Cleavage in the cabinet, cont.

(Below, an NER commenter exposes Jackson’s feminist m.o.)

Mary Jackson at the New English Review thinks my recent blog entry on “Cleavage in the cabinet,” concerning a photo of British Employment Minister Caroline Flint, is silly. Here are a couple of things Jackson gets wrong:

1. Jackson, continuing her by-now notorious career of reading incomprehension, thinks I am disapproving of any decolletage displayed by women throughout the ages. In reality I was speaking of women in government (and television news) who dress in an overly revealing way that shows a lack of respect for their own positions, for the seriousness of the issues with which they are supposedly dealing, and for the public. In other words, in a typical female behavior that has been licensed by women’s political equality, today’s women are bringing certain female values, which are appropriate in the non-political areas of life, into the political arena, and thus degrading the latter.

2. Jackson focuses on the relatively small amount of cleavage in the photo of Caroline Flint that I criticized, as though that were the sole issue. In fact, I wasn’t just speaking of breasts, but of the plunging necklines by which women in public positions reveal their skin down to the middle of the chest. Whether or not there is cleavage is secondary. Women in public positions are showing too much of themselves, period.

3. Jackson tells the old joke about the psychiatrist showing pictures to a patient who sees sex in everything, as a way of suggesting that I have a neurotic obsession with sex. This of course has been a rhetorical device used by the left since the Sixties to silence critics of sexual liberation. Most people do not want to be accused of being “uptight” or overly concerned about sexual matters, and the mere threat of the accusation is enough to silence them. So what needs to be understood is that Jackson is not just attacking me. She is letting her readers know that if they agree with me that there is anything inappropriate about the way women dress today, there is Something Wrong With Them. She is practicing one of the hoariest methods of leftist social control.

And now, in her usual manner, Jackson, having played her PC hand, will try to have it both ways, by saying that it’s all just a joke, why am I taking it seriously.

* * *

By the way, I’ve also criticized men for inappropriate self-expression in the public square, such as in my comments on John Derbyshire’s and Jonah Goldberg’s sleazy remarks at the Corner.

- end of initial entry -

Cindy L. writes:

I couldn’t agree more with your comments about the inappropriate way many women in the political or communication worlds dress. It is so typical to turn on the TV and see, say, two or three men and women, and, invariably, the men will be wearing dark-colored suits and ties while the women will be wearing nearly fluorescent, tight-fitting tank tops or low-cut blouses, short skirts, etc., while perched on a stool for their legs to be on full display. A woman once came to our office to give a lunch-time talk about investing our retirement funds while wearing a blouse that was literally open to just above her navel. It was embarrassing to all of us and an insult to the professional women in the group. As you say, there’s a time and place for it, and the professional world is not it. I say to any woman who feels she can’t resist vamping on a daily basis—get a job as a cocktail waitress or work at Hooters, where it’s written into your job description. Otherwise, take a cue from the men you work with and dress accordingly.

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Commenter Big Bill at the NER thread, takes Mary Jackson apart from a moderate or centrist point of view. He tells her that if she can’t make rational arguments against me, she should drop the subject. Here’s his comment, slightly abridged:

20 Aug 2007
Big Bill

You say: “Is she right? Well, how would I know? As a sub-intellectual, I am not qualified to form opinions on political matters,” and “bazoomikas” and “Bristols,” and “war chests.”

Really, sweetie, you need to chill. Sulking with a flip veneer of sarcasm is just plain unbecoming an adult woman.

Beyond that, by repeating what Auster says and sniping in such a catty way, you do three things, all of which are bad for liberals.

First, you draw attention to what Auster says, thereby providing him with new readers who DO think that dressing standards are dropping and women are looking more like hookers everyday.

Auster’s readers are dads who hate the spandex and belly-button shirts that liberated tweens wear in church—and we know it doesn’t have to do with hating women of fearing breasts. As your mother and father doubtless told you, there is a time and a place for everything.

And for us (although not for college freshmen and Daily Kos true believers) your sarcasm is ineffectual. Sarcasm only works where your audience is already on your side and will dismiss your opponent out of hand. Since we are not automatically disposed to reject Auster, your sarcastic responses are just painfully ad hominem and empty of all reason. You make his case by not providing any intelligent resistance.

Second, by defending tittie flashing you sound more like a college freshman in her first women’s studies class. As soon as you start sounding like Annie Sprinkle, you’ve really lost us.

Third, by engaging in catty feminine sniping, you make his case, part of which is that women cannot resist engaging in traditional feminine modes of emotional combat.

Sweetie, rather than dig a deeper hole, do yourself a favor and just drop it. Go rational or don’t respond at all. But don’t rise to the Auster bait if you cannot hew to the issues.

Either that or just fess up you are hanging with the wrong crowd (thereby proving Auster’s point), link arms with UBM and return to the Democratic Party. No harm, no foul.

Challenging (or defending) liberal orthodoxies on philosophical or scientific grounds isn’t for everyone.

Good luck!

Michael B. writes from Sweden:

A few good responses are slowly trickling into the NER thread. On one hand, this whole episode is real shame since Jackson is obviously capable of some good writing and thinking. I’m really quite fond of her in “logical” mode, making witty but pertinent commentary on Islam, sharia laws, postmodern fallacies etc.

On the other hand, there’s a quite powerful irony at work here: the more Jackson is trying to “get back at you,” or “prove your bigotry” as it were, the more she is painting herself in a logical corner (since your basic point was quite sound), thus proving your earlier point about feminine emotional responses to challenges and perceived threats. This will also alienate her from those among her conservative readers willing to explore these issues rationally.

If Jackson, acting in the office of “the modern, thinking, conservative woman,” really wanted to deflate the image of the stereotypical over-emotional female, she would do well to respond in a reasoned, matter-of-fact, logical manner. That would open up for some interesting back and forth. Considering Jackson’s status and previous high-quality output at NER, her apparent inability to do reply in kind makes for an interesting case study vis-à-vis your original thread about women and politics. Alas, she seems to be heading for the gutter and that really saddens me. Jackson has given us some decent, entertaining writing in the past.

LA replies:

Her collapse into what I have called sub-intellectualism indicates how insubstantial her “conservatism” was. Based on your description of her past work, her “conservatism” consisted of opposition to obvious, extreme targets like Islam and post-modernism. Other than that, this “conservative” woman was still living within an unreflective liberal, feminist mindset. So, when certain liberal, feminist shibboleths were challenged in a direct way by me, she reacted in knee-jerk fashion. It didn’t occur to her that there might be a rational basis on which to challenge modern notions of sex equality.

And this is typical of liberals (the NY Times editorial page is the best example). For true-believing liberals, everything outside liberalism is simply hatred, bad faith, mental sickness, moral darkness. Refusing to believe that there might be a rational, good faith conservatism, they have no ability to confront conservatism with rational, good-faith arguments themselves.

LA continues:

However, there is a problem with my above argument. Mary Jackson at the “What’s Wrong with the World” thread said that she agrees “wholeheartedly” with another commenter who had highly praised The Path to National Suicide, adding that PNS is “excellent.” Now, since a positive response to PNS (which is about how immigration is destroying white America) requires that the reader have at least some degree of what I would call normal white racial consciousness, and since absolute disapproval of such racial consciousnes, along with a dogmatic belief in non-discriminatory openness to nonwhites, is the sine qua non of liberalism, Mary Jackson cannot be a liberal, at least in the sense I described above. It would appear then that she is a conservative, but a conservative who still adheres to one, huge area of liberalism that she has never questioned: feminism. So, though she is a conservative in other areas, when women’s equality was challenged, she reacted like a knee-jerk liberal.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 19, 2007 03:24 PM | Send