“My secret lust for right-wing women” is explored by self-described “liberal-lefty-pro-feminist” Cosmo Landesman in the UK Spectator:
I have slept with women who write for the New Statesman and women who write for the Daily Telegraph and I can’t honestly claim that one lot is better than the other. But there are certain post-coital benefits that come with women of the right. They never subject a man to the music of Nick Drake or Nina Simone. As good libertarians, they don’t mind if you smoke in bed or pick up a newspaper or roll over and go to sleep — come to think of it, that’s what they are more likely to do. Nor do you ever have to lie in bed and watch some mawkish film about Nelson Mandela or one made by Michael Moore. (They don’t think you’re demented because you’d rather watch Die Hard.) And right-wing women never think that leaving the toilet seat up is a passive-aggressive act of patriarchy.
Sorry, comrades, but when it comes to the bedroom I’ll have to vote Tory.
Fair enough — but didn’t Landesman’s fellow Brit (well, expatriate Brit) John Derbyshire explore this exact theme for National Review in early 2001?
Though the Derb’s column was much more devoted to aesthetics than Landesman. Derbyshire wrote:
Still, I think I could make an objective case for the general proposition. Just line them up, for goodness’ sake. On the Left: Janet Reno, Donna Shalala, Hillary Clinton (you can take her before or after the style crash, far as I’m concerned), Madeleine Albright, Barbra Streisand, Rosie O’Donnell, Katie Couric, Anna Quindlen, Andrea Dworkin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Nina Khrushchev, Mao Tse-tung’s last wife … On the Right: Margaret Thatcher, Condoleeza Rice (pity about that forename — what were her parents thinking of?), Linda Chavez, Katherine Harris, Laura Bush (a cutie, in my book, though I wish she’d get the squint fixed), Suzanna Gratia Hupp, Heather Nauert (oh God), Paula Zahn, Ann Coulter, Peggy Noonan, Grace Coolidge, Elizabeth the First, the last Tsarina, Eva Peron … I rest my case.
There are a few necessary qualifications, but I don’t think they blunt my argument. They may actually strengthen it. Madeleine Albright, for example, is said to have been a babe when younger. Well, water will find its level, physical states return to equilibrium sooner or later, and all lefty women, whatever attributes they may have started out with, revert to type at last. Margaret Thatcher at 60 could still drive men crazy — I would have given my all for one favoring glance. Those Young Conservative girls I used to know, who are now Middle-Aged Conservatives in tweeds, manage to look good in tweeds. (There is, in fact, a great deal to be said for women in tweeds. There will be a future column on this topic.) But Hillary Clinton at 60?
* * * * * * *
When Arthur Koestler was a communist in Weimar Germany, he used to have secret meetings with comrades in open public places where a police “tail” would be easy to spot. Once he met with a female comrade in a Berlin park. While discussing necessary business, the woman lost her attention and began staring at the surrounding trees. “Why is it,” she suddenly blurted out, “that the leaves die wherever we go?”
Perhaps because, as Landesman writes this month:
I recently had sex with a woman who writes for the Guardian and in the heat of the moment I said, ‘I love you — you filthy slut!’ I meant it as a compliment! Honest! She stopped the proceedings and gave me a long lecture about how the ‘verbal demeaning of women’ was totally unacceptable. I had a similar experience with a woman of the right. (I won’t repeat what I said because it’s too embarrassing.) But she just laughed and said, ‘Oh, you do say the sweetest things to a girl!’
Women of the right will not tolerate sexism; but nor do they have that tendency of some left-wing women always to play the victim of sexism. They have a robust, get-on-with-it attitude to life that makes them less prone to the neurotic, whiney, oh-poor-me melodrama that has infected so much thinking of left-leaning feminists.
Is Landesman kidding? In any case, does it matter? I’m sure his column is already receiving the following stern rebuke from the left …
Summary of the #NN14 humor panel. pic.twitter.com/76lmvZoQAt
— jon gabriel (@exjon) July 19, 2014
(Via Kathy Shaidle.)
Related: “A Guardian columnist looks at the subtext of Thomas the Tank Engine,” as spotted by James Lileks. Entirely predictable archleftist Brit-scolding of an venerable and universally beloved kiddie show ensues. As Lileks quips:
Every parent does this: analyzes their kids’ shows to death for fun, because you’re stuck at home watching something inane. Everyone has that “hmm: this is a show about slavery, in a way.” It also lacks class consciousness:
Inevitably, the trains get in a fight with or pick on one another (or generally mess up whatever job they are supposed to be doing) until Hatt has to scold one of them about being a “really useful engine”, because their sole utility in life is their ability to satisfy his whims. Yeah, because I want to teach my kid to admire a controlling autocrat.
Well, it’s Guardian writer, so yes, she does, but the proper kind.
Heh, indeed.™
Update: Naturally, the smoke from Thomas’s engine is racist — it’s white smoke, get it?! — but then, isn’t everything?
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