The Dees Diversion: If you want to insult a man, the best way to do it is to call him a woman

Monday, May 30, 2005

If you want to insult a man, the best way to do it is to call him a woman

Which is exactly what Frank Rich does in his May 29 New York Times column, "Ground Zero Is So Over."

Rich calls John Kerry "...a character whose genius for equivocating on just about any issue rendered him a pantywaist..."

Liberals are already jumping all over Rich's attack on Kerry (they would do better to find a non-equivocating candidate), but who is really being attacked is every woman in the country. Every time we attack a man by saying he is a woman, we insult all women.

You can write to the Times at letters@nytimes.com

4 Comments:

Here, here!

I am really, REALLY tired of "like a woman" or "like a girl" being an insult.

Whereas "like a man" seems to connotate bravery and good things, "like a woman" means weak for some reason.

As if a man had to bear a child, withstand menstrual cramps or go through menopause .... then you'd see someone acting "like a baby".

By Unknown, at 2:56 PM

I am inclined to defend Rich here because I think his point was to criticize the GOP for feminizing Kerry as a campaign tactic. He spelled this out more in his 9/5/04 "How Kerry Became A Girlie-Man":

"But with the high stakes of an election at hand, it's not enough to stuff socks in the president's flight suit. Mr. Kerry must be turned into a girl. Such castration warfare has been a Republican staple ever since Michael Dukakis provided the opening by dressing up like Snoopy to ride a tank. We've had Bill Clinton vilified as the stooge of a harridan wife and Al Gore as the puppet of the makeover artist Naomi Wolf....

"Once Mr. Kerry usurped Howard Dean, whose wartime sojurn in Aspen made the president look like a Green Beret, the Bush campaign's principals and surrogates went into overdrive. Mr. Kerry was said to appear ''French.'' (That's code for ''faggy.'') His alleged encounters with Botox and a Christophe hairdresser were dutifully clocked on Drudge. For Memorial Day weekend, the redoubtable New York Post published hypothetical barbecue memos for the two contenders, with Mr. Bush favoring sausage and beer (albeit nonalcoholic) and Mr. Kerry opting for frogs legs, chardonnay and creme brulee. Ann Coulter, that great arbiter of the marriage bond, posted a column titled ''Just a Gigolo'' in which the presumptive Democratic candidate was portrayed as ''a poodle to rich women.'' Eventually John Edwards would become ''the Breck girl,'' and Dick Cheney would yank an adjective out of context to suggest that Mr. Kerry wanted to fight a ''sensitive'' war on terror. (For a translation of ''sensitive'' in this context, see ''French'' above.)

By Fred Vincy, at 1:40 PM

And I am inclined to agree with you insofar as what was possibly inside Rich's head. But I don't think that many readers would carry such a context. I didn't. He needed to make the context clear because the article comes off as woman-bashing.

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