THAT "WOMEN ARE STUPID" OP-ED: BROUGHT TO YOU IN PART BY WINGNUT WELFARE

The talk of Blogistan yesterday was a Washington Post op-ed by Charlotte Allen that declared women stupid:

...What is it about us women? Why do we always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental? ...

I swear no man watches "Grey's Anatomy" unless his girlfriend forces him to. No man bakes cookies for his dog. No man feels blue and takes off work to spend the day in bed with a copy of "The Friday Night Knitting Club." No man contracts nebulous diseases whose existence is disputed by many if not all doctors, such as Morgellons (where you feel bugs crawling around under your skin). At least no man I know. Of course, not all women do these things, either -- although enough do to make one wonder whether there isn't some genetic aspect of the female brain, something evolutionarily connected to the fact that we live longer than men or go through childbirth, that turns the pre-frontal cortex into Cream of Wheat....

Allen slams Barack Obama because a whopping five of the nine million-plus Obama voters this year have fainted at campaign rallies. She goes after Hillary Clinton because her "nearly all-female staff" (Mark Penn? hello?) "has run one of the worst -- and, yes, stupidest -- presidential races in recent history" (which is true only if "recent history" doesn't include, oh, say, January 2008 and the latter part of 2007, when the highly promising and decidedly more male campaigns of Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and Fred Thompson, unlike Clinton's, utterly cratered).

Allen reminds me of Ward Connerly -- the African American who's made destroying affirmative action his life's work, seemingly because, as one reporter learned a few years back after talking to Connerly and a number of his acquaintances, Connerly he really doesn't like black people or being thought of as black. I don't know why Allen feels about her femaleness the way Connerly feels about his blackness, but it's clear that she does.

Over the years, Connerly has received quite a bit of support from right-wing foundations. Allen, for her part, was an editor at the blog of the anti-feminist Independent Women's Forum, which is also lavishly funded by right-wing foundations (UPDATE: A more detailed breakdown is here.) Go here and you can page through her blog work for IWF (a few choice cuts: "Stay-at-Home Moms Are Happy--and So Are Their Sons"; "Be a Feminist--and Worry About Becoming a Bag Lady"; "When Radical Feminists Grow Old--Not a Pretty Sight"; and this piece in which she reads that girls are doing better than boys in Wilmette, Illinois, and throws up her hands in despair). She also wrote quite a bit for IWF's magazine Women's Quarterly (in this piece, for instance, she describes herself as "a surrendered wife"). This hasn't been her sole source of income by any means, but I'm sure it really helped pay the bills. It certainly gave her ample opportunity to hone her self-hating chops.