This should turn into an interesting series. It is all about the way the media has decided to hunt women, as if some invisible hunting horn has been blown, to get all the misogynists on their horses and ready to ride. Yes, my sweet reader, I'm asking you to imagine women as foxes. Of course that's not an uncommon term for some women.
The first big hunting meet of this season seems to have taken place in the Washington Post yesterday. What other explanation might there be for the humorous column of one Charlotte Allen on the topic of the intellectual inferiority of the weaker sex (her own), ending with this:
So 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. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can 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.
The shorter version of Allen's whole piece goes something like this (should you wish to dispense with the longer version):
Women faint and shriek. Women act irrationally. Women can't drive (or at least fail to kill enough people while driving, compared to men), can't think in abstract thoughts or do three-dimensional mental rotations (which everybody knows to be the decisive skill underlying philosophy, history and the sciences). Women read chick lit and have hysterics.
Therefore, the only possible place for women is at home where they can be the only ones responsible for the care and safety of little helpless children.
So.
The e-mail address for the Washington Post ombudsman is:
ombudsman@washpost.com