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| The liberal New Yorker's byline ratio: 5 women to 24 men way back in 2012 |
One of the people photographed skulking around in the dark for the Bari Weiss article about the IDW is Christina Hoff Sommers, whose entire right-wing think tank-funded career is based on being a woman who hates other women.
Pinker, like all the reactionaries associated with the IDW, has dedicated his life to the belief that women are innately, genetically less capable in STEM pursuits than men. This is a pillar of the political movement - falsely labeled a science - known as evolutionary psychology.
The American right, having hurt trans rights thanks to the Trump administration, aided and abetted by grifting ghouls like Jesse Singal, has now set its sights on trying to force women out of jobs, the better to distribute women as rewards for good behavior to men, and so women will resume their godly roles as domestic servants and breeders of white babies.
The New York Times, of course, quickly jumped on the bandwagon.
The New Yorker has responded to this latest backlash against women with a surprisingly good article. I am surprised because only 13 years ago I was tracking the liberal New Yorker's terrible male:female byline record, which always favored men and often by a lot.
But this recent article by Jessica Winter, "What Did Men Do To Deserve This?" is great in spite of the title. Here is the archive if you don't have access to the article on the New Yorker site.
It's especially good because Winter goes after weaselly influencers like Scott Galloway:
The squishier centrist side has no such certainties. Galloway, in both his podcasts and “Notes on Being a Man,” presents masculinity not as one side of a fixed binary but as a state of mind and a life style, one equally available to men and women, and therefore impossible to define. (It’s a feeling, and we know how Trump supporters feel about those.) Within this amorphous framework, men’s biggest problem is, likewise, a feeling—an unreachable itch, or a marrow-deep belief—that men should still rank above women in the social hierarchy, just not as much as before. This belief may be misguided or unconscious, but it is nonetheless insuperable, and it must be accommodated, for the good of us all.
What these pundits are nudging us to do, ever so politely, is accept that women, in the main, are accustomed to being a little degraded, a little underpaid and ignored and dampened in their ambitions, in ways that men are not and never will be. The “female-coded” person, to borrow Krugman’s terminology, may feel overwhelmed by child-care costs, ashamed that she can’t acquire a mortgage, or hollowed out by long hours as an I.C.U. nurse, but such feelings do not disturb the order of the universe. This person’s duties to protect, provide, and procreate are real, but they do not take the capital “P.” This person’s opinions matter, but not decisively. The Times pundit Ezra Klein has lately suggested that Democrats consider running anti-abortion candidates in red states, even though more than three-quarters of Gen Z women support abortion rights. Rights, like jobs, can be gender-coded, and these rights are valued accordingly.
And later...
Reeves frets that fatherless homes will beget more lost boys, more twentysomething men living in their childhood bedrooms, and more fractured families. If we do not update our “obsolete model of the breadwinner father,” he warns, “we will continue to see more and more men being left out of family life.” As for what authority has decreed that these absent fathers should be “left out” of their own families, Reeves never says—the culprit’s identity is shrouded in passive voice. Nor does Reeves explain how women’s attainment of economic independence would cause their husbands to be “stripped” of anything, much less the many non-economic aspects of being a spouse or parent.
The notion that fathers wander away from their families owing to some gnawing sense of existential dislocation—some humiliating certainty of their own uselessness or usurpation—is especially pungent when one takes into account the enormous gender gap in housework and child-rearing in heterosexual marriages. According to the Gender Equity Policy Institute, mothers who work full time do almost twice as much household labor as fathers. Research by the Nobel-winning economist Claudia Goldin has suggested that married men’s disinclination toward housework and other “draggy business of family life” may be holding back birth rates, which should pique the interest of Republican pronatalists such as J. D. Vance.
And maybe the best slam-dunk on Galloway:
Reading Galloway, one gets the sense that men last knew who they were about seventy-five years ago. Much as the Trump Administration does when it vows to revive the coal industry, or when it shares fascist-lite iconography that would be at home in a Paul Verhoeven film, Galloway appeals to the reader’s nostalgia for mid-century “Peak Male.” It was young men, he reminds us, who stormed the beaches at Normandy and who won the Battle of the Bulge: “When Germans or Russians are streaming over the border or firing from the beach, big-dick energy isn’t just a nice idea; it’s fucking mandatory.” Of course, the German soldiers were young men, too. And it isn’t clear which border Galloway thinks the Russians were crossing, or if he realizes which side they were fighting for.
You'd think someone who claims to represent manly men would at least know which side the Russians were fighting on during the Battle of the Bulge.
And Winter does a great job of addressing the claim that women need men for protection, by pointing out that women need protecting from men. And although the Russians were on the side of the Allies during most of World War II - and so technically the good guys, they were "an army of rapists."
