My Tweeter-machine is full of hilarity about Charlotte Allen's recent column which recommends that the Republican Party should choose Sarah Palin as its next presidential candidate.
What's truly hilarious about this is that Charlotte Allen is still offered a place to write! After all, in 2008 the Washington Post chose to publish her op-ed piece in which she states:
I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies. 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. I have coasted through life and academia on the basis of an excellent memory and superior verbal skills, two areas where, researchers agree, women consistently outpace men. (An evolutionary just-so story explains this facility of ours: Back in hunter-gatherer days, men were the hunters and needed to calculate spear trajectories, while women were the gatherers and needed to remember where the berries were.) I don't mind recognizing and accepting that the women in history I admire most -- Sappho, Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth I, George Eliot, Margaret Thatcher -- were brilliant outliers.
The same goes for female fighter pilots, architects, tax accountants, chemical engineers, Supreme Court justices and brain surgeons. Yes, they can do their jobs and do them well, and I don't think anyone should put obstacles in their paths. I predict that over the long run, however, even with all the special mentoring and role-modeling the 21st century can provide, the number of women in these fields will always lag behind the number of men, for good reason.
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.
To put that 2008 column in perspective: Something similar would never have been published by the Post if it was about African-Americans, Latinos or other minority groups. Never. And had it somehow gotten through the editing process, its author would have been over as an author, for good.
Not so with Charlotte Allen! She could come back and opine that all women (ALL WOMEN) dress as sluts for Halloween. And now she can come back and propose a woman for president of the United States who isn't well prepared for that job, and nobody asks what the f**k this is all about. If Allen thinks all women are dim, why propose a woman at all? And if Allen thinks all women are dim, why is she out there opining?
Here's the post in which I discuss that 2008 column, by the way.