Has Patriarchy Ruined the NYT?
A short history of anti-women content, and women who smokescreen for patriarchy.
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Before Joe Rogan and the manosphere, before the podcast bros and the misogyny slop pipeline—I was first struck by a piece of bizarrely anti-woman content when I was reading the New York Times after the 2016 election.
I came upon a column written by Ross Douthat of the New York Times, in which he blames the election of Trump not on the majority of men who voted for him—but on women.
He argued that the election results were the consequence of the U.S. having become a sad place, one that is depressed and doesn’t care about the future anymore—especially for white baby boomers. And this was women’s fault. Because they weren’t having enough children.
Women used to have lots and lots of babies, and now they have not as many babies. Which makes other people sad. Which made them elect Trump.
That was the argument. That ran in this publication of record.
Here’s the headline and the photo that ran with the story at the time…which was quite a statement!
One simple rule of patriarchal thinking is that women are always to blame. No matter the issue, women are the problem.
And there has been no shortage of this anti-women sentiment at the Times since.
In 2016 the NYT gave us: Are Women to Blame for Ruining Politics?
And last week, it gave us this now infamous little gem:
Even if you don’t read the NYT or subscribe, it matters when the Times is platforming unchecked patriarchal thinking that undermines gender equity and women’s rights. It matters because these are immensely influential figures in the public discourse. If something gets platformed in the Times, it gets covered everywhere, and it stands to get mainstreamed.
This kind of content also raises larger structural questions about a publication. I worked in a newsroom for years, and there’s a process that stories go through before they get published, and it doesn’t involve just one writer.
How does one writer get hired, and how has he been allowed to continue a pattern of anti-women content and keep his job is one question.
Another question is—who is vetting these story pitches, approving these stories for publication, and writing the headlines that go with them, and do they all think so little of women?
Let’s also not forget that just a few weeks ago another Times podcaster—the one on the left!—proposed that in order for the left to win elections some people were going to have to get thrown under the bus. And those people are women.
Ezra Klein last month: Are Women Ruining the Democratic Party?
Klein proposed that Dems should run pro-life candidates (just take a hit for the team ladies! Some of you will have to bleed out, but someone has to take a literal hit, and it’s not men).
Et tu, EK? This, despite the fact that women make up more than half the electorate, that abortion rights consistently win at the ballot box, and that young women are now actually the base of the Democratic party.
This also happened the same week that said podcaster platformed Ben Shapiro, also well known for his anti-woman views. (P.S. And I haven’t even started on David Brooks here—a whole separate essay!)
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This brings us back to this week’s Times headline, and all of its sister headlines. The Times changed the original headline from “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” to “Has Liberal Feminism Ruined the Workplace?” and then “Have ‘Feminine Vices’ Taken Over the Workplace?” in the space of less than 48 hours. But any way you word a sexist question, it’s still sexist, guys!
The headline is for a “debate” that the NYT hosted featuring two anti-feminist conservative women and one columnist with a history of sexism, in which they actually discuss whether women have ruined the workplace. By being at work, and being women. It’s not just clickbait—it’s the actual content of the discussion.
The sound of Douthat’s voice is like the sound of Jordan Peterson’s fingernails on a chalkboard, so I didn’t listen, but I read over the transcript. Just one paragraph at the beginning includes the phrases “evidence from evolutionary biology” and “primatology” and “the feminization of institutions” and “woke” and culminates in the actual question: “So, are women the problem with wokeness?”
Which, what in the right-wing sexist pseudo-intellectual word salad nonsense is this?
In other words, the discussion posits: There are many problems, and women are to blame for all of them.
Women are to blame not just for ruining the workplace, but for all institutional decline (please note by the way that most sectors of society are still dominated by men, but no matter), and also women are to blame for wokeness!
(No one can seem to explain what wokeness is anymore, by the way, other than it’s something that the far-right hates, seemingly because it is a category that contains and cares about people of color, and gay and queer people, and women.)
Once again, unchecked patriarchal thinking tends to blame women for everything—which means that this pattern is not a great look for this publication of record. But the real stars here are the women. Once an institution bring out women to make sexist commentary for them, that’s a real red flag.
As I’ve written here, patriarchal organizations—from high-control patriarchal religions to authoritarian political parties—tend to bring out women to keep women in their place when they want to bring out the real big guns.
When an institution brings out women to keep women in check, take notice.
Sending a woman to keep women in their place
When I saw footage from Katie Britt’s now-infamous SOTU address I gasped. Not because it was so strange, but because it was so familiar.
The woman who was platformed in this debate (Helen Andrews) is someone you’ve likely never heard of, and she was brought on to talk about something she published in an obscure journal that you’ve also likely never heard of. Probably because it’s insular sexist nonsense for a niche audience.
When questioned on the program, she couldn’t name any positive attributes of women. Why platform this particular obscure writer on a major podcast? Could it be because she was one of the only women willing to come on and make sexist arguments about women? What’s the justification—or was it just finding a female voice that reinforces the host’s pattern of sexist views?
I want to note here that there are certainly notable female and feminist voices at the Times—Michelle Goldberg and Jessica Grose come to mind, and occasional fantastic contributors like Tressie Cottom and Roxanne Gay. But the Times hasn’t given them anywhere near the platform that they’ve given these male podcasters. It’s high time for the Times to correct that. (Where’s Jessica Valenti’s podcast with a major US media company is a question that I ask myself regularly!)
But did this “critic of feminism” have a point, or was she merely smokescreening for patriarchy?
Fair question, and here’s the plot twist in this little scenario that has a poetic symmetry that you just can’t make up. The article that Andrews wrote that’s discussed in the NYT debate is called “The Great Feminization.”
It opens with an excerpt in defense of Larry Summers, and how he was (to her wrongly) “cancelled” from Harvard. She says this marked a terrible turning point toward a disastrous “woke” era. The worst part? “Who did the cancelling: women.”
She condemns women and #MeToo for a state of cultural decline.
In case you didn’t know, Summers had to step down as president of Harvard when he floated the opinion that there are fewer women in STEM fields because women have lower aptitude and “innate” preferences, not because of discrimination. (Please note that Summers’ “cancellation” amounted to him leaving Harvard to become Director of the Economic Council at the White House. We should all be so lucky to get cancelled like Summers!).
Now, as luck would have it, the very same week this woman went on an NYT podcast to describe how women are indeed to blame for the downfall of the workplace and culture in general, especially the downfall of poor Larry Summers, guess who we got an update about? Larry Summers!
It turns out Larry Summers (who apparently per the people on this podcast is not “feminized” or woke and has not been ruining any workplaces) is in the newly-released Epstein emails. They show that he has exchanged numerous messages with his confidant, the convicted child sex offender. Summers maintained congenial contact with Epstein well into 2019, with the last email exchange occurring only months before Epstein’s arrest. (Epstein first plead guilty to child exploitation way back in 2008-so Summers really knows how to pick his friends.)
The messages include gems that Summers sent to his pal Epstein like this quip about the IQ of women, in regards to the sexist comment that he made at Harvard about women in science:
“I observed that half of the IQ In [the] world was possessed by women, without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population.”
Get it? It’s a joke that women actually do have lower IQ than men. Hilarious.
And there’s this one, in which he bemoans his “cancellation” to Epstein:
“Hit on a few women 10 years ago and can’t work at a network or think tank. DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT.”
And yet “feminization” is the problem in America’s workplaces and culture—not “masculinized” guys like this?
It’s almost like these arguments about “ruining the workplace” and “ruining culture” were never about women, and were always about protecting patriarchal structures and guys like Larry Summers.
All this is not a good look for Andrews, but more importantly it’s not a good look for the NYT that platformed her and stood to mainstream her ideas. As
wrote this week, “Women like Helen Andrews like to cozy up to male power in order to enjoy a shred of it, to bask in the pallid light of conservative male approval.” (Take note Megyn Kelly!)There are always women who will do patriarchy’s dirty work, but the accountability really lies with the institutions that look to platform them. Take note when it happens, because it tells us something about those institutions, who runs them, and how they value (or devalue) women.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will have to keep ruining workplaces by not committing sexual harassment, not showing up in the Epstein files, and steadfastly calling out the people that do.
Stay woke, y’all.
What else do you read and follow that centers women—so many good ones in our “MR Recommends” here on Substack! Would love to hear who else we should be reading/platforming/supporting.
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Lane, I LOVE how you weave the connection between the power of these editorial writers and other powerful men who will go to many lengths to degrade women. Intellectually bankrupt anf morally suspect.
++ to Jessica Valentini getting platformed by a larger publication!
I want Ezra to interview her and see him squirm.
Can we start an initiative to make that happen! Write to his podcast email?!