Satire is a Dying Art

The Washington Post is now claiming that the opinion piece of Charlotte Allen’s titled “We Scream, We Swoon, How Dumb Can We Get?” was satire.

“If it insulted people, that was not the intent,” Outlook editor John Pomfret told me this morning, calling the piece “tongue-in-cheek.”

Pomfret said that Allen pitched the idea to him as a riff on women fainting at Obama rallies, and similarities with the Beatles.

Allen wrote:

“I can’t help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women- I shoud say “we women”, of course- aren’t the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailing and distraction by the superficial.”

“She wanted to make fun of this issue,” Pomfret said. “A lot of people have taken it very seriously.”

But Allen didn’t stop there. She continued on with countless stereotypes about how women are supposedly inferior to men. We’re talking smaller brain, loving Grey’s Anatomy and being bad at math and driving. Ugh.

………………………….

Pomfret said that being an opinion article, he’s not surprised readers reacted to it strongly. But added: “Perhaps it wasn’t packaged well enough to make it clear that it was tongue-in-cheek.”

As I wrote in the comments section of Will’s post, I found the article to be poorly written in general when I thought she was being serious. The rating changes to abysmal knowing that it was meant to be satire. You also probably shouldn’t allow someone with a past record of writing misogynistic articles to write feminist satire.

From a 2005 article Allen wrote for the Dallas Morning News regarding Lawrence Summers:

…The statements violated the central tenet of feminist ideology: that the two sexes are intrinsically identical except for a few superficial physical characteristics and that any perceived differences between them can be blamed on sex discrimination and social conditioning. Scientific evidence to the contrary be damned; a feminist professor in Mr. Summers’ audience announced that his remarks made her feel as though she was “going to be sick.”

Recently, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a vote of no confidence in Mr. Summers, the equivalent of demanding that he be fired. The measure carries no legal weight, but it is a damning indictment nonetheless. This despite the fact that Mr. Summers has apologized over and over for what he said. He’s also set up two new “gender diversity” (that is, affirmative action) panels designed to boost the number of women on Harvard’s science and engineering faculties.

In short, he’s made like Galileo shown the instruments of torture, except that, unlike Galileo, he’s not muttering “e pur se muove” (but it still moves) under his breath. The parallel is apt, however. Doctrine – in this case, feminist doctrine – has trumped the scientific data.

Radical feminism has somehow become modernity’s sole triumphant totalitarian ideology, at least in the universities and other elite-culture hothouses where it counts (the vast majority of women shun the label “feminist,” but they don’t control public discourse).

As with the other leading totalitarian ideologies of our time, Marxism and National Socialism, the tenets of ideological feminism need not be argued but merely asserted – and then enforced by any means necessary. Critical examination of those tenets is not permitted, as Mr. Summers has learned to his detriment.

On a university campus or on the pages of The New York Times (or Time or Newsweek) you are not allowed to question the feminist dogma that “gender” – that is, the assertion of distinctive masculine and feminine traits – is merely a social construction, and that all such reflect nothing more than a patriarchal society’s behavioral dicta designed to weaken women and reinforce male hegemony.

Was that supposed to be satire, too? How about this piece about feminists and the Teri Schiavo case (I am not responsible for what is behind that link)*?

That elite, of course, includes NOW, the Foundation for a Feminist Majority, and other feminist-establishment groups that are more devoted to their own abstract ideology  than to the plight of real women who are really abused by men. NOW and the rest of them didn’t lift a finger on Laci Peterson’s behalf because…she was pregnant when she was killed and NOW supports abortion rights. And they’re not lifting a finger to interfere with Michael Schiavo, the slo-mo Scott Peterson who, like his California counterpart, seems to want to kill his wife because she’s interfering with his lifestyle. If you look at the congressional debate over saving Terri, you’ll see that it breaks down along the usual ideological and political lines: Republicans scrambling to put off her scheduled starvation, liberal Dems saying: Go Michael!

I…the…what? I understand that there is meant to be a bias in opinion articles. Hell, we’re biased all over the place. The difference is that we admit it up front. If Ms. Allen intended the Post piece to be satire, it was of the most malicious ”I actually really mean this but am going to hide behind a defense” sort.

A Modest Proposal was a brilliant piece of satire but if Jonathan Swift had really gone around eating babies, it wouldn’t be taught in schools today. And Charlotte Allen is no Jonathan Swift.  

* The post referred to is no longer in the IWF archives. I read several of Allen’s similar articles to confirm that the style matches but as it is a secondary source, I will state an apology if this page misquoted Ms. Allen.  

Tags: Charlotte Allen, satire, Washington Post