Writing for Slate, Ron Rosenbaum hails the choice of Jill Abramson as NY Times executive editor as evidence that NY females are no longer merely human, but have evolved into something superior:
Here’s my theory: Women in New York City have evolved into the equivalent of a higher species. Not quite the leap from Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon (especially since Neanderthals have recently been getting props from anthropologists for having bigger brains than previously suspected and for not being quite as cave-mannish as they once were seen). Still a step up the ladder, not just from men, but from women elsewhere as well.
So when I say New York City women have evolved into a higher species I’m not speaking in a strictly biological, genomic way. (Although I call your attention to a recent Scientific American paper called “Urban Birds Boast Big Brains,” which posited that the challenges of urban life to avian intelligence have resulted in an increase in the capacity of their brains to cope with the struggle for survival in the city.)
When I read the first paragraph of the excerpt, I thought Rosenbaum was just kissing ass, but the second suggests he is at least somewhat serious about this “higher species” idea, which says something about Rosenbaum and his head.
Rosenbaum goes on to advocate a full-court press for more feminist legislation from the Times, perhaps in the hope that it is a sufficiently powerful instrument to give feminism a decisive, total victory over American society.
When he isn’t praising his new, transhuman overlords, what does Rosenbaum have to say about us men?
Apparently, we are cranky whiners:
I don’t think any similar study has been done on urban birds of the human persuasion. But I think an anecdotal case can be made that if our urban birds aren’t smarter than nonurban birds, or other urban birds, New York women are smarter than New York men. Or at least that there are far fewer dumb New York women than dumb New York men. But this is what has always puzzled me: The evolution of women has made them not merely more fiercely intelligent and multitalented, but more sophisticated, witty, charming, and seductive. What’s not to like? And yet few were the celebrations of the new realities by New York men, at least in the early years. In fiction, film, nonfiction, and memoirs by New York men, one sees so much crankiness and whiny complaint about the terrible inconvenience the women’s movement has caused. Consider Roth, Updike, Mailer, Bellow. Consider, even, the enduring cruel image of the liberated woman in Kramer vs. Kramer. A major portion of the last century’s literary history has been written by men unable to deal with the loss of subservience. And by women trying to deal with the inability of men to deal with it. (Even now in the new century, look at all the male literature devoted to whiny men flummoxed by female accomplishment. It’s the new whininess. Neo crankiness.)
Rosenbaum isn’t fit to lick the boots of the writers he disparages in the above passage, yet he has the gall to declare them inferior to no-name feminist writers.
What garbage. If, as he predicts, Jill Abramson will herald a new era of feminist dominance in our nation’s paper of record, the New York Times will cease to be relevant to anyone outside of Manhattan’s tiny little world.
