Yes, Ms. Allen, how *can* some women be so dumb?

I too must put in my own two cents about Charlotte Allen's op-ed for the Washington Post.

It is undeniable that Allen assumes that men are automatically superior, and that what is not male is therefore bad. Aristotle alluded to that. Augustine said it. Luther said it very loudly. There are a great number of women and men who have proven this premise false, and a great number of feminists of both sexes who have argued against it more eloquently than I ever can, so I shall leave it to them.

What has caused the controversy is that a) from a technical aspect, this is a poorly written and defended argument, and b) the Post defended itself against the controversy by saying "Geez, it was satire. Didn't you get the joke?"

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I was on my way to a back-handed defense of Ms. Allen--"the problem isn't so much that she is anti-women as it's that she's a bad satirist." Perhaps she was sending up satire and is way more po-mo ("a mental rave") than the rest of us.

This is unlikely. I was going to reparse the piece for my own and my readers' enjoyment, but when I looked at it a second time, there is not much there that is not woman-hating or relying on pretty shoddy statistics. I'm not an alchemist.

What we have is a woman- (and therefore self-) hating columnist, and an editor who didn't bother to read the piece before creating negative publicity for his editorial page.