I finally drove Hoffman home today, and he is a very good car indeed. The Washington Post, however, is very, very bad. They are the opposite of Hoffman. The editor of their Outlook section, John Pomfret, needs to go, as Bob Somerby says in today's Daily Howler. Yesterday Pomfret put into print two of the most execrable opinion pieces I've ever seen, side by side under the banner "Women vs. Women" (I ask that you not click on the links to these two articles just yet). The first, by Charlotte Allen, dredges up a catalog of ugly stereotypes about women, going all the way back to the Victorian era to reference women's supposedly frequent fainting spells (and cast doubt on the theory that it was because of their tight bodices), following up with pseudo-science by linking proportional brain size directly with intelligence, and then fatuously referencing the results of a recent study to trash women's driving skills. The second piece, by Linda Hirshman, absurdly claims that the split in the female voting bloc between Clinton and Obama in the primaries is a result of women being too flighty to band together and take power. This strange conclusion relies on the impossibly disingenuous premise that the goal of feminism is to seize power rather than to achieve equality between women and men in decision making and rights.

These two articles are astoundingly disgusting (although Allen's piece has gotten the majority of criticism), and they would not have been allowed into print if they were written about any other group of people. The Post knows that it could not get away with publishing such nasty slandor if it were of blacks, Jews, Arabs, or other such groups, because the backlash against the paper would lose them both readers and respect. It is a sad commentary on the state of the mainstream media today that they can still publish pieces that call women stupid and flighty, and not make any more substantive response to their numerous A-list blogger critics (and a flood of negative reader response) than to call Allen's piece "tongue in cheek". Firedoglake shows how phony this defense is with a description of Allen's previous work, and her obvious long-term agenda of dismantling feminism.

It seems likely, instead, that Pomfret published these articles for two reasons: pushing the Overton window, and creating a controversy to get lots of links and clicks to the pieces online to shore up their dwindling income. This is why I requested above that you not click on the links to the articles themselves. You can see long block quotes from both articles at many of the other blogs I linked to, so you can see what they're like, but I don't want to reward the Post by directing even one more reader to their page. A commenter at Feministing suggests going after their advertisers, which sounds like an excellent idea to me. Regardless of what to do about these two articles, the bullshit that they exemplify are by no means limited to the Post. You can see similar assaults against women in The New York Times style section just about every weekend; the L.A. Times published an equally insulting piece about women last Friday; big pundits like Chris Matthews, Andrew Sullivan, and Tucker Carlson all have deplorable records when discussing (or, in Matthews' case, even talking to) women. And I probably have no need to link to anything to reference the sexism on display in all facets of the mainstream media in the coverage of the Clinton campaign, which will probably become legendary.

As Somerby says in the post I linked to above (about a related but slightly different issue), "at various times, reformations of institutions are needed—reformations which may include widespread purges." I've been thinking today about how to help bring about such a reformation of the media, and really of society (although with respect to society generally the term purge has a rather different connotation that I wouldn't wish to apply). Why is this disgusting and damaging behavior still so common in 2008, and what can be done about it?