Jezebel: feminazi bonerkiller squad

The Washington Post, Advancing The "Women Are Stupid" Argument Since 1994

Moe — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:00:35 EST

Well, "Woman Are Stupid" advocate Charlotte Allen gave an online chat elucidating her little polemic (as well as waxing lyrical over the virtues of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War etc. etc. puke hurl) over at the Washington Post today, and we gave them the page view because the Washington Post not so long ago overlooked the fact that women are stupid for long enough to allow two women into the position whereby they won two separate Pulitzers the same year. Here is the highlight:

Anywhere: Hey, Charlotte. Nice tits. Sincerely, a guy.
Charlotte Allen: Hey, Washington Post forum moderators: I thought obscene comments were supposed to be filtered out of this forum? How did this one get in?

Who indeed?! Wait, maybe here's a clue! A tipster tells us a 1994 piece by Washington Post editor Gene Weingarten has seen a sudden surge in traffic. "This thesis will reluctantly examine the painful though inescapable scientific fact that women are stupider than men," it begins.

We make no assertion here that brain mass relates directly to intelligence. As scientists, we must at all costs avoid the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. To argue that women are dumber because their brains are smaller would be no more intellectually valid than asserting that just because someone is 6 feet 7 inches tall he is more likely to be able to dunk a basketball than someone who is 5 feet 3.
So call this one a tossup.

3. Extremely Empirical Data

According to the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N.J., women, on average, score nearly 50 points below men on the Scholastic Assessment Test, the national college entrance exam.

Some studies point out that once women are in college, their performance is equal to, or even superior to, men's performance. We accept that fact, and applaud it warmly, but we must recognize it for what it is. Unscientific.

Unlike an exam administered anonymously, graded by computer and field-tested over generations to eliminate bias of any sort, performance in school is perforce a manipulable measurement. It is a measure not of raw ability, or of intellectual capacity, but of a mishmash of qualities that include diligence, organization and diplomatic skills. It can be affected by factors as extraneous as one's consumption of fraternity beer, or one's skill at coquettishly elevating one's stockinged thigh in a manner calculated to be pleasing to the professorial eye..

Um, yeah I smell an "inside job" here. And yeah, it's sad that the funnier article on women being stupid was written by a man, but I'm going to go out on a limb and call him a "brilliant outlier." XO, Gene.

Charlotte Allen On Outlook Article, Reaction [Washington Post]
Sex And I.Q.: An Apologia [Washington Post]

Five Reasons To Love Viagra

Moe — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 14:00:40 EST

It's the tenth anniversary of Viagra! And given this rare nexus of the pharmaceutical industry, the institutionalized sexism that so famously led insurers to reimburse the Viagra prescriptions of the same men whose girlfriends couldn't get their fucking birth control covered, and the gazillions of terabytes of Viagra-hawking spam clogging the world's fiber optic cables, we should probably be doing some sort of angry feminist rant about it. But I'm feeling counterintuitive today! (And also, um, sex-positive.) So instead I compiled 5 reasons we should all stop worrying and learn to love the little blue pill so beloved by Jack Nicholson and 30 million other men too old to be having threesomes.

1. The story of Viagra starts in 1982 with a conference of urologists in Las Vegas at which one Dr. Giles Brindley decided to display off the effects of an injectible erectile dysfunction drug he was developing by brandishing his boner onstage. The doctors in the audience described his wang as long, thin, and grayish. It was the beginning of a reliable flow of fun, bizarre erectile dysfunction-related news stories and assorted stupid crap like this.?

2. Lots of dudes get prostate cancer. My dad, for one. Don't get me wrong, I do not want to think about my parents having sex. So I am going to end this entry before I get ahead of myself. I mean, when it all comes down, you're glad breast implants exist, aren't you?

3. Viagra actually definitively solved a physical problem. How many modern pharmaceuticals can even say that? For every person you know whose, like, life was saved by Zoloft, you probably know five people whose insurance companies have spent thousands of dollars sampling an array of mood-altering drugs that left them crazy, panicky, suicidal, incapable of solving any underlying problems and/or completely devoid of the desire to have sex. And couldn't most of our first world problems be solved by a little more sex?

4. Viagra helped people talk about sex. Again, agreed: you didn't want to picture Bob Dole and Liddy having sex, but you probably didn't want to picture Ron Jeremy having sex either, and now you don't have to, because thanks to Viagra the adult entertainment industry no longer has to rely on gross freaks who happen to have massive boner-prolonging capabilities.The Viagra salesman memoir Hard Sell which I actually read for some reason is full of heartwarming stories about uptight Midwesterners being emboldened to talk to their doctors and then, their neighbors! about fucking. And what followed? Bible Belt vibrator parties, the repeal of the Texas sex toy ban, and... well, the term "va-jay-jay", but every revolution has its lame elements.

5. As long as I am going to get old, I would like to get laid. I mean, duh.