It’s the most rickety crutch for a female columnist with nothing to say, but that hasn’t stopped both Maureen Dowd and now Tina Brown from throwing baldly sexist remarks at the Bush administration. MoDo recently went on a rant about the “locker-room” taunts and high testosterone in the White House. Brown now gives us this brilliant insight:
Is it just the residue of fashion week that makes me wish there were more, or should I say any, gay men in the Bush Administration? At The Sunday Times in the Seventies one top editor used to shake his head when the paper became too humourlessly high-testosterone and say that what it needed that week was ‘more pooftah power’. In lieu of outright womanhood – except for Condoleezza Rice, who crosses the gender barriers by becoming the most zealous enabler – perhaps an injection of androgyny could be brought to bear on diplomatic relations in this moment of crisis. The Bush crowd’s only management style, like that of many who subscribe to the outmoded cult of America’s Toughest Bosses, is to unzip and thwack it on the table.
Ignore the homophobic stereotypes. (Why is it “gay” to be lacking in testosterone? Or androgynous? Or soft on dictators?) Imagine if a male writer used similarly sexist language to describe, say, Tina Brown’s administration at the New Yorker. Imagine sentences like this: “Wouldn’t it be better if there had been more men at the New Yorker in the ’90s? And I don’t mean Tina’s neutered gay male flunkies. Brown’s flitty attention span, bouts of editorial PMS, hysterical responses to criticism and general whorishness toward publicists and celebrities made for a very menstrual management style.” It would never be written. It should never be written. It’s sexist, dumb and almost meaningless. But in all those respects, it’s indistinguishable from Tina’s latest column.
The Dish 