Virgin, mother, whore/crone

Sigh. I really like to imagine we are at a point where we've developed a few more archetypes from which women can chose. A girl can dream, can't she...

The boys over at the Alternate Brain have called my attention to Maureen Dowd's latest column dedicated to the dearth of women columnists.

Guys don't appreciate being lectured by a woman. It taps into myths of carping Harpies and hounding Furies, and distaste for nagging by wives and mothers. The word "harridan" derives from the French word "haridelle" - a worn-out horse or nag.

Men take professional criticism more personally when it comes from a woman. When I wrote columns about the Clinton impeachment opéra bouffe, Chris Matthews said that for poor Bill, it must feel as though he had another wife hectoring him.

While a man writing a column taking on the powerful may be seen as authoritative, a woman doing the same thing may be seen as castrating. If a man writes a scathing piece about men in power, it's seen as his job; a woman can be cast as an emasculating man-hater. I'm often asked how I can be so "mean" - a question that Tom Friedman, who writes plenty of tough columns, doesn't get.

Even the metaphors used to describe my column play into the castration theme: my scalpel, my cutting barbs, razor-sharp hatchet, Clinton-skewering and Bush-whacking. "Does she," The L.A. Times's Patt Morrison wondered, "write on a computer or a Ronco Slicer and Dicer?"

I'm loving that last line that manages to consolidate castration and domesticity in one deft metaphor.

I know I've said this before (in re. L. Summers, for example)--we may be approaching "ad nauseum," in fact--but I just find it so tiresome that we still need to even have this discussion. One of the things that I like about the Internet is that it confers absolute anonymity if you want that. Political theory about the rise of the public sphere and its role in fostering democratic republics has it that the anonymity of print is crucial in maintaining a democracy. Thus you have "Publius" rather than "Madison," for example, or the "Gleaner" rather than "Judith Sargent Murray." (And note, here that Murray, one of America's first female columnists, chose a gender-less moniker with which to scribe herself. She was, however, widely understood to be a man.)

The Internet has even greater potential as a medium without gender, race, etc., it being a disembodied form. And yet, you might note, I sign myself Travis♀. Initially, I did not and everyone assumed I was a boy. Not a stupid assumption to make; I acknowledge the name is usually a boy's name. And it bugged me. When I posted, for example, about the Hannukah panties that spelled out "a great miracle happened here" in Hebrew on the crotch, it seemed important to me that people know I am a woman. What does all of that mean? I'm not sure. Maybe that Habermas was a white boy and so it's easier for him to see an unmarked position as liberatory. Maybe that Utopian ideals don't work so well in our non-Utopian world (it's that theory/practice schism that seems to trip me up over and over again). Maybe that, like Maureen Dowd, I want people to recognize the Emma Peel in me.

What it doesn't mean is that I'd like the chance to pick from the oh-so-limited buffet of virgin-mother-whore/crone options (though let's be clear, were I forced to, I think there's no other option for me than whore/crone).

If I had more time this would be a more definitive and less speculative post, but oh well. (And when you're done reading this, you should go over and encourage Prof. B. to become a columnist.)