Berkeley linguistics professor says going after Hillary for her email is a "bitch hunt" — happening only because Hillary is a woman.

I'm reading this thing — "Hillary Clinton’s Emailgate Is an Attack on Women," by Robin Lakoff, published in Time — and I'm waiting for the linguistics analysis, but it's just a series of unsupported assertions in the manner of a Facebook rant.

The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female. Can you imagine this happening to a man? Clinton is guilty of SWF (Speaking While Female), and emailgate is just a reminder to us all that she has no business doing what she’s doing and must be punished, for the sake of all decent women everywhere. There is so much of that going around....

If the candidate were male, there would be no scolding and no “scandal.” Those very ideas would be absurd. Men have a nearly absolute right to freedom of speech. In theory, so do women, but that, as the creationists like to say, is only a theory....

It’s not about emails; it’s about public communication by a woman in general...

(How to tell the genders apart: men are truthful; women are liars. Now you know.)...

This is so embarrassing, I wouldn't talk about it except that Lakoff is a professor associated with a prominent university and promising special insight through linguistics. So I'm afraid we need to stare straight at what would normally cause decent people to avert our eyes.

As for freedom of speech, it doesn't mean that you're not responsible for the things you say and do with speech. And if you undertake to protect the security of the American people by handling classified information, you get access to speech that you must keep restricted. If you are extremely careless in protecting that information, you richly deserve criticism, and — male or female — "freedom of speech" is no defense.

By the way, the first paragraph of Lakoff's piece reads like a children's book — an insane children's book:

I am mad. I am mad because I am scared. And if you are a woman, you should be, too. Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us.

Yeah, I'm mad too. I'm mad because a woman who is purportedly concerned that women's speech is treated as less worthy is putting out such a ludicrously unworthy exemplar of speech by a woman.

"Aggressive humor, you’ll probably guess, is linked to maleness...."

Writes Kyle Smith in a NY Post column titled "Who tells the best jokes? Neurotic, aggressive jerks."

[Scott Weems, a cognitive scientist] at the University of Maryland, tiptoes into the area of what he delicately calls women’s “struggle in the world of comedy,” or as feminist sociolinguist Robin Lakoff put it more directly in 1975, “Women can’t tell jokes — they are bound to ruin the punch line, they mix up the order of things, and so on. Moreover, they don’t ‘get’ jokes. In short, women have no sense of humor.”

With feminists like that, who needs male chauvinist pigs? I googled that quote to see if Lakoff was paraphrasing what other people think, and the first hit was this webpage — with genuinely ludicrous retro web design — with the headline — I'm not kidding — "From Peek-a-boo to Sarcasm: Women's Humor as a Means of Both Connection and Resistance." I almost got a headache finding the answer to my question, which is that Lakoff was only explaining the old stereotype, not expressing her own opinion. Anyway, Smith continues:

Terrified of where he’s heading, Weems retreats to the usual Women’s Studies jibber-jabber about how this is men’s fault, writing, “Women communicate differently than men and, consequently, are often subjected to misunderstandings in male-dominated environments. Because their language tends to be powerless, they can’t tell jokes, at least not effectively, and so are robbed of an important social function.”

But isn't Smith doing pro-woman jibber-jabber of a typical sort: Whatever is found to be true of women is portrayed as good. "Neurotic, aggressive jerks" are the best joke tellers, and that's why men are better at joke telling. What might seem bad about women — inadequacy at joke-telling — is transformed into good: non-jerkiness.