Let's read this morning's Instapundit post about feminism and happiness.

Glenn Reynolds writes:

PYRRHIC VICTORY:  Joel Kotkin: Women have won the ‘war between the sexes,’ but at what cost?

Even Vox is wondering why women have gotten everything they said they wanted, but are still unhappy. Their explanation, of course, is that men still aren’t doing enough to make women happy. But it’s interesting that they’ve noticed the problem.

My hypothesis: What we’ve been told that “women” want is in fact what a relatively small percentage of women — 20% at most — who tend to be neurotic and anxious, and largely incapable of sustained happiness anyway, say they want. But even to the extent that’s true, their needs aren’t really those of most women whose interests fall closer to the norms.

Related:  “Actually, it’s very much an open question as to whether feminist interpretations of life make women happier. . . . Certainly, polls such as the General Social Survey suggest that women have become steadily less happy every year since 1972.”

Also:  The Female Happiness Paradox. 

Lots of parts there, so let's take this one piece at a time. 

The top story today (according to Memeorandum): The dream of a woman President dies early this time around.

In 2016, we had Hillary, and the dream persisted until the morning after Election Day. This time around, in 2020, there was a feeling that maybe this time...



Here's Memeorandum's picture of what's getting read and talked about this morning:



Go here to get clickable links. From the top article, by Jessica Valenti: "Don’t tell me this isn’t about sexism. I’ve been around too long for that. Even just supporting Warren has come with an unbearable amount of misogynist condescension. I’m tired of being told that I’m a single-issue voter because I care about a candidate’s gender...."

The last link — to Michelle Cottle in the NYT — goes to "Maybe Next Time, Ladies."

From the above-embedded song: "Maybe this time I'll be lucky... All the odds are in my favor/Something's bound to begin/It's gotta happen, happen sometime/Maybe this time I'll win...."

That's from a Broadway show. A Broadway show where we know the characters are all doomed.

This idea that it's my turn. Where do people get it?

It's not just women thinking we're entitled to our turn and imagining that I am getting my turn if some co-genderist fulfills her hyper-ambitious dream. It's also the dreary practice of ceding the nomination to the stalwart party-member who's waited his turn most patiently, which is what the Democrats en masse have decided to do this time (and what happened with all the losers in recent memory (2016, 2012, 2008, 2004, 2000, 1996)).

And it's not just about presidential politics. It's the crazy dream that things happen in order. I'll just cite one example: The enthusiastic embrace of the idea that the coronavirus will not kill young people but is coming to pick off the oldest, the ones closest to the end of life anyway. That's a subset of the delusional dream of modern America: That human beings die in the same order that we were born.

No, we don't.

"It just beggars belief that the same liberals who fret about 'micro-aggressions' for 20-somethings were able to see 16-year-olds absorbing the worst racist garbage from religious bigots..."

"… and then express the desire to punch the kids in the face. How did this grotesque inversion of the truth become the central narrative for what seemed to be the entire class of elite journalists on Twitter? That’s the somewhat terrifying question. Ruth Graham on Slate saw a 16-year-old she’d seen on a tape for a couple of minutes and immediately knew that he was indistinguishable from the 'white young men crowding around a single black man at a lunch counter sit-in in Virginia in the 1960s' or other white 'high school boys flashing Nazi salutes.' Even after the full context was clear, Graham refused to apologize to the kid, or retract her condemnation.... Across most of the national media, led by the New York Times and the Washington Post, the narrative had been set. 'I’m willing to bet that fifty years from now, a defining image of this political era will be that smug white MAGA teen disrespecting a Native elder and veteran. It just captures so much,' Jessica Valenti tweeted. 'And let’s please not forget that this group of teens … were there for the March for Life: There is an inextricable link between control over women’s bodies, white supremacy & young white male entitlement.' This is the orthodoxy of elite media, and it is increasingly the job of journalists to fit the facts to the narrative and to avoid any facts that undermine it.... Liberal democracy is being dismantled before our eyes — by all of us."

From "The Abyss of Hate Versus Hate" by Andrew Sullivan (New York Magazine).

"To the feminists who have such interesting ideas for how boys and young men should adapt to the current times, thank you for your opinion."

"You are mostly wrong and more than a little bit presumptuous that you have something of value to contribute to the shaping of young men. Arrogant, actually. You have zero understanding of the challenges, the pressures, the id, the ego, the essence of what it means to be male. Zero. You have only your perspective on what a feminist would want a male child to become. You would be wise to consider your own reactions if men were to offer suggestions on how to prepare girls and young women for the rigors of the real world."

So says the highest-rated comment on a NYT op-ed by Jessica Valenti, "What Feminists Can Do for Boys/We fought for young women in the patriarchy first. But budding patriarchs could use some help too."

The second-highest-rated comment is:

How 'bout not referring to them as "budding patriarchs"?

You know, just for a start?

(Deep Thought: I'd love to elucidate for you how odiously sexist this term is, but it is so vile as to preclude any parallel which wouldn't be censored by the moderator, correctly, as hate speech.)

I never comment, but when I see someone attacking children...

For decades, I've heard feminists say they don't care what happens to boys  — their focus is on girls — and if their work in support of women and girls has an impact on boys, well, that's fair play turnabout for millennia of subordination. I have been on the receiving end of sharp words from feminists who don't even want to hear the argument — the one Valenti makes here — that you should at least be interested in boys doing well because it's relevant to whether girls do well.

By the way, the term "budding patriarchs" is in the subheadline and probably wasn't written by Valenti.

Long-term readers of this blog will remember that I got into an on-line squabble with Valenti and her supporters after I criticized her for posing happily in front of the well-known woman abuser Bill Clinton, when she and other bloggers were assembled to be massaged into blogging in the interests of the Hillary '08 campaign. I haven't kept up with the writings of Jessica Valenti over the years — it says in the NYT she is "the author of six books on feminism" — so I don't know if she's ever called Bill and Hillary to account for what they'd done to women.

Anyway... this new column doesn't have much to say about how feminists can serve — serve?!! — the needs of boys and whether they'd be any good at it. She thinks of relieving them of the obligation to be "strong and stoic" and of breaking "the silence" about male victims of sexual assault. She's more expressive about what she doesn't like: the "misogynist huckster" Jordan Peterson and "dangerous online extremist" "incel" support groups.

Let's talk about The Atlantic firing Kevin D. Williamson — immediately after hiring him.

Here's Adele M. Stan at The American Prospect last week, "The Atlantic’s Gigantic Stumble/When a 'thought-leader' magazine hires the misogynist Kevin Williamson, that’s some kind of leading from behind":

The thing for which Williamson is most famous is his (since deleted) tweet advocating the execution by hanging of every woman who has an abortion. [Jessica] Valenti notes that this would encompass approximately 25 percent of U.S. women.

Williamson’s second-most famous comment is in his contemptuous depiction of a nine-year-old African American boy, which is basically a litany of racist stereotypes strung together, complete with a description of the boy making a gesture Williamson describes as “the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge.”...

So Williamson got the boot.

Here's "By Firing Kevin Williamson,The Atlantic Shows It Can't Handle Real Ideological Diversity/Williamson's rhetoric is inflammatory, but his views on abortion are not beyond the pale" by Katherine Mangu-Ward (Reason). Excerpt:

But the thing that cost him the gig was a remark he made on a podcast well before his firing and in a tweet (since deleted):

And someone challenged me on my views on abortion, saying, "If you really thought it was a crime, you would support things like life in prison, no parole, for treating it as a homicide." And I do support that. In fact, as I wrote, what I had in mind was hanging.

The Atlantic is obviously caving to pressure. They had to know when they hired Williamson that he maintains that abortion is murder, and the fact that he would treat it the way he'd treat any murder is just standard, mundane adherence to principle and resistance to pragmatism. There's nothing to be shocked about. Why hire him if that wasn't what you wanted?

Melania's "mysterious world" — "and why she may never move into the White House."

There's not really any news here — "may never move." Maybe she will. Maybe she won't. She's mysterious!

In other words, US Weekly knows nothing...

"They will reevaluate toward the end of the school year if they will keep this arrangement or if Melania and Barron will move to Washington," [says the unnamed "family insider."] "They could go either way right now. They will ultimately do what's best for Barron."

... but it's still riveting the attention of a certain sort of soft, distanced political observer, the kind that responds to the lure of a cover she sees while waiting in the checkout line at the supermarket.

Just yesterday, I was blogging about the previous week's issue of US Weekly, the one with Trump's 5 children on the cover. The feminist rabble-rouser Jessica Valenti had called for people to cancel their US Weekly subscriptions (as if her readers — or anybody — subscribes to the thing (it's more of a checkout-line impulse buy, isn't it?)). And Mashable's Heather Dockray chided the rag for "normalizing" Trump.

US Weekly may not know much about how the Trumps live their private life, but it must know its audience and what sells magazines. The thing has been around for 40 years. It knows its groove through the culture, the right degree of coziness with politics, the niceness toward celebrities. From its Wikipedia page:

It was acquired by Jan Wenner in 1985 and is a part of Wenner Media LLC, which also publishes Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal... In 1999... Wenner expressed his intention to keep Us "celebrity-friendly" in contrast with the more gossipy character of its competitors. He told The New York Times: "We will be nice to celebrities. A lot of my friends are in the entertainment business."...

[In 2007, Tina Brown said,] "I adore Us Weekly. I think it's a genius magazine. I'm a big fan of magazines that fulfill the goal of what they're trying to be."...

The magazine was criticized for allegedly biased coverage of the 2008 Republican National Convention. The September 5, 2008, issue featured Alaska Governor Sarah Palin on the cover with the headline "Babies, Lies & Scandal", while the June 19, 2008, issue featured U.S. Senator from Illinois Barack Obama and wife Michelle Obama with the headline "Why Barack Loves Her." 

US Weekly is kind of a safe space for people who want to think that celebrities are nice. If you're not one of those people, you're probably not picking up US Weekly anyway. It's not for you. But the don't-normalize-Trump crowd might get upset because they need the whole supermarket to be a safe space and these Trump covers are impinging on their mental peace. These people have to worry that other people like the magazine, and what is on the cover is presumably what US Weekly knows (or expects) those other people to like.

And the Trumps are getting the usual nice family-love-oriented treatment. From the current mysterious Melania article:

Though living 200 miles apart is unprecedented for a president and first lady, it suits the fiercely independent Donald just fine. 

Fiercely independent. That's US Weekly's spin on this:

When ABC News anchor David Muir asked January 25 if not having Melania, 46, or Barron around left him feeling lonely, he responded, "No, because I end up working longer. And that's OK."

What I like to think Trump was saying there is that he knows he signed up for a big job and he intends to work hard on it, for us, as he said he would do. In this view, living in the White House is not about getting lots of family time. If you need too much of that, stay out of the White House. This is a major workplace, not a domestic retreat.

And if he's the one who goes to her — and she stays in where she is, in place, embedded in her life, with her activities and friends and associates — shouldn't feminists celebrate? Maybe she's one who is "fiercely independent." But look at the "abused Melania" meme:



The presumptions there are outright misogynistic.

Boycotting the normalizers.

Once you're done deleting Uber, cancel your @usweekly subscription if you have one. This is vile. h/t @moorehn pic.twitter.com/R2byypEKTh

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) January 29, 2017

Via Mashable, "US Weekly is all-too-ready to normalize Trump," by Heather Dockray:

While printing photos of a president's family is standard practice for a pop culture magazine...

For readers just starting to become aware of the dangers of the Trump presidency, (yes, that's just happening for some), US Weekly's cover is a mistake.

Dockray seems to have the assignment of tending to Trump-related feelings of millennial (and younger) readers. What's just the right touch of outrage + humor? How much earnestness? How much sarcasm?

Her post yesterday was: "What to do when you're so overwhelmed by the Trump presidency you can barely move." It's illustrated by a cutesy cartoon of a wide-eyed Statue of Liberty in hell saying "This is fine." There are lots of gifs showing sweet young people getting upset. What are kids supposed to do when they feel required to stay engaged but battered by one scary thing after another?

The bad news comes in so fast you can hardly keep up with it.... As important as it is to remain informed, however, it's equally necessary for people to stay calm and not lapse into full on Facebook post hysteria. It's far easier to organize when you're motivated by the hope in your heart rather than the panic our president inspires.

You can't and shouldn't dissociate from what's happening in Washington. You have a moral responsibility to act. But there are more effective ways you can manage your media consumption and activism, making you a stronger organizer (and way more likable human)....

There are 13 items, like:

8. Eat whatever the hell you want because f*ck it

Listen, the doomsday clock is literally inching towards midnight — now is not the time to go Paleo, folks. Sure, it's technically "good" to eat healthy, but who cares. If eating fettuccine alfredo for breakfast keeps you from bawling in front of your boss, then do it. Don't let Trump take away your constitutional right to cream sauce.

That's not representative of the list. That's in there for relief. Mostly the list tells you to limit your consumption of the news and pick a few moderate political things to do (like "Go to a march").

Managing the mood of young people is serious business. It won't be easy. It shouldn't be easy.

Robert Stacy McCain reads Jessica Valenti's memoir "Sex Object."

Excerpt:

Dear God, what awful choices she has made in her life! Her personality was warped by insecurity, a problem made worse by the way her parents burdened her with their own ambitions and, of course, there was New York City itself.... The working-class neighborhood where Jessica Valenti grew up was frequented by hookers and their customers, and when she traveled to school via the subway, she encountered the notorious “flashers” and “mashers” (exhibitionists and frotteurs) who have menaced the city’s public-transportation system for decades. Ms. Valenti doesn’t seem to understand this as a uniquely urban hazard....

"We can't stop rape if we prize men's reputations over women's safety."

A headline at The Guardian demands that we put abstractions in hierarchical order. That's a style of thinking that feminists used to consider phallocratic.

Why can't 2 things be considered important and capable of balancing and coordination, considered in context? I remember when feminists criticized men for their unwillingness/inability to engage in that kind of complex thinking.

(Note: The underlying article does not support the headline.)

Things called curious that are not actually curious.

"... there is curiously no code about how much skin male prom-goers can show."

From the comments: "This article reminded me of this cartoon."

"I choose to believe Jackie. I lose nothing by doing so..."

"... even if I’m later proven wrong – but at least I will still be able to sleep at night for having stood by a young woman who may have been through an awful trauma. No matter how the media story ends, or what we come to know, there is a reason that people believed and continue to believe Jackie: There are so many people – too many people – who report similar attacks."

Writes Jessica Valenti in this morning's Guardian.

I choose to believe because I lose nothing by doing so...

Kind of like Pascal's wager, no?

"It’s not that I mind seeing breasts everywhere; after all, I have two of my own that I quite like."

"But it’s disheartening that breasts are often considered more interesting than the women they’re attached to – as if we’re an afterthought compared to our body parts. But now a bevy of women, in a matter of days, have taken back the tit. We’re reclaiming the rack, whether you like or not.... You don’t like it? Tough titties."

Writes Jessica Valenti in a Guardian column titled "Topless Keira Knightley is not alone: 2014 is the year women reclaimed our boobs."

For a prescient Althouse post — pinpointing 2006 as the year of "boob" reclamation — see "Let's take a closer look at those breasts."

(I put "boob" in quotes because that is not my style of slang. Nor is "tits," for that matter. I never use any word other than "breasts" (unless I'm quoting someone else).)

ADDED: 2 more things:

1. A "bevy of women"? I don't think I've ever seen the word "bevy" used outside of the trite phrase "bevy of beauties," where it seems old-fashioned and insufficiently attentive to the personhood of women but at least alliterates.

2. Why is it "disheartening that breasts are often considered more interesting than the women they’re attached to"? Lots of women aren't very interesting, whereas breasts have a base level of interestingness. If you're someone who believes you are regarded as less interesting than your breasts, become more interesting. I don't see how calling more attention to your breasts — in some sort of out-and-proud move like baring them in a magazine — is supposed to boost the relative interestingness of the aspects of you that are not your breasts. Do you imagine there's something especially feisty and feminist about posing with naked breasts that somehow transcends all those women in the past who thought they were baring their breasts in an exciting new way? I've heard this self-deception for at least 40 years. I'm sure Hugh Hefner has whispered it to bevies of beauties.

Do school dress codes rules about covering body parts discriminate illegally against female students?

At The Guardian, Jessica Valenti has an article about the high school dress code rebellion we talked about here. Her piece is titled "How many young women can a school legally punish for dress code violations? Singling out female students for humiliation and discipline because of their sex is a blatant violation of federal law."

Let’s be honest: rules for boys that prohibit certain kinds of jewelry or hoodies have nothing to do with their sexuality, whereas rules that seek to literally cover women’s bodies absolutely do.

There's a link to the actual dress code, PDF, where you can see that the rules are written in a gender-neutral form. "No... hoodies" restricts males and females. "No... accessories with metal spikes" — which I take it is the jewelry rule referred to — applies to males are females. "No visible undergarments" is a rule that might aim more at males than females, and it's a matter of opinion whether low slung pants with undershorts showing has anything to do with male sexuality.

"No low-cut blouses, tube/halter tops, midriff tops" does very strongly imply restriction on females specifically, but it's a matter of opinion whether young women making a special display of their breasts has something to do with their sexuality. (I'm thinking of statements from "SlutWalk"-type protesters and advocates of public nursing.) "No short-shorts, mini-skirts" refers almost entirely to females, but I suspect that many girls would be upset to hear that these fashion choices were expressions of sexuality, rather than fashion and comfort choices. (I know I was upset when confronted with this theory by my junior high school principal, explaining my miniskirt to me in 1965).

But I do get the point that the relevant sexuality could be in the minds of the rule-makers, and the covering up of females is part of a long and continuing tradition of controlling sexual behavior. The girl might not think she's doing anything related to sex when she wears short shorts on a hot day, but the authorities may worry that she's stirring sexual feelings in other students. (That's what I learned from the vice principal in 1965.)

Valenti continues:

The rules are so disproportionate...

An "if" would help that phrase.

... they could be a violation of Title IX, the federal law that ensures non-discrimination in educational environments. Alexandra Brodsky, co-founder of Know Your IX, ... explained that dress code violators could argue that they are being targeted precisely because of their sex: rules about short shorts or spaghetti strap tank tops are aimed directly at women’s attire.

The rules actually don't mention "spaghetti straps." The rule is "No tank tops," and boys do wear tank tops. I had to ask the internet "do boys wear short shorts," and I got: "Who Wears Short Shorts? Guys Wear Short Shorts!"

Back to Valenti:

There is also an argument to be made, Brodsky said, that targeting, humiliating and disciplining of female students could constitute a hostile environment, “making young women feel that the school isn’t for them.”

Interestingly, most school discipline seems to be aimed at boys and to make boys feel that school isn't for them. But maybe dress code rules, unlike rules about getting up out of your seat and pushing and shoving, has a greater impact on girls. It is important for authorities do need to set gender-neutral rules and to enforce them in a gender-neutral fashion. They should send the solid message that all the students are equally valued whether they are male or female.

But Valenti seems to be suggesting something more than that obvious proposition. She seems to say that formal gender neutrality is not enough and that demands for coverage of the flesh are aimed at females or that females have a special expressive interest in revealing their flesh. I don't reject that theory, but I would be more careful about applying it to the specific case of a high school principal demanding that students take reasonable rules seriously.

(And yes, yes, long ago — not as long ago as 1965, but long ago in 2006 — there was a big controversy about a blog post I wrote about the way Jessica Valenti posed in front of a very famous sexual harasser. I am not trying to rake up that old business, but I see the resonance here, and I'm mentioning it to free you from the need you might otherwise feel to remedy a seeming omission.)

I wasn't even going to talk about the tampons...

... but if Glenn is going to bring that up and the old uproar about being a feminist standing proudly in front of the old sexual-harassment-in-the-workplace ex-President, I'm going to have to link.

"I expect that later this century we'll see a growing trend around the world of many couples deciding in advance to simply not have children."

"Hopefully this will occur via mutual agreement for the man to have a vasectomy early on."

Not everyone has to agonize over choosing life priorities, and I think it's likely more and more will choose to skip mom-ism altogether,... maybe for economic reasons, and maybe because we'll have more talk about women asking themselves, "Do I really want to raise kids?".  "If I love kids, would I rather free myself to work with lots of them in other settings?"  

Oh, what could go wrong?!

That's one of the early comments on an article over at The Nation, by Jessica Valenti, "I'm Not a 'Mother First,'" which begins:

"This is a fucked-up country to grow up in, especially as a girl."

"And we all want to give young women the tools necessary to succeed. So let’s teach girls to survive a misogynist culture with a fist, not a smile."

Jessica Valenti, over at The Nation, is getting a bit exercised about plastic surgery (and a charity that pays for surgery to correct children's facial deformities, including some things that aren't that terrible, but that parents with enough money would probably get fixed to improve their kids' lives).

I respond to those 2 posts Andrew Sullivan wrote about me yesterday.

In Sullivan's first post, he quotes me saying that if his blog had comments, it too would collect some homophobic comments, just as mine does. He called this "disingenuous," because his readers, according to his polls, have said they don't want comments. That's irrelevant. I'm not criticizing him for not having comments. I'm just saying that if he did have comments, some of them would be nasty.

He also accuses me of having comments so that I can get "vile ad hominem, anonymous hate-speech" which he thinks, I "rel[y] on for traffic." What proof does he have that that is my reason for having comments or that it helps my traffic? I'd be very surprised if the ugliest comments brought more traffic. I think they hurt traffic, so I certainly am not relying on them for traffic. I do think a vivid, flourishing comments section keeps readers coming back to this blog, but not because of the ugliness. I think that drives people away.

This is more serious:

[T]hese were not just homophobic comments. They were vicious personal attacks on a specific human being, using both my sexual orientation and my illness as targets.

But generic attacks on gay people as a group are much worse than attacks on a specific person who is a public figure, like Andrew Sullivan.  They are still mean, but they are more like the anti-Bush material that goes on about how he was an alcoholic or used cocaine or whatever. I'm not saying it's good, just that it's different from general bigotry. And I would like Andrew Sullivan to acknowledge that I have a good number of active commenters here who are gay men. (Lesbians too.) So there is plenty of pushback against homophobia, and anybody who hates gay people is not going to be happy in my comments section.

Sullivan goes on to criticize me for not deleting the comments that attacked him:

I am glad she does not deny that she engaged in this thread herself, and she did so long after many of the references to my HIV were published. It seems to me that if you are actually contributing to a comment thread, you tend to have read the thread leading up to that point.

Well, try it some time. There are hundreds of comments. I skim. I look for spam. I stop at the names of commenters I know and like. I have a free speech policy and ignore stuff that looks like low-quality junk. I have a lot of idiosyncratic strategies for getting through it all, and it's still a lot of work. I'm telling you: Your assumption is wrong.

So the idea she had no idea what was afoot is ludicrous.

I may know what's "afoot," but only in a vague way, and not oriented toward finding things to delete. My working strategy is not to delete. From that I have exceptions. One is to look closely if someone emails me and points to something specific. Sullivan never did me that behind-the-scenes courtesy. He just made a post attacking me — and reprinting the ugly stuff. If he really wanted it excised, he wouldn't have reprinted it. He wanted to expose it and air it out. And there you see the value of my non-deletion policy. The ugly stuff is self-destructing! It argues against itself. Why drive it underground? Why empower the haters by letting them see they got to you? They are their own worst enemies.

She has already accused me of being a racist, a heterophobe and a misogynist...

I appreciate those 2 links, because I wouldn't have remembered what I'd said. Go ahead and read those old posts of mine. I didn't generically call him a racist. I found racism in the way he talked about Bobby Jindal. As to heterophobia and misogyny.... well, frankly, I do think Sullivan has a problem with women. Does he ever write positively about women? For the most part, women barely exist in his world. And when one comes into prominence — notably Sarah Palin — he seems to feel a special antagonism.

[E]ven if everything Althouse says in her defense is true, it says a lot to me that she is unable even to offer a word of apology or regret, or to remove any of the vilest personal attacks in that thread. I offended her a while back with a post on her announcement that she was getting engaged to one of the commenters on her site... I subsequently apologized for any offense she subsequently felt.

Did he really apologize? I emailed him about his outrageous insult and he posted something, but it wasn't really to the point.  And anyway, "I subsequently apologized for any offense she subsequently felt"... that's what's called a nonapology. Okay, if it's really that easy then: Andrew, I am subsequently sorry if anything on my blog subsequently offended you.

I was too glib, and insensitive, but it's in a different universe from the hate speech she publishes.

It's different all right. The difference is, what was said about me, you wrote. I didn't write any of the the offensive comments. I just have an open forum and a free speech policy. To say I "published" it makes it sound as though I pre-screened it. Ironically, you published those comments. You chose to copy and paste them on your blog.

If Althouse had not partially built her traffic on this kind of stuff for years, and if she weren't a big blog, and a contributor to bloggingheads and other MSM outlets and a professor at a university, I'd let this slide as I usually do....

Since I didn't respond yesterday, he may have thought I was letting it slide, because he came up with this second post:

Just check out Ann Althouse's reaction to Garance Franke-Ruta's rather anodyne reference to Jessica Valenti breast controversy on bloggingheads....

Oh, for the love of God.

I have no idea what the reference is....

Don't worry. It has to do with breasts. It would only bore you.

... she threatens to hang up and tells Garance that she is involved in character assassination. But she is happy to post the vilest attacks on my being gay and having HIV and refuses to apologize.

Again, jeez, I don't post the comments! I have an open comments section and a policy against deletion. In the Bloggingheads, I was in a one-on-one conversation with someone who was quietly sticking a dagger in and I called her on it. Where is the contradiction? I don't like crap said about me — and believe me, the breast controversy was a shitstorm — and I completely understand that you don't like crap written about you. Do you realize that my free speech policy includes leaving hundreds of insults against me in my comments section?

Finally, Sullivan restates my asserted free-speech position and then quotes something I wrote in 2005, when I was annoyed by the trend in the comments and said "I'm adopting a new, more activist form of supervision." He then says:

Maybe I missed a post after that where she expressed her willingness not just to accept but to participate in threads that accuse an HIV-survivor of AIDS dementia because they disagree with him.

Let me use his word, "disingenuous." It's disingenuous to assume that a policy I stated 4 years ago is the policy I maintain and employ today. Obviously, it's not. Digging up the old defunct policy is a lame device that Sullivan is using to push the point he's been tying himself up in knots trying to make, that the insulting remarks came from me. They did not.

Why antagonize me over this? My inclination is to be sympathetic to anyone with an illness, and I like substantive argument (or funny snark) and not mean-spirited trash.

And, Andrew, if you ever want to go on Bloggingheads and talk about it one-on-one, let me know.

"Love in the Time of Commenters."

On Bloggingheads, Bob Wright wants to know all about what's been going on. Topics:

Ann gets engaged to one of her blog’s commenters
Is the internet full of shy, lonely men?
Are women always in it for the man’s money?
Ann accuses Obama of excessive frivolity
Should we be more freaked out about the economy?
Reviving the Althouse vs. BhTV commenter rivalry

I'll update with some juicy clips soon.

ADDED: The first clip, in which Bob speculates that Meade might be my sockpuppet. The clip ends with a surprising offer.



AND: I shock Bob with a very personal revelation:



AND: "All your commenters woo you, Ann."



AND: The test for how much you need to kiss in public:



IN THE COMMENTS: Mortimer Brezny said:

See? This is why Mortimer Brezny stopped blogging. He came on this damn blog to woo Ann into marrying him and all it got him was mockery from Trooper York and into flame wars with Simon Dodd. (For which I apologize, Simon.) Then some other commenter steals Mr. Brezny's idea and succeeds. I mean, all the defending I did of Ann was totally just a vain and pitiable attempt to get in the knickerbockers! Who cares about what Ron Bailey thinks! And it's Meade! Oh man, I could have put in so much less blogging effort! Gaaah! I mean, I threw Jessica Valenti through a plate glass window for Ann! And I broke her leg with a pipe! I mean, talk about full frontal feminism!

But at least this bloggingheads diavlog clears some things up. Ann is not dominant in her personal relationships. I guess that kills it, Simon. It kills it for me. I mean, I had fantasies, man. Mortimer had dirty, filthy fantasies. Mortimer came to the meetups to score, man! It hurts! The wooing I did here! The hardcore woo action that I put out here! I was devoting it up in here. I am fulminating with rage! Rage and fulmination and fire and brimstone! I mean, if I can't have Ann, no one else should! That is the cosmic rule, doesn't everyone KNOW that?

Anyway, I'm not a shy guy. I don't have any problems meeting women. I just use e-harmony. That's where the real sluts are. But, truly heartbroken. I am. Truly.

So: congratulations and stuff. To the happy couple. This post has all been performance art. Now I must go weep. And, I better get frontpaged for this crap.

"The feminist movement has a right to define what constitutes being a member, and I'm not going to appropriate their label if it bothers them..."

"... any more than I'm going to start calling myself a Catholic who just doesn't happen recognize the authority of the Church. If you read any feminist blogs, you'll know that they spend an enormous amount of time trying to define the core values of feminism, and while I may disagree with the definitions they end up with, if they dislike my opinions on the matter, well, it's their movement."

Says Megan McArdle, and I completely disagree. I was going to explain my disagreement in detail but the second comment over there — by Julian Sanchez — is so apt that it instantly cured me of any propensity toward verbosity:

Why is it "their movement"? I didn't realize the analogy "Jessica Valenti : Feminism :: The Pope : Catholicism" held.

And why must feminism be attached to that ugly word "movement"? Movement feminists can have and define their movement, but they shouldn't be allowed to claim feminism. You know, back in the 1980s, I used to be afraid to say I was a feminist because there were other, more active people out there defining the term and I didn't want to adopt by reference a set of beliefs that I wasn't able to control. By behaving that way, I was ceding the field to the most activist types. That's what Megan is talking about doing now. I understand the impulse to say: Okay, then you can have your word and make it mean whatever you want it to mean. I'll find a different word. But if a word has a grand history and tradition — and "feminism" does — then it deserves a wide usage and a continued struggle over its meaning. Don't give it away to the boldest aggressor.

ADDED: Elisa Camahort thinks I have the better side of this argument and says:

In a way McArdle's concession of the term is not much different than Rush Limbaugh painting feminists as Feminazis. It's saying: over there there is a group of people who hold beliefs with which I disagree, and I am going to decide that they represent the sum total of all people who might believe some of the same stuff.

I do need to defend Rush here. In the time I've been listening to him (since January 2008), he hasn't said "feminazis" much, and when he does, it's always to bait a certain type of type of extremist feminist. He seems to support equal rights for women and similar individualistic feminist values.

In fact, I have heard him encourage young women not to marry, to go into business, and to compete with men. I have never heard him say women are inferior or that they should devote their lives to serving men and bearing children. So I suspect that he would concede that he agrees with feminism broadly defined.

The people to whom McArdle would defer are perhaps the same kind of extremists that Rush is talking about when he says feminazis. So if McArdle-style deference were to prevail, "feminist" and "feminazi" would come to mean the same thing but only because the category "feminist" will have shrunken.

"Is Obama over?"

Bob and Mickey think so.

The link is to a segment of a Bloggingheads episode that's worth watching in its entirety, in part because Bob and Mickey are such great diavloggers, but also because they talk about me... twice. The first time is a teaser for a Bloggingheads that I've recorded, but which hasn't gone up yet and which might cause a big sensation. The second time is in the last segment, where Mickey gives Bob a pop culture quiz, and one question is "Jessica or Nick?" and the only Jessica that Bob can think of is Jessica Valenti, whom Mickey can't identify until Bob prompts with my name, at which point -- I think -- Mickey gives me some light support.

ADDED: A link at "teaser for a Bloggingheads" and, from it, a new quote for the masthead.