It’s literally hard to believe that the Washington Post published a 1,700-word opinion piece about women being dumb. This is, after all, the 21st century, and reasonable, sensible people like to believe feminism has made at least some strides towards equality between the genders.
And yet, there it is, in black and white. Charlotte Allen, without a hint of irony or parodist tendencies, makes the case that women are dumb, shallow, and generally kind of pathetic.
As proof, Allen kicks off her discussion by pointing to women supporting Barack Obama’s campaign, some with great enthusiasm.
“Women ‘Falling for Obama,’ ” the story’s headline read. Elsewhere around the country, women were falling for the presidential candidate literally. Connecticut radio talk show host Jim Vicevich has counted five separate instances in which women fainted at Obama rallies since last September. And I thought such fainting was supposed to be a relic of the sexist past, when patriarchs forced their wives and daughters to lace themselves into corsets that cut off their oxygen.
I can’t help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women — I should say, “we women,” of course — aren’t the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women “are only children of a larger growth,” wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?
She goes on, at great length, to answer that question in the affirmative. Indeed, Allen insists that women are “embarrassing.”
I kept waiting for the punch-line. I thought, “There has to be a paragraph in here somewhere in which Allen actually defends women from vapid accusations she couldn’t possibly mean.” Alas, it was not to be. This WaPo piece, which Scott Lemieux accurately described as “the dumbest thing published in an American newspaper in many moons,” is a lengthy treatise that hopes to convince the reader that adult American women are generally worthless.
In addition to “swooning” over Obama, Allen went on to insist that the proof of women’s flaws is evident in their tastes: “What is it about us women? Why do we always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental?” Yes, according to Allen, women who like Oprah, Celine Dion, romance novels, and “Grey’s Anatomy” are helping to prove the entire gender’s flaws as human beings.
Apparently hoping to drive sensible readers completely over the edge, Allen — again, in all seriousness — argued that “supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true,” including the notion that women are bad drivers, have physically smaller brains, and are awful at math. (In one especially jaw-dropping sentence, Allen writes, “I can’t add 2 and 2 (well, I can, but then what?). I don’t even know how many pairs of shoes I own.”
Allen concludes:
…I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home…. Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.
How the Washington Post editors decided this was worthy of publication is a total mystery.