My latest blog post for the Independent Women’s Forum:
Don’t call her Hillary!
Why? Because a bunch of women’s studies professors say that’s sexist.
Here’s the report from McClatchy:
“Laura F. Edwards, a history professor at Duke University who studies gender, said calling a woman by her first name is part of a larger problem in our culture in how to acknowledge women, who have always used their fathers’ and husbands’ names because they were never expected to have a public place in the world.
“’All this gets to the point that women had no public identities of their own,’ she said. ‘And we’re still living with the implications of that.’
***
“Clinton, the first female candidate to seriously vie for the presidency, was called by her first name four times more than her 2008 Democratic rival Barack Obama, according to a study examining news coverage of the 2008 presidential race by University of Utah researchers published in the Political Research Quarterly. Male news anchors and reporters also dropped Clinton’s title of senator more than did female broadcasters, the document showed.
***
“Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University who referred to Clinton in her book, ‘Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work,’ said Clinton may be called by her first name in part because ‘Hillary’ is more distinctive than common female names such as Susan or Mary. (Clinton’s mother had said she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, a New Zealand explorer who with Nepalese Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest. In 2006, her aides said that was not true.)
“Tannen said that no matter the reason that people use first names – even if it’s a sign of friendliness – there is no denying that the result is that the person does not get as much respect.”
Posted by Charlotte Allen
My latest blog post for the Independent Women’s Forum:
Tribe also likes to brag that Harvard Law grad President Obama was one of his star students, “one of the most amazing research assistants I’ve ever had.” Tribe served in the Justice Department during Obama’s first term and has been a staunch defender of the constitutionality of the Obamacare laws.
But now, Tribe has been retained by Peabody Energy, the nation’s largest coal producer, in an effort to block a recent regulation of the Obama-administration Environmental Protection Agency that requires states to cut carbon emissions in power plants within their borders. The regulation is aimed at squelching use of fossil fuels and pushing ‘renewable’ solar and wind power–all in the name of combating ‘climate change.’
Tribe’s position is that in issuing the regulation, the EPA exceeded the power delegated to it by Congress in the 1970 Clean Air Act–an unconstitutional usurpation of Congress’s legislative authority by the executive branch. As he put in more bluntly in a House hearing last month, the regulation amounts to “burning the Constitution.”
Uh-oh, global cooling! From the New York Times:
“Anger from within the Obama administration about Mr. Tribe’s actions is particularly fierce, although officials declined to comment on the record for fear of escalating the situation.
“‘Whether he intended it or not, Tribe has been weaponized by the Republican Party in an orchestrated takedown of the president’s climate plan,’ said one former administration official.
***
“’That a leading scholar of constitutional matters has identical views as officials of a coal company — that his constitutional views are the same as the views that best promote his client — there’s something odd there,’ said Richard L. Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law.”
Posted by Charlotte Allen
My latest blog post for the Independent Women’s Forum:
“As I read the piece, I felt that Erdley and Rolling Stone’s many lapses in judgment and the bad calls they made while reporting the piece didn’t come from laziness, egotism, or ignorance — they came from the magazine’s efforts to be sensitive to the alleged victim. And that really is something we could use more of.
***
“And yet, despite these steps forward, rape coverage that attempts to give equal weight to the stories of the accuser and the accused often stumble, because proving the victim’s account using traditional journalistic fact-checking techniques is so difficult, and frequently ends up placing blame on the victim. I believe that Rolling Stone was attempting to fight this tendency in their approach to the UVA rape story — and, unfortunately, their failure on this front will probably serve as a serious setback for sensitive journalistic coverage of rape.
***
“The decision to use a pseudonym for victim Jackie’s alleged attacker, rather than pursue an interview with him, or the failure to reach out to the friends that Jackie said had turned their backs to her, may come off as eye-popping journalistic failures — but I believe that these moves were made in an attempt to try to develop a new form of rape coverage, one that didn’t act as if the alleged attacker’s word carried as much weight as the victim’s.”
Posted by Charlotte Allen
My latest blog post for the Independent Women’s Forum:
“Childlessness may be one of the last vibrant taboos in our culture. Women, especially, who don’t have children are still regarded as somehow incomplete or thwarted, even by liberal and tolerant people.***“What is surprising about this collection of intensely personal essays is the level of torment that most of these women articulate. I was struck by how many of them tried to have children and couldn’t, for whatever reason. There are second thoughts that shadow them, admissions of longing, honest grappling with possibilities, weighing of advantages. Because the cultural expectation is so profound, the women writers who decide not to have kids or end up not having them have constructed elaborate, fortresslike defenses of their lives and choices.”
Actually, it’s hard to figure out what’s eating all these non-mothers, because, according to them. they’d rather have their eyes pulled out with rusty pliers than have their blissful single–hood interrupted by, eew, a rugrat!
“[T]he child-burdened should come away from this engaging collection with a rich sense of what they have missed: ‘I would prefer to accept an assignment to go trekking for a month in the kingdom of Bhutan than spend that same month folding onesies’ …; ‘Let’s face it: children’s intellectual capacities and conversational acumen are not their best features. Boredom and intellectual atrophy are the normal conditions of daily life for the child-raising classes’…; ‘Our shared passions thrill and satisfy us, and our abundant freedoms — to daydream; to cook exactly the food we want when we want it; to drink wine and watch a movie without worrying about who’s not yet asleep upstairs; to pick up and go anywhere we want, anytime; to do our work uninterrupted; to shape our own days to our own liking; and to stay connected to each other without feeling fractured — are not things we’d choose to give up for anyone, ever’ …”
Posted by Charlotte Allen
My latest blog post for the Los Angeles Times:
Annie Lowry of New York magazine admits that Pao couldn’t prove that sexism exists at Kleiner Perkins — but that’s because it’s “the sexism that you can’t quite prove.” Lowry writes:
“The problem is that sexism today very often is not overt. It’s subtle, and that makes it all the more difficult to identify and root out. It’s not your boss hitting on you and then demoting you to secretary when you spurn his advances. It’s your boss describing your assertiveness as too assertive, and suggesting you might be better suited for an operational role.”
Yes, it’s sexism so subtle that you can’t even tell whether it’s there or not. Perhaps the jury couldn’t tell whether it was there or not either — which may be why Pao lost her case.
Posted by Charlotte Allen
My latest blog post for the Independent Women’s Forum:
In fact, Mendes was onto something, actually two things.
First, wives ought to try to look attractive for their husbands, even at home. It’s a way of respecting the fact that your looks were one reason why he married you in the first place (men are very visually oriented when it comes to women), and every man wants to be proud of the way his wife looks. It doesn’t hurt to try to please the man who’s working his tail off to please you. Your husband won’t love you any less if you look like a slob all the time–although maybe he will because your clothing may be telling him that you don’t care enough about him to bother to look nice. The fabulous-looking Mendes could actually get away with a pair of sweatpants. Most women look terrible in them and should reserve them for vacuuming if they wear them at all. Even if you spend your day in bluejeans, you can dress them up a bit with a cute T-shirt and a pair of ballet flats.
Second, there’s the issue of public decorum. Take a look around you the next time you’re out. We’re a nation of slobs these days, women and men. Sweatpants, sweatshirts, baseball caps, dirty sneakers, uncombed hair. That’s where we can learn something from Eva Mendes, who is always dressed, even when she’s looking casual. She has superb, age-appropriate taste. Yes, she’s a movie star who can afford expensive attire. But anyone can afford a nice-looking T-shirt. Americans during the Great Depression strived to look their best. In our age of plenty we ought to take some pride in ourselves and be doing the same.
Posted by Charlotte Allen
My latest blog post for the Independent Women’s Forum:
That’s not funny!
Just two days ago, after Comedy Central picked half-black/half-white South African comedian Trevor Noah to succeed Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, progressives were prophesying that racist, birther, dog whistle-blowing, guns ‘n’ religion-clinging wingnuts would soon be crawling out of the woodwork to try to destroy him:
“The tenor of conservative criticism of ‘The Daily Show’ is about to get very, very ugly. This country spent years embroiled in a debate over whether an American citizen who became the president was ‘really’ American; what are we going to do to Trevor Noah? Conservative critics have a practiced, doublespeaking method of piling on the heat on figures who stand out because of their race or gender or sexuality, while protesting that they are doing no such thing—whether their refrain is ‘ethics in game journalism’ or ‘long-form birth certificate.’
***
Oopsie-do! Yesterday the SJWs found out about some old tweets of Noah’s where he made some jokes about women instead of Hitler–and that was it as far as ‘standing for him’ went. The jokes specifically concerned plus-size women (‘fat-shaming!’) and Jewish women (even though Noah, like Lena Dunham, who’s also in hot water with the P.C. police over wisecracks about her people, is part Jewish himself).
Suddenly the reaction to Noah went from “I hope we can prove…that we deserve him” to “Eeeew–misogynist creep!”:
“[N]ot here for this sexist, objectifying, fat-shaming bullshit. this is why we need more female hosts, please.”
“So
@Trevornoah‘s a bit of a misogynist. Well done,@ComedyCentral“
Posted by Charlotte Allen
