This is Ross Douthat. He once wrote about a near sexual encounter with a woman who "resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon." This coming from a man who, judging from his picture, is the epitome of chunk. He was eventually disgusted to the point of not completing the act when the woman whispered to him that she was on the pill. So we know this man is revolted by the prospect of a sexually aware woman who may have slept with other men, but this post isn't about that. It's about the fact that Douthat, The New York Times' purportedly young, renegade, revolutionary-thinking new Op-Ed columnist has written now two pieces about women's issues that are underhanded and offensive to modern, pro-choice, working, educated women.
A couple of weeks ago, Douthat penned a column after he (supposedly) read a 45-page paper about the paradox of declining female happiness since the steady incline of female power and presence in the work force and equality in the home. But his piece does conveniently skip over some pretty interesting clauses in the paper, penned by economists at The Wharton School of Business at UPenn, in favor of unembelished statements in the paper's short abstract that support his claim that "…all the achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness…" Douthat also claims that the paper shows that all women of all races are unhappier than all men of all races when this is not the case. African-American women have been shown to be happier than their male counterparts and, as other bloggers have pointed out, despite Douthat's claim that Hispanics are more likely to be single mothers than rich white women, the study includes evidence from the Latina community only since 2000. So it seems like Douthat didn't completely read or understand the paper, but was still able to advocate the stigmatism of sexually active women:
[Feminists and conservatives] should also be able to agree that the steady advance of single motherhood threatens the interests and happiness of women. Here the public-policy options are limited; some kind of social stigma is a necessity. But a new-model stigma shouldn't (and couldn't) look like the old sexism. There's no necessary reason why feminists and cultural conservatives can't join forces – in the same way that they made common cause during the pornography wars of the 1980s – behind a social revolution that ostracizes serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors as thoroughly as the "fallen women" of a more patriarchal age.
No reason, of course, save the fact that contemporary America doesn't seem willing to accept sexual stigma, period.
That's right, Douthat. Even though you have no problem applying a stigma to women who are willing to sleep with you because they are willing to sleep with you (I am picking up on some Groucho Marx-like logic here: you wouldn't want to sleep with any woman who'd have your member?) and protect themselves accordingly, the rest of what you term "contemporary" America does not want to accept sexual stigma. Thanks for throwing us the bone (or not) about not going back to the "old sexism."
By pointing out that same "old sexism" won't and can't work, Douthat effectively suggests that there needs to be a replacement for it, in other words, a "new sexism." There is a way to describe the kind of stigma he's talking about without mentioning the "S" word. As a Harvard grad, author of two books, and contributor to national magazines, newspapers and blogs, Douthat certainly knew what he was doing when he chose the word "sexism." He thinks he is a sneaky rhetoricist, but the fact that he apparently approves of some form of sexism is not at all a clever end. Asking Feminists to come up with a new wave of self-sexism is ludicrous.
Now let's turn to the column that was published on Tuesday. Called "Not All Abortions are Equal," Douthat takes on the recent murder of Dr. George Tiller and uses it as a tool to segue into his thesis that "by enshrining a near-absolute right to abortion in the Constitution, the pro-choice side has ensured that the hard cases are more controversial than they otherwise would be," and that abotion should be returned to democratic process. If it is, Douthat claims, "[t]he result would be laws with more respect for human life, a culture less inflamed by a small number of tragic cases." So, clearly, even though he makes limp-wristed attempts at looking like he's not taking sides beyond acknowledging that there is a violence problem (i.e.: "Arguments about whether and how to restrict abortions in the second trimester — as many advanced democracies already do – would replace protests over the scope of third-trimester medical exemptions"), Douthat is anti-abortion (though maybe not anti-choice, or at least realizes the intellectual merits of being pro-choice).
The most stunning evidence of this fact is his assessment of Dr. Tiller's life and work, which were marred by violence and relentless prosecution by a religion driven DA. But Douthat doesn't say it quite like that. Instead he chooses to say that,
[Tiller] was a target of protests — and, tragically, of terrorist violence — because he performed late-term abortions, period. But his critics were convinced that he performed them not only in truly desperate situations, but in many other cases as well. Over the years, they cobbled together a considerable amount of evidence — drawn from the state’s abortion statistics, from Tiller’s own comments, and from a 2006 investigation — suggesting that Tiller abused the state’s mental-health exemption to justify late-term abortions in almost any situation.
This evidence is persuasive, but not dispositive. We may never know how many of George Tiller’s abortions were performed on healthy mothers and healthy fetuses.
But the courts aquitted Tiller. Over and over and over. The evidence was not persuasive.
The irony that Tiller was religious and gunned down in his church's lobby is not lost on Douthat. He comments on the thousands of thank you letters and testimonials written by former patients of Tiller, saying of them scornfully, "They help explain why Tiller thought he was doing the Lord’s work, even though that work involved destroying something that we wouldn’t hesitate to call a baby if we saw it struggling for life in a hospital bed." In this case, Douthat's rhetoric descision was to be the opposite of witty, was to be deliberately obtuse. He fluxuates from attempting to subliminally endorse descrimination to blatantly writing like a provocateur.
Only, if you're going to be provocative, you must always be provocative. And if one is a centrist (as Douthat claims he is) one cannot, by definition, be provocative. To do so, you have to provoke by offering an opinion that offends or contradicts the opinion of a large group of people. That might only illustrate that Douthat is still finding his niche, his identity as a writer, or whatever. If that is the case, he should be conscious of his search and own that–write about uncertainty in the face of grave and controversial topics (that would certainly be a revolutionary position for an opinion piece)–instead of steadfastly proclaiming that sexually active women should be publically shamed and that abortion delegation and legislation is justifiable because it will distract anti-abortion protesters from killing more doctors.
