Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Are Women Dumb?   [Lisa Schiffren]

Whoa. I just read the Charlotte Allen piece in the Washington Post Outlook section that Kathryn linked to Sunday. (Unpromisingly Titled, "We Scream. We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?") I want to believe that the Post got as much dissident mail on that one as it deserved. But contrary to the sneers at the always quite intelligent XX factor blog at Slate, Allen is not usually this wide of the mark. (She wrote the single best, most comprehensive piece ever on the politics of the Duke rape case.) This piece, however, fails as either humor — plain old not funny — or social commentary. To succeed at the latter it would have had to answer the question it posed about why some women act in certain dumb ways, instead of just listing myriad dumb things women do — a list which merely invites a parallel list of the dumb things men do.

The rationale for the piece appears to be the admittedly quite disturbing phenomenon of adult women literally swooning at Obama rallies. Allen makes the same analogy that has occurred to me: These women look like the teenage girls at Beatles concerts, fainting and wetting their seats, circa 1964. Disturbing, to be sure. But that was a mass phenomenon in a repressed age. The Obama business is considerably more limited in scope. Anyway, what does this prove about women's intelligence? It proves, for sure, that certain kinds of generally sexualized "fan" behavior have become acceptable, and leached from the popular culture to the political culture, which, post-Bill Clinton, is no surprise at all. More specifically, it suggests that some "fans" (and this applies equally to men and women), don't really know in which realm "Obama the phenom" belongs. And thirdly — yes, it's just plain embarassing behavior. You'd think the Obama campaign would want to squelch it, since he isn't really angling to get on the Ed Sullivan show, and it trivializes his appeal.

Does a certain type of man swoon and faint in the same way? I don't know. But over a lifetime in and around politics I have seen the equally awful spectacle of the drippy, excrutiatingly earnest young man, defending his views and his candidate at painful and tedious length. All campaigns are stocked with these young men. They approach the candidate with extreme reverence, citing little known and generally irrelevant details about his or her life as if they were kabbalistic invocations. They trade received opinions about floor fights at political conventions held in their infancy as if those had been the high points of their own, personal lives. They have no sense of humor or distance whatsoever. Is this better than swooning? It sure takes a lot longer.

As far as I can tell, there is more than enough stupidity out there to go round. When it's a writer with a dumb idea for a column, the idea is that an editor will exercise better judgement. I'm not an oversensitive feminist. But as a rule, "women are really stupid" columns aren't funny even when written by women.

03/04 09:50 AMShare