Many things have been written about James Watson’s inglorious Imus homage, but for my money, Annalee’s column, pointing out the remarkable arrogance and needless associations with race and gender, is one of the few that consider the expansive context.
Category / Sexism
Sam Tanenhaus: Let the Cheap Sensationalism Continue
Have you heard the latest from Sam Tanenhaus’s dismal literary tabloid? Writers should be pilloried for writing the sentence “Men are rats.” It’s an absolute scandal. Toni Bentley, presumably recruited because this offered the boys another opportunity to pump her for more thoughts on posterior probings, proceeds to characterize Katha Pollitt’s latest book as another volume in “[g]roaning and moaning from clever, sassy women.” After spending three paragraphs attacking the right of intelligent women to write about being burned by men (in a remarkably sexist term of art, Bentley characterizes these women as “vagina dentata intellectualis”), while failing to point out precisely where Pollitt went wrong in her work. Four paragraphs into the review, we still have no explicit quote from the book that will support Bentley’s thesis, but we do have this extraordinary sentence:
It’s hard to tell if she’s coming into her own, trying to sell more books or has lost it entirely.
I don’t see how speculating upon the mental health or financial motivations of a writer offers any thoughtful insight into a book. It’s clear enough that Bentley hated the book. I get that. Pollitt is a polarizing figure. But as a reviewer, does not Bentley have the obligation to tell us why specific passages reflect what she perceives as inadequacies? Instead, Bentley merely summarizes some of the essays and spends most of her review offering limp wisecracks. (“Not being in drowning mode, I, for one, am bringing a cliché-proof life jacket to the party.”)
It is stupendously irresponsible to take a sentence like “Men are rats” and not provide any additional journalistic context to offer us a few clues about what Pollitt was writing about. In publishing such a piece, it seems evidently clear that Sam Tanenhaus has no interest in examining social issues with any degree of maturity. It is bad enough that he would resort to cheap sensationalism. But it is the act of a thug to permit a piece that would attack Pollitt’s character rather than her words.
Unnamed “Surveys” That I Pulled Out of My Ass Confirm That NPR is Full of Shit
NPR: “McEwan’s prognosis is surely hyperbole, but only slightly. Surveys consistently find that women read more books than men, especially fiction. Explanations abound, from the biological differences between the male and female brains, to the way that boys and girls are introduced to reading at a young age.”
Apparently, David Remnick Also Thinks Women Aren’t Funny
Benjamin Cohen has a gender breakdown of contributors to the New Yorker‘s “Shouts & Murmurs” section. The results are extremely troubling. It seems that only 17 of the 133 authors who have appeared in “Shouts & Murmurs” since 1992 have been women. Patricia Marx is the female author who has appeared most, at seven times, but her work is occluded by Steve Martin’s 29 appearances.
So does Remnick subscribe to the Christopher Hitchens hard line? (It’s interesting to note that Hitchens’s essay also appeared in a Conde Nast magazine.) Why haven’t women been assigned to this section? And while I’m on the subject, why does Steve Martin get an interview slot at the New Yorker Festival, but not Marx? Okay, so some chick named Susan Morrison is interviewing him, because this is the 21st century and some faces have to be saved. But I’m truly astonished that the magazine which frequently published Dorothy Parker, an inarguably funny woman, seems to have reverted to some backwards 19th century idea about gender on this subject.
Roy Den Hollander: A Man of Limitations, A Man of Principle
Several groups of men have, at long last, discovered the true evil that lurks beneath the nightlife underbelly and have initiated the appropriate legislation to exact justice for the greatest threat to equality since they bussed in those dark-skinned kids into schools some decades ago. It turns out that those goddam women, who continue to complain about the apparent injustice of a woman making two thirds the annual income that a man makes, have now spawned a grand plan in collusion with nightclub owners to disrupt the natural patriarchal order. Not only do these women have the temerity to order drinks at a price lesser than that of a man, but they often get into these nightclubs for free! FOR FREE! Doesn’t a woman know that her only role in life is to a man’s pliable arm candy? Doesn’t a woman know that she must abstain from pursuing a career and do nothing more in life than cook, clean and reproduce?
Thankfully, there are brave men like Roy Den Hollander, who has tired of “being treated as a second-class citizen.” It’s bad enough that Mr. Hollander’s penis size is smaller than the norm. To dwell upon this personal topic is to open up a healing wound. But now Mr. Hollander has to suffer the indignity of paying one or two more dollars for a drink than a woman! Well, enough is enough. If you ask me, the only real solution here is to castrate Mr. Hollander and begin the appropriate court-enforced pre-op transexual procedures. It’s the only way to be sure. As a woman, only then will Mr. Hollander understand the gender chasm. As a woman, only then will Mr. — make that Ms. Hollander know the meaning of “second-class citizen.”
(via Jason Pinter)