Women Aren't Dumb, Charlotte Allen, You Are
self-loathing troll, Charlotte Allen
We're shocked the Washington Post even ran this drivel.
What is it about us women? Why do we always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental? Take a look at the New York Times bestseller list. At the top of the paperback nonfiction chart and pitched to an exclusively female readership is Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love." ...Men do lots of dumb shit too, Ms. Allen. They watch sports, read FHM, and start preemptive wars. We concede that you're an idiot, Charlotte, but we won't blame that on your gender. Did we mention you look like a troll who lives beneath a bridge?I swear no man watches "Grey's Anatomy" unless his girlfriend forces him to. No man bakes cookies for his dog. No man feels blue and takes off work to spend the day in bed with a copy of "The Friday Night Knitting Club." No man contracts nebulous diseases whose existence is disputed by many if not all doctors, such as Morgellons (where you feel bugs crawling around under your skin). At least no man I know. Of course, not all women do these things, either -- although enough do to make one wonder whether there isn't some genetic aspect of the female brain, something evolutionarily connected to the fact that we live longer than men or go through childbirth, that turns the pre-frontal cortex into Cream of Wheat...
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
Comments
And some stupid men write gutless diatribes on hipster blogs.
Oh, btw, a former (male) pitcher claims to have Morgellons disease. She was wrong on that one, but spot on target with the rest of the piece.
Posted by: paul | March 3, 2008 04:55 PM
if he's a stupid man, why are you reading his blog?
Posted by: Christine | March 3, 2008 05:37 PM
wow, what strange comments.
Posted by: al | March 3, 2008 11:59 PM
Thank you for defending women against Allen's sexist attack. I was quite disgusted by her whole piece in the Post. However, I argue that it was unnecessary for you to twice use the word "troll" to describe her appearance. Her physical traits should be neither here nor there when discussing what she has written. To comment on such things only perpetuates sexist notions, which I know you were trying to defeat.
Posted by: d | March 4, 2008 09:41 AM
Charlotte Allen should check out where she gets her research. Her entire argument about men's brain sizes correlating to superior intellect has origins in a racist 19th century "science" called craniometry.
The late Stephen Jay Gould debunked it, and his widow Rhonda Roland Shearer responded to her article on StinkyJournalism.org.
Posted by: Adam Klasfeld | March 4, 2008 11:29 AM
shut up D, she's ugly. how is making a joke about that sexist? Is it sexist to say Rush Limbaugh is fat? Cause he is.
Posted by: NYB | March 4, 2008 05:00 PM
'paul' - please elaborate on your choice of words, specifically 'stupid' and 'gutless'.
Posted by: paul is an e-bag | March 13, 2008 02:15 PM