Salon’s feminist Inspector Clouseau attacks MAGA

During the course of a memorable career, I have been an editor of both magazines and a newspaper — notably features editor of the Philadelphia Daily News.

In that role, not only did I accept submissions of questionable merit, I actually commissioned some.

One that sticks out in my mind was when “Oh! Calcutta!” opened in the early ‘70s, it was the first “legit” show in Philly to feature nudity.

I assigned the paper’s entertainment columnist, Charles Petzold, to interview the star to find out what it’s like to work in the nude. More than that, I cajoled him to be nude while doing the interview. He was a good sport, he got a good interview, and we ran a (tastefully cropped) dressing-room photo of star and columnist in the nude.

I always believed in participatory journalism.

When I wrote a story about skydiving, I jumped out of (as they say) a perfectly good plane. For a story about pilot lessons, I piloted a single-engine aircraft over Philadelphia. For a story about fun funerals, I climbed into a coffin. For a story about dolphins’ playful nature, I  swam with them at the Coney Island Aquarium. For a story about suicide . . . Well, you have to draw the line somewhere.

The editor’s of Salon didn’t know where to draw the line when they published an April 8 article supposing that the series of unprovoked attacks on women in New York City was traceable to male rage flowing from MAGA.

Yes, blame Republicans. I guess because senior writer Amanda Marcotte couldn’t trace it to racism, or climate change, or transphobia.

As an editor, I have green-lighted opinions with which I disagree. As a “publisher,” on my website, I do not block living-in-a-silo, brain-dead partisans from either the far Right or far Left. I let them have their say, but ignore them.

I have even published (or written?) an occasional horse shit article, but rarely anything that would match Salon, which allowed Marcotte to simply invent protagonists for the attacks — angry, white, MAGA males. In New York City.

The first thing that came to mind was the claimed MAGA attack on Black, gay actor Jussie Smollett in Chicago outside a sandwich shop in the middle of a freezing winter night.

It was horse shit and he eventually was sentenced to five months for creating the imaginary hate crime.

As a writer, Marcotte is protected by the First Amendment, and, of course, she didn’t report it to police.

Just to the world, in her piece that you can read here.

You can see for yourself that the horse shit begins in the first paragraph, in which she admits “There is much that is unknown, including how often this is happening, how many people are involved, or whether it is all coordinated.”

She confesses her ignorance and compounds it in the next paragraph when she says “Women report being assaulted by men of different races and ages.” Does that sound like a MAGA profile?

The victims were mostly young and pretty, just living their lives, she reports, and then veers into her deep victimhood: “Whatever they were doing, they were just living their lives, and that, it seems, is what enraged their assailants.”

Ah! Marcotte dons her Pink Panther pajamas and channels Inspector Clouseau.

It seems a little, well, personal.

“While it rarely turns to violence, most women who spend much time walking around in public have experiences with men who berate them for paying attention to something other than the man who is now, often out of nowhere, spewing invectives. (Italics added)

I’m not a woman, I have no plans to transition, but I know a few.

And while some — usually the more attractive ones — get unwanted attention from some men — is it a daily occurrence to be sprayed with invectives?

I mean, really?

In what seems to be a psychiatric analysis session, Marcotte dredges up painful memories. “I’m old enough to remember when I got yelled out for reading books in public.”

Really?

Let me apply some journalistic questions: Who, where, when? A 19th Century Shaker commune? In a collegiate theater production of “The Handmaid’s Tale”?

Look — men are jerks, often. But jerkdom is not a political value, it mostly often is social , and connected to class. 

The jerkdom manifests in different ways. It might be blue collar construction workers wolf whistling at passing skirts, or it might be a gang rape of a drunk female in an Ivy League frat house.

I realize in some quarters criticizing a woman on any grounds will lead some call me sexist, which happens when they have no reasonable response to my opinion.

You say I’m sexist? Je t’emmerde. (Pardon my French, as some people say. It means fuck you.) Taylor Swift says shake it off. I do. Marcotte mentions Swift as being under attack by some enraged men. (True, but she conveniently forgets to mention anti-Swift females.) 

In Marcotte’s strange world, “the nation is having a moment of increasingly unhinged male fury at women for daring to have lives that are centered around something other than catering to a man’s every whim.”

Wow. Really?

She thinks every male, or at least every conservative male, is Archie Bunker. She culls the internet to find examples of bad male attitudes. They are not that hard to find, but when she cites Ben Shapiro setting fire to a Barbie doll because he feels emasculated — really? 

And yet, she has to admit Barbie, which this male liked, was a box office smash, Taylor Swift is a billionaire, after Dobbs women organized to secure abortion rights, and women’s basketball has just shattered ratings records. I guarantee many of those fans were male, and conservative.

Viewing through her own neo-feminist(?) filter,  she declares, “The rise of MAGA is fueled by misogyny. But it is less a backlash than a tantrum, a rage explosion by men who want to restore their dominance but fear that, this time, women won’t buckle to their bullying.”

Oh, bullying. That’s a word I often hear from weak women.

I oppose Trump, but I don’t hear MAGA males talk about women’s issues at all, except maybe abortion, which they oppose. They don’t fear women. They fear losing America through the actual Open Borders Joe Biden has created, they fear that an economy will crash under the weight of government giveaways that have created inflation, they fear the loss of America’s standing in the world. You may feel those fears are imaginary, but they are not as imaginary as Marcotte’s thesis.

Which brings us back to the NYC punch-outs.

I wonder how Marcotte would feel about cashless bail for the accused perpetrators?