Alternative Universe: Supreme Court Arguments

Professor and pundit Susan Estrich -- campaign manager for the failed 1988 Dukakis Presidential campaign -- has gone nuts. She started ranting about an LA Times op-ed by Charlotte Allen that tied the dearth of female public intellectuals to the tendency of credentialed women to be feminist ideologues, rather than addressing larger questions about politics, culture, and the arts. Estrich responded with a "nasty" mass email dissected by Cathy Seipp:

Charlotte works for the dreaded IWF, "a group of right-wing women who exist to get on TV and get in newspapers attacking the likes of us...a lot of them turn out to be the wives of guys you see on right-wing talk shows." As opposed to the wives on Susan Estrich's Hollywood-heavy mailing list — like the ex-Mrs. Jerry Bruckheimer, Mrs. Larry David, Mrs. Jonathan Dolgen, Mrs. Peter Norton, Mrs. Richard Riordan, Mrs. Haim Saban, and the ex-Mrs. Bud Yorkin — every one of whom is of course fiercely independent of any income or name recognition provided by men.

"There are more wonderful women writers in L.A. than anywhere in the country; none of them are asked to write for the Opinion section," Estrich continued. Hey, what am I, chopped liver? (O.K., technically, I wasn't asked, I invited myself. Story of my life!) Obviously, what's really bugging Estrich is that not enough of the right kind of women were asked.

Then, Estrich shifted her focus to LA Times editor Michael Kinsley, sending a letter "signed by approximately 50 women, among them some of the most powerful women in town":

Everyone is assuming it will be published on Sunday. I honestly think it will be a bigger deal if you don't publish it, and Drudge and Newsmax and the rest do, than if you simply publish it, and start adding more women from Southern California to your mix.

Remember, her original objection was to a column written by a woman! And Kinsley's not backing down:

Don't try to push me around girlie. . .We don't run letters from 50 people, and we don't succumb to blackmail. So we won't be publishing your letter.

As a "he said, she said," the exchange is more gossip than genuine dispute. But consider this: as Harvard Law grad, Law Review president and prominent advisor to Democrat politicos, Estrich was widely acknowledged to be on the liberal short-list for a Supreme Court vacancy. So this kerfuffle might have been about something serious.

Be thankful we were spared.

(via The Corner)

More:

Heather Mac Donald takes down Susan Estrich:

It is curious how feminists, when crossed, turn into shrill, hysterical harpies—or, in the case of MIT’s Nancy Hopkins, delicate flowers who collapse at the slightest provocation—precisely the images of women that they claim patriarchal sexists have fabricated to keep them down. Actually, Estrich’s hissy fit is more histrionic than anything the most bitter misogynist could come up with on his own. Witness her faux remorse at engaging in blackmail: “I really do hate to be doing this. I counted e-mail after e-mail that I sent and was totally ignored. I can’t tell you how much I wanted to help quietly. If this is what it takes, so be it.” Witness too her self-pitying amour propre: “You owe me an apology. NO one tried harder to educate you about Los Angeles, introduce you to key players in the city, bring to your attention, quietly, the issues of gender inequality than I did—and you have the arrogance and audacity to say that you couldn’t be bothered reading my emails.” Add to that her petty insults: “if you prefer me to conduct this discussion outside your pages . . . that makes you look even more afraid and more foolish.” And finally, mix in shameless self-promotion: “I hope [this current crusade is] a lesson in how you can make change happen if you’re willing to stand up to people who call you names, and reach out to other women, and not get scared and back down. If you recall, I wrote a book about that, called Sex and Power. It’s what I have spent my whole life doing.”

The assumption that being female obviates the need for any further examination into one’s qualifications allows Estrich to sidestep the most fundamental question raised by her crusade: Why should anyone care what the proportion of female writers is on an op-ed page? If an analysis is strong, it should make no difference what its author’s sex is. But for Estrich, it is an article of faith that female representation matters: “What could be more important—or easier for that matter—than ensuring that women's voices are heard in public discourse in our community?” . . .

She provides a clue to her thinking, however. For Estrich, apparently, having a “woman’s voice” means being left-wing. She blasts the Times for publishing an article by Charlotte Allen on the decline of female public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag. Allen had argued that too many women writers today specialize in being female, rather than addressing the broader range of issues covered by their male counterparts. For Estrich, this argument performs a magical sex change on Allen, turning her into a male. After sneering at Allen’s article and her affiliation with the “Independent Women's Forum which is a group of right-wing women who exist to get on TV,” Estrich concludes: “the voices of women . . . are [not] found within a thousand miles” of the Los Angeles Times.

In other words, Allen’s is not a “voice of a woman” because she criticizes radical feminism. Estrich does not disclose if she conducted this sex change operation on all conservative women when compiling her phony statistics on the proportion of female writers on the op-ed page.

(via Occam's Toothbrush)