Benevolent sexism

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As far as you know. You didn't read the articles to which your over-sensitive looking-to-be-offended Feminist author was referring.

Certainly falsehoods based on stereotypes about Jerry Falwell's basic qualities were used in this piece. Why shouldn't female public figures be subject to similar treatment? Because the Feminist Code of Chivalry would be violated?

Fox "News" makes patently false statements all of the time, and they get away with it.

Do you know any intelligent people who believe Fox News? You're reaching again, saying things I can't imagine that you seriously believe, and just when I thought we might be having an actual discussion.

I'm taking her word for it. She has the kind of reputation that people work hard to maintain. People who act smug while throwing out irrelevant arguments mixed with spurious accusations do not receive the benefit of the doubt.

The basic premise Naomi Wolf wants to promote in her books is a sensible and much-needed antidote to the stridency and ideological self-righteousness purveyed by hard-core feminists. She has argued for a pragmatic, new brand of feminism based on common sense instead of rigid dogma, for a feminism that treats men not as adversaries but as partners.

Unfortunately for women who would like to ratify Ms. Wolf's message, she proves a frustratingly inept messenger: a sloppy thinker and incompetent writer. In her latest book, ''Promiscuities,'' she tries in vain to pass off tired observations as radical apercus, subjective musings as generational truths, sappy suggestions as useful ideas.

In this volume, Ms. Wolf seeks to use autobiographical reminiscences and interviews with contemporaries who came of age during the 1960's and 70's to limn ''girls' secret struggle for womanhood in the post-sexual revolution world.'' The narratives of their sexual coming of age, she writes, are ''virtually always 'extreme,' normatively shocking'' and are ''rarely spoken'' outside a circle of trusted confidantes ''because they include elements of sex and greed, danger and narcissism, insecurity and bad behavior.''

To begin with, it's hard to buy this ''silencing of the female first person sexual.'' Where has Ms. Wolf been? What about the raunchy confessions that surface daily on radio and television talk shows? What about all the memoirists -- from Anais Nin to Kathryn Harrison -- who have bombarded us, over the years, with tales of their illicit affairs? What about Madonna's self-dramatizing revelations in ''Sex'' and ''Truth or Dare''? What about the endless articles about dating and orgasms that fill women's magazines, from Cosmo to Mirabella to Glamour?

Indeed the stories Ms. Wolf sets down in ''Promiscuities'' are incredibly familiar ones about the loss of virginity, birth control, unwanted pregnancies and possessive boyfriends. Using anecdotes about such matters as a springboard, Ms. Wolf tries to make sweeping and highly pretentious generalizations about women and men and sex. The story of a teen-age friend named Dinah who had a reputation as the class slut becomes a cautionary tale about the perils of being thought promiscuous, even though Ms. Wolf does not know what happened to Dinah after high school and says she had ''to imagine her thoughts.'' Ms. Wolf's own youthful affair with an Irish laborer whom she met one summer at an Israeli kibbutz is similarly used as an excuse for a windy meditation on the lure of the forbidden.

Ms. Wolf's philosophically embroidered reminiscences about former boyfriends -- which try to turn the current craze over memoir-writing into an excuse for pompous moralizing -- suffer, as so much of this book does, from an annoying self-importance and myopia. The AIDS crisis, for instance, appears fleetingly in this book as a development that shook Ms. Wolf's own ''brave-girl, my entitled-girl demeanor,'' a development that ''gave elements in our culture tacit license to regard every sexually active woman as a slut once more.''

The same sort of melodramatic inflation of language and sentiment that undermined Ms. Wolf's earlier books (''The Beauty Myth'' and ''Fire With Fire'') infects this volume as well. Of the danger of earthquakes in her hometown of San Francisco, she writes: ''It gave girls in the Bay Area the license that young women have in wartime: if today is your last day, do you really want to die a virgin?'' And of the dangers (once again) of being thought promiscuous: ''We could die, socially; in terms of our identities as good children, we could die to our families; we could even die literally. We already understood that our own death could be the shadow side of our desire.''

Throughout ''Promiscuities,'' Ms. Wolf combines heavy-breathing Nin-like effusions with the cloying New Age language of self-help groups and the pastel-colored prose employed by those facts-of-life pamphlets that the makers of sanitary napkins used to give to pre-pubescent girls. ''What would our culture -- and our divorce rate -- look like,'' she asks, ''if we dared to teach men the skills that could keep women's promiscuously responsive bodies happy in monogamous lives?'' Women, she writes, want to be regarded as ''goddesses, priestesses or queens of our own sexuality.''

There are some interesting topics in this book (concerning the emotional fallout of the sexual revolution, and other cultures' perceptions of female carnality) but they are buried beneath reams and reams of bad writing, narcissistic babbling and plain silliness.

Ms. Wolf may have started out with something useful to say, but she has ended up writing a terrible and tiresomely solipsistic book.

I don't consider someone to have gotten away with a lie when the only people who believe it are a bunch of racist, sexist, or homophobic f**king idiots. It's not like anyone can stop Fox or any other network from making $hit up. It's a free country, where news organizations are free to pander to corporate interests, stir up hatred by othering everyone they can, and make a ton of money from all the Wal-Mart shoppers who watch them. Fox (and the others) do get fact-checked and called out on it at every turn, but why should Murdoch care about that when he hasn't cared about the truth in decades. He doesn't actually even care about the law, as we've seen in England. Good clip, btw.

What's your definition of getting away with it, anyway?

On February 14, a Florida Appeals court ruled there is absolutely nothing illegal about lying, concealing or distorting information by a major press organization. The court reversed the $425,000 jury verdict in favor of journalist Jane Akre who charged she was pressured by Fox Television management and lawyers to air what she knew and documented to be false information. The ruling basically declares it is technically not against any law, rule, or regulation to deliberately lie or distort the news on a television broadcast.

On August 18, 2000, a six-person jury was unanimous in its conclusion that Akre was indeed fired for threatening to report the station's pressure to broadcast what jurors decided was "a false, distorted, or slanted" story about the widespread use of growth hormone in dairy cows. The court did not dispute the heart of Akre's claim, that Fox pressured her to broadcast a false story to protect the broadcaster from having to defend the truth in court, as well as suffer the ire of irate advertisers.

Fox argued from the first, and failed on three separate occasions, in front of three different judges, to have the case tossed out on the grounds there is no hard, fast, and written rule against deliberate distortion of the news. The attorneys for Fox, owned by media baron Rupert Murdock, argued the First Amendment gives broadcasters the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on the public airwaves.

In its six-page written decision, the Court of Appeals held that the Federal Communications Commission position against news distortion is only a "policy," not a promulgated law, rule, or regulation.

Fox aired a report after the ruling saying it was "totally vindicated" by the verdict.

A review of her book Promiscuities:

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/10/books ... -roar.html

Yes, she does indeed have quite a reputation.

A graduate of Yale and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Wolf was a consultant to Al Gore during his presidential campaign on women’s issues and social policy. She is co-founder of The Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, an organization that teaches leadership to young women, and The American Freedom Campaign, a grass roots democracy movement in the United States whose mission is the defense of the Constitution and the rule of law.

Women, she writes, want to be regarded as ''goddesses, priestesses or queens of our own sexuality.''

And, that bit about women wanting to be regarded as "goddesses, princesses and queens": weren't you saying earlier that men shouldn't regard women this way, or we're being sexist?

http://www.rense.com/general35/MEDIA.HTM

She does have quite a career as well, the opinion of one book reviewer aside. Snarky book reviews sell newspapers. From her website:

Now you're just deliberately misconstruing things again, and doing it in such a transparent way that no one could imagine that you take yourself seriously. Do you seriously not understand the difference between being a goddess of your own sexuality and a goddess? Is it really fun for you to pretend to be that stupid?

AP, in what context did you mean the word "creatures" when you used it back there?

My brother believed in all sorts of mythical creatures: pixies, dragons, werewolves, honest men.