James Wolcott has a story about the way the wingnuts write on uppity women. This time it is Jane Hamsher of the Firedoglake blog who gets the treatment. A little background is necessary. Right Wing News, a wingnut site, had a list of the twenty most annoying liberals in the United States. Jane Hamsher got an honorable mention but didn't get included in the list, and wrote a funny post lamenting her failure to be counted as one of the twenty Annoyingest.
Wolcott found a response to that funny post in the American Digest, another wingnut site, and it is that response which he wrote about and which I want to write about here, too.
Here is a sample to get you going. Jane's initial funny questions are in italics and the American Digest answers are not:
Was I not shrill and caustic enough?
No, I am certain this was not the case. For those afflicted by blazing hormones, there is no such thing as beyond infinity shrill and caustic. You have the tiara, Jane, wear it with pride.
Did I not do enough to mock Michelle Malkin and her histrionic halucinations?
No woman in love with an impossible goddess could have done more to mock her love object than you have done, Jane. Just lay back, select a cucumber, and think of England.
...
Am I not being taken seriously because I am a woman?
Jane, I assure you that if you were indeed a woman you would be taken seriously as one, but you have to remember that in this day and age a brace of poodles and a thinning fright wig is no guarantee of gender. "Fool us once, etc...."
"Blazing hormones", "fright wig", "shrill and caustic". Not just misogyny but fear and loathing of an uppity woman or a woman who is not eighteen and very submissive. Note that these slurs are not about the person of Jane Hamsher at all. They are about her sex.
Is this light-hearted bantering? Or just the way the blogosphere discusses things these days? I doubt that, and I think I could have been funnier than that without resorting to generalized anti-woman references.
Though of course cucumbers start looking very good indeed if wingnut guys are the alternative.