Never Mind Gender, Just Hear Me Roar

Anne Applebaum, the one regular female columnist at The Washington Post, informs Susan Estrich that she'd just as soon not be known primarily as "the one regular female columnist at The Washington Post."

Comments

[glory]

you forgot marcela sanchez 😀

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/world/columns/sanchezmarcela/

cheers!

[madpad]

Pretty timely...

http://www.commondreams.org/news2005/0315-25.htm

[Ironchef]

But but but . . something "must. be. wrong." with the Post's hiring practices! Only 10.4% of articles were written by women. Last I checked at least, oh say, 15% of this country is female.

The horror! We need oversight! Regulation! Set-asides! Quotas! Action!

[Susan Estrich (not)]

Ms. Applebaum clearly doesn't get it. She is the obvious victim of a patriarchal society. She must be re-educated...NOW!!!

[MP]

I can't wait to see the right to "bodily integrity" (from link via madpad) enshrined in the Constitution.

[David T]

I miss the good old days when the Left (not that Susan Estrich is really of the "Left" except by the peculiar standards of the US) had never heard of "gender"--except as something that nouns have in some languages. When Rosa Luxemburg debated with Lenin and Kautsky about the declining rate of profit or the right of nations to self-determination, if you had been crazy enough to tell her, "No, Rosa, you should write about *women's* issues" she would have looked at you as if you came from another planet...

[jcl]

During the Summers brouhaha, the gender difference crowd constantly argued that tests showed that girls were worse at math, that language was the area they excelled in. So now why aren't they defending Estrich and arguing that under fair hiring practices women would make up not just 50 percent but more like 80 percent of opinion writers, because of their natural abilities? You can't blame the disparity on lack of interest; most J-school students are female these days.

[Ron Hardin]

Since when are newspaper columnists any good anyway?

Well, okay, Mencken was good, though I'm sure it was wearing at the time; and Tyrrell was good when he wrote like Mencken. Aside from that, newspaper columnists have been pretty much a zero.

[too many steves]

Hey, did anyone else notice that there are women in the top government diplomatic posts? Condi Rice, Karen Hughes, & Dina Powell (no relation to Colin). Should we be worried that the "fairer sex" is in charge of this stuff?

Btw, growing up when I did the term "regular" as in: 'the one regular female columnist at The Washington Post' had a much different connotation.

[someone named sue]

how do you do,

i was discriminated because of my sex and spelling; which gender was i?

[Handsome Dan]

For what its worth, I really liked Applebaum's GULAG book.

[mitch]

For what its worth, I was always thrilled to see Applebaum's name on the contents page of the New York Review of Books, wedged between the "Bush is going to start a nuclear war" and "Holy Shit, some Americans believe in God!" articles.