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I wasn't talking about Salon Readers. I was talking about the vast (over 14 million views) popular reception of this video. That reception I think is almost entirely misogynistic. My only objection to Salon readers are to those comments here which defend the humor people find in this video as being sympathetic or about something other than misogyny and prejudice against southerners. That may be true for a few people, but pretending that those sort of responses have anything to do with the meteroric rise in popularity of the Miss Teen video requires ignoring (or having no knowledge of) what most people out there in the rest of the world are saying.
It's an enormous understatement to dismiss the misogyny and prejudice as just what a "bunch" of people on YouTube think. That is the popular reception. That's where millions upon millions of people are going. There are tens of thousands of comments on this video at YouTube (whereas here there are only over a hundred). Look at what people are saying at YouTube, Digg, Reddit. Do a google news search and look at how most news sources are covering this. No one is hiding that they are laughing at someone who they believe in unfathomably stupid. People are mocking her, in droves, for being a dumb woman and a dumb southerner. They mock her hair color. They mock her accent. That's what tens of thousands of people are saying.
Salon readers are I think in no way representative of the popular reception of this video and it is a mistake, if one wants to understand how this video became one of the single most popular videos in YouTube's history in less than a week, to take Salon readers as an example.
