Over at Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte has a short review of The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity, by Stephen Ducat. She writes:
Ducat’s basic thesis is that boys grow up having a harder time than girls creating a positive gender identity, and therefore grow up too often to define themselves as Not Women, creating misogyny, war, etc. I think there’s little doubt that this is true, though the reasons it is true are in dispute. Ducat points to a number of factors, including the fact that child-rearing is gender-segregated, children are disciplined through abuse and the interesting idea that men suffer from “womb envy”.
The book sounds pretty interesting, and I’ll have more to say about it tomorrow, but I’m mostly mentioning it as a way to interject that I was at the Crown & Anchor pub in Austin yesterday, having a beer with a friend, when who should sit down a few seats away from us but Amanda Marcotte, of Pandagon, fresh out of the frying pan of one of the first mini-controversies of the 2008 presidential election.
A lot has already been said about the controversy—which ended when Marcotte resigned, last week, after less than a month as blogmaster of John Edwards’ presidential campaign—but the basic plotline is this.
Marcotte, whose blog gets about 30,000 readers a day, was hired by the Edwards’ campaign to be its blogmaster. Almost immediately, conservative activists saw in the hire an opportunity to gin up a scandal, to embarrass Edwards, and to intimidate the Democratic party into continuing to repudiatee its activist base (of which Marcotte, an outspoken feminist, was immediately a symbol). A few of Marcotte’s more intemperate comments were dug up from the archives, taken out of context, and strung together into the narrative that she was an anti-Catholic bigot.
The right-wing germinated the story, spread it to the mainstream media, and within a week or so it was a full-fledged tempest in a teapot. Would Edwards capitulate to the pressure to fire his blogger and thereby alienate the left-wing blogosphere? Would he stand by his woman, and his principle, and earn the loyalty of the base at the expense, possibly, of his credibility with the mainstream media?
In the end, Edwards stood by his woman (albeit after issuing a press release that distanced himself from her more undiplomatic rhetoric), but Marcotte resigned soon after.“I realized,” she wrote, “that I couldn’t handle the stress of having people flinging an endless stream of baseless accusations at me without being able to come out and defend myself, so I resigned from the campaign.”
Anyway, I briefly introduced myself to Marcotte, told her not to let the bastards get her down, and then left her to what I assume was her blogging (she had her laptop with her), and may in fact have been the very review that I just excerpted above.
