Letters to the Editor
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Oh! Oh! Look at me! I'm dismissing Maureen Dowd
Contrary to this piece's subtitle, actually, I *can* dismiss Maureen Dowd--precisely because she is inflammatory and she is generally satisfied with being exclusively that. Traister says, "Dowd has clearly touched a nerve. And you only touch a nerve by telling a truth."
Well, pardon me, but what kind of bullshit is that? Sometimes you touch a nerve because the flesh has been scraped off by having the same old, rusty untruth scraped over it again and again. For instance, "Sex and the City" sociology jangles my nerves not because it's true, but because I'm so appalled at the notion of having complicated lives reduced to anything so facile that even Sarah Jessica Parker can narrate it.
When Salon runs "the trouble with feminism" (or "the trouble with men", or "the trouble with guys who don't wanna date me") pieces like this, I have to remind myself that this is the same magazine where Joan Walsh printed her "Actually, I do want to run the world, and what of it?" column in the wake of the NYT Magazine's piece on women opting out of careers. This magazine is capable of seeing through trend pieces and the memoirs of a narrow stratum of women. So how'd this pointless assemblage of quotations and would-be ahas get through again?