In an editorial titled "Women At Risk," Herbert touches upon the the recent gym shooting in Pennsylvania, as well as various shootings that have taken place across the country over the past few years, and notes that the media tends to brush past the obvious misogyny behind many of these crimes, noting that "we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected." Acknowledging the culture of misogyny that spawns such horrific acts, Herbert argues, is the first step towards stopping them.

While many commenters on Herbert's piece thanked him for pointing this out and noted their own brushes with misogyny on a daily basis, some commenters denied that our culture is filled with misogynistic messages, choosing instead to blame "crazies" and dismissing Herbert's argument as over-the-top and ridiculous:

28.
Cdr. John Newlin, USN (Ret.)
Vista, Calif.
August 8th, 2009
9:27 am
Sigh. We so blissfully ignore the warnings that scientists have been issuing for years now. There have been a number of studies of rats living in confined spaces. The results of these studies have been congruent. As the rat population increases and the size of the confining space remains constant, the rat-on-rat violence emerges and increases.

In a society of increasing population and social pressures, when anyone who really wants one can get a gun or even an assault weapon, such incidents are bound to happen.

We cannot decrease our population. We seem to be unable to slow the growth of the poor and impoverished. We are doomed by Darwin's truth. The more humans that inhabit our cities like rats in mazes, the more demand for food and energy. And that demand is slowly but surely is killing planet earth. And it won't be long - much sooner than even those that know that it is coming - before earth starts killing its inhabitants. And that, as Edith Ann was wont to say, is the truth.

So you see, it's not misogyny, but population control that's the problem. If only people would stop breeding! Then we wouldn't have misogynistic killing sprees at all.

44.
MT
Washington, DC
August 8th, 2009
9:48 am
Hmm, let's see:

According to Mr. Herbert, killing females because they are females is a sign of misogyny.

But lots more men are killed than women in the United States, and undoubtedly many if not most of these men were killed because they were males. Such violence against males must be a sign of misandry, according to Mr. Herbert's formulation.

Furthermore, following Mr. Herbert's own logic, because so many more men are killed than women, the scale of our society's misandry must be much, much greater than the scale of our society's misogyny.

Which means that Mr. Herbert should be writing many, many more columns about violence against men then he should about violence against women.

Frankly, Mr. Herbert's real mistake is to insist on viewing this matter through the prism of gender, which leads him to not only insult the entire male half of the species but also ignore the fact that females commit violence as well — the majority of violent abuse of children is committed by females, for example. (Google it.)

Perhaps Mr. Herbert should remove his ideological blinders and focus on the real issue: reducing violence, in all its permutations.

Misogyny! Blah blah blah, ladies! Let's get back to what really matters: MEN.

49.
Nick Bourbaki
LA
August 8th, 2009
10:03 am
This is ludicrous; if anything the culture in the US today is rife with misandry and reverse racism, but you won't see Mr. Herbert writing about that anytime soon, because the idea that someone not a woman or a minority can have it just as bad, whether it be in divorce courts or college admissions, is considered a threat to the inexorable march of Mr. Herbert and his ilk towards an America free from the oppressive white man. What is truly expected is that the descendants of those who ill-treated women or blacks genuflect at the trinity of feminism, multiculturism and affirmative action, as is evidenced by the proceedings in our courts and colleges and Obama's shortlist for the Supreme Court. All this aside, perhaps Mr. Herbert should consider that a reason why this didn't provoke wide outrage at misogyny in our culture is because most people realized that the actions of an insane lone gunman do not reflect upon all men (or misogynists, since the two seem to be interchangable), much less on our national culture. This crime didn't occur because of a culture of misogyny, it occurred because the gunman was out of his mind. Even then, what is your solution Mr. Herbert? Mr. Sodini's obsession with women was genetically hard-wired into him by millions of years of evolution, which he had no choice over, and exacerbated by his warped mind, a personal suffering, not a societal one. Would you have all men chemically castrated and subdued, that the poor women shan't suffer more?

Also, I find it highly hippocritical that those who vehemently support the freedom and legitimacy of sexual pleasure in premarital and homosexual relationships, like Mr. Herbert, despite the ire of the religious fundamentalists, now turn around and join hands with the religious against pornography, which is a different form of sexual pleasure, apparently favored by many more than Mr. Herbert might imagine, considering that there are more such sites than the rest put together. If you contest that the practice somehow abuses the actresses (again ignoring altogether the well-being of the actors, who are just as involved and vulnerable), then would you say that the suffering of the enormous number of children born out of wedlock who's fathers have no societal obligations towards them and are entirely absent from their lives, save a check every month, which cannot replace a father present in the home, are less than those of the adult actress? Surely then you ought advocate abstinence, for these children were conceived in a time rife with birth control. What about those children caught in a divorce, who suffer similarly? Then you ought advocate a ban on divorces for reasons not grave, which constitute the large majority; for it is difficult to believe that so many so abuse their spouses that there is no other choice. The children did not choose this and have no way out, but the actresses did and do. Of course you won't speak out for the children with the same vindication that you denounce pornography as misogyny, since you would have to oppose the party line of unrestricted promiscuity or the prevalence of parental conflict over their obligation to their family.

This is so "hippocritical!" WILL SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE OPPRESSED WHITE MEN!?!?

50.
GHF
Orlando, FL
August 8th, 2009
10:03 am
"They are attacked because they are female."

There is a simple solution. Sam Colt, John Moses Browning, Gaston Glock, Smith and Wesson, the Beretta family, etc., provide the way to make women - in a physical confrontation - the same size as their potenital male attackers.

Make the price of an attack high enough, and the certainy of the negative response sure enough, and the possibility of attack diaminishes.

Gun fights are inheriently head games. For the female, the old, the outnumbered it is not how strong you are, it is how focused and under control you are that count. This might sound mad (Mutually Assured Distruction, the olde Cold War phrase), but it beats hang-wringing over events.

Look, if the ladies knew how to shoot a gun, they'd never face misogyny again. Don't have a penis? Buy a weapon instead!

179.
Marcia424
Eagan, MN
August 8th, 2009
1:04 pm
Women and girls all too often don't repect themselves. As a grade school teacher, I regularly saw boys teasing girls, often in an insulting, overly sexual way. Typically the girls responded with giggles—they were flattered. The next step is the adult "boy" saying after an assault,"She wanted it!"

Girls needn't turn into little Puritans, but they do need to respect themselves enough to help boys see them as human beings, not just as dolls for their amusement. Dare I use the word "empathy"?

And, as always, it's all our fault.

Women At Risk [NYTimes]
Women At Risk: Reader's Comments [NYTimes]

Minutes later, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert came on and said that he felt Armey owed Walsh — and Hardball viewers — an apology for his sexist bullshit. (I added that last part; Bob Herbert didn't actually curse.)

Chris Matthews later said, "We had a rather uh, rough back and forth; I think Dick Armey, I like the guy but I think he went way overboard going after Joan. I mean, you gotta let the other person make their point without a reference to your wife or whatever. This gender aspect that shouldn't have been brought up."

Actually, I think it's fine Armey brought it up. If, in the face of a smart, strong woman making good points, all Republican douchebags are simply going to throw up their hands and insult women rather than responding with substantive or remotely intelligent counterpoints, then we really aren't going to have to worry about the 2010 midterm elections.

MOE: Did you check out Geraldine Ferrarro giving Shep Smith a beej? How could someone be SO HYPER AWARE OF anything even remotely construable as "sexist" still be saying things like "black journalists who are Obama surrogates like Bob Herbert." Because yes, Bob Herbert is so simpleminded, so singlemindedly focused on electing one of "his own" that — oh yes, and the only reason he has his New York Times platform is surely tokenism in the first place — why would a progressive white woman even read him to begin with?
MOE: You know he doesn't have anything worth saying about misogyny

MEGAN: Like Shep wants a beej from a girl...
MOE: Dude
MOE: I'm shaking from anger.
MEGAN: Also she wants an "independent group to do a study on media." Like Media Matters?
MOE: Yeah maybe they should check out that Obama surrogate Bob Herbert who hasn't had anything nice to say about Hillary in the past six months because he's so sexist

MOE: OH EXCEPT WELL THIS FIVE MONTHS AGO

If there was ever a story that deserved more coverage by the news media, it’s the dark persistence of misogyny in America

MEGAN: Also, so, can we check her crazy hair? She's got a tuft sticking up in the back. How did that happen?
MOE: Okay, I can't handle it anymore, let's just have a moment of silence for Ted Kennedy's brain. I had dinner with Jennifer Gerson last night and she said that as an intern for MSNBC she was once charged with escorting him up a platform and he was outraged to find that he had to climb steps. "There were literally two steps," she said. My kind of septugenarian! Although…not if I stay in this apartment!!
MEGAN: Well, I think his knees are shit. But, yes, it doesn't surprise me. But brain cancer sucks. I'll bet he thought his heart would get him.
MOE: Okay, in another window SinisterRouge is calming me down. (Imagine if Geraldine Ferrarro was a commenter! She'd get put on notice, and then she'd just go crazy and her last comment would be something like "Hang that darkie from a tree!" and then she'd claim it was a joke and then no one would pay attention to MY brand of "controversy" anymore.)
MEGAN: I love that she's the one calming you down today. I mean, Ferraro just makes me sad. I'm sad that's she's turned into this caricature of a nasty old woman whose racism shows and who is so concerned with her supposed victimhood that she dismisses the claims of others. She was the first female candidate for the vice presidency of the United motherfucking States of America and she's stomping all over the legacy of that. I realize that not everyone reading this would remember, but I remember 1984 and I remember thinking it was, like, totally normal that a woman be running and then realizing it wasn't and thus how cool she was. Only now she's not cool. So I'm more saddened than outraged.

MOE: Uh, in other news Hillary won Kentucky by a 30-point margin. Um, dumb question: are there no black people in Kentucky or something? What's up with that? Also oil went above $130 a barrel, another new record.
MEGAN: I have deliberately avoided looking at gas prices while in New York, a situation helped by the fact that the only times I've passed any have been in a cab and I've been intoxicated. I'm sure they're high.
MOE: A friend of mine asked me the other day why oil prices were so expensive and I was like "1. China 2. India 3. The market tends to overreact 4. no exploration or real incentive for exploration." But I forgot to add "the dollar." And seriously regarding the exploration thing I'm not sure whether that's still true.
MEGAN: Also, Obama barely campaigned in Kentucky. I think despite his crazy fundraising skills, he's conserving his money at this point to get through the convention and Pennsylvania sort of proved that sometimes its just a waste. He doesn't need Kentucky, so he didn't spend so much to make that margin tigihter.
MOE: Kentucky is only like 7.5% black.

Gross reports having students of his at the University of Kentucky tell him they had never seen or talked to a black person before coming to Lexington, a college town of nearly 300,000 people. In some areas of Kentucky, Gross says there's perhaps only one or two black families there.

MOE: Also Kentucky declared neutrality during the Civil War…
MEGAN: I actually met someone once in her forties who had never seen a black person until she left her state. It was, um, interesting. I'm amazed it still happens.
MOE: Though it was a slave state and in the early 1830s slaves comprised a quarter of the population. They just never had much of a plantation economy…Is it possible my perception of Kentucky has been skewed because some huckster from Indiana decided to dress in "stereotypical Southern gentleman type clothing to promote his restaurant chain"?? Um why yes it may be!
MOE: Oh in other news Hezbollah has veto power over everything the Lebanese government does now.
MEGAN: Oh, well, that's great. I love how having the power to scuttle stuff is important.

MEGAN: Kentucky was an okay state. I drove through it once. It was sorta pretty, plus, obviously, bourbon.
MOE: OBVIOUSLY
MOE: So, here's something else. I was on the train yesterday with this lady who was really nice and let me use her phone. Her computer said "Property of the World Bank" and she told me how she was coming up to New York to present a new survey on economic development and by George it would appear she was not pulling a fast one on me! And check this:

But departing from free-market orthodoxy, the panel also said that governments had a far greater role to play in development than was recognized in the markets-are-king 1980s and 1990s. To boost growth, the panel urged developing nations to spend heavily on infrastructure and endorsed, with some reservation, government subsidies to build local industries.

MOE: You don't say!

Among the findings that are bound to stoke the most controversy: democracy isn't essential for growth. Autocratic governments that allow "vigorous debate" internally on economic policies are sufficient, the report said. Free trade isn't a prerequisite either. Some fast-growing economies kept barriers high to imports, even as they promoted exports, the report said.

MEGAN: Oh, wait, someone noticed China! Cool!
MOE: Well yeah and who did China notice? Why…Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia and also Thailand!
MOE: But what I really love is this:

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers praised the commission's focus on government-led growth policies, but said its emphasis on economic winners didn't fully take into account how industrial policies deepened corruption in many countries and failed to ignite growth there. "It's like looking only at those who made fortunes in the stock market without diversifying their portfolios" to figure out the best way to get rich, he said.

MEGAN: Indonesia's kind of a hot mess, though, and has oil/natural gas, so I think that's a little different. But otherwise, I agree with your list.
MOE: Um, actually, looking at the United States economy is what that is like.

MOE: Well yes, Indonesia is an incredible mess, which is why China managed to grab so much manufacturing business from them as Suharto's government crumbled.
MEGAN: Indonesia is one of those places I'd really like to visit. I don't know why. I wish I was like my friend Tim, who parlayed a Masters in theology to a job as an investment banker, saved a shitload of money and bailed on life to travel the world for a year. I am really jealous of him right now, and not just because I keep looking at his flickr account.
MOE: Which speaks to Larry Summers' point, but the fact is that Korea and Taiwan both paid close attention to Japan's climb up the "economic value ladder" into more sophisticated manufacturing. When you manufacture computer chips, for instance, which are by definition very small and shrink in size every 18 months, the cost of sending them down the Insatiable Consumption Esophagus toward the US is not that great. So your population can eventually see much more of the cost! But semiconductor plants are incredibly expensive and sophisticated to operate, so while they're harder to transplant in other countries — though the Taiwanese have certainly been doing just that in China despite the fact that you still can't get a direct flight between the two countries — they also require a lot of PLANNING. INVESTMENT. An educational strategy.
MOE: And then! Much to the chagrin of shareholders…semiconductors are a highly cyclical business! So while the demand keeps growing, sometimes you have to sell them at a loss!
MOE: It can be painfully low-margin…again something the market doesn't reward!
MEGAN: Oh, God, stop, visions of grad school case study horrors dancing in my head!
MOE: BUT. Your countrymen will thank you!
MOE: Sorry, it just completely kills me that you mention how we need better economic and industrial planning in this country to some people and they act like you're fucking advocating the next Great Leap Forward.
MEGAN: I mean, the problem with industrial planning is that you take the concept, throw in 20,000 businsess lobbyists and 535 Members and Senators and you come up with a bullshit plan that won't help anyone that really needs it and will help whomever has the political capital to get help. Ahhh, democracy.

MOE: Okay I cannot tell you how much I read and forgot last night while trying to get to sleep. And then a fucking earthquake came and toppled a thousand cell phone towers and trapped 900 high school students in school and if it's anything like the 1976 earthquake of a slightly lower Richter 240,000 people stand to die.
MOE: Did you also read how in Burma they are counting the survivors because it's easier than counting the dead? I guess the death toll there is supposed to reach 100,000...
MOE: But the Most Emailed story is this thought provoking Tom Friedman column.
MEGAN: That was last week, before the military decided that all the food was for them. So, I think we can safely assume that the total survival rate will be about equal to the members of the junta, the military and their families, since apparently everyone else is just supposed to die quietly and let the soldiers dump their bloated bodies in waterways so no one knows.
MEGAN: Fucking Tom Friedman.
8:55 AM
MOE:

That restriction has angered local government officials like Tin Win who are trying to help rebuild the lives of villagers. He twitched with rage as he described the rice the military gave him.

"They gave us four bags," he said. "The rice is rotten — even the pigs and dogs wouldn't eat it."

He said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had delivered good rice to the local military leaders last week but they kept it for themselves and distributed the waterlogged, musty rice. "I'm very angry," he said, adding an expletive to describe the military.

"The government told us that school must reopen June 1, if you have a schoolhouse or not," Myint Oo told his visitor. "'Teach under a tree if you have to,' they said."

When he began describing the devastation to the school and village, a portly man in a white T-shirt who also seemed to hold a position of power interrupted.

"Don't tell these foreigners anything," the man said.

Myint Oo replied that he wanted to talk to the visitors in the hope that they could help rebuild the village.

"They will send the facts to the world and show the weakness of the Myanmar government," said the man in the white shirt.

"This is not just a new generation, but a new kind of generation...In the omphalocentric process of self-construction and discovery," today's youth "stalks love like a wary hunter, but has no time or target — not even the mellowing Communists — for hate."

MEGAN: Maybe he can talk about how he held the Metro system's budget hostage until they agreed to spend more than a million dollars to change all the signage in the system to reflect the full name of National Airport.
MEGAN: But to guarantee his ability to fuck over the Republican Party and my ability to have something interesting to write about, I would totally make my first political donation to him.
MOE: No Peggy is totes the weird answer to Maureen Dowd. Her prose is kind of hilarious, like the way she seems to go inside a dark room and close her eyes and meditate and return with a Very. Melodramatic. Assessment. Of the feelings and attitudes governing the political awareness of the American populace. I should have Maria do a Best Of Peggy I think. And does McCain really need Bob Barr undermining his campaign when he's got RON PAUL undermining it already?
MEGAN: Scroll down, by the way, for the picture of them standing in front of the Eiffel Tower with a Ron Paul sign. Crazy ass motherfuckers.
MOE: Also: didn't two McCain advisers just step down after admitting to representing the Burmese junta? (That might lose Laura Bush's vote.) McCain is kind of a lousy subject right now.
MOE: Here we go.

Doug Davenport, the regional campaign manager for the mid-Atlantic states, founded the DCI Group's lobbying practice and oversaw the contract with Myanmar in 2002.
"Doug has tendered his resignation and we have accepted it," Jill Hazelbaker, McCain's communications director, wrote in a e-mail.
He joins former DCI Group CEO Doug Goodyear, who resigned yesterday from the post of convention CEO after Newsweek reported that DCI was paid more than $300,000 to represent Myanmar's ruling junta.

The Democratic front-runner's wife did not comment on other rival candidates for the party's nomination, but she has been sniping at Clinton since last summer. According to Obama sources, those public utterances do not reveal the extent of her hostility.

A procedural hearing on Fossella's drunken-driving arrest - which ultimately exposed his double life - is slated for a Virginia courtroom Monday.

MEGAN: Ah, that's the brilliant thing! When he got pulled over for running a red light drunk, his excuse was that he was on his way to a friend's house, after which he admitted he was going to see his sick kid.
MEGAN: Only his official kids were in NY with his wife. And, OMG, they've been having an affair since at least 2003? Five years? Dude, what the fuck. Even Kennedy got a divorce.
MOE: Even Prince Charles got a divorce! Dude did we learn anything over the weekend about this minister who officiated the Jenna wedding?
MEGAN: He's an Obama supporter who also does weddings?

Black civil rights weren't won by suited men (or women) sitting at desks. They were won by a mass movement of millions who marched, sat in at lunch counters, endured jailings, and took bullets and beatings for the right to vote and move freely about.

Barbara thinks Hillary is cynical and pragmatic to the point of political futility and basically indicates her skillset would be better-suited to the corner office than the presidency. And Bob is merely troubled by the willingness of America to regularly demean, exploit, belittle, grope, abuse, and throw away the rape kits of one half of its populace. (Also he is so cute!) Go read both of them and read some people with real opinions for a change!

Hillary's Real MLK Problem [Huffington Post]
Politics and Misogyny [NY Times]

*Could you tell that was a joke? That was a joke. Designed to offend you, avoid earnestness, save space, etc.