Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Kate O'Beirne makes MY world worse

Maggie says:
As regular readers know, nothing gets me going quite like women who hate women. The latest installment is Kate O'Beirne, who is the primary reason I decided I would never, ever, watch another episode of "The Capital Gang" again, at least while she was still a commentator.

O'Beirne is a nightmare. She's loud, she's abrasive, she horribly overstates and generalizes, she's ignorant, and she's just plain mean. She's the perfect hypocrite for the right: a tough, outspoken woman who proclaims she hates feminists and the left without once acknowledging that her ability to be who she is today is hugely due to the gains of the women's movement and social progress over the last forty years.

As I said, O'Beirne is my worst nightmare. Stuck with a choice of being confined in a small room with O'Beirne or George W. Bush for all eternity, I would choose Bush. At least he and I could talk about... fishing or something. O'Beirne and I would just end up killing each other.

Leave it to the poster girl for female self-hatred to gently title her new book "Women Who Make the World Worse: And How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports." Ah yes, gentle Kate.

Thank goodness there are smart women who are calmer than I am about how to deal with her. This Salon interview (get the free day pass to read it) does several things really well:

  • It shows what a smart choice it was for me to get out of journalism, because I could never pull off what Rebecca Traister does here with such good manners. (And let's face it, manners matter to this Southern girl.)
  • It spotlights just how ridiculous and weak O'Beirne's accusations toward feminists are and how she really doesn't understand much of anything about modern social movements, including the very gains she's personally enjoyed because of them.
  • It pinpoints why this book is just plain weak and unoriginal - using old and easily attacked feminist statements such as 'all sex is rape' (which I've attacked, too), for example, rather than taking on newer, sex-positive, lifestyle-choice-positive feminism. And what's the point of re-hashing stuff from decades ago? I guess it works if you have nothing new to say about modern women's issues...
  • It sheds some light on how her notions of what it means to be masculine are as misguided as her perceptions of femininity. In a single breath, O'Beirne will state that "men just wouldn't want to stay home and raise kids while their wives work" while also maintaining that feminists think "all women who stay at home are stupid." So... it's okay for O'Beirne to generalize about manly men but not okay for anyone else to generalize? And I don't know a single feminist who thinks a woman staying at home means she's stupid -- give me a break! But since O'Beirne has set the tone, I'd love to make some generalizations about her and her husband's sex life... ;-)
  • Finally, it makes me feel better to know that at least one interview is out there that breaks through O'Beirne's complete bullshit and balances the bulk of her reviews a little. If you want to see what I'm talking about, check out this outrageous National Review interview, where one of her "hardball" questions from the female interviewer is "Seriously though, feminists always go on about unequal pay when most pay discrepancies simply make sense and are, in fact, fair, right? Why can't anyone get them to shut up?" Please tell us, dear Kate. Please tell us why we deserve to make less than men...

Whew! I need a good girls' night after reading this crap. Girls? Girls?

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