I’m going to try to write this without jumping all over anyone’s ass, because I think the male liberal blogging cabal—-while no doubt a conspiracy that has absolutely no relationship to paranoid anti-Semitic myths—-is composed of a group of generally pro-feminist dudes. But I ground my teeth when reading this post at Lawyers, Guns, and Money and the link to Brad DeLong’s observation:
Moneyblogging vs. Sexblogging
At the moment “Fear of Reese Witherspoon Look-Alikes on the Pill” has 116 comments, while “The Geithner Plan FAQ” has only 89 comments. I confess this leaves me somewhat disappointed: I thought money would be dominating by this point…
And DJW at LGM added:
It’s a fair point. The mockery of Douthat’s all too public sexual peculiarities is a grand internet tradition, but at the end of the day, we all knew that Bill Kristol’s slot would be filled by a ridiculous person, and the particular nature of that ridiculousness is pretty inconsequential.
Everyone understood it at the time that the Douthat quote was shocking not because he was bragging about someone wanting to fuck him, but because it was so nakedly misogynist. It’s not a “sexual peculiarity” that he was expressing, and sadly it’s not that peculiar at all to see a man like him whose loathing of women runs so deep that he can’t get an erection unless he’s threatening his sex partner’s safety and bodily autonomy. It’s not even that peculiar that he’d brag about it—-our culture is awash in the message that women deserve to be shat upon for daring to have either sexual desire or independence. And while it’s true that the slot was reserved for a conservative who is almost surely going to be a misogynist, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t use the opportunity to point out how acceptable this sort of hatred of women is in mainstream culture.