Respect: The hottest girl-on-girl action of all

They tell you not to blog angry, so I left this NYT book review alone for a few hours, had lunch, went to the movies, drank some bourbon, had dinner, played a few records, and then came back to it. It was still awful:

Save the Males is one of two new books, each of them arresting, entertaining and serious in its own way, that inspect the battlefield of the sexes in America, and come to opposing conclusions about the nature of the conflict. The disparity would almost be funny if the outcome didn’t matter so much.

With apocalypse on the line, one would think Liesl Schillinger could keep herself from straw-manning her opponent:

While the author doesn’t let Hollywood and the intelligentsia off scot-free, the chief offenders in her mind are the people in push-up bras...liberated women.

As she sees it, an entire generation of men have lost their moral compass because women decided to flash skin instead of flashing behavioral cue cards that say: Respect. Protect. Marry. Provide.

I'm sure that Schillinger could have come up with a better way to put it than this, one that didn't reduce the fun of exploring, defining, and living up to femininity to "behavioral cue cards" designed only to keep men in line. She introduces Jessica Valenti as "a gutsy young third-wave feminist"; the first paragraph introduces Parker as a defender of Dan Quayle.

To match Schillinger eschaton for eschaton: disrespect for non-feminists is reaching epidemic proportions! I used to read Feministing for opposition prep purposes, but it seems that very little real argument appears on their site, a side-effect of not taking their opposition at all seriously. John McCain believes that mothers and fathers contribute different things to a child's upbringing, a position they reduce to "some serious antigay assholery." Kathleen Parker pointed out that women in combat zones face certain extra challenges because they're women (direct quotes here); Jessica Valenti responded, "And clearly, the best way to put us bitches back in our place is with a good raping, huh?" and accused Parker of believing that female soldiers who are raped deserve to be. I can't tell if they think that non-feminists are stupid, ill-intentioned, or suffering from false consciousness, but it's clear that, according to Feministing, non-feminist ideas aren't worth engaging, only mocking.

Valenti disagrees with Parker and that's fine, but to pretend that Parker's position doesn't even clear the bar of legitimacy is snide and disrespectful. If feminists can't acknowledge that it's possible for a smart and well-intentioned person to believe in traditional gender roles, it eliminates any possibility of any good-faith discussion between the two sides.