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March 14, 2008

"An awful way to spend the day ... unless they get in the kitchen and make a great meal after all the bitching."

A
nn Althouse announces an upcoming conference on feminist legal theory at the University of Wisconsin, and all misogynist hell breaks loose in her comments, especially from some of her most frequent commenters. Nauseating stuff ... and Ann remains curiously silent (except to note that the program features some men, and to encourage people to hit her blog's tip jar). Ann has blogged quite a bit about her own feminism, and has criticized some powerful people whom she sees as feminism's false friends. So it's hard to understand her wanting to provide a forum for the sort of filth her commenters are spewing.

My theory: this was a ploy to drum up fodder for conversation at the conference. She set up a blank screen for her commenters to reveal themselves. If this was her strategy, it was brilliant, and it worked.

UPDATE: Ann sees her comment threads differently from me. She says, in a comment (to this thread, posted at 6:53 p.m.), "many commenters are finding academic feminism ridiculous and that is not misogyny. To call it misogyny is to put your lack of thinking and writing skills on display."

I was the first to call some of the comments misogynist, so I guess I'm among those displaying allegedly poor thinking and writing skills.

Here are some comments from the original thread that strike me as misogynist (as distinguished from simply critical of academic feminism):

11:20 a.m.: a feminist meeting is "another meeting with a lot of older women wearing shoulder pads."

12:24 p.m.: men attending a feminist meeting are there "to get laid."

12:39 p.m.: inquiry about anal sex.

12:44 p.m.: "if they want to be taken seriously, they need a bra-burning."

2:38 p.m.: a meeting of feminists is a place to "pick up babes."

3:24 p.m.: women at the meeting are probably just "bitching" and can make up for this only by cooking a good meal ... and the meeting will have lots of "lebanese" (which is to say, lesbians) with armpit hair and shag haircuts.

7:23 p.m.: a joke about womens' breast sizes

7:24 p.m.: a reprise of the anal sex theme, with a new reference to oral sex.

1:00 a.m.: a commenter raises the idea of ejaculating on a female law professor's hair.

7:49 a.m.: a screw-in-a-light-bulb joke in which a woman serves a man dinner and drinks and then allows him to have intercourse with her from behind, with a picture of a now-famous prostitute taped to the back of her head.

11:59 a.m.: a fantasy, complete with linked visual illustration, in which a cartoon woman's head is removed, and then she is reduced simply to legs and a vagina. (Yeah, "visual" was redundant.)

Posted by Eric at March 14, 2008 3:45 PM