Oh, my. The internets are endlessly amusing.
Act. 1 — Linda Hirshman writes that women are dumb cows. Hillary needs to catch the eye of the dumb cows by talking about emotions and all. Subtext — Why can’t women be more like men? Maybe if I yell at them enough, they’ll butch it up.
Act 2 — Liberal and feminist blogosphere say fuck off, Linda. And Ann Althouse, too. Mark Schmittt on Blogginghead TV really takes her to task.
Act 3 — Linda responds (and here, too.) It starts off, “The Internet is full of the eponymous blogs of academics with apparently nothing else to do….” It gets better.
Act 4 — Mark Schmitt replies in the comments. Oh, it is so, so fine. He ends with, “… I’m beginning to think that you have simply strip-mined the academic literature for evidence that proves your point, rather than evaluated it seriously.”
Apt. 11d 
Amusing indeed…if it weren’t so freaking tragic.
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LOL, Mark Schmitt kicks a** and takes names. I particularly love that last comment, where he actually reads the study she tries to beat him over the head with, and points out that it doesn’t say what she says it says. Then she says she’s bored. LOL LOL LOL. I guess we know who won that argument. TKO: Mark Schmitt.
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I am still surprised at Hirshman’s essentialist stereotyping of women – the fact that she thinks it is of socio-cultural or psychological rather than biological origin (I think she thinks!) doesn’t make it any easier to swallow.
Of course, having read her sloppy and misguided book, I shouldn’t be all surprised at how she strip-mines the the academic literature. Cherry picking at its finest.
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Hirshman looks to me like someone desperately trying to stay in the game after she has lost her platform, now that she’s retired. She finds she can best get attention by saying the most outrageous things.
Not terribly helpful for folks who are trying to get along, make good marriages, get our children raised.
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Yeah, I used to support Hirshman, but, she sure seems like she’s gone a bit nuts now. I have this theory, that the interaction we see in our own personal lives (i.e. someone criticizes, you get defensive) plays out in a larger way in the public/political world. So, Hirshman said something (i.e. that women who choose not to engage in paid work undermine the feminist revolution, a point of view I’m willing to debate). But then, she’s attacked, and so she retreats to an even more extreme camp, and presumably, surrounds her self with sympathisers (both because no one else will talk to her, and because being constantly criticized isn’t fun). Even odder positions follow.
bj
PS: I never listen to a person again, if they say that they are bored when confronted with data [it’s like they’re dead to me] 🙂
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I’m confused by Linda’s attitude – doesn’t she have a vagina too?
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Garance Franke-Ruta at tapped points to a disturbing disparity in a poll from 2004.
as Ellen Goodman has reported in The Boston Globe, [women] are much more likely than men to believe that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9-11. Forty percent of the population was under this misimpression in 2004, with 51 percent of women believing so, compared to 29 percent of men.
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