Supplemental: Our choice for current most interesting scribe!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2014

Which isn’t exactly a compliment: We’ve begun to think that Salon’s Katie McDonough is the most interesting writer out there.

We don’t mean that as a compliment, though there are several things we like about McDonough’s work. We like her values, and her aggressive pursuit of those values. We like the way she seems to walk the walk, which we won’t even try to explain.

But good God! On balance, McDonough’s writing is awful. Along with her positioning at Salon, that explains why we think her work is so interesting.

We don’t know when we’ve seen a writer with such a strong sense of entitlement. By that, we mean the following:

McDonough seems to feel no obligation to paraphrase other people with any degree of fairness or care. Consider her treatment of a recent piece at Time by the admittedly annoying and obscure Camille Paglia.

Paglia starts with the recent disappearance of University of Virginia student Hannah Graham. With that disappearance as her base, she discusses “the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder.” Along the way, she tosses off all sorts of received wisdom which she doesn’t bother to argue for, as she typically does.

Can you figure out what Paglia is saying? To the extent that you can, you can agree with her or not.

As always, Paglia is a bit hard to decipher. That said, we feel fairly sure that this is not what she said in her piece:

MCDONOUGH (9/30/14): It’s plenty weird that Paglia thinks that all men are born with rape buttons inside them that are automatically switched on when they see cleavage, but it is equally weird that lots of men seem to really support this concept of men’s “nature.”

It’s almost always hard to figure out what Paglia is saying. But fairly plainly, she isn’t saying that “all men are born with rape buttons inside them that are automatically switched on when they see cleavage.”

As noted, Paglia is specifically talking about the most heinous possible crimes—“extreme sex crimes like rape-murder [which] emanate from a primitive level that even practical psychology no longer has a language for.” At one point, she specifically refers to the misinterpretations of women’s behavior which may be made by “psychotics.”

There’s no sign that she’s discussing types of behavior which will emanate from “all men.” That said, we’ve never seen anyone who is so cavalier about paraphrasing other writers as McDonough is.

As usual, Paglia is a bit hard to follow. Things get no better when other writers start their critiques in the manner shown below, which is typical of McDonough’s work:

MCDONOUGH: I get lots of unsolicited emails from men who want to tell me things. Often, these men will just want to tell me that I am wrong, but sometimes they will also want to tell me about someone else—someone who is right, so that I might learn from them. One such man emailed me on Monday to let me know that I should read Camille Paglia’s latest for Time because she is “someone who has a clue.”

According to Paglia, any talk of rape culture is “hysterical propaganda,” and claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on college campuses are “wildly overblown.” Instead, the real problem women need to contend with is “the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.”

Men, it seems, are hard-wired to do ancient sex crimes. Or something.

In that opening passage, McDonough makes the tiniest attempt to paraphrase Paglia. She then throws off her trademark putdown: “Or something,” she says.

Later, she does it again:

MCDONOUGH: After establishing that she thinks that rape is intrinsic to men’s nature, a nature that can’t be changed, Paglia advises women to try to understand “evil” and then stop wearing short skirts because those short skirts activate men’s intrinsic primitive violence boners or something. “[Women] assume that bared flesh and sexy clothes are just a fashion statement containing no messages that might be misread and twisted by a psychotic,” according to Paglia. “They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.”

In that passage, we get more of the snark and the snide—and we get another “or something.” In the process, McDonough seems to slide right past the difference between “some” and “all.”

As noted, Paglia is almost always hard to follow. That said, it’s fairly clear that she isn’t discussing “all men” in this piece; she’s mainly talking about the reactions of those “psychotics.” She seems to be talking about “the sexual stalker, who is often an alienated loser consumed with his own failures” and “is motivated by an atavistic hunting reflex. He is called a predator precisely because he turns his victims into prey.”

To our ear, it doesn’t sound like Paglia is talking about “all men.” But as is often the case with McDonough, she has employed her first “or something” by the end of paragraph 3. From there, she proceeds to this:

MCDONOUGH: Men, it seems, are hard-wired to do ancient sex crimes. Or something.

“The gender ideology dominating academe denies that sex differences are rooted in biology and sees them instead as malleable fictions that can be revised at will,” Paglia explains. “The assumption is that complaints and protests, enforced by sympathetic campus bureaucrats and government regulators, can and will fundamentally alter all men.”

So I am having a hard time engaging with this as a serious idea, so instead let’s casually discuss it as something that is very weird. And then let’s talk about the positive response to the piece from men who are usually like #NotAllMen any time a woman tries to write about violence. And then let’s all take a nap or maybe watch a movie.

By paragraph 5, McDonough is lazily throwing the piece aside as something she can’t take seriously—and she’s snarking hard.

We’re inclined to like McDonough for her values and her ardor. That said, her attitude is amazingly flip; perhaps for this reason, her analytical skills often seem non-existent. She writes about very serious topics, but does so in a profoundly undisciplined, flippant way.

In this case, Paglia seemed to be writing about “psychotics.” Psychotics do exist in the world. For people unfortunate enough to engage them, their existence can be a deadly problem.

McDonough has very good values, but she writes in a flippant, lazy way. Can a winning gender politics really get built this way?

Tomorrow: The most fascinating piece of all

Concerning the phrase “all men:” Hey, wait a minute! In the passage quoted above, Paglia specifically cites “all men!”

Let’s review the passage:

MCDONOUGH: Men, it seems, are hard-wired to do ancient sex crimes. Or something.

“The gender ideology dominating academe denies that sex differences are rooted in biology and sees them instead as malleable fictions that can be revised at will,” Paglia explains. “The assumption is that complaints and protests, enforced by sympathetic campus bureaucrats and government regulators, can and will fundamentally alter all men.”

There! Doesn’t that mean that “Paglia thinks that all men are born with rape buttons inside them that are automatically switched on when they see cleavage?”

Or something?

No. That passage seems to mean that complaints and protests will affect some men, but they won't affect all men. In particular, they won’t affect the psychotic or the “the sexual stalker, who is often an alienated loser consumed with his own failures” and “is called a predator precisely because he turns his victims into prey.”

Paglia is almost always annoyingly hard to read. In this case, it seems fairly clear that she is talking about the irredeemable “evil” of some exceptionally dangerous men, not of all men.

At the new Salon, such things don’t seem to matter much. We tend to throw off a few paragraphs, then turn to the snark and the snide.