A graphic depiction of the inane gender politics of The Washington Post.

Here's a screen selection of the upper right corner of the WaPo front page right now:



It looks as though they're hot and desperate to show the importance of women, but they've got next to nothing. This, after a week of centralizing women. These are the crumbs of regard we get on Monday morning? Another story about Melania's hat, and a dopey attempt to disqualify her because of what the hat means. Checking in with the #MeToo movement, going back to the same minor actress for accusations that the supporters aren't supportive enough. And above all...

"Can Taylor Swift, revered by young Americans, help lead Democrats out of the woods?"

The photo Swift is from 2016, so WaPo went out of its way to choose the platinum blonde, black-red lipstick look. Does it inspire "reverence" or hope that this is the person to "lead Democrats out of the woods"? Are the Democrats lost in the woods? I guess we've gone from presuming it's a big blue wave election to finding ourselves far from the beach and up in the woods.

The news is just that Swift put up an Instagram post that told her fans they should vote and endorsed 2 Democrats — Tennesseans Phil Bredesen and Jim Cooper. Here's the post, with a photograph of Swift in much darker, longer hair. WaPo:

A black-and-white Polaroid was swapped in for a standard headshot.... By early Monday, more than a million Instagram users had registered their approval.

A million? That's not impressive when you consider that Swift has 112 million followers on Instagram.

By characterizing the midterms as “an overall struggle for protecting human rights and dignity” rather than a partisan grudge match, Swift is speaking effectively to young people who have less fealty to the party structure, said William Fotter, the vice president of the University of Arizona Democrats. “Young people are less party-oriented and more issue-oriented,” said the 21-year-old political science and international relations major. “If Taylor Swift is able to convince millennials that their votes matter, that could make a huge difference,” he said....

What if the young people are inspired by Swift to vote but not for Democrats? This danger is squirreled away deep in the article (which is so insanely padded that it would be weird if normal readers got this far, but it's the most interesting part):

Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union scolded her for threatening to sue a California blogger who accused the singer of being associated with white supremacy. And in an editorial, the Guardian called her an “envoy for Trump’s values.”...

Here's what the Guardian wrote last November:

[Swift and Trump both have] their adept use of social media to foster a diehard support base; their solipsism; their laser focus on the bottom line; their support among the “alt-right”.

Swift’s songs echo Mr Trump’s obsession with petty score-settling in their repeated references to her celebrity feuds, or report in painstaking detail on her failed romantic relationships.... The message is quintessentially Trumpian: everyone is out to get me – but I win anyway....

[N]otably her much-publicised “squad” of female models, actors and musicians is largely thin, white and wealthy. In a well-publicised Twitter exchange with rapper Nicki Minaj, she treated the discussion of structural racism as not only incomprehensible, but a way to disempower white people such as herself....

As for those other 2 WaPo articles, what Rose McGowan said about entertainment industry #MeToo supporters was:

“I just think they’re douchebags.... They’re not champions. I just think they’re losers. I don’t like them.... I know these people, I know they’re lily-livered, and as long as it looks good on the surface, to them, that’s enough.”

As for Melania and the pith helmet — despite the headline, the actual article has some depth and nuance. I'll highlight the details that really ruin the hat-based attack on Melania:

In 1994, The Washington Post’s Phil McCombs reported that then-First Lady Hillary Clinton “appeared in a pith helmet, looking vaguely like a North Vietnamese Army officer” on a visit to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park....

[P]ith helmets are worn by motorcycle taxi drivers in Hanoi, as well as police officers in Cameroon and Peru. In the U.S., postal workers wear pith helmets as part of their uniforms on exceptionally rainy or sunny days, and the U.S. Marine Corps’ marksmanship coaches wear them at shooting ranges....

In 1966, the civil rights activist James Meredith marched through Mississippi wearing a pith helmet while encouraging African Americans to vote. Charles W. “Hoppy” Adams, the legendary black DJ at WANN in Annapolis, Md., wore a pith helmet during live appearances in the 1950s and 1960s... And the rapper Andre 3000 of OutKast wore a straw pith helmet with a bow tie and overalls on MTV’s Total Request Live in 2006.

So are pith helmets properly called — as in the WaPo headline — "a symbol of colonialism"? If you want to say yes, you'll have to attack James Meredith!

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A new WaPo trend — giving Trump credit?

It takes 4 journalists to see it, but, apparently....



... Trump isn't an impetuous, wildly swinging idiot. What if he is what he says, a political genius?

Let's see how far the WaPo journalists go:

Again and again, President Trump was instructed not to do it. A cadre of advisers, confidants and lawmakers all urged him — implored him, really — not to personally attack the women who had accused Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

So he did it anyway.

Addressing thousands at a boisterous rally in Mississippi, Trump relied on his own visceral sense of the moment and mocked Christine Blasey Ford for gaps in her memory, directly impugning the accuser’s credibility.

Establishment Republicans initially reacted with horror. But Trump’s 36-second off-script jeremiad proved a key turning point toward victory for the polarizing nominee, White House officials and Kavanaugh allies said, turbocharging momentum behind Kavanaugh just as his fate appeared most in doubt....

Trump had no particular personal affinity for Kavanaugh, although a dinner was arranged between the two men and their wives to cultivate a relationship. “I don’t even know him,” the president told the Mississippi crowd, “so it’s not like, ‘Oh, gee, I want to protect my friend.’ ”...

“Kavanaugh’s an establishment guy. He was a Bush guy,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), referencing the nominee’s experience as White House staff secretary under President George W. Bush. “There was a lot of pushback, you know — ‘Don’t go [down] that road,’ ‘That’s not why you won,’ and he said, ‘Wait a minute. I want to pick the best people to be on the court I can,’ and he said he was incredibly impressed by his background, just the whole package of Kavanaugh.”...

[Kavanaugh's Fox News interview] was widely criticized — “objectively a horrible idea,” in the words of one White House official. Kavanaugh appeared wooden and dispassionate, sticking only to a few talking points, and Trump, an avid consumer and critic of television news, thought he appeared weak and unconvincing....

[The Judiciary Committee hearing with Ford and Kavanaugh] left the president seesawing from fatalism to enthusiasm about Kavanaugh’s confirmation prospects.

When Ford had finally finished, [White House counsel Don] McGahn spoke privately to Kavanaugh, who had not watched, urging him to be passionate. “Speak from your heart,” McGahn advised the nominee, according to someone familiar with their discussion.

Kavanaugh roared into the committee room and shouted his opening statement, which he had personally written the night before with the help of one trusted clerk. The hotly defiant performance was so effective in the eyes of his advisers — and, perhaps most importantly, of the president — that a group gathered in Vice President Pence’s Capitol Hill office began to cheer and pump their fists. Some even had tears in their eyes.

The hearing galvanized activists on both sides and left jittery senators — including Flake, one of 11 Republicans on the Judiciary Committee — torn between competing accounts and party loyalties.... McConnell spoke with Trump and convinced him that the only option was to delay a vote and move forward with the FBI probe....

On the campaign trail... Trump ratcheted up the partisan warfare at his rallies. In Mississippi, the president — already fuming over a New York Times investigation into his family’s allegedly fraudulent tax schemes — felt the media was not properly scrutinizing Ford’s account and decided to engage.

“How did you get home? ‘I don’t remember,’ ” Trump said, reenacting Ford’s hearing. “How did you get there? ‘I don’t remember.’ Where is the place? ‘I don’t remember.’ How many years ago was it? ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.’ ”

The riff lasted less than a minute, but had lasting ramifications. The senators whose votes Kavanaugh was wooing said they were aghast at the president’s rally-stage behavior. But Kavanaugh allies saw a clear benefit: An argument by the president that bucked up Kavanaugh, discredited Ford and became a clarion call for conservatives.

More than two dozen Trump supporters interviewed at the president’s campaign rally Thursday in Minnesota said they wish he had not gone after Ford, fretting that doing so was not presidential. Yet many also acknowledged the president had simply spoken aloud what many of them thought privately.

The reporters don't tie it all up. In fact the headline at the article is toned down from the one on the front page which you see in my image at the top of this post. At the article, there's less credit to Trump. It's just: "‘Willing to go to the mat’: How Trump and Republicans carried Kavanaugh to the cusp of confirmation." But the facts are there in the article. Trump critiqued Ford's testimony in clear powerful terms — something everyone else was afraid to do. He recognized that Kavanaugh's presentation on Fox News wasn't compelling (even though it was what the pushers of the "judicial temperament" argument claimed they needed to see). And during the hearing, after Ford testified, Trump performed a public routine of "seesawing" about whether Kavanaugh could make it, lighting the fire on him to shed his establishment guy/Bush guy demeanor and talk more like Trump.

That's all in the article, but with no strongly stated bottom line, Trump haters can shrug it off and cling to their belief that Trump is an impetuous idiot.

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"Canada agrees to join trade accord with U.S. and Mexico, sending new NAFTA deal to Congress."

WaPo headline. First 2 sentences of the article:

Canada agreed late Sunday to join the trade deal that the United States and Mexico reached last month, meeting negotiators’ self-imposed midnight deadline designed to allow the current Mexican president to sign the accord on his final day in office and giving President Trump a big win on trade.

The new treaty, preserving the three-country format of the original North American Free Trade Agreement favored by business groups and congressional Republicans, is expected to be signed by Trump and his Canadian and Mexican counterparts in 60 days, with Congress likely to act on it next year.

NYT headline: "U.S. and Canada Reach Trade Deal to Salvage Nafta." First 2 sentences of the article:

The United States and Canada reached a last-minute deal to salvage the North American Free Trade Agreement on Sunday, overcoming deep divisions to keep the 25-year-old trilateral pact intact.

The deal came after a weekend of frantic talks to try and preserve a trade agreement that has stitched together the economies of Mexico, Canada and the United States but that was on the verge of collapsing. 

In WaPo, it sounds like a new deal. In the NYT, it sounds like what we're getting is the preservation of the old deal.  The NYT makes it seem like a close call with disaster, and WaPo says the deadline is self-imposed and designed to make Trump look like he has a big win.

I suspect that both newspapers wanted to make Trump look like less of a success and they chose different approaches to diminishing him.

WaPo credits Trump with a "big win" in the first sentence. The NYT forefronts the stress. In the first few paragraphs: "a year of tense talks and strained relations," "frenetic Sunday." You'll have to wait for paragraph 6 to see "a win" for Trump:

The deal represents a win for President Trump, who has derided Nafta for years and threatened to pull the United States from the pact if it was not rewritten in America’s favor. Overhauling trade deals has been one of Mr. Trump’s top priorities as president and he has used tariffs and other threats to try and force trading partners to rewrite agreements in America’s favor. 

It's a "win" not a "big win," and maybe the Times isn't even conceding that it's a win. It only "represents a win." And Trump created all the disorder and threat on his own. He didn't critique NAFTA for any real problems. He "derided" it.

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"What exactly is Saint Laurent saying about female sexuality and empowerment here?"

I'm reading Robin Givhan in the Washington Post. The post title is the headline. There are lots of photographs of glamorous clothes with an edge of trashiness. I clipped out part of one photograph. Not randomly selected. It's what caught my eye as I scanned the page with the idea of "female empowerment" foremost in my mind. I've left out what Givhan calls the "teeny-tiny shorts" (which are what we used to call "hot pants").

Let's see how Givhan answers the question posed in the headline:

Yes, the female form is beautiful, but is it made more beautiful by borrowing clothes from the boys, by wrapping it in a cloud of debauchery, by having parts exposed in a way that makes a woman “all legs” instead of full human?

This is not to say that the collection was bad or offensive or improper, only that it raised questions. And raising questions is good, particularly in this moment when the culture, both here and in the United States, is considering its male and feminine norms....

I guess I'm not going to get an answer to the question, only more questions. Questions good. Why not a column full of questions? Maybe we women writers should be all questions, just like the runway models are "all legs."

[Male designers at Saint Laurent] have told women that it is empowering and satisfying to wear teeny-tiny snakeskin shorts with towering heels, to splash through shallow waters with breasts bared on a night chilly enough that guests were swaddled under blankets. They have told them that the ideal female form has the spindly legs of a filly — so immature and scrawny that one half expects the model to collapse in a heap from the sheer exhaustion of having to walk upright....

Yes, the female form is beautiful. It’s inspirational. But what has it inspired? And has that been empowering to women or simply satisfying to men?

So, yeah, we do end with more questions. I was going to say it's the same old questions I've always seen about fashion designers, but really the questions have evolved. What I used to see (half a century ago) was the question whether the designers hated women. This idea was typically tied to the observation that they didn't sexually desire women at all: The designers are gay and that's why the clothes are hostile to women. What we see in this new column is the idea that male sexual desire for women is driving the designs. Are the designers not gay anymore? Why would expensive clothes be designed to "satisfy" men? The women are the clients. What's the logic here?

Oh, I see I'm doing questions, even as I want Givhan not to proceed in the form of question-asking. All right. I'll posit some answers to her questions. Why shouldn't I take the power to say what's what? I will! The clothing is designed to call out to women. It looks the way it does because that has been working to sell clothes. The women who buy those clothes think those clothes will benefit them, and the perception that this is what heterosexual men desire in a woman is a perception that needs to take place in the mind of the woman, and that is the perception the designer is trying to stimulate. If the woman buys clothes that she perceives as satisfying male desire, she is seeking sexual power over men.

And I suspect that one reason Robin Givhan doesn't say that is because it criticizes the woman. The question "has that been empowering to women or simply satisfying to men?" leaves women in the down position, where we can muse MeTooishly. That's a politically advantageous place to stop. And how much of the advertising in The Washington Post comes from the fashion industry? That's another reason to end with musing questions and not rough critique — economic interest.

Raising questions is good, particularly in this moment....

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