Charlotte Allen: Maybe She’s Just a Terrible Satirist

March 3rd, 2008 | View Comments

It’s been suggested that maybe, just maybe, Ms. Allen was trying to be satirical. Tongue-in-cheek. JOKE’S ON YOU, HUMORLESS FEMINAZIS!!

Fine. It doesn’t change the fact that it’s garbage and shouldn’t have been published.

If Allen was trying to be satirical, she needs to go back to freshman comp and learn what satire is. Doonesbury is satire. The Onion’s War for the White House is satire. The opening of my favorite Mother Jones article is satire (the original Alice in Wonderland is also satire). Certain pieces of Allen’s article might reasonably be construed as satire, but the whole doesn’t hang together as a satirical work.

If you’re trying to write satire, you should not be devoting 15% of your space to mis-interpreting scientific research. If you’re trying to write satire, you should not repeatedly step on your own points with said scientific research.

This poster at Metafilter managed to say exactly what I tried to say yesterday, but with 99% fewer words:

Let me see if I can follow the rhetorical progression of this article here:

Some women, somewhere, are doing something the author does not approve of.

The author claims this means that all women are stupid.

The author supports her thesis with dubious studies she does not understand, to the extent that she actually cites results that undercut her own points (e.g., according to a study she cites, women have slightly more minor traffic accidents and a massively lower amount of fatal traffic accidents — about 60% fewer per passenger mile and an amazing 81% fewer as a measure of total traffic fatalities — which she claims proves that women are poorer drivers) …

Thus proving she is stupid.

See?

I do not think she has proven what she thinks she has proven. She has amply demonstrated point 4, but not point 2.

The problem is not that the paper published an unpopular article—challenging popular viewpoints is part of a newspaper’s job. The problem is that the paper published an article that is stylistically, structurally, and scientifically incoherent.

My undergrads who turn in that kind of miserable writing get Ds, but Charlotte Allen gets an op-ed in the Washington Post. Good grief.