act so dumb?’ from ‘Women aren’t very bright’ and think that this somehow makes all the meany feminists go away and stop demanding that you treat them like people.
If either of the misogynist jackasses you blogged about in the past couple of days were going to turn around and pretend to be joking, I was sure it was going to be Joel Stein. I’m honestly surprised it was Allen, or someone embarrassed for her.
Look, there are women who spend a lot of time talking about Botox and watching Oprah. There are an equal number of men who spend the same amount of time playing XBox and talking about sports. But mens’ frivolity is invisible because it is accepted, and womens’ - not so much. I had this sinking feeling the other day when a woman who peforms a salon service on me every 10 days which out of mercy to you all and embarrassment I won’t describe told me she HAS to watch Oprah because 9 out of 10 of her clients discuss it incessantly. But then I remembered you can’t make Rouseau’s mistake and attribute the cause of the unhealthy diet of daytime TV to “nature” instead of “nurture.” Most of her clients do not work outside the home. No wonder they talk about Oprah. Men who stay home a lot also have a tendency to get into daytime TV. The part I don’t get is how everyone can ignore the utter idiocy of knowing so much about football, you can name the Redskins 8th round draft pick in 1985. It doesn’t make you rich. It maybe gives you man-cred with your buddies. That’s it. If men knew that much detail about math, their jobs or the universe, world hunger and ring around the collar would certainly have disappeared by now. Few women could possibly talk about botox so much as men drone on about sports and FOR WHAT. Why can’t that be evidence of male idiocy? What about voting for Dear Leader’s codpice instead of a decorated vetran for idiocy? I think we all know! They don’t have Charoltte on their team to point it all out.
But no really guys he was just talking tongue in cheek. Like how I would say, tongue in cheek, that John Pomfrey is dumber than shit and ought to be smacked in the head until the stupid pops out of his ears. Someone seriously needs to strap this drooling cretin to a rail and ride his useless out of town. Tongue in cheek!
The opinion editor’s statement:
“If it insulted people, that was not the intent,”
left me gawping. What exactly was the intent then? Because “general chortlement” is not the antithesis of insult — it’s often the intended consequence. Insult people, laugh about it, rinse, repeat.
So if the intent was not (1) “insult” nor (2) “general chortlement as a result of insult” what else is there?
Five bucks says the next defense to be trotted out will be “oh, we were being PROVOCATIVE. We were starting a lively DISCUSSION. See how well it worked? Whatsamatta, you hate lively provocative discussion, along with having no sense of humour?”
gahhhhhhhaaaahhhh.
Does he even know what “tongue-in-cheek” means? Because there was nothing tongue-in-cheek about Allen’s drivel.
I’m getting really tired of these “I’m sorry if you were offended” non-apologies, which make it the fault of the insulted party rather than the offender.
I figured it out just a second ago: if woman as a whole accept his explanation, he reasons, then they are as stupid as the IWF loon claims they were to begin with.
The whole “But it was a joke!” excuse seems to me to just be a variation of the “I’m sorry if you were offended” dodge.
When somebody finally crosses the line, the joke thing gets whipped out real fast. It’s bullshit, (almost) everybody knows it’s bullshit, but somehow making the effort to claim it was a joke lets (some of) them off the hook.
It’s all just another example of perceptions being considered far more important than actual objective reality.
But since they tell us every day that we’re winning the war in Iraq, the American economy is doing better than ever before, and the Bush/Cheney Administration has brought more transparency, accountability, morality, and competence to Washington than any other administration in America’s history, I don’t know why I should bitch about it…
Wait, what is this about? I haven’t encountered this one yet.
I asked Howard Kurz in his Q and A today if the Washington Post management, which thinks the idea of women being dumb is so funny, uses that kind of humor in the newsroom. How funny it would be for their male reporters, for instance, to ask their female reporter to get them coffee. A real knee slapper, that one. Funny, though, Kurz spent most of his time lending ammunition to the right wing slime machine against Obama and said little about the “opinion” piece. I guess he hadn’t read about it on Powerline, his favorite blog, yet.
I think those slimeballs are in for a surprise. I’ was heartened to see more people, including one of the Times Swampland blogger, light into the Post for the piece. Maybe one of the villagers will be forced to say he made a boo boo - sorta like Saletan’s walking back his KKK talking points about black intelligence on the WAPO owned Slate a few weeks back.
Wouldn’t it be great if D.C. had a decent paper?
I wonder how much Donald E. Graham hated his mother that he could do to the Post what he’s done to it. I’m Katharine wouldn’t have allowed such an article as this.
Will, the favorite scientific fact that sexists use to argue women’s inferiority is that some research indicates that men on average are somewhat better at looking at a picture of a 3D object and correctly figuring out what it would look rotated on a test. There’s few cognitive differences between men and women, so they focus on the single one that there’s any proof of and extrapolate all sorts of things from it. Like I can look at a picture of a chair and figure out how it would look upside down faster than you, that means that I’ll be a better president.
Standard operating procedure for all idiots when their idiocy shines through - when you can’t distance yourself from it, then just say that it’s a joke and only stupid people would think you’re serious. Then you can’t possibly lose!They’re taking their tips from Rush Limpballs.
All these non-apology apologies (see Chris Matthews, etc.) have the added bonus of implying that women are humorless and can’t take a joke and are just oversensitive even as they “apologize” for insulting us.
I’m terrible at rotating 3D objects — it’s my Achille’s heel on any kind of intelligence test. I maintain that copious amounts of LSD rendered my brain ripe for the bogglin’, but that’s a pretty weak excuse, really — a transparent attempt to take the fact that I have an unmanly brain and turn it into some kind of twisted, macho dude-I-was-so-wasted bragging right.
I really was wasted when I fainted at the Obama rally, though.
Washington Post: We are just pages of funnies. Give us a break.
These dead tree publication should be closed down, at least for crime against nature. hah. They can do their free speech gag online.
A joke? Its not the fucking Onion, its the Washington Post!
yeah, I can still do quite well on those spatial tests, and I can’t possibly imagine your amounts of LSD were any more “copious” than mine. In fact, at those times I believed I could see and manipulate 4-D and 5-D objects!
nice try, though, thanks for playing!
When Fox Propaganda had a “humor” show to compete with the much-loved “The Daily Show”, one person informed the clueless conservatives that a humor show has to first be funny, then political.
Maybe this is what passes form humor at the WaPo. If so, Dagon help them.
Good lord, if women suck at rotating 3-d objects, why on earth are almost all the geology majors at Caltech women? That just doesn’t make sense!
I seriously thought it was women that were supposed to be better at rotating 3-d objects than men.
I asked my boyfriend if he was aware that women were worse at rotating 3-D objects in their heads and he said that no, he didn’t know that. Then he asked me what the point was of rotating a 3-D object in your head. I told him that I wasn’t sure what the point was and he said, So, not only can women not rotate 3-D objects in their heads, they can’t even figure out why they should be sitting around doing so, clearly indicating why our country should be exclusively run by people who not only sit around all day rotating 3-D objects in their heads but understand why it is important that they do so. He thinks this explains a lot about the Iraq War.
See, you’re missing the target of the humor. It’s not women, but Charlotte Allen. This must be a parody of a Charlotte Allen column to show how stupid she is. And if she herself is the writer, I expect a statement any day now saying that she no longer believes the things she has written about in the past.
You might think this sounds unlikely, but really read the article again, remember it’s in one of the major newspapers, a newspaper that’s trying to increase its number of female readers, and tell me that my theory makes less sense than something else. Right?
The more I think about it, what really depresses me is not just the article, but the (mostly) women who rushed to condemn “frivolity” and harrumph that THEY never shop, spoil their pets or watch Oprah, oh noooooo.
In their zeal to proclaim themselves part of the serious-minded, sensible-shoe crowd, did it ever occur to them that there is really nothing wrong with a bit of frivolity? I mean yes, I think Celine Dion is ghastly, but is it really a crime to listen to her music? Men have their guilty pleasures too - sports, Chuck Palahniuk, “big boy toys,” etc. but male frivolity is much more accepted in our culture. I wonder how many men who wouldn’t miss a ball game and spend thousands on “big boy toys” nevertheless condemn their wives or girlfriends for “squandering” money at Sephora, or listening to Oprah.
There is a definite double standard with regards to “frivolity” in our culture.
/rant
Murcielago,
It must be because women at Caltech can only handle the easy majors, like geology. Geology majors at Caltech are known as the “happy undergrads”, which must mean that geology is the easy major.
And nope, geology needs none of that 3D spatial reasoning that men are so good at. Nope, none.
What’s that, you say? Geology (at least field geology) is pretty much entirely 3D spatial reasoning? Well, shoot that theory to hell, why don’t you. While you’re at it, why not point out that I felt stupid compared to my female colleagues when I was the only male geology major in my year (there were 4 of us total) at Caltech. You could further point out that that was reflected in our grades quite well, but that would really put a dent in the women=dumb argument, so why don’t we just ignore that?
Huh, guess women are smart after all. Who’da thunk it?
PS - I’m not sure how good I am at internet sarcasm, so for the record, this whole post is agreeing with murcielago.
Anyone who thinks Allen was kidding should read this:
My html sucks, so you’ll probably have to cut and paste.
I like the LSD theory. At least, I saw the phrases “LSD” and “Washington Post editors” in at least a few posts and it all clicked for me. The Washington Post editors were all totally tripping on acid. I bet this article is funny then. I mean, when the letters in the words all turn into little bugs and start running around on the paper, that’s hysterical.
Okay, that didn’t work at all. Just cut and paste, and I’ll buy an html book.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/040305dnediallen.35261.html
I’m sick of the 3-D rotating shit. Who cares? Sexist won’t be eliminated by the appeal to rationality - it will be eliminated, or diminished, by strictly Pavlovian means. If a major newspaper prints a headline asking if women are stupid, then that paper should be given proper Pavlovian conditioning for bad behavior. Flood the letters columns, bring up WAPO sexism whereever comments are allowed, and in general make the Post SUFFER! They can take their dangling rubik cubes and cram them up their ass IMHO.
Well, that the author was kinda-sorta poking fun is pretty obvious. I can give them that much.
But so what? Is mockery no longer insulting? Is the subject matter of a joke no longer something to complain about?
Shouldn’t we say “what would have to be true (or commonly believed) for this joke to be funny?” Shouldn’t we be upset if the joke is only funny if we accept something that would be upsetting if it was said directly?
If women couldn’t imagine and rotate a 3-d object mentally, they couldn’t have been sewing since the beginning of time. I bet the object on the test was something like a carburetor.
Besides which, you have to be pretty hot shit to get into Caltech as a gum-chewing major, so picking on women for “only” majoring in geology there would be a pretty weak shot.
Ailurophile, definitely. It’s like when men talk it’s ’serious’ and when women talk it’s ‘frivolous gossip’, even though a lot of what they talk about overlaps. It’s not like men don’t talk about other people (technically gossip), or read trashy magazines/bad literature, or dpend lots of money on expensive things. But when THEY do it, it’s important. Women just don’t understand how great sport is (and the ones who do are ignored, ostracised and belittled). Women don’t do technology or gaming (hmm, could it be because a lot of men act like assholes every time they see a woman in their hobby?). Everything coded male is sacred and if women don’t get it, it’s because they’re dumb.
But stereotypical women’s things? If a woman does like them, she’s dumb. Even though her shoe collection probably costs less than his gadgets and cars. I can’t imagine collecting shoes or handbags, but I hate how women are belittled for this, when men aren’t for the equivalent behaviour.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing whatever frivolous thing you want if you can afford it and it makes you happy per se, but I don’t like how women are the only ones being raked accross the coals for it.
Does anyone know where you can see John Pomfret’s full response.
Atrios linked to an excerpt at War and Piece
My favorite quote:
But my reading of it was more a tongue-in-cheek screed borne from exasperation with her sisters than a mysoginist rant from a self-hating woman.
Now you see in my little bity pea-sized girl brain:
“screed borne from exasperation”=”mysoginist rant”
Some big strong intellectual man care to elucidate me on the difference.
When I did cognitive experiments at MIT for beer money, I did one where there was a whole lot of spatial manipulation and visualization involved. Despite my failure to have a Y chromosome, I set extreme speed records. They had me repeat it because it was so anomalous, and I did it again and again.
Mind you, this was in a set of experiments performed, by and large, with MIT students. Then again, I would build things with legos and construction toys to make Barbies flip over and over, launch to the moon, etc. Perhaps it is my constant building (and not being told not to build) that had something to do with it. That and playing football with the other kids in the neighborhood.
My husband’s grandmother would see a dress she liked on the subway, spend the evening creating the pattern and sewing one in her size, and wear it the next day. Too bad she didn’t have any spatial abilities either!
JESUS, magtured! What an article. I loved this bit:
This should come as a relief to those in cells in N. Korea, Guantanamo, Iran and elsewhere that they really aren’t there, and that people who have to debate with feminists have it FAR worse.If you go on a bit further you see that Charlotte Allen compares radical feminism to Nazism and Soviet Communism.
Which of these three ideologies has not murdered tens fo millions of people? Anyone?
I didn’t think anybody would call out, because it WAS such a difficult question. The correct answer, of course, was that they all have.
Ailurophile:
Yes, I was thinking that as well. The immediate rush to distance oneself from everything that is considered feminine frivolity is rather sickening, if (sadly) understandable. Considering the amount of scorn that is directed towards the stereotypical feminine interests, it’s not surprising that the almost instinctive reaction is to plead innocent rather than examine the argument itself.
If the op-ed had been about men and some manly frivolity (insert stereotype here), how many men would have rushed to proclaim that they did not have such manly interests, oh no, and would never take that much interest in something so silly and masculine. No, not me - that’s what all the other men do, but I’m different, I swear. I’ve never done any of those stupid manly things, me…
Go and read the piece that magtured linked to, longhairedweirdo. I think that you are in error. The article makes it quite clear that she isn’t joking at all, or at least not in the humorous sense. More so in the “I’m smiling to cover up my hate and provide deniability” sense.“The correct answer, of course, was that they all have.”
…Jonah Goldberg’s next
bookcrayon-written rant will be Feminist Fascism, The secret history of shrinking men’s balls, from Susan B. Anthony to Amanda Marcotte…Jonah’s mommy promised to give him $20 if he did a good job…
To be fair to WaPo, the column may indeed have been satire - at least, satire as it has been redefined by Ann Coulter. Coulteresque satire involves not saying the opposite of what you mean, or ridiculing ideas to discredit them — it apparently involves saying exactly what you mean, but punching it up a bit for impact. In a Coulter world, Jonathan Swift actually wanted Irish babies to die of starvation, but didn’t actually want to eat them. This twit is cut of the same cloth.
Also, I don’t think you can discount the possibility that she is a troll, offering a deliberately inflammatory opinion in order to feed off the response. The wingnut sequence these days seems to be (1) act like a dick (2) when called out as a dick, cherry-pick the most extreme responses and use them to demonstrate how everyone on the other side is nuts. It works every time.
Here’s another very lovely article by Ms. Allen claiming that the white kids in Jena Louisiana were just mis-understood:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/589bfhgz.asp
Tell you what Ken, I will strike a bargain with thee. We will start being fair to the Washington Post when it starts being fair to us, and by “us” I mean anybody in the political centre, or on the left, or progressive.
Don’t hold your breath.
No one whose eighty-seven year old grandparents and newly widowed mother-in-law and schoolteacher mom lost everything in Katrina and the resulting federal flood believes for one minute that Charlotte Allen’s article in which she said the disaster was “good” for New Orleans was satire or worthy of print.
The woman is despicable.
Feminists have no sense of humor? Neither do New Orleanians, apparently. Maybe it’s not all the various groups, but YOU, Charlotte Allen.
One of the WaPo commenters claim that Charlotte Allen is the pen name of Kathryn Jean Lopez whose bio can be found here: http://author.nationalreview.com/bio/?q=MjE3Mw==
Can anybody back this up?
I’m thinking of writing a 2nd letter to the WaPo criticizing them based on this woman’s history of right-wing and bigotted writing.
Anybody got more info on her?
somegirls, I don’t think so. Isn’t this the Charlotte Allen at issue?
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/charlotte_allen/profile.html
As Amanda has noted, there is always a market for this sort of bile so there are a lot of providers.
Ailurophile, I completely agree with you. I hate the way my interest in, for example, “What the Stars Wore to the Oscars” is silly, frivolous and worthy of being taunted, (it is frivolous, but that’s actually OK) but my interest in rare funk records is somehow a legitimate - if somewhat nerdy - interest.
This article made me so angry, know what I did? I took a 3-D object, in this case Charlotte Allen, and - in my head - kicked her ass allllll the way over the horizon. Watching her rotate and rotate as she went. I assure you, I had no problem at all rotating her.
Although I will admit to problems parallel parking.
This is my theory; As Amanda said, this article clearly isn’t satire, since it just parrots the arguments used by real misogynists rather then attempting to make misogyny look ridiculous.
But I don’t know, there’s just something off about it that makes it hard for me to take it at face value.
I think Ms. Allen was attempting some kind of revolutionary form of non-internet trolling. Although I sort of suspect it was motivated more out of idiotic glee at being able to piss people off then any strategic concerns.
Unfortunately, Charlotte Allen doesn’t work for the WP and can’t be fired. I propose that the WP demonstrate serious repentance by retiring Gene Weingarten, the humor column writer who appears on the back page of the Washington Post Magazine section (where Dave Barry used to). Weingarten is not funny, and he works the tired old and sexist man / woman contrast (often Gene vs. feminist) long past its minimal worth.
I suspect it was glee at being paid to shit one’s own prejudices and smear them onto the pages of what was once one of the best papers in the USA.It’s rather proof, isn’t it, of Amanda’s contention that America is more sexist than racist. If the rep of one of those nasty little racist organizations had desired to write an article about how them black folk weren’t as good as men because they like rims and spend too much time having their hair straightened he would have been shown the door.
Then he asked me what the point was of rotating a 3-D object in your head.
1) Knowing what’s behind something without having to go around to look.
2) Recognizing landmarks from two directions - leaving and coming back.
etc. 3-D reasoning is useful - and I guess I say that because I’m good at it - but it’s hardly a direct measure of intelligence. Arguably things like memory and verbal reasoning are greater predictors of success, being more useful in an information economy, and so forth.
“If you are satirizing a position, you say things you don’t believe.”
Heh. It isn’t really a difficult concept yet so few people seem to get it. Note to readers: Jon Swift didn’t believe people should eat kids, not even their non-essential parts like fingers and toes.
What most people call “satire” is actually minor hyperbole. It’s funny to see people say what they really think then when people realize how batshit insane they are immediately back down and make excuses.
Coming soon to a WP editorial page near you: “The Lockhorns!”
Sara, good idea about the retirement, but let’s retire the guy who commissioned the article, this John Pomfret character. The “it was just a joke” excuse isn’t even an excuse - it is an indication that women are considered fair game by the Washington Post management. There’s a kind of ridicule that pulls down the shibboleth’s of the establishment, and a kind of country club humor that builds them back up again. It is pretty obvious what Allan was doing, and it is also pretty obvious that Pomfret though it was hilarious. Pormfret’s susceptibility to country club humor is a good predictor of the kind of things he is going to commission for Outlook. Mind, this paper has been way to the right of its subscriber base for a while, but I think it is passing a new threshold here. If it is allowed to become a conduit for sexist garbage like this, well, guess what? You will see a lot more sexist garbage like this. It will so tickle John Pomfret.
Let him come out in the open and defend his choices. Instead of cozy one on one’s with the rebarbative Politico. First question for him should be: why do you think saying women are stupid is so screamingly funny, dipshit?
The female geologist with an MS, who has taken structural geology, sed-strat, crystallography, two semesters of chem, hydrogeology, and applications of InSAR would beg to differ with the posit that women are bad at rotating 3-D objects in their heads.
Nyah-nyah :p
Hi Chet. Both I and my boyfriend actually do know what the test exercise of rotating a 3D object in your head is designed to show aptitude for. I believe the bf was attempting “tongue in cheek” humor. Maybe I was fulfilling my ancient “gatherer” instincts in “picking up” his joke and sharing the largesse with the community…hey, is there EVER an inappropriate moment to relate whatever you’re talking about to our ancient “hunter-gatherer” gender roles and evolutionary psychology?? No way!
Can’t say whether or not memory or verbal reasoning are greater or lesser predictors of success, personally, or whether or not being able to rotate 3D objects is. I outscore 99% of the US population in my abilities at all three.
w00t! hi five to another triple-threat!
bah. if Allen, Pomfret et al are so damned threatened by brilliant women, I’m sure there’s a hovel somewhere in the frozen North where they can satisfy themselves with being the smartest –and only– people about.
“It’s rather proof, isn’t it, of Amanda’s contention that America is more sexist than racist.”
Ah, no. Americans just express racism and sexism differently, is all. Apples and oranges are both part of the fruit category, but they’re inherently different. Therefore, it makes little sense to examine an apple for sufficient “orangeness” before it can qualify as fruit, or vice versa. As someone who’s simultaneously black and female (just happens sometimes *shrugs*, weird, I know), I’d definitely like to see the incessant jockeying for who gets pwned the hardest stop. And why does “insert black people here” have to be the litmus test for offensiveness? We need a Godwin’s law equivalent.
Look, there are women who spend a lot of time talking about Botox and watching Oprah.
Yeah, talking about Botox is almost as dumb as reading William Faulkner, reporting on the Katrina damage, and making political endorsements. That frivolous Oprah with her girly book-reading and giggly engagement with current events!
So yeah, no, Oprah’s not the chick equivalent of sports-watching, actually. Even decades ago in her trashier incarnation, she was never as mindless as men’s entertainment.
I want to go on record and say I don’t think America is more sexist than racist. I think that racism and sexism function in different ways and often go hand in hand. But while it’s easier to call someone “bitch” rather than “nigger”, it’s also true that 1 in 9 black men in this country are in jail, 1 in 15 black people are, and white women especially are probably the least likely group of people in this country to spend time incarcerated. I’d rather be called a name than thrown in jail, so my initial reaction is to say that while sexism is certainly an easier pose to adopt in our culture, racism is, if anything, much worse.
Krusty the Clown of “The Simpsons,” running for Congress:
“It’s a JOKE! Whenever I say something that offends you, it’s a JOKE!”
See: Tubman’s Law.
When I do those rotate 3D test things I usually get them all right.
i’m a girl, but maybe i would make a good president?
I really suck at rotating 3-D objects in my head.
Yet somehow, some way, I manage to dress myself, feed myself, get to work in the morning.
I also miraculously got through graduate school, despite my obvious lack of intelligence. Guess the members of my committee thought I was cute.
I hate this 3-D object crap. I hear it all the time and I’ve been chuckling with glee at this thread. I’m very happy to hear from the women who have this skill. I always feel a little deficient in that I could be a poster child for lack of spatial reasoning skills. I hate conforming to a dumb-broad stereotype, as I’m afraid I’m perpetuating the stereotype in others’ minds.
Awesome statement, Amanda. Thank you for putting your finger exactly on what has been troubling me about the whole “racism vs. sexism” argument.
Okay, I know Amanda made a really good point up there, but I was totally tripped up by this bit:
women can’t rotate 3D objects
Oh, fuck no. Has anyone played Rocket: Robot on Wheels for the N64? That game is really hard unless you have *uncanny* 3D-sense, thanks to some really bad AI and camera control. And yet, who kicks butt at it? Oh, yeah that’s me. And who sucks at it? Oh yeah, that would be about every guy I’ve ever met.
I also kick ass at that Warioware: Smooth Moves game where you scan the pineapple.
Seeker6079:
How about this: the author threw in enough whimsy to use as camouflage so she could claim it was joking/poking fun.
But the main point of my comment is, if it was a joke, so what?
If you make a joke about a person or group of people that only make sense if the person has some horrible quality, does it become less insulting?
So why worry about whether it was intended to be joking or funny or whatever? What matters is, it was ugly and nasty and stupid, even if it was intended to be joking.
If it wasn’t intended as joking, it was awful, and it was terrible that it was run.
If it was intended as joking, it was awful, and it was terrible that it was run.
Sigh.
Part of this is personal; I’ve long felt that the fig leaf of “it was just a joke!” needs to be ripped away from the poison that is spewed all-too-often these days. So, give them “it’s a joke”, and rip them a new one anyway!
Small brains are actually more efficient if anything; there’s a reason chip manufacturers try to make chips as small as possible.
Also her own stats seem to indicate that women are better drivers than men.
Jon: I have only three things to say to that.
1)
2) The geology department is still at about that sex ratio. And still happy. I think it’s just the beer and camping, though, because thermodynamics is kicking my ass.
3) Other Techers at Pandagon, w00t!
Also, to Digger: geology FTW!
Also her own stats seem to indicate that women are better drivers than men.
Yeah, that’s what insurance companies seem to think, too. You know, the ones who employ those folks who do nothing but crunch statistics all day.
You could spend literally days unpacking all the crap here, but then you’d have wasted days and there’d be crap all over the place. Screw you, Charlotte Allen and John Pomfret, you miserable tools of the patriarchy.
Incidentally, my spatial skills sucked until I started sewing. (No gendered stereotypes there, nope nope.) I suppose that means that I just had some kind of latent spatial ability in there, huh? Not maybe that it’s a learnable skill?
I’m enough of a rhetoric geek that I think it would be fun to walk up to Charlotte Allen and say, “Do me a favour, would you? Define ’socialisation.’”
Longhairedweirdo: I agree completely.
I think that progressives should adopt a GOP tactic: if somebody low down the food chain does something bad, make the highest person in the food chain own it. Here the writers should go after not just Allen, but also WaPo management and WaPo’s chief RW shill, media critic Howard Kurz. (And kudos to roger for an effort in that direction.)
Joe Conason puts his finger on it:
In other words, necessarily calling them to task on this poisonous sexist nonsense can be a tool for calling them to task on their multitude of other slime rides.
The only people who think that this was supposed to be a joke are the ones who also laugh at dumb blonde “jokes.”
Those jokes, I think, might have actually been where she got her content from.
Rotating 3-D objects is useful to engineers, physicists and mathematicians, I suppose. Many of these people have limited language skills in real-world contexts — that is, they’re articulate enough but kind of tone-deaf to nuance and the non-verbal parts of verbal communication. Doctors, too, seem in many cases to be kind of Asperger-y.
I myself have a superb sense of direction in the real world. Drop me in the middle of a strange city and I’m just fine. I just hate those damn geometrical diagrams with the patterns of dots and you’re supposed to flip them and then reverse them, and so forth. I can do it for the most part, but it makes me feel frustrated, then angry, then I just quit because I hate it so much.
Needless to say, I lack the patience to develop decent chess skills. So I guess I have to read Sartre if I want to look smart at the coffeehouse.
I mean yes, I think Celine Dion is ghastly, but is it really a crime to listen to her music? Men have their guilty pleasures too - sports, Chuck Palahniuk, “big boy toys,” etc. but male frivolity is much more accepted in our culture.
Well yeah, because guys are human and therefore allowed to have emotions and quirks. Heck, they can even cry on the campaign trail without being vilified.
I believe the bf was attempting “tongue in cheek” humor.
I can only ascribe my failure (to detect humor) to my poorer verbal reasoning skills.
Now I’m going to go rotate some things.
See, for me to really know my way around, I first have to see a map of the new place. You know, an overall 2-D spatial represntation of the 3-D space. Granted, “grid” cities are obviously quite easy to grasp, I often don’t need a map for those. But I definitely did need to see a map to originally get a handle on New Orleans’ odd pie-shaped configuration (a function of being between lake Pontchartrain and a bend in the Mississippi River).
Once I’ve seen that and gotten the general contours, I can find my way around — no matter what direction I am facing, thank you. I have heard that women are supposed to be worse at reading maps, and also that women cannot use a map without having to physically rotate the map to match the direction they are facing, (i.e., they cannot rotate it in their heads). I call bullshit on that one too, it’s a skill that most people can learn. Although: what is wrong with rotating the map, anyway, if it still gets you there?
However, I am appalled that they no longer seem to be teaching map skills in school any more….I’ve encountered quite a few young people who can’t read a map, and when I ask they say no, they did not learn that in school. is that widespread? Another casualty of the focus on standardized testing?
Amanda, as a WOC who has been sexually assaulted in a park, been threatened with rape on various occasions, once on a crowded bus after enduring a torrent of sexist abuse for simply daring to get on a bus with a vagina and has been groped too many times to count (to name but a few examples of my reality as a woman) I call bullshit on racism being worse than sexism. Sexism is not a case of being called a bad name, it has meant very real physical abuse for myself and many of the woman I know (admittedly I only really know other WOCs). Also, I am sick to death of these oppression olympics.
“Rotating 3-D objects is useful to engineers, physicists and mathematicians, I suppose. Many of these people have limited language skills in real-world contexts — that is, they’re articulate enough but kind of tone-deaf to nuance and the non-verbal parts of verbal communication.”
Godmonkey, you’re confusing “lack of ability” with “lack of interest.”
jxthree, I think what Amanda was saying was that the life of a black man is much more fraught with physically endangering events than the life of a white woman. The high number of black men in prison ensures that this does not exclude the risk of rape. I am a white (appearing) woman who has been both threatened with violence and had violence done to me, yet I would be even more afraid to be a black man than I am of being a white woman. Disclaimer: oh, believe me though, I am not discounting sexism as the grotesquerie it is.
I’ve done that. My intent has always been to point out a parallel when people just can’t see sexism (because it’s so THERE it’s invisible) but are slightly more enlightened about why a similar remark is racist. Not as a litmus test for “is it offensive”, but a way to demonstrate clearly that is IS. Usually comes up when one of the privileged thinks they get to define the terms and be the decider. I’m not saying “this is worse”, but rather, “Why can you see this kind but not the other, because it’s all the same shit?”
It doesn’t work with the truly head-up-the-assed who think that those who are oppressed are too close to the situation to see their oppression “objectively”. I’ve found that out when they say, “Of course I’d tell a black person they were full of shit to see racism in this case. It’s NOT THERE!!!ONE!”.
So now I’ll apologize and find a better way to point this stuff out. It’s not easy to find any way when appealing to logic just. doesn’t. work. and empathy is nonexistent.
On topic, yes, she’s a self-hating woman whose boss is eating it up, and 3-D rotation in the head is a learned skill not a secondary sex characteristic.
Jx, I’m sick of the oppression olympics, too. But unfortunately, the can of worms was opened by feminist Clinton supporters looking for an edge. And we have to address it now. My concern is that the severe problems in our society that are caused by racism are getting swept under the rug.
“Although: what is wrong with rotating the map, anyway, if it still gets you there?”
Thank you! As I said in my earlier comment, spatial orientations are really difficult for me. I always have to rotate the map. I have a little Post-It on my printer to remind me how to orient the pages when I feed them back in to make double-sided documents. I also happen to be female.
But it doesn’t follow from the above that all women find these things challenging, nor does the fact that I do make me a drooling idiot! Like you said, I still get where I’m going on time.
But again, as I said above, hearing from so many people who are expert 3-D object rotators, I feel a little less embarrassed that it really is a challenge for me–it’s good to know I don’t have to live down every stereotype singlehandedly.
Cara, I’ve done the same thing when trying to enlighten people as to why their sexist or homophobic bs is WRONG. People acknowledge that racism is wrong and they don’t want to be called a racist and so they seem to be more sensitive to that than to the so-pervasive-it’s-invisible-to-them sexism & homophobia. For example, my gf who works on a college campus has constant discussions with her student workers where they argue that it’s perfectly okay to use “fag” as a joking epithet and she tries to get them to see that it is NOT. They truly do not think it through, and sometimes drawing a parallel to racial epithets (and who gets to decide what epithets mean, their targets vs. those in the majority) actually does work, and they finally get it! You’ll hear “hm, I never really thought of it that way, I guess you’re right.”
As you said, not a “contest” of oppression, but rather a tactic to get people to examine prejudices that they cannot see. I’ll try to use it only as a last resort, but can’t say I won’t ever use it at all — that is sometimes the ONLY way I’ve been able to get through to someone. Do people have some suggestions for alternative strategies?
But while it’s easier to call someone “bitch” rather than “nigger”, it’s also true that 1 in 9 black men in this country are in jail, 1 in 15 black people are, and white women especially are probably the least likely group of people in this country to spend time incarcerated.
Seems to me you’re implying that white women are benefiting from racist and sexist chivalry rather than not committing crimes. That rather strikes me as something an MRA would say: “Men go to jail nine times more often then women do. This means that men are being targeted while….women are just sneakier and get away with it? Or else it’s chivalry. The little ladies just simper and snivel at the jury and get off.”
Black people are disproportionately arrested and profiled and harassed for stuff that white people don’t get hassled over. White guys get away with some pretty amazing shit. But white women? Hell, women in general? Tend to commit economic crimes rather than violent offenses. And all types of men, if they’re intelligent enough to attack their own wives or girlfriends, serve less time than women who defend themselves against bigger, stronger, sexist-society-coddled boyfriends and husbands.
Women Who Kill by Ann Jones, does a pretty good job of exploding myths about legal chivalry. It doesn’t exist for ordinary, non upper class women.
It also might be a horror found in many of those who design curricula that anything might be found on them that teenagers might need once they get out in the real world. In HS I had a belief — repeatedly and vigorously expressed — that most HS science was deliberately or obtusely of no use in the real world and usually painfully boring, and that real science that we might need (environmental issues, engineering related to how homes or cars worked, orienteering in and understanding of the woods ) was ignored as insufficiently “academic” and denied to us. Oh lord, I remember being sneered at in HS by teachers who thought that these beliefs reflected only an immature mind. I also remember the exultation of listening to David Suzuki speak and hearing him tear a strip off of HS curricula, saying all the things that my HS teachers had pompously said were childish nonsense.Remember, kids! From sex ed to street signs to saving and credit, HS’s motto is If You Need It and If You Want To Learn It Here, You Can Just Fuck Off.
It also might be a horror found in many of those who design curricula that anything might be found on them that teenagers might need once they get out in the real world. In HS I had a belief — repeatedly and vigorously expressed — that most HS science was deliberately or obtusely of no use in the real world and usually painfully boring, and that real science that we might need (environmental issues, engineering related to how homes or cars worked, orienteering in and understanding of the woods ) was ignored as insufficiently “academic” and denied to us. Oh lord, I remember being sneered at in HS by teachers who thought that these beliefs reflected only an immature mind. I also remember the exultation of listening to David Suzuki speak and hearing him tear a strip off of HS curricula, saying all the things that my HS teachers had pompously said were childish nonsense.Remember, kids! From sex ed to street signs to saving and credit, HS’s motto is If You Need It and If You Want To Learn It Here, You Can Just Fuck Off.
Sexism is intimate: everybody has at least had a woman in their life. Race can be avoided to a certain extent for the privileged. They can live in all-white enclaves or what have you. Very few people can avoid the opposite sex. Sexism is what makes people feel all cozy about making women the sex class and the servant class. Fighting racism, by contrast, is so much more obvious, because some of the people benefiting from it are men. Sexism obviously benefits women, though it has hidden benefits to men. OF course, those benefits don’t seem like benefits to sexist men, who are quite happy with sexist benefits like power, low standards, unlimited indulgence and so forth. Who would exchange those for the drudgery of equal parenting, gay friends, women who like you for yourself and so forth? Being sexist gets a guy power in work, in marriage, in life, and on the power pyramid. Being decent requires you share power.
http://www.someguywithawebsite.com/blogarchive/week_2008_03_02.html#002468
From August:
If you were a low-level grunt at a fast-food restaurant, and when a customer asked for a burger and you accidentally served them a raw, uncooked patty of ground beef, you would most likely be fired. In contrast, if you are the editor of the Washington Post you apparently get to respond by asking people to send in their favorite hamburger recipies to counter the massive epidemic of Salmonella poisoning you just gave everyone.
I took a stab at commenting on the WaPo apologia, but sorely doubt its effectiveness. It’s just… surpassing lame to have to remind people who should damn well know better that the Tee-Hee tag does not excuse continued perpetuation of the very mores being (supposedly, and quite poorly) satirized.
It would be nice to think that Allen’s pandering was not consciously malevolent (i.e., used for advancement) but I just don’t know.
Like I said, they can’t compare… Amanda brings up prison… well, prison would probably be at least 30-40% more bearable without the very real and omnipresent fear of rape… a fear that women have to deal with while just going out and about in the free world. Furthermore, why compare? It isn’t even constructive.
“Women Who Kill by Ann Jones, does a pretty good job of exploding myths about legal chivalry. It doesn’t exist for ordinary, non upper class women.”
This is probably true. If you’re the “wrong kind” of white female, a “free pass” for criminal behavior based on myths of blameless, naive women tossed about by the tides of circumstance and forced into immorality by corrupt men probably won’t be coming your way. One reason for that is that kind of woman usually can’t afford a lawyer that can magically transform a unrepentant, fully complicit gun moll into a damsel in distress. Remember Karla Faye Tucker? Her case was considered way differently than any comparable minority woman, minority man, white man, or non-Christian, but she still wasn’t “pure enough” to pass muster.
“insert black people here” actually works? Ya’ll must live in a more liberal area than I, because in flyover country, if you want to see sympathy evaporate just like that, all you have to do is add “black people”, rinse and repeat. (ex: Katrina) I don’t like it because it fosters the widespread misperception that -isms are interchangeable in the way that they work, when they’re just not, leading groups to follow strict formulas for gaining rights and acceptance that may be ineffective and leading society to measure levels of acceptance/rights by the same ruler and say things like “Your group has ________. That group doesn’t even have ______, so you have nothing to complain about!”. It’s like this: would you rather be attacked by bugs that bite the surface of your skin and poison you, or the kind that burrow underneath the skin and stay with you, laying eggs, multiplying, and feeding off of the host? They’re both disgusting, they’ll both f*** you up, they’re both bugs, but you probably can’t kill them with the same can of Raid.
I live in Minnesota, which in the Cities has a certain self conscious liberalism to it, plus a large minority population of various denominations. Plus you see lots of inter racial couples here as well. Racism is a big issue here. Sexism? It doesn’t exist.
But while it’s easier to call someone “bitch” rather than “nigger”, it’s also true that 1 in 9 black men in this country are in jail, 1 in 15 black people are, and white women especially are probably the least likely group of people in this country to spend time incarcerated.
Is it possible to get a breakdown on this? I’m finding it difficult to reconcile this mentally with recent reports of an incarceration rate of better than 1% and about 12% of your population being black.
Is it possible to get a breakdown on this? I’m finding it difficult to reconcile this mentally with recent reports of an incarceration rate of better than 1% and about 12% of your population being black.
I make no comment about the validity of these numbers, but here’s how it would work.
1 in 15 black people in jail is 6.7% of the black population. 6.7% of 12% is 0.8%. Since the total incarceration rate is around 1%, these numbers would imply that 80% of the prison population is black. I don’t know whether that’s true or not.
Note that you can’t use the 1 in 9 statistic with the 12% number, since the first is for black men only, and the second is for black people.
The discussion obviously has moved beyond the original post, but here’s an interesting commentary from Columbia Journalism Review:
http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/women_are_dumb.php?page=all
And there are several good posts on this blog, from a female journalist who usually covers national security issues (I wasn’t familiar with her before, but it looks pretty interesting beyond just this issue, but anyway):
http://www.warandpiece.com/
And even at the National Review Online, Lisa Schiffren had this to say (along with a much longer description of stupid political behavior among men that would be inappropriate to extrapolate to apply to men in general):
She does defend Allen’s other work and of course, feel the need to say she’s not a feminist, but how bad can you get when even the National Review says you are out of line?
“Since the total incarceration rate is around 1%, these numbers would imply that 80% of the prison population is black. I don’t know whether that’s true or not.”
It’s not true. At least in 2002, African American men composed about 45% of the prison population with sentences longer than 1 year. I’ve heard 50% bandied about since then, but the first stat is straight from the DOJ. Anecdotally, if blacks became 80% of the prison pop., I wouldn’t have heard the end of it online.
And I’m not going to argue with you, Ginmar. You know when a group of people talk about how they “never gossip” right before launching into the tale of how Joe got plastered last Sat. and ended up making out with Gary, even though he’s engaged to Sue? Well, I don’t plan to be in that group that says “Oppression Olympics is wrong, mmkay” just before they light the torch and proceed to perform the pole vault, the shotput and the 100 yard dash. I think it’s wrong, and I actually mean it.
I hate this 3-D object crap. I hear it all the time and I’ve been chuckling with glee at this thread. I’m very happy to hear from the women who have this skill. I always feel a little deficient in that I could be a poster child for lack of spatial reasoning skills. I hate conforming to a dumb-broad stereotype, as I’m afraid I’m perpetuating the stereotype in others’ minds.
If you really want to get better at it and you have the time to do so, pick up video games as a hobby. Seriously. I OWN at spacial relations, and I am positive it’s because I’ve been gaming since I was 10 or so.
I’m not up for slogging through all those comments to make sure this hasn’t been posted already, so in case it hasn’t, here’s Charlotte Allen’s responses to questions and comments about the piece.
Oh my goodness, I want to run off and go live in the woods after reading your link, Rebecca.
Well, from that link, so it was meant to be a “joke” and “funny”, but not “satire”. And, of course, feminists are humorless.
I’m with you, DivergentDana. I want to go run off and live in the woods, too, after reading that.