Time was that if you were a woman and wanted to work at a newspaper, you were sent to cover parties and the doings of “high society.” Either that or, like the late, great Dorothy Kilgallen, writing “sob stories,” human interest stories aimed at bringing a tear to the reader’s eye, a lump to the throat.
Then came the 1970s, Roe v. Wade, penumbras and emanations, women on the march, complete with their own anthem, I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar:
And now, having achieved parity in news columns and as columnists, The Washington Post’s relatively new publisher, Katharine Weymouth, granddaughter of the late Katharine Graham, has brought the institution full circle with a new blog with the air-sickness-inducing name of She The People, — “The World As Women See It.” And the birth of She The People –get this — has inspired the newspaper’s ombudsman, one Patrick B. Pexton to inquire, of all the questions in all the world, Is The Post Innovating Too Fast?
Earth to Mr. Pexton: What The Post is doing is not innovating too fast; it is, rather, bicycling backwards too slowly, uphill. This ludicrous new blog is the opposite of progress.
Now the gals are back in the corral where they were lassoed from the 1920s to the 1970s.
Thanks a lot.
At least here at PJM we’re all considered bloggers, contributors and columnists, irrespective of our gender. Isn’t that what the so-called women’s movement was all about?
The other night a friend shared with me some article online which claimed that it was “racist” to view people in colorblind fashion—that to not distinguish between people on the basis of race was racist behavior! This was, naturally, an impeccably leftwing article.
A few years ago some leftwing loon declared that the Israeli Defense Forces were “racist” because they did not rape Arab women; to this poor person’s fevered brain, it proved that the Israelis were so racist that they did not regard Arab women as fit subjects for violation.
Thus, it is no surprise that the Washington Post should now be going all pre-women’s-lib-distaff, with the exception that while she might be barefoot (free spirit) and in the kitchen (experimenting with organic, locally-grown, and above all sustainable produce) she sure as hell won’t be pregnant. The left has been working for some time to recapture traditional roles, as long as those roles are approached in the proper ironic attitude and slightly distorted to make them a mockery of what they are.
I saw that “colorblind is worse than racism” article, too. Apparently the ideal of “by their character, not their skin color” means you’re not even seeing non-whites or something.
To take your point a little further: No to have separate dorms for white and blacks is now racist (and foolish me thought integration meant integrating black and whites, not segrating them). And so now the Washington Compost will have separate women-headed columns of one genre, and male-head columns of another genere. (That is the gist of the Ombudsman’s having quoted one reader’s comment: ‘One reader, naming several of The Post’s excellent female opinion writers and news reporters, said sharply, “Why not just revert to the quaint ‘Women’s section’ of the last century newspapers? The girls also could share recipes, cut out dress patterns and discuss debutantes … ” ‘) It would seem that what is ‘liberalism’ theses days has sunk into incoherence. It all depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.
They have identified their audience: 60s retreads that missed all the events of the last 5 decades. Barack Obama was elected by people that still think the 1963 Civil Rights Act needs to be passed.
“You can go broke taking over a shrinking market.”
Actually, the Baby-Boom generation voted for McCain.
It was the post-Boomers who elected Barack Obama.
I know plenty of boomers who voted for Obama. Many of them are hippie throwbacks, Marxists, or both, but many more of them are just ordinary folks who ignorantly believed in the hope and change fairy tale. instead of exercising due diligence in selecting a qualified candidate for president they naively bought the disingenuous promise of racial healing and voted their guilty conscience. While the throwbacks and the unapologetic Marxists will always flock to their bastions of statism, those who now realize they were sold a bill of goods may just represent the last generation to put any stock in what passes for news in the dinosaur media. At least I hope that is the case.
Boomer voters split evenly between McCain and Obama. Gen Y’s voted two to one for Obama. A majority of Gen X’ers also supported Obama.
And the Post owns that hate speech-lite black “culture” website The Root, or as I like to call it, The Permanent Excuse Factory.
They actually have headlines from racist events from 80 years ago cuz they have nothing recent. And they don’t count black flash mobs beating the snot out of white people as either news or black “culture” even though they define culture by skin. Funny how those flash mobs never operate against blacks. Now that’d be news.
Anyway I’m looking forward to articles that make excuses for why women in England didn’t follow up the success of Jane Austin and Charlotte Bronte to write massive amounts of books about philosophy and morals. I’ve never read the story of how Jane and Charlotte escaped long enough to write their novels or how they snuck them out.
I resent the insult that the Washington Post is “bicycling” to the past.
Bicycles today are technologically superior to those of the past as both Trigger and Leroy (my bikes) will testify.
The Washington Post is a classic example of plantation politics. The “ladies on the porch” is how they want to treat women. Sit and sip your tea, ladies. But don’t you dare mix with the politics of the men. Don’t presume to run for office unless you are willing to mouth the party line. Otherwise we have to destroy you.
Yup, cue Helen Reddy and “Male chauvanist pig!”
A couple of years ago, the Omaha World-Herald launched a website for moms. Mommy bloggers, health stuff…topics that would ordinarily fall in the women’s section (Living) of the paper. Failing newspapers are trying to find new sources of revenue and where else but online? The newspapers are simply providing a meeting point for women consumers and the advertisers. The few times I have visited the Momaha site, it has been as I feared: discussions of toilet training and invitations to ‘mommy’ events. However. Advertisers go where the money is. Instead of beating up newspapers for segregating their readers, give them credit for trying to keep their businesses afloat.
The attention to women is only part of what newspapers are doing to retain readers. They have also changed the standard for journalistic writing to the more lurid story-telling style used by tv reporters. So far, I don’t think they have found a way to save the newspaper.
Now wait a minute.
There is a difference between restricting women to producing only content that is only directed at women, and having some women produce content that is directed at women.
The former is ghettoization; the latter is recognition of a market segment.
She the People? Sheeple?
Years later, I’m still adjusting to the fact that ever since I heaved off the cadaver of habit and stepped over to the Right, my bookcases have been filled with so many delightful, brilliant female writers — and not chosen by gender. And not a few women I was reading all along — Phyllis Chesler, Elinor Burkett (not that she’s embrace the label), and now Ann Coulter, whom I had not read, who blew me away with Demonic.
Go back to 1878, or 1898 and there were lots of women publishing. The lefty boyos of the ’60′s and ’70′s were worse than a lot of what came before or after them. By the 1990′s, the weekly rags wanted women talking about their sex lives, while the men rubbed their hairy chins and addressed the social problems of the day.
The really sad part is that the advent of women’s studies programs has produced a generation of girls (Feministing, Salon, and so on) who have internalized the notion that relentlessly re-examining and re-naming their own genitalia is both cutting edge and liberationist.
If WaPo started publishing a recipe corner for the ladies it would be an intellectual step up from the self-imposed sex ghetto these girlies have built.
Feminism, far from helping women, has actually exposed the full extent of female inferiority (both intellectual and moral) far more visibly than ever was possible before feminism.
Before, women kept out of things they knew they could not handle. But today, they loudly proclaim their competence even as they are demonstrating the opposite.
Everyone needs to read The Misandry Bubble. It is the comprehensive essay on the topic of feminism ever written.