The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

We Puff, and We Puff, and We Blow Ourselves Down ...

Erica Jong posted yesterday on the embarrassing lack of substance in our political coverage. I don’t disagree on the merits. The media (ourselves included) have now devoted exponentially more energy to Hillary’s non-tears in Portsmouth, than they have to the sixth anniversary of Guantanamo, which occurred almost unnoticed last Friday. But she also falls prey to a piece of Steinem-ism that shouldn’t go unobserved. Jong claims that “women writers are only drafted for the most trivial subjects. We comment on style not substance, beards not policy, clothes and shoes and chick lit and cooking. The men get the big topics like war, though women have the most to lose. ... ” The implication must be that women writers are disproportionately responsible for producing the poufiness that is the mainstream media.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. For one thing, women—including many on this blog—write about the “big” topics, now more than ever. For another, as Jong herself admits in this post, women who choose to write about style over substance (as she has done “because that's all the news that's fit to print and I like shooting my mouth off on the Op-Ed page as much as anyone”) cannot then turn around and complain they’re being marginalized.

Some women choose to write about shoes and chick lit and cooking. Good for them. Other women choose to write about CIA black sites and national security. Excellent. But I am sick to my teeth of the complaint that women are only tapped to write fluff. Here, by way of a valentine to Meghan: An interview with Harold Bloom (hat tip Scott Horton) offering the same critique of the media as Jong: “Democracy, whether in Sweden or the United States, depends on the voter’s capacity to think. If you have read the best of what has been thought and said, then your cognition and understanding is on a much higher level than if you have read Harry Potter or Stephen King. So what this decline into half-literature and mediocre media really means is de facto a self-destruction of democracy.” Bloom’s interviewer, by the way, is a woman.