Pomfret's well-qualified to work at the Bush White House, National Review, VDare or McCain/Hagee '08.

I really can't comment. As a woman, according to Charlotte Allen, my brain is too small for me to do anything but raise children.

eff Pomfret, but Allen sure takes the cake.

I just can't help think that if Charlotte Allen thinks women are too stupid for the really important stuff in life, one of two things has to be true: she's unqualified to write for any major paper, or, major papers traffic in unimportance and stupidity. Either way, Pomfret looks like a real idiot and Ms. Allen is just the nitwit cheerleader he enlisted to prove it(no offense intended to cheerleaders as a class).

From a medical point of view, Allen's article is an excellent example of self-loathing fueling success.

Not that we needed any more examples (i.e.: the Senator from Idaho).

Charlotte Allen made her own point, nicely.

as a woman to me everything she says rings pretty much true with modest exceptions - but it makes sense that new agey liberal white men would have problems with it, drunk as they are on the cheap wine of phony egalitarianism. A man writes an article like this about men [and there are many such essays] no one bats an eye - but a woman does it and every limp wristed somewhat intellectual white male in the country starts throwing a hissy fit. Kinda revealing I'd say.

I remember an old Newlywed Show episode that has stuck with me many years. Bob Eubanks asked the brides "Ladies, when you look out your front door does the sun rise in the North, South, East or West? Now keep in mind, I need to know where it rises looking out YOUR FRONT DOOR." Each woman pondered and then they randomly proceeded to pick every direction but East. The husbands were brought out, dutifully answered to a man "East" and then were berated by their wives, "But honey, he said looking outside OUR FRONT DOOR!" At that point there was nothing to do but concede the mechanics of the universe do vary from neighborhood to neighborhood and move on. This is what it's like being married. If any of you feminist guys want to protest otherwise and continue to castigate the Post you're smoking crack.

Kevin: "I'm always a little unsure of what to do in cases like this."

So we've noticed. You seem to be doing that an awful lot lately. Perhaps you ought to further examine your reasons for hesitation, which may well be personal and have absolutely nothing to do with politics. Maybe you and your wife should drive to Santa Barbara or San Diego for the weekend, and just enjoy each other's company.

But please, don't go wobbly and burn out on us in March of a very significant year in our country's political history.

"I'm always a little unsure of what to do in cases like this. There's a class of people (patron saint: Ann Coulter) whose sole objective is to provoke a response. Link to me! Talk about me! Help me promote my new book! So no matter how deserving of ridicule they are, it turns out that ridicule actually helps them."

I agree with your point about people, but as you point out, this isn't really about people. This is about what kind of ugly nonsense it's okay to print in the Washington Post. And there I think the problem is not too much response but too little; the Post's editorial staff will probably end up patting itself on the back for this because it'll generate a nice fizzy buzz of outrage and then subside. But imagine if they'd published this same article with "black" substituted for "woman" where appropriate. They wouldn't be getting a fizz, they'd be getting a volcano; and somebody would be getting fired.

But it's okay to say this stuff about women, and that's in part because responses to this stuff are self-limiting - we get the arguments (for both genders) about how we shouldn't reward provocateurs, and the arguments (for women) about how we shouldn't validate this stuff by getting hysterical about it, and in the end, not much gets said.

If liberals really want stupid articles like the Charlotte Allen piece to not be published, they will hope that the truth about the medically established differences between men and women brains be published instead.

The most idiotic statements made are the ones that insist against all available evidence that women and men have essentially the same aptitudes, or that their is not a significant difference in verbal vs. spatial abilities, or that girls prefer dolls over computers because of some socialization.

Hopefully, these stupid ideas will fold and in a post-feminist world we will learn to celebrate each individual for their qualities instead of trying to force quota numbers of women engineers into Americas companies.

If liberalism went for freedom instead of idealistic naivete and allowed the number of female/male participants in any endeavor be established by the market instead of some misguided affirmative action, the ability for people like Ms. Allen to publish something founded on junk science will disappear. And we would have a better world.

I am not counting on it. Liberals in general have too much invested in their men are idiots meme to go back to common sense.

When one of John Solomon's nonsense hit pieces for AP was challenged for being nonsensical, the AP acted as though the tsunami of rebuttals was great news, for exactly this reason.

Also, criticizing the WaPo editorial page for printing low quality, insubstantial articles such as this one doesn't seem to have much of a track record of success.

Agreed that it's necessary to keep it up on both fronts, on a case-by-case basis, but it is pretty dispiriting.

allowed the number of female/male participants in any endeavor be established by the market

There are more female than male college and law school graduates these days, John Hansen. Why does the market have so much invested in the men are idiots meme? Why can't we go back to common sense, which told us all fifty years ago that women were better suited for home life than schooling?

The thing to do when you see an opinion column you think unworthy of comment is to comment on something else.

I'm sure there's a good reason Kevin Drum expects the Washington Post's Outlook section to adopt a policy toward submissions that Drum himself does not toward comments submitted to his own blog. But I always get the impression that the opposition of some liberals to censorship is not entirely on the level; they'd be all too happy to censor freely if they could -- with the best of intentions, of course. This impression gets occasional reinforcement, for example from posts like this.

John Hanson,

You had me right up to the point of letting the market decide, then I realized the market is rigged. My daughter in law who has a masters and runs a day care makes less than her husband, my son, who is an insurance adjuster with a bachelors degree. Why? The men who established the "market" values insurance adjusters more than it values child care providers. Frankly, in a rational market child care providers would be worth more than insurance adjusters. Go figure.

in a post-feminist world we will learn to celebrate each individual for their qualities

Yeah, you did that so enthusiastically before.

**

I can't really seem to care about the article. I don't think ignoring it constitutes "allowing idiocy to go unchallenged" in a way that might have consequences. I don't think anyone takes it seriously. It's a fluff piece. In a more fair world, the piece would get people to consider the media's motivations, and start to discount nearly everything they say. On more substantive issues, their disinformation has consequences.

The Washington Post itself is staffed by a bunch of dishonest neo-con ass@#$%s. Look at any article they've written about the Middle East. Not even close to objective. The NYT is nearly the same.

There are more female than male college and law school graduates these days, John Hansen.

Elvis,

The fact that you think the ratio of male to female law school graduates has anything to do with "the market" only makes my point. Please bring up a valid point next time.

According to Politico, Pomfret is arguing today that the article was written "tongue in cheek." Frankly that doesn't wash. Allen is well known as a modern day Phyllis Schafley, not a comedian.

If someone went through and substituted the word "African American" for "women" in this piece, it would have never been published. It is factually innacurate, insulting and adds nothing to reasonable discourse on issues. Pomfret deserves all the censure he gets for this crap.

Yeah, you did that so enthusiastically before.

I have to admit I don't have the foggiest idea what you are alluding to SS.

Ron Byers,

My daughter in law who has a masters and runs a day care makes less than her husband, my son, who is an insurance adjuster with a bachelors degree. Why? The men who established the "market" values insurance adjusters more than it values child care providers.

Can you scream any louder that you are totally ignorant of what is meant by "market" forces.

trolls.. watch me ignore them.

i'm ignoring them... the trolls..

John Hanson

The market is not a god and it can be manipulated. It is irrational and the job market favors jobs traditionally held by men. You can believe otherwise, but you would be wrong.

Did you read the whole thing?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022902992.html

It read to me as a fairly amusing, thought provoking essay. I could go on, but you'd just delete my comment.

This is the second Outlook piece I've read recently by Ms. Allen. The first was a snarky (or maybe mean-spirited is a better description) commentary about how offended she was at the concept of living wills. That essay I read the whole way through; I didn 't get past the sixth paragraph of this one, when Allen dissed Hillary Clinton's debating skills, which most sentient people would describe as top-notch....
If the Post wants to publish a right-wing pundit who feels the best way to get her point across is by insulting those who don't think or live the way she does, fine. Now I'll know to give her work a 10-second skim rather than settle down to actually read it. I do think the Post has the best group of columnists of any daily paper - and that probably has something to do with the fact that it has the most diverse group as well.
I'm sorry to see John Pomfret criticized; he wrote the wonderful CHINESE LESSONS, a must read for anyone interested in present-day China.
(Allen writes in the same biting tone as Maureen Dowd, which can be pretty hard to take when it is unleavened by humor; must be something in the water in DC)

Earlier this month Ira Glass had a segment on his radio show, This American Life, about supposedly intelligent teen girls who didn’t do very well on a quiz show that was specifically created to showcase their abilities. See third segment down at this link: http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1229

The producer of the show was a woman, who had high hopes for the show, but soon discovered that she had to write easier and easier questions for the girls before they could answer any correctly. She was finally reduced to having the girls race around the studio audience collecting autographs from cute guys.

I am not sure what was going on. Were the girls afraid to look too intelligent in front of cute guys? Who knows.

Obviously there is a very simple thought experiment that can be performed.

Would WaPo publish a similar screed about blacks (we are not good at swimming) or catholics (our priest are pedophiles) or say asians (we are only good at math) and get away with it?

Liberals in general have too much invested in their men are idiots meme to go back to common sense.

In all fairness, John Hansen's posts do tend to support the theory...

I'm sure there's a good reason Kevin Drum expects the Washington Post's Outlook section to adopt a policy toward submissions that Drum himself does not toward comments submitted to his own blog.

That's idiotic. Comments aren't "submitted" to this blog, they're posted automtically as soon as you hit "post." WaPo, on the other hand, has limited space and must pick and choose what to print from a multitude of worthy sources. By picking one essay out of dozens or hundreds available to them that day, they are necessarily making a judgment as to whether they consider it worthy of publishing.

But I always get the impression that the opposition of some liberals to censorship is not entirely on the level; they'd be all too happy to censor freely if they could -- with the best of intentions, of course. This impression gets occasional reinforcement, for example from posts like this.

It's not "censorship" not to post everything under the sun. Otherwise the Op-Ed page of the WaPo would be several thousand pages long every single day.

Kev wrote:

I'm always a little unsure of what to do in cases like this. There's a class of people (patron saint: Ann Coulter) whose sole objective is to provoke a response. Link to me! Talk about me! Help me promote my new book!

People always say that about people like that, but I think the point is a little exagerrated. What about the teenaged guy who swears to some virgin teenaged girl that he's hard that if a guy has an erection, but doesn't have sex, his dick will fall off-- or some such bunk, and at least depending on what neighborhood you're in, probably a little more believeable line replace something like that nowadays-- so she'd better have sex with him? Doesn't a girl like that desrve to have "sex ed" or whatever explained to her properly? There are new people who are going to hear these old sexist lines from Allen, and they should not hear only silence from us in response.

Allen's statements should be refuted- for my take, see my blog: http://www.swanpoliticsblog.blogspot.com

Wwomen are not as a whole idiots, but vast majority of college girls I knew during my undergrad days 2-5 years ago were certainly either quite stupid, or lazy intellectually.

Kevin, I agree with the poster who's said you've gone wobbly lately. I've been reading your blog since it was Calpundit, and lately you've seemed much less decisive, much more willing to let your readers take the ball and run with it.

That's egalitarian of course, but also lazy and too much buck-passing. Consider that you might be losing your energy and may be a tad burned out. If that's true, take some time off and recharge. But do search for that second wind, will you?

John Hansen, you are the one that is completely ignorant about markets, women and I'm sure a hell of a lot more things, as evidenced by your posts.

A "market" is made up of people with money to spend on a particular product or service. Since, for the last 10,000 years or so men, much, much, much more often than women, have controlled the bulk of the wealth in any given society.

It has been men who have dictated who gets hired, for which position, and at what compensation.

So the "market" isn't some objective, rational, impersonal force. It's comprised of subjective, impulsive, people who make their decisions on insufficient information, stereotypes, and greed.

According to the "free market" ideology African Americans in the Jim Crow South wouldn't have suffered being forced not to sit at the "whites only" lunch counter because some "entrepreneur" would allow them to do so and force out of business everybody who didn't. I mean their money is still green, right?

But that didn't happen did it? Nor did qualified women get promoted or paid like their male peers.

Why? Because, the person making the decision about hiring, firing, and compensation was a different color or gender.

And these people were raised to think that N* shouldn't be allowed to do anything other than menial labor and that women shouldn't be paid very much or promoted because "obviously they were going to quit once they got married".

That meant that no matter what white male they worked for the results were going to be the same. The market was static until an outside force (the Federal Government) knocked it out of it's equilibrium.

So no, markets never free people if there is any caste system in place. And the gender roles and race roles in the US are just as much of a caste system as the one in India.

Wwomen are not as a whole idiots, but vast majority of college girls I knew during my undergrad days 2-5 years ago were certainly either quite stupid, or lazy intellectually.

Ah, I see we have a Yalie in our midst. But really, were the men any better?

"Wwomen are not as a whole idiots, but vast majority of college girls I knew during my undergrad days 2-5 years ago were certainly either quite stupid, or lazy intellectually."

Whereas the college boys were what, rocket scientists? Please...

Ms. Allen wrote a column for the LA Times last month about what an idiot Speaker Pelosi was for serving healthier food in the House Cafeteria. I guess once you get on an editor's Rolodex you never have to worry about not seeing your name in print.

Neither Allen or Pomfret would have even gotten a job at the Post mopping the floors when Katherine Graham was publisher.