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....

"The pseudo feminists, the pseudo Marxists, the pseudo power-and gender-freaks... I call them all, in capital letters, the School of Resentment."

"I always get nasty reviewers. I couldn’t care less," said Harold Bloom, asked by Time Magazine whether he "anticipate[s] flak" because his "new book, The Daemon Knows, features 12 American writers touched by genius – only one of whom is a woman."

I don’t even bother anymore. I’m always being denounced.

I assumed I knew who the one woman is, and I was right. Here's the book, in case you want to check the list (encourage old man Bloom by buying it).

How clean did "male feminist" Hugo Schwyzer come?

The Daily Beast has an interview with the headline "Porn Professor Hugo Schwyzer Comes Clean About His Twitter Meltdown and Life as a Fraud." I suspect he's playing a longer game, and this is first class bullshit. We've all heard of this guy now, and I wonder what's his next move, now that he has our attention.

Let's review the facts thus far. He got his academic credentials in British and medieval history, and he is a tenured professor at Pasadena City College, who taught classes in Women's Studies. It emerged that he, a 46-year-old married man, had "sexted with a 27-year-old sex worker activist." Then, he tweeted a lot about what a fraud he was. Who cares?! Well, I guess it was dramatic for a professor to let loose with a spate of tweets ostensibly attacking himself.

Using the iPhone as an eBook with the app Stanza.

I'm a sucker for eBooks. I bought a Rocket Book years ago and, in the last year, a Kindle. (Here's a vlog I did comparing the 2 quasi-rectangular objects). And I haven't much liked either of them. I complained about the Kindle here, and I haven't touched it in months. I have to remember not to throw away hundreds of dollars on eBooks!

But now, here's an app -- Stanza -- that makes the iPhone work as an eBook. It's free, so if I don't like it and don't use it, I won't have to feel like a chump. Anyway, it works nicely. I've set my font size. The print is, of course, bright and clear. And you don't turn pages, you "cover flow" to the next page with a finger swipe.

The on-line libraries are fun to browse. For example, I can see a list of the most commonly assigned high school books. The top 5:

1. "Pride and Prejudice," by Jane Austen
2. "Jane Eyre," by Charlotte Bronte
3. "Wuthering Heights," by Emily Bronte
4. "Death Comes to the Archbishop," by Willa Cather
5. "The Awakening," by Kate Chopin

Notice anything? Has high school become Women's Studies? Well, to be fair, the next 20+ are by men: "Heart of Darkness," "The Divine Comedy," "Don Quixote," "A Tale of Two Cities," "Crime and Punishment," etc.

It's also interesting to see what books are most popular among those who download free digital books. From the Freebooks list, #1 is "The Art of War." Hmmm. The top 6 are by men, and #7 is good old "Pride and Prejudice." (When did that get to be the greatest novel ever written?) But generally, this list is pretty masculine, and I'm glad to see it's not all novels. Charles Darwin ranks high. So do Freud and Nietzsche. From the Project Gutenberg list, Albert Einstein is #1, followed by Confucius, "The Art of War" again, and Plato's "Republic." The Gutenberg crowd is really ambitious. What's the top novel for these folks? "Siddhartha"!

Anyway, highly recommended, if only for the fun of browsing lists of what other people read. But I've downloaded a few things to read in full.

The Givhan of HuffPo is pretty sure her Women's Studies professor vomits whenever she sees Sarah Palin.

Karin Tanabe, who seems to be the Givhan of HuffPo -- which is nothing like the Mull of Kintyre -- takes a 2-week old Robin Givhan column -- which she quotes but doesn't link to -- and trashes of Sarah Palin's style.

Because it wasn't enough for Givhan to credit Palin with showing that "a woman can step onto the national political stage without having to manipulate her wardrobe into some torturous costume calibrated to make her look authoritative but not threatening, feminine but not sexy, serious but not dour."

Palin must be mocked.

Tanabe writes:

The point is, Sarah Palin and her hockey mom's, grandpa's and second cousins, don't want her to be authoritative.

It's funny when the Givhan of HuffPo falls prey to the grocer's apostrophe, is it not? Modeling haughtiness, she takes a pratfall.

Her bad highlights and her layers of puffy bangs scream "don't mind me, I've been filing my nails in a log cabin for the last decade and didn't know the bouffant was now reserved for burlesque dancers and women who think Vogue is a devilish jig invented by Madonna (cue giggle)." I'm pretty sure my college feminist literature professor is vomiting every time she sees bouffant Barbie. Don't worry Professor Hart, I am too.

Is that that what Women's Studies teaches these days -- inane snobbery? And when did throwing up become the preferred form of elite expression?

Spewing.

Paglia on Palin: "a brand new style of muscular American feminism," "combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen."

Continuing with the Paglia article, let's look at the part about Sarah Palin:

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before...

As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing since my arrival on the scene nearly 20 years ago that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than taking women's studies courses, with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances....

I am still waiting for substantive evidence that Sarah Palin is a dangerous extremist. I am perfectly willing to be convinced, but right now, she seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan, someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it. I don't see her arrival as portending the end of civil liberties or life as we know it....

A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn't worth a warm bucket of spit....

Now that's the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism -- a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. Sarah Palin, if her reputation survives the punishing next two months, may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.

Exactly. This is the way I feel too. I may not agree with a lot of things Palin stands for, but I celebrate this advance in feminism.

This is great for women, and it's especially great that it is happening from the conservative side, because feminism is already well-entrenched among liberals. Let feminism spread amongst conservatives, in this new version that is purged of all the off-putting trappings of liberal attitudes and issues.

Mocking Hillary is not sexist — and it's not good feminism to think it is.

So there's this novelty pen with a laughing Hillary head stuck on top. Really, if you like Hillary, it should even be a good thing. It's just an item of commercial political Americana:

"

Yet Media Matters is upset. And Melissa McEwan cries sexism:

[I]f you are savvy enough to understand that the sexes don't play on equal playing fields in the first place, then you ought to be savvy enough to understand that singling out Clinton's voice as horrible necessarily invokes the woman-specific sexist context, even if that is not your intent.

As I've said before, you can't divorce criticisms of women from the context of womanhood....

[W]e can't use misogyny-charged criticisms in reference to Clinton as if her sex doesn't matter. And "her voice is unbearable" and/or "her laugh is terrible" are unavoidably tinged with a misogynist history older than this country, even if the person making the complaint isn't consciously or even subconsciously motivated by sexism.

The point is, you've got to be aware of your history. And there's a long-ass history of marginalizing women in this way. So if you're inexorably compelled to criticize Hillary's voice, just know that you've got to own the sexist context, too.

Look, we make fun of male candidates. We joke around about how they look and sound and it's often unfair and unrelated to their qualifications for office. It's part of the vivid debate we have in America. We don't have to pull back and tone it down because a woman (or a black person) is running. The candidates are seeking vast power. We should be irreverent and unafraid.

McEwan apparently means to be a good feminist by saying things they teach you to say in Women's Studies class, hushing and chiding us, and grasping after moral high ground with vague references to "history," but this notion that a powerful woman needs special protection from the full force of political debate — with all its vicious mockery — is not good for women. It may be stupid or unfair to judge a candidate by her laugh, but to cry sexism is lame.

The art that was obviously a hoax was a hoax.

WaPo reports:

A Yale University student's senior art project, which she said documented her bleeding during repeated self-induced abortions, sparked a protest on campus, an outcry on the Internet, and debates over morality, medicine, art and academia.

And -- the project was all faked. Senior Aliza Shvarts told Yale officials yesterday that she didn't get pregnant and didn't have abortions. But that didn't stop an outpouring of emotion as the story spread....

Within hours after the article ran yesterday in the student newspaper, blogs were full of livid reactions, including horror that so many fetuses were apparently aborted, revulsion at the graphic nature of the piece, shock that someone would risk her own health in such a way, and general disdain for art and academia.

I wish the WaPo would report that in addition to the "outcry on the Internet," there were plenty of people, including myself, who immediately spotted a hoax.

In a statement yesterday, Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said: "Ms. Shvarts . . . stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages. The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman's body."

Ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman's body... So that's what passes as insight at Yale these days? If I was going to get livid and horrified about something it would be that a great university sucks so many young women into the into the intellectual graveyard of Women's Studies. Think what these women could be studying instead of this endlessly recycled drivel. If you care about women's bodies, study science and help us with the limitations of the body. But to imagine you are helping us by restating meager platitudes is just very sad.

Shvartz, an arts major, told the Yale Daily News: "I believe strongly that art should be a medium for politics and ideologies, not just a commodity. I think that I'm creating a project that lives up to the standard of what art is supposed to be."

So you "believe strongly" in the boring dogma that's been circulating in the art world for decades? Do you believe anything interesting or original that might make it worth inflicting yourself on the world in the form of an artist?

"It's supposed to challenge the mythology of the body," [said classmate Juan Castillo]. "Are we only supposed to do what our bodies were 'naturally' meant to do, which is to procreate?

"I think she was definitely trying to spark conversation. In that respect, she's accomplished her goal," Castillo said. "But I don't know if she meant it to get this crazy, this out of control."

No, the conversation about whether we are only supposed to do what "our bodies were 'naturally' meant to do, which is to procreate" has been going on for a long, long time without the "spark" of a jejune art project.

The only interesting question is who was dopey enough to think this wasn't a hoax. WaPo would like us to think it was only those deranged internetters who get everything wrong. But it seems to me that a lot of the Yalies were slow on the uptake.

ADDED: The first commenter here links to this Yale Daily News item headlined "University calls art project a fiction; Shvarts '08 disputes Yale's claim." She's saying her school libeled her?

But Shvarts stood by her project, calling the University’s statement “ultimately inaccurate.”

Ultimately inaccurate? That sounds weaselly.

But Shvarts reiterated Thursday that she repeatedly use a needleless syringe to insert semen into herself.

Who's to say she didn't? Produce the sperm donor! Sue the university for libel! Let's keep thinking about Shvarts and her semen injections, because it's really enlightening on women's issues. Put her on "Oprah." This is at least as profound as the "pregnant man."

At the end of her menstrual cycle, she took abortifacient herbs to induce bleeding, she said. She said she does not know whether or not she was ever pregnant.

At the end of her menstrual cycle... she got her period!

“No one can say with 100-percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen,” Shvarts said, “because the nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties.”

Uncertainties... ambiguities... that's so heavy.

This afternoon, Shvarts showed the News footage from tapes she plans to play at the exhibit. The tapes depict Shvarts — sometimes naked, sometimes clothed — alone in a shower stall bleeding into a cup.

Oh, great, homemade porn.

Yale’s statement comes after a day of widespread outrage all across the country following an article in today’s edition of the News in which Shvarts described her supposed exhibition, which she said would include the video recordings well as a preserved collection of the blood from the process, which she said she is storing in a freezer.

Right next to the Haagen Dazs vanilla raspberry swirl frozen yogurt.

IN THE COMMENTS:

titusisnotcurrentlyhorny said...
It would of been cool if it was true.

I would love to see an art piece of hundreds of people on toilets pinching a loaf also.

Also, pictures of the hog in different "moods" would be interesting.

8:57 AM

titusisnotcurrentlyhorny said...
Tits bouncing in slow motion on thousands of televisions would also be something that should be explored in someone's art.

8:58 AM

titusisnotcurrentlyhorny said...
I'm really into Avant Garde shit.

9:00 AM

ADDED: The Chronicle of Higher Education presents the issue in terms of protecting the free expression of the student:

Robert M. O'Neil, a free-speech expert at the University of Virginia, agreed that displaying the Yale student's artwork is about freedom of expression. "Art departments have always been and must remain shelters for creativity which sometimes offends and often challenges," said Mr. O'Neil, director of the university's Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression. But he also acknowledged that such a message "doesn't usually go down terribly well with people in the outside world."

[T]he episode at Yale has prompted questions about what constitutes legitimate academic work and how far universities should go in giving voice or providing a platform to students who express outrageous and offensive opinions. The incident also has caused people who already are skeptical about what they see as an anything-goes attitude in higher education to feel even more alienated from the world of academe.

(The boldface is mine.)

This is framed as if the "people in the outside world" don't understand art and don't care about free speech. But that's not how I've written about the problem here. I'm big on free speech. That's why I want more speech and why I'm dishing it out in hefty portions here. I'm being "outrageous and offensive" as I try to shine some light on bad, boring, unoriginal, lame, weak and bad for women and damaging to abortion rights. I am concerned not with the strength of the academic citadel, but with its feebleness. What is this elite institution giving young people if it pads out their minds with art world and Women's Studies ideology. Where is the critical thinking? Where is the education?

(I'm saying this as someone who has put a lot of time and energy into studying and caring about feminism and who wasted my undergraduate education years frittering away my powers in the art school of a great university.)

At least the Chronicle has the sense to talk to Roger Kimball: "What does a higher education mean and what is going on in these privileged, expensive redoubts of educational endeavor?"

But why am I reading that, when Roger Kimball has a blog. Yes, he's writing about this, of course:

I know that in the universe occupied by Ivy League academics, the spectacle of a woman repeatedly inseminating herself, quaffing abortifacient drugs (“herbal” ones, though: we’re all organic environmentalists here), and they video taking the resultant mess poses a problem. I mean, in that universe there really are basic ethical standards: Thou shalt not smoke, for example. Thou shalt not support support the war in Iraq. Thou shalt not vote Republican. There really are some things that are beyond the pale.

But when it comes to “art”: oh, that’s a tricky one. Shvarts “is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art,” the Yale spokeswoman said. But doesn’t it depend on the nature of the performance?

Read the whole thing.

They all play the gender card... and Hillary's playing it well.

So says Susan Faludi. What counts as the gender card?

When facing George H.W. Bush, Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis learned this lesson too late, after he failed to fly into a vigilante-style rage in response to the question: "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?" Dukakis' reply -- "No, I don't, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life" -- whacked his approval ratings from 49% to 42% overnight and helped deny him the election.

So, the gender card is being played when a candidate doesn't realize he should play it? Or is Faludi patching over her sketchy argument by making it seem as though Bush I asked the "if Kitty Dukakis were raped"? (CNN news anchor Bernard Shaw asked the question in a debate. And no one wanted to see Dukakis "fly into a vigilante-style rage." We just wanted to see some human feeling and not a robotic incantation of his stand on the death penalty.)

The gender card was also played, Faludi argues, in the 2004 election, with Bush II's "Wolves" ad. Here's the ad — which I admit is absurd, but find the gender card:



Give up. Here's Faludi:

In "Wolves," set in a forest invaded by a pack of wolves (read: terrorists), a trembling female voice-over claimed that Kerry had voted for cuts in U.S. intelligence "so deep they would have weakened America's defenses -- and weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm." "Wolves" engaged the American terror dream, which the GOP was going to vanquish with a cowboy swagger.

Was that woman's voice "trembling"? (It is so easy to accuse Faludi of sexism for hearing a woman's voice and imagining it is trembling.) Really, where is the gender card? Both men and women are concerned about security. And there's nothing in the ad about cowboys. There isn't even an association between cowboys and wolves. Cowboys don't fight wolves.

Faludi also cites Bush II's ad "Ashley's Story." Let's take a look:



This ad is deeply sentimental (and incredibly effective), but again, how is it playing the gender card? It may be that woman are generally more responsive to this ad than men are, but there is gender difference everywhere. Trying to appeal to women with women's voices, images of children, or — God help us — tinkling piana music, is not playing the gender card. Candidates craft messages for various constituents, but it's not playing a card unless you are basing an argument on gender, such as saying, as Hillary Clinton does, that her being a woman is a reason to vote for her for President or that she is being attacked because she is a woman. That is unusual, and that doesn't happen all the time.

Now, let's look at Faludi's other point, that Hillary Clinton is playing the gender card well:

So far, the only person who has a lock on rescuing women is the one female candidate. Her approach departs from the old male version. In the old model, helpless women were saved from perilous danger by men; in the new, women are granted authority and agency to rescue themselves.

Soooo.... HC "has a lock on rescuing women" but "women are granted authority and agency to rescue themselves." So is Hillary rescuing us or not? Or is she the one granting the authority and agency to rescue ourselves. If so, what does it mean, and how is she doing it?

And what is "perilous danger"? The opposite of safe danger (or perilous safety)?

Oh, why did I assign myself the task of wading through this morass? Fortunately, I am going to grant myself the authority and agency to rescue myself from this Women's Studies rhetoric and note that Faludi doesn't bother with coherence. She simply swirls up an evocative, emotional verbal melange which, I would say if I indulged in Faludious reasoning, amounts to playing the gender card, since it stimulates the female mind more than the male.

But let's get a grip reason and slog to the end of the Faludi swamp:

Understanding the distinction [between the "old male... model" and the new Hillary model] is essential to an evaluation of current American politics.

Okay. Somehow, Hillary is going to represent individuals taking responsibility — authority and agency — for themselves, as distinguished from the "male model" of expecting someone to rescue us. That doesn't sound like what Hillary normally talks about, but Faludi sees this distinction "on vivid display." Where? Well, Bush signed the Afghan Women and Children Relief Act ant then failed to finance "women-run nongovernmental organizations in Afghanistan." Get it? And Bush "sought to roll back women's progress on many fronts, from reproductive rights to employment equity to military status." Vivid? Or murky? You decide.

And what's Hillary Clinton doing that distinctly different from the bad old "male modle"? Let's see if Faludi has something vivid here:

This year, as always, the presidential candidates must contend with the rescue formula, complicated by the fact that Bush has so devalued its currency. In this climate, Hillary Clinton can do what her male counterparts cannot. She is, indeed, reaching for the gender card, as her accusers claim. It's just different from the one they imagine. She is auditioning for the role of rescuer on a feminist frontier.

She returned to Wellesley to tell female undergraduates that she was there to free them; she was there to help them "roll up our sleeves" and "shatter that highest glass ceiling." As such, she latched onto a crucial element of presidential races past, and possibly to come -- that at the core of all American political rescue fantasies is a young woman in need.

In the general election, whoever the candidates may be, they will be tempted, perhaps required, to show just those bona fides. Clinton may be the only one who can do so without betraying the signature of a disgraced cowboy ethic.

What on earth does that mean? Is there anything there but the blunt fact that Hillary Clinton is a woman?

The argument seems to be that Bush is a man who ran for President by calling attention to his manliness, then, because he did a bad job, he gave manliness a bad name, so the cure is to have a woman President. If she's saying anything other than that, I can't strain it out of the godawful mud of her writing. And that argument is stupid and offensive. If there is some other argument to be found in there, please tell me what it is.

Let's take a closer look at those breasts.

NOTICE: You are about to read a post that has been widely linked and discussed on various blogs, and I suspect that you are not inclined to read this post carefully or with any sympathy toward what I intended. So, I'm adding this note to make it more likely that you will understand what I am trying to say. First, I am writing from a feminist perspective, even though I am criticizing a feminist. Second, the "breasts" referred to in the heading are the drawings and photographs of breasts that a feminist blogger sees fit to decorate her blog with. I don't like that. Third, the real target of this post is Bill Clinton. I think Clinton betrayed feminism (and I hate the way many feminists have given him a pass). Fourth, this post is written in a humorous, cutting style. It's meant to hurt, but I am attacking public figures about an important issue.

What follows after the asterisks is the original post.

***

I wanted to elevate a discussion from the comments section of a post from Wednesday, you know the one with the photo of the Daou-wrangled bloggers posing in front of Bill Clinton? The first commenter, Goesh, picks up on my prompt -- "Let's just array these bloggers... randomly" -- and wisecracks: "Who is the Intern directly in front of him with the black hair?"

Eventually, Jessica from a blog called Feministing, shows up and says: "The, um, 'intern' is me. It's so nice to see women being judged by more than their looks. Oh, wait..."

Snarky but somewhat conciliatory, I say: "Well, Jessica, you do appear to be 'posing.' Maybe it's just an accident."

Jessica Feministing returns and says:

It's a picture; people pose. And I'm not sure I understand your logic anyway. If I "pose" for a picture (as opposed to sulking and hunching over?) then I deserve to be judged for my looks? I don't see anyone talking shit about the other bloggers smiling pretty for the camera.

Provoked, I decide to actually give her a small dose of the kind of judgment for brains she seems to demanding:

Jessica: I'm not judging you by your looks. (Don't flatter yourself.) I'm judging you by your apparent behavior. It's not about the smiling, but the three-quarter pose and related posturing, the sort of thing people razz Katherine Harris about. I really don't know why people who care about feminism don't have any edge against Clinton for the harm he did to the cause of taking sexual harrassment seriously, and posing in front of him like that irks me, as a feminist. So don't assume you're the one representing feminist values here. Whatever you call your blog....

Making this colloquy into this new blog post, I actually click over to Jessica's blog, and what the hell? The banner displays silhouettes of women with big breasts (the kind that Thelma and Louise get pissed off at when they're seen on truck mudflaps). She's got an ad in the sidebar for one of her own products, which is a tank top with the same breasty silhouette, stretched over the breasts of a model. And one of the top posts is a big closeup on breasts.

Sooooo... apparently, Jessica writes one of those blogs that are all about using breasts for extra attention. Then, when she goes to meet Clinton, she wears a tight knit top that draws attention to her breasts and stands right in front of him and positions herself to make her breasts as obvious as possible?

Well, I'm going to assume Jessica's contributions to my comments are an attempt at a comic performance, as was her attendence at the luncheon dressed in the guise of Monica Lewinsky. Lord knows we need more comical feminists.

Or are you going to say she's some kind of Karl Rove plant? Alternatives: She's a clueless fool. She's in it for the money. (And you know the blog money is all in the T-shirts.)

UPDATE: You know what? If you breastblog and someone calls you on it, just laugh. If you try to deny it, people will laugh at you. Case in point? The big comments thread herein. I'm not saying you should read all the stuff in there, even though some of it's funny (and it could be useful as raw material for a Women's Studies master's thesis), but really, denial is some serious quicksand. And thanks to Glenn for linking. Quoting the title of this post unleashed some serious Instalanche action. (I knew it would.) The most ever, actually. And late on a Friday! What are you going to do? Guys love breasts. I think Jessica knows that quite well. And I think for all her gasping outrage, she's thoroughly pleased to get this attention. And as for you chumps who spent the afternoon defending her... well, you're chumps. So am I for giving her the publicity.... but what the hell? It's Friday.

ANOTHER UPDATE: This post has gotten a lot of links from folks who profess "puzzlement." I think a lot of this puzzlement is willful blindness to the criticism of Clinton.

Audible Althouse #50.

The 50th podcast is ready to download or stream.

Freddie's dead, smoking'll kill you (and make you glamorous), shallow fictional characters (and the authors who hate them), the women's studies sociologist who became a prostitute and why the Washington Post is writing so much about it (and what it's not saying), John McCain's lack of awareness and spontaneity while giving a commencement address at The New School, the promotion of movies by stirring up bogus controversies, and wondering how sweet or harsh to make my own writing.

"The woman with a PhD in sociology, an expertise in women's studies and a former career as a well-regarded college professor."

Accused of running a house of prostitution in her $400,000 suburban home. The neighbors had gotten suspicious:

For months, Bonnie Sorak and other residents on Shirley Meadow Court had speculated about the goings-on at the home of the woman known to take walks at midnight, string Christmas lights at 4 a.m. and always buy candy when schoolkids went door to door. Lately, neighbors had noticed, men in golf shirts driving Lexuses and other nice cars seemed to be frequenting the house. Sorak had idly wondered if Britton was dealing drugs. Another neighbor had joked that she must be turning tricks.

Now, as Sorak pulled up to her house, her two small children in the backseat, she spotted police. Hurriedly closing the garage door behind her, she called her husband: "The SWAT team is over there now."

Men in golf shirts! That gets the neighbors talking. Too many men, too similarly dressed, all with nice cars, and just not staying long enough.

"My god, I can't wait for Mardi Gras. I am so homesick. Hearing about these holdouts gives me so much hope."

I just wanted to break out one of the comments from yesterday's post about the holdouts in New Orleans. The post is written by one of our regular commenters, Elizabeth. She's an English and Women's Studies instructor from New Orleans, who left before the storm:

Ann, a message posted late Saturday night by one of the holdouts who has been helping organize rescuers and information, said she was "sitting in Johnny White's drinking a COLD Abita Amber [a favorite local brew any Wisconsite would enjoy], thanks to Eddie Compass!!" Compass is our Chief of Police, so that tells me there is some negotiating going on.

...[T]he corrupt cops are the exceptions. The NOPD ranks have worked this storm, and the days after, away from the families, in sometimes terrifying and frequently sorrowful circumstances, and they keep showing up, day after day. I've heard this from people on the ground, nurses still in the city, and others who owe their lives to the cops.

Those of us who left are going through cycles of what we can think about and talk about. We're starting to talk about how the rebuilding will happen. For many, there's a feeling of distrust; we don't want the type of help the government gave in the storm--let's not debate that here, the point is to understand that New Orleanians are very suspect of outside planners. We want to guard our historic homes, and not have developers with U.S. contracts come in and slap up pre-fab, cookie cutter houses. We want to plan how we can make use of this awful event to sweep away some of the poverty and corruption, to fix our schools from the ground up, not piecemeal. And we want our people, our contractors and bricklayers and ironworkers and trash haulers, to do this work, not just contractors with big connections. We have to be part of this; we're getting very tired of waiting to be let in to our homes.

So, my answer to Ann is yes, resoundingly, the government needs to work with the Red Shirts, with the holdouts, and with all of us who are ready to return. My god, I can't wait for Mardi Gras. I am so homesick. Hearing about these holdouts gives me so much hope.

Have I been too kind to the late Andrea Dworkin?

Cathy Young, who wrote in the comments section of my post on Andrea Dworkin, has this post on Dworkin over at Hit & Run. Young doesn't think anything positive should be said about the recently departed feminist, and is especially distressed that I said something positive:

I was especially taken aback when the usually reasonable Ann Althouse, University of Wisconsin law professor and blogger, decided to "honor" Dworkin with this tribute. Althouse notes that in contrast to the "blatantly partisan" feminists who flocked to Bill Clinton's defense when he was accused of sexual misconduct, "Dworkin, for all her overstatements and wackiness, was truly devoted to feminism as an end." All right, so Dworkin was nonpartisan in her demonization of men and male sexuality ("What needs to be asked," she notoriously told a British writer on Clinton's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, "is, Was the cigar lit?"). That's a good thing? And what is this "feminism" she was dedicated to, anyway? It certainly wasn't liberal feminism, anti-censorship feminism, or pro-sex feminism, all of which she despised.

I've read a lot of Dworkin's books, but I read them a long time ago, and I really can't remember the extent of "her demonization of men and male sexuality," which I don't agree with. I remember finding a lot of rousing and provocative ideas in those books and a real passion about harms done to women. I think I was careful about what I wrote; my honoring of this woman who had just died was not unqualified. I'm glad Young thinks I'm "usually reasonable" but I'm going to defend myself and say that this was another example of my being reasonable.

Here's what Young wrote in the comments section to my original post (linked above):

As a semi-regular reader of your blog, I am extremely disappointed by your positive comments about Andrea Dworkin.... Dworkin was a psychopath -- a pitiful woman to some extent, because she was so obviously sick; but unfortunately she acted out her sickness on a public stage, by demonizing not only men (and male sexuality) but women who have the temerity to enjoy heterosexual sex.

(Yes, Dworkin spent the last 20 years of her life living with a man, and she wrote warmly about her father and her brother. But it's possible to be a bigot and to make a few personal exemptions. By the way, Dworkin's companion, John Stoltenberg, was an avid follower of her anti-male views; he wrote a book called Refusing to Be a Man, and in his own writings described the penis as "an instrument of oppression.")

By the way, let's please not get into the tiresome discussion of whether or not Dworkin actually uttered or wrote the words "all sexual intercourse is rape." Read this chapter from Intercourse and see for yourself:

"Physically, the woman in intercourse is a space inhabited, a literal territory occupied literally: occupied even if there has been no resistance, no force; even if the occupied person said yes please, yes hurry, yes more."

"Intercourse remains a means or the means of physiologically making a woman inferior."

"Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women."

I showed some of these passages to a friend who had never even heard of Dworkin before. Her immediate response: "She's writing about rape, not sex."

Here's a thought experiment. Suppose a man -- a very troubled men who had had horrible experiences with women -- wrote book after book arguing that women are evil sirens and parasites whose sole purpose in life is to sexually manipulate and destroy men.

Would anyone be hailing him for his "challenging" and "provocative" ideas? Would there be a lot of quibbling over whether he actually ever used the words "All women are whores"?

Yet you, Prof. Althouse, seem to embrace the left-wing double standard with regard to hate speech -- it's not really so bad if directed at "the oppressor" and motivated by concern for the oppressed.

I prefer to agree with Daphne Patai, a former women's studies professor who has written: "Cultivating hatred for another human group ought to be no more acceptable when it issues from the mouths of women than when it comes from men, no more tolerable from feminists than from the Ku Klux Klan."

The accusation that I "embrace the left-wing double standard" was a response to something I wrote in the comments: "People who speak out on behalf of the oppressed can be admired -- with qualifications -- despite their anger-driven overstatements and misjudgment." And I wrote a comment later explaining this:

My phrase "people who speak out on behalf of the oppressed" refers to Dworkin's writing, which is concerned with rape victims, pornography workers, prostitutes, etc. I think women have been oppressed throughout history, around the world, and that there is scarcely a more important concern, but it doesn't justify hate speech and it's not even helpfully dealt with by vilifying men. I'm just trying to explain why I don't vilify Dworkin.

I'm sorry I just don't have the heart to point out the shortcomings of the woman's work. She just died! I alluded to some disagreements I have, and I don't have a problem with the substantive content of Young's post other than that I obviously don't think I departed from my usual reasonableness.

Young points out this op-ed in the NYT by Catharine MacKinnon, which I somehow missed yesterday. MacKinnon's point is that Dworkin was mistreated and that "[h]ow she was treated is how women are treated who tell the truth about male power without compromise or apology." It's not surprising that people reacted strongly to the very harsh things Dworkin said, and it's simplistic to call what she said "truth" and leave it at that. It was dramatic overstatement for effect. She provoked a big argument -- as did MacKinnon -- and I don't see how you can blame people for fighting back on the important subject of sex.

And much of the mistreatment MacKinnon describes is the typical lot of the writer. People talk about writers' work without taking the trouble to read it all the time. People misstate and twist the meaning of what people say all the time. And people mercilessly ridicule public figures for the way they look -- though surely Andrea Dworkin got a particularly harsh version of that treatment. Dworkin made people really angry, and even if there was a good measure of sexism in that response, a lot of the nastiness was returning in kind what she dished out. That is part of being taken seriously.