The MSNBC commentator, Jill Nelson, has just responded to my criticism of her statement that “As far as I’m concerned it’s equally disrespectful and abusive to have women prancing around a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking the streets shrouded in burkas in order to survive.” Here’s her letter, and my response:
Andrew Sullivan’s quote from my MSNBC.com column is taken out of context and serves to distort my position in order to further his own. This is both a cheap shot and bad journalism.
How “out of context”? The quote was consonant with the entire article’s equation of Western treatment of women and extreme Islam’s social and cultural enslavement of them. And what context would in any way affect the fatuousness of Nelson’s statement? Nelson doesn’t say. In any case, when you provide a link to the original article, you can hardly be accused of disguising the context.
It’s also inaccurate, manipulative and, in the current political and judicial climate in America, dangerous to say there is a “weird overlap” between my beliefs and those of violent radical Muslims. As for characterizing this 50-year-old African-American woman as among those who “hate free societies,” that simply shows Sullivan’s ignorance and arrogance, characteristics typical of those who feed daily at the trough of white male privilege.
Dangerous? What is Nelson suggesting? That any criticism of her moral equivalence amounts to inciting violence against her? If that’s the case, we’d barely have free speech at all. And the fact that I use the term “weird overlap” and later “bizarre moral equivalence” is precisely because I hold out hope that feminists of most kinds would resist this kind of moral idiocy. Then we have the first of several personal insults. I am arrogant and ignorant. I feed daily at “the trough of white male privilege.” There is no response to this, any more than there can be a response to any simple insult. But it’s telling how swiftly Nelson stoops to this gambit. I never personally insulted her. I just attacked her opinions.
Sullivan’s suggestion that I playa-hate Western societies where women “choose how they want to present themselves,” demonstrates no understanding of women’s roles in Western culture, contempt for feminists, and, possibly worst of all, that he has no women friends. If he had any, he’d know how difficult it is to find one woman in America who actually believes that the way she chooses to “present” herself is determined absent historical, cultural and political conditioning, expectations and constraints.
What world does Nelson live in? I count myself a feminist; and there are legions of feminists who don’t believe that a woman who chooses to enter a beauty contest is as oppressed as one who is forced to wear a burka from head to foot just to leave the house. “Difficult to find one woman in America” who would agree with me? Is she kidding? I’d say a huge majority of American women would agree with me. My point, after all, is not that Western women don’t live under some cultural and social constraints. My point is that this cannot be equated with the way they are treated in, say, Saudi Arabia.
As I made clear in my column, religious zealots make the world a terrifying place for all of us, particularly women, even as they profess to protect us, whether they’re Muslims fighting Christians in Nigeria or antiabortion Christians attacking women and bombing clinics in America. The simplistic “You’re either for me or agin me” calculations of an Andrew Sullivan or a George W. Bush — or an Osama bin Laden, come to think of it — only serve to make the world a more dangerous place than it already is. Now that’s saying something.
So now I’m as bad as Osama bin Laden. Because I distinguish between his view of women and the views governing the Miss World contest! And this is an argument? Nelson is also presumably unaware of my many, long-standing battles with Christian fundamentalists on a whole battery of questions. But when all you’re trying to do is insult someone, listening to their arguments is superfluous.
Finally, I’m offended and bored by Sullivan and all the other willfully oblivious white guys who thought they were immune from the world’s terrors – and worse, believe they had a divine right to be – until Sept. 11. Now, having experienced the terror that much of the world lives with every day, they respond by swinging their dicks around and threatening – with bombs or bombast – those who do not view the world as they do. Talk about cultural relativism, p.c. journalism, and decadent machismo! But then, what’s new? In spite of all the rhetoric about how the terrorist attacks “changed us,” the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Threatening? Whom have I threatened? All I’ve done is make an argument in a liberal publication. But this is too much for her victimized sensibility. Notice the racism again – “willfully oblivious white guys.” Notice also the sexism: “swinging their dicks around.” Can you imagine the fuss if some right-wing nut started complaining about women waving their privates around? Notice the thinly veiled homophobia: “he has no women friends.” If you want proof of the idea that the bile of the far left has become in some respects indistinguishable from that of the far right, just read this letter again. And notice also how little she has to say and how diligently she has learned to hate.
The Dish 