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

Charlotte Allen's Swoon

The brouhaha over Charlotte Allen's awful essay continued today on Washingtonpost.com, where the author fielded questions from readers almost as uniformly incensed as XXers were by the piece. She started off the chat by poking a huge hole in Outlook editor John Pomfret's rushed insistence that the piece was satire (Allen: "I'm not sure whether I'd characterize the piece as satire, but I'd certainly characterize it as humor: my poking fun at the dumb things my sex does"). For a woman who felt perfectly comfortable dashing off a couple thousand words on how unintelligent the vast majority of her sex is, she sure didn't seem to have much of a cogent argument to offer in the chat. Instead, she comes across as very petty and once again not funny at all despite trying hard to be so. Allen doesn't so much make an argument as fire off a series of defensive "jokes" (sample witticism—"Is the pope German?"). Her back is clearly up against the wall—she might be the most hated woman in the feminist blogosphere right now—but it's pretty telling that the majority of readers' questions were longer than her responses. I guess Allan wasn't expecting women to be able to string so many words together, though.