Stridently Stupid Female Columnist in LAT Whines That She's Being "Crushed Into Silence" By Men

Silence best evidenced, I guess, by the fact she writes almost two thousand words in a high-profile newspaper. One can almost feel the cold sweat of fear dripping off her fingers with each and every hysterically repetitive claim.

Women feel silenced by the assertiveness and cockiness of men? Shyah, right. I wish. Were it so I wouldn't have to explain to every girlfriend the importance of "Shut-Up Time."

Solnit mewls on for 1,863 words about how women are patronized and silenced by men.

But, wait. Let me check. (Peering down into pants and then panties) Yup, there’s a vagina in my pants, which suggests I’m either a woman or there’s a matched, escaped set of labia taken up hiding in my underwear. Most mysteriously, I don’t seem to suffer the myriad conversational injustices from men that Solnit and so many other women apparently do.

Solnit opens her piece by describing how she was conversationally pummeled by a guy about Eadweard Muybridge, when she’d actually written the very book the guy was holding forth on. “Men explain things to me,” complains Solnit, “and to other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I mean.”

We do? I think somebody forgot to send me the memo. Yet, Solnit claims this terrible injustice is something “nearly every woman faces every day,” which “makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field,” and “keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare.” (“When they dare”? The woman writes like Mr. Darcy is going to pop up from behind the copier at any moment.) Solnit goes on and on about how this “syndrome” (yes, everything must be pathologized) “crushes young women into silence” and “trains” women “in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.”

So let me get this straight:

1) A woman asserts something as true.

2) A man, taking her as his intellectual equal, disagrees with her sharply, without fretting too much about how the "Softer Sex" might take his angry and harsh "Man-Words."

3) The woman properly considers herself oppressed and intimidated into silence.

It may (or may not) be true that many women speak differently than many men; as the claim goes, women are more interested in seeking common ground and finding points of agreement and men are more interested in the competitive aspects of points-scoring. (Though this rule goes out the window entirely when men and women discuss dissatisfying aspects of their relationship; there, the roles reverse entirely.)

But even if that's the case, then it's simply a case of men and women favoring different styles of discourse. I can't say for certain the "feminine style" is necessarily wrong, but the "chilled into silence" writer here sure seems to have qualms about informing me the "male style" is entirely wrong, and not just wrong, but painful, oppressive, intimidating, demeaning, and threatening.

For a woman frightened into abject timidity, she sure seems capable of making stridently self-serving assertions when she puts her (quivering) mind to it.

From Hot Air again.

Meanwhile, the cowering and quaking RightWingSparkle somehow gathers up the courage to email me -- despite not having secured a Temporary Restraining Order beforehand -- and sends me this video, three and a half minutes of abject white-knuckled terror.

She has the temerity to ask which of you commenters is the guy in the clip.

Hmm. I'm going to have to have a word with her husband about keeping her in line. We can't have women making such impudent remarks. The next thing you know, they'll dare to look into our eyes as if they are our equals.

posted by Ace at 01:23 PM

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