Women: Dumb as Cream of Wheat?

If you're interested in a debate about women's inherent abilities (or inherent dimness), there's been a torrid debate about a column that appeared recently in the Washington Post's Outlook section.

This op-ed, by Charlotte Allen, is called "We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?" (click hyperlink to read), and it contains this questionable conclusion:

"I don't understand why more women don't relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home.(...) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts' content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim."

In response, Katha Pollit wrote a strong reply for Washingtonpost.com, "Dumb and Dumber: An Essay and Its Editors". Pollit says Allen mainly detests women who "reject, with every fiber of their latte-loving beings, the abstinence-only, father-knows-best, slut-shaming crabbed misogyny of the Republican right." (that really is a fantastic line... "slut-shaming"!)

She further calls out the Washington Post editors who approved the piece with another great line: "Here's a thought. Maybe there's another thing women can do besides fluff up their husbands' pillows: Fill more important jobs at The Washington Post." Hear, hear!

Agree, disagree? Are women inherently "dim" because they get into more car accidents, but die less frequently in car accidents, than men do? Should we give up on math, science and politics just because some women like "Grey's Anatomy"? (I can't judge - I've never seen it.)

Finally, if you want more, the Post's ombudswoman, Deborah Howell, summed up her reaction here. Turns out the Post editor (a woman) who worked w/the writer on the original piece thought it was "funny, clearly tongue-in-cheek and hyperbolic but with a serious point" about women in the context of the presidential campaign. Funny? I don't see that either.