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dreamer_marie (![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} dreamer_marie) wrote in ![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/community.gif){kind=small} unfunnybusiness,@ 2008-06-29 14:13:00 |
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Maureen Dowd: It Was a Social Experiment!
Maureen Dowd is a columnist for the New York Times who is well known for her obsession with Bill Clinton. To be more precise, a certain part of Bill Clinton's anatomy. In the 2000 presidential election, she spent a lot of time making fun of Al Gore for the way he dressed. To keep it short, her worldview can be summarized like this: Republicans are manly men and Democrats are sissies.
As you may know, the Democratic primary has caused a lot of sexism in the media, and many people are objecting to it. So now, even the New York Times, in the person of their public editor Clark Hoyt, is wondering if they could have handled things differently. The answer, of course, is...
(the rest of what they said, of course, like the cackle, the pantsuit references, etc... was found to be perfectly OK).
Kristol, it turns out, was only a sexist pig on Fox News, so the New York Times could wash their hands off him. Dowd was another matter, and her case they had to come up with a more sophisticated defense. And, wait for it...
Bob Somerby, from the Daily Howler, calls bullshit (scroll down to "The Loathing that Dares Not Speak Its Name"):
Can someone explain to me why being Irish Catholic makes you lust after Bill Clinton in an unhealthy way?
Maureen Dowd is a columnist for the New York Times who is well known for her obsession with Bill Clinton. To be more precise, a certain part of Bill Clinton's anatomy. In the 2000 presidential election, she spent a lot of time making fun of Al Gore for the way he dressed. To keep it short, her worldview can be summarized like this: Republicans are manly men and Democrats are sissies.
As you may know, the Democratic primary has caused a lot of sexism in the media, and many people are objecting to it. So now, even the New York Times, in the person of their public editor Clark Hoyt, is wondering if they could have handled things differently. The answer, of course, is...
The Times itself, however, was barely mentioned, even though two of its Op-Ed columnists, Maureen Dowd and William Kristol, were named in the Hall of Shame.
(the rest of what they said, of course, like the cackle, the pantsuit references, etc... was found to be perfectly OK).
Kristol, it turns out, was only a sexist pig on Fox News, so the New York Times could wash their hands off him. Dowd was another matter, and her case they had to come up with a more sophisticated defense. And, wait for it...
“From the time I began writing about politics,” Dowd said, “I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes.” Now, she said, “you are asking me to treat Hillary differently than I’ve treated the male candidates all these years, with kid gloves.”
Bob Somerby, from the Daily Howler, calls bullshit (scroll down to "The Loathing that Dares Not Speak Its Name"):
Who knew? Readers, had it even crossed your mind that Dowd was trying to make this point? That Dowd has been trying to “force [us] to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes?” We’ll confess—we’ve read Dowd closely for more than a decade, and it never so much as entered our head that this was her lofty intention! To us, it had often seemed that she was trying to do something different—that she, like others in her friendship group, was trying to ridicule the Big Major Dems whom she clearly seemed to despise. But as it turns out, we were totally wrong! She was just trying to help us see “how differently we view the sexes.” The fault was not in this media star. The fault was in ourselves.
Examples of her tireless efforts: Just to make Dowd’s method more clear, here’s the way she opened her column the Sunday before the Bush-Gore election. You may have thought she was taking one last chance to portray Al Gore as a big f*cking f*ggot! Not at all! Dowd was simply helping you see how confused your gender notions were! “I Feel Pretty,” her headline said. Candidate Gore was singing:
DOWD (11/5/00): I Feel PrettyThat’s right—two days before the nation voted in one of its most consequential elections, Dowd pictured Candidate Gore at the mirror, singing—what else?—“I feel pretty.” Thanks to Hoyt’s intervention, we now know why Professor Dowd did that; why she said Gore was “so feminized he was practically lactating;” why she called Edwards “The Breck Girl” so often; why she described Obama as “the diffident debutante” and, of course, as “a starlet obsessing on a svelte waistline.”Sorry! She wasn’t trying to ridicule Dems; she was helping us get beyond our own foolish notions! Go ahead—laugh out loud! In the same week when David Broder lied in the face of his ombudsman, Maureen Dowd had the gall to say this to Hoyt.
I feel stunning
And entrancing,
Feel like running and dancing for joy . . .
O.K., enough gloating. Behave, Albert. Just look in the mirror now and put on your serious I only-care-about-the-issues face.
Awkward though it may be to say so, Dowd’s lunacy is the expression of a particular culture—a throwback form of Irish Catholic culture which most Irish Catholics have had the good sense to move far away from, long ago. But Dowd, and Matthews, and many others, have propagated this viral illness as it has damaged our public discourse over the past many years. We Irish! We sat on TV all last week and proclaimed how much we love the truth—how superior we are in that regard, thanks to our days with the nuns and the Jesuits. Tomorrow, we’ll start to revisit “four days in the life” to show you what was being said at NBC’s cable arm all the way back in December 1999. This lunatic loathing has gone on for years—sometimes in gender-based forms, sometimes not. It’s an illness—a plague on Oran. It’s time to discuss it a bit more frankly, as we do with other religious cultures which play key roles in American politics. Yes, it’s awkward to do so. But unless we want this plague to last forever, we actually need to start doing this.
Can someone explain to me why being Irish Catholic makes you lust after Bill Clinton in an unhealthy way?
