Said I, 3 days ago, responding to Instapundit's long post in which he said, "Ann is a thoughtful and open-minded and smart woman, but at some level I feel like she doesn’t really get it." I've heard nothing back, not that Glenn needs to spend his time interacting with me, but by writing a long post in which he accused me of being a not-getting-it — albeit "smart" — woman, he created the impression of an invitation to a back-and-forth. Now, I'm left to interpret silence. I could say: I guess he doesn't get it. But I suspect — as my linked post insinuates repeatedly — that he knows I'm right, and he doesn't want to have to say it.
Confronted by silence over there, I'll link to Roy Edroso:
One of the things I've noticed about the famously libertarian Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds is that, while he claims to be pro-choice, he seems annoyed that anyone would defend abortion rights and delighted whenever someone tries to restrict them. Among recent examples...Examples elided.
The guy's some advocate.Roy's perception that I'm Glenn's "usual fellow traveller" is off, but not uncommon. I think this distorted impression has partly come from the comments section, which had become dominated by right-wing voices, perhaps folks who arrived via Instapundit links. Some of these people got very irritable after the same-sex marriage cases came down, and they really couldn't handle my criticism of the "men's reproductive rights" arguments.
Partly, I suppose, this comes out of his whole men's-rights schtick about how women are oppressing men, which he recently took to such lengths ("When people talk about 'reproductive freedom,' they generally mean women’s reproductive freedom") that he ticked off his usual fellow traveller [sic] Ann Althouse, leading to a spat and resulting in a rare long Perfesser post full of paranoid gas ("we give women a pass on sexual behavior that would be considered predatory if it were done by males"), whining ("noting the unfairnesses involved, is not 'victimology' — though given how successful women have been in obtaining power via victimology, no one should be surprised if men start to give it a try"), and just plain bullshit ("When Rush Limbaugh suggested that Sandra Fluke should at least pay for her own birth control..."). Someone who actually thinks this way is bound to consider abortion some kind of illegitimate special right because men can't have one.
Ah, but that's another matter. I'm not going to endlessly discuss why I had to shut off comments on this blog. If anyone wants to argue with me, they can open up their own blog, write their comment there, link to me, and send me the link. I'll interact with them if they write well and say something interesting and not the same old thing that bogged down my comments section. That's essentially what Glenn has done over the years — outsourcing the commenting. The would-be good commenters are to be bloggers themselves, and they need to show their stuff and be linkable, not hop on the high-readership platform that he's built up.
FROM THE EMAIL: Reader A.A. writes:
Sorry you guys had to shut down the playroom. I don't blame you.
I'm no doctrinaire conservative; I'm a libertarian, and share the Professor's views on some of the hot-button issues. But what really rankled me in the last kerfuffle was the tone of misogyny and hatefulness on the part of the usual suspects.
Stuff like:
Women are not essentially honest.
I say this is proof of the superiority of men. We're just better humans, and we vote with our brains.
Do we really expect people who routinely fake orgasms and then brag about it to be honest?
And so on ... and that was just picking out a frew from the first couple screens of the first post about the Slate piece. Things got progressively more vile (and shockingly personal, with attacks on both Meade and Althouse and their first marriages and children).
In all honesty, though I enjoy reading Instapundit, his wife's blog has become a haven for disaffected and angry men, and her book has become a kind of bloody shirt for them to wave. That kind of attitude was what hijacked the commentariat. That viciousness, against women in general and the hosts in particular, kept me away from Althouse until today, and I just wanted to say how very sorry I am that this happened.
Posts
