Are Women Dumb?

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.

Lisa Schiffren

Poor Bill Buckley is hardly even in the ground, and the feminists are given free reign on his magazine. I don't know if Lisa is one of those bizarre creatures who considers herself a conservative feminist, but if she is, I would ask her how it feels to be an oxymoron.

This is a predictable response. And predictably, Lisa misses the point.

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.

Horse puckey, Lisa. I love the way feminists and other liberals like to excuse any less-than-savory behavior of the 1960s by saying that anything done was the result of repression. That excuse was lame when they used it back then and it hasn't improved a bit.

Mass phenomenon, yes, but no more or less so than the Obama groupies. There is also that little matter of degree that Lisa has glibly skated past. Gaggles of women in wet underwear, stoned on hormones is less ominous with regard to the future of civilization when it involves a group of musicians. John Lennon made the attempt to alter the course of history, but he had no more effect on it than a june bug can alter a semi's course. Obama seeks to lead this country down a path of his own bolshevist flavor. One of these things is not like the other.

I'm not an oversensitive feminist. But as a rule, "women are really stupid" columns aren't funny even when written by women.

Oh, but Lisa, you contradict yourself. You are behaving exactly like an oversensitive feminist, which is what you probably are. I don't know if Charlotte Allen intended her article to be funny or not. I read it as darkly ironic. The point that Lisa misses is that this is simply a public demonstration of what has been going on privately in voting booths since women were granted suffrage.

I know a number of women who are honest enough to admit that they are victims of their body chemistry on a frequent basis, just as I know a number of men who are honest enough to admit the same thing, but for different circumstances. I even know several women who agree that their gender should not be voting, for exactly the same reason. Ironically, these women are among the few people of either gender who should be voting.

Lenin was correct when he cynically, but astutely observed that the people always get the government they deserve.