Pardon Me, I Apparently Forgot I'm Dumb and Fickle

For some reason, the Washington Post has decided that it's going to try to alienate its women subscribers.

I can't really think of another reason why its editors would decide to run two articles attacking women voters as dumb and fickle in its Sunday Outlook section. Between We Scream, We Swoon.  How Dumb Can We Get?  and For Hillary's Campaign, It's Been a Class Struggle, I found my self shaking my head and wondering, why do we do this to ourselves?

Even if you buy that each article might have  a legitimate point buried somewhere in those paragraphs, I don't see any men penning essays this campaign season suggesting that guys are acting against their political self-interest if they don't vote for the candidate of their gender or that men are somehow irrational in their electoral decisions if they display any emotion about the candidate of their choice.

Women labeling women as "dumb" and "fickle," even in the name of humor or purported feminism,  only gives men our implicit permission to continue dismissing our voices by turning our words against us.  It makes me rethink the discussions I've been having with my eight-year-old daughter about whether it's OK to be a "girly girl" or not.  Maybe her second-grade intuition about this one is on the money.

Those who already believe that women don't deserve much respect in the spheres of politics or business or law or medicine don't really need our help in that department, do they?

It's long past time to stop promoting the negative stereotypes that we've been fighting against for decades.   In portraying women in the main stream media, where is the coverage to prove that "dumb" and "fickle" are the exceptions? 

We can make plenty of points, too. I know I'm not the only woman with a political voice out here in the blogosphere, trying to use the new tools of social media to have conversations on this presidential race and the issues, and angles and nuances that so many of us believe are important.

WaPo editors, I'm not dumb or fickle.  But I am ticked off.

And I'd be happy to write as many articles and op-eds as you'd like on what's going on with political women in the blogosphere and how that's changing our role in this election. But that doesn't have the controversy of having women scorning other women, does it?

Posted on DC Metro Moms by the author & originally posted at PunditMom.  You can also find Joanne scratching her head about other political oddities at MOMocrats and BlogHer.