Mary Elizabeth Williams Says We’re Charmers!!

I don’t know if you guys noticed that the post I wrote a few weeks ago, about “benevolent sexism” got a little attention from the HuffPo. That was kinda cool, because it was a very unbiased write-up, neutral and fair, and honestly not what I expected when I was initially contacted by them.

But today I discovered that Mary Elizabeth Williams, who I’ve written about critically before here and here, had something to say about us as well in her recent column at Salon.com. She seems kinda miffed, you guys.

She said, “And the charmers at Chicks on the Right announced that a recent study had filled them with ‘a desire to punch the nearest self-proclaimed feminist in the face.’ Now that’s just unladylike.” I’m going to take a wild guess on this, but I THINK she was being sarcastic when she called us charmers.

According to MEW, one of the key points that was left out all the critical write-ups of the story, was that “Women engage in benevolent sexism all the time too. As the study’s authors wrote, they ‘endorse sexist beliefs, at least in part, because they do not attend to subtle, aggregate forms of sexism in their personal lives.'”

Allow me to take this opportunity to clarify. I do not attend to “subtle, aggregate forms of sexism in my personal life” because I am not an overly sensitive, hyper-feminist, positive-men-are-out-to-exploit-or-minimize-me-at-every-opportunity lunatic. Apologies if I didn’t make that clear in my earlier post.

MEW cites an example of a woman she knows who is a VP, and was praised for “thinking like a man” by a colleague. MEW said if that woman wasn’t thrilled with that description, perhaps she had a point. I agree. And I would have simply said, to said colleague, “If I thought like a man, perhaps I wouldn’t have risen to the level of VP here” and thrown it right back in that dude’s face. The point is, the WOMAN IS A VP. That rocks. And what that says to me is that she works for a company which APPRECIATES WOMEN. Maybe she should (sorry in advance for this expression, MEW) grow a pair and call the guy out for making that comment, and not simply stew about it to MEW.

Whoops. Was that sexist of me to say?

MEW insists that feminists like her are able to distinguish between good manners and condescension. I’m happy to hear that, but the study didn’t demonstrate that point at all. In fact, it listed examples of “benevolent sexism” which were positively ridiculous and nothing that any reasonable woman should get miffed about. But MEW says, “We just don’t trade in flippant generalizations about gender, even ones that would put us on a pedestal we never asked for. Why would we, when the view from side by side is so much nicer?”

Personally, I enjoy hanging out on the occasional pedestal. It’s unfortunate that MEW would apparently take offense to being put on one herself, simply because she never asked to be put there.