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Monday, March 21, 2005
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WOMEN WHO READ THE ECONOMIST AND THE MEN WHO LOVE THEM Actually, UD will say nothing about the men who love them. She just likes the title. Steve Sailer (iSteve.com) comments, apropos the few-women-are-pundits controversy: I've spent enormous amounts of time standing around magazine racks in my life, and I can assure you that women almost never look at the prestige section where they group together "The Economist," "The New Republic," and "The National Interest," and other journals that don't have anything to do with your personal life. Attractive single women look at fashion and beauty magazines. Attractive married women look at expensive home decorating magazines. The ugly truth is that UD, anatomically female, reads The Economist all the time. She subscribes. Why oh why oh why oh, why does UD ever read The Economist? Because it covers all these teeny countries (Montenegro. Population, 600,000.) in fascinating detail. Because it has lengthy special reports on things like universities. Because its orientation is international. Because it’s well-written. Does UD have reservations about The Economist? She does. Graphically it’s a bore. Photo captions are sometimes sophomoric. It still runs ads for a Thai airline that portrays its female flight attendants as sex slaves. To be sure, UD also reads the shelter mags Sailer mentions. Metropolitan Home means a lot to her, as does the extremely well-put-together Garden Design. UD’s furtive love for Paris Match is now, thanks to her tell-all blog, well-known. And while UD reads the shelter magazines from front to back like a normal person, faithful readers of this blog already know that UD reads The Economist from back to front, starting with the week’s featured obituary, and then moving on to the arts and culture pages. When she finally backs up into the Finance section, she doesn’t even look. She just keeps going in reverse until she gets to the foreign news. Finance stories tend to be about hefty men named Helmut who may or may not be going to jail for malfeasance. Oh, and UD’s a regular reader of the New Republic, too. Has been for years. So… a pretty good writer, with a pretty good grasp of politics… and yet UD doesn’t punditize, at least about non-university stuff. Why? I’m not sure. UD is enough of a professional writer that if you paid her to do it she’d probably do it adequately. I don’t think I’m afraid to speak out. Dahlia Lithwick, in an interview on NPR, remarks that it can be “hard for women to brave an opinion. When they do they get slapped down for it.” In UD’s experience, it’s not so much that you get slapped down. It’s that you get The Look. Men have a way of looking at women who speak and write sharply … like …it’s like… Huh? … It’s not exactly hostile… it’s just like, uh, what are you doing? What are you? What's going on? Simplement, these men are confused. It's best to ignore them and keep going until they begin to understand what is happening to them. No, UD fears that the problem, at least for her, is too great a sense of Life’s Ambiguity. Pundits have to generate confident settled positions about everything. UD dithers about the ineffability of it all. |