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Shorter Mary Grabar: I’m Serena Joy and Phyllis Schlafly all rolled into one

Oh, looky: another wingnut woman telling us how silly women are and how much better, and more like a man, she herself is. And she does it by getting the vapors about The View. Tres originale!

After watching The View and following the inane statements made on the program, I’ve come to the conclusion that it really is true what Aristotle, Saint Paul, and John Milton said: Women, without male guidance, are illogical, frivolous, and incapable of making any decisions beyond what to make for dinner. . .

But it’s a sign of our crumbling civilization that a bunch of girls of varying ages and ethnic backgrounds, sitting around all dressed up for a coffee klatch, some of them with cleavage spilling out of Victoria’s Secret Infinity Edge Push-Up bras, spout off opinions borrowed from disturbed teenagers and Michael Moore, and call it a talk show.

This was the danger of giving women the vote. The danger to conservatives (and the survival of this country) is the voting bloc of single women, i.e., those who lack the guidance of a man in the form of a husband or intellectual mentor.

Let’s break this down a little before we continue, shall we?

First, the idea that all those men were right, and women shouldn’t be listened to. I rather like tbogg’s treatment of this idea. Considering that she doesn’t get around to telling us She’s Not A Typical Woman until paragraph 15 or so, she’s not doing a good job of explaining why she should be allowed to post her views at Clownhall under her own name, instead of under that of her husband or her “intellectual mentor,” and why anyone should read it.

Second, the focus on what the women (not “girls,” love; Baba Wawa is in her, what, 70s by now?) on The View are wearing. Note how she dances around actually telling us who’s wearing the hookerwear and the pushup bras and flashing that naughty, naughty cleavage (Dr. Helen? Ann Althouse? Is that you?). The only photo we get of any Viewster is of Rosie O’Donnell, who’s buttoned up to her clavicle. Where’s the cleavage and the streetwalker outfits, Mary?

Well, the clue is probably in that bit about why women shouldn’t have gotten the vote: as Shakes pointed out, her real concern is that, if single women voted as a bloc, conservatives — the very fabric of the nation! Real America! — would be in danger! Imperiled! At the mercy of women who don’t have a man to guide them and might think for themselves! O Heavens!

And who’s the resident conservative on The View? Elizabeth Hasselbeck. The Young One. The one who wears the cutesy, cleavage-baring tops. Unless Joy Behar’s been taking the girls out for a walk and I missed it.

Not that I think that what any of them wears on the show resembles anything that’s worn by the working girls on Eleventh Avenue. But the wingnut obsession with breasts and purity and pearl-clutching continues apace (latest entry? Bill O’Reilly, expert on the female anatomy, claims that most women who like artificial Christmas trees have artificial breasts. It’s true! A study said so!).

Grabar’s real problem is the fact that many of the women on The View have expressed frankly liberal opinions about certain things. So she has to tear them down, somehow, while building her own self up. And how does she choose to do it? By pulling that I’m Not A Typical Woman trick.

First, the setup: Girlz are Teh Icky, and Menz are Kewl:

Ever observe a table at a restaurant filled with women? Good Lord, it’s exhausting just watching the gesticulating and gabbing. Whenever I get invited to a “luncheon” I head for the hills.

Not that there is anything wrong with such gatherings and not that I have anything against other women. In fact I have a few female friends. But such squeal-a-thons (“I love what you’ve done to your hair!”) are not the proper places in which to make public political statements. When women have been the minority among men they have proven themselves to be quite competent. Look at Jeane Kirkpatrick, Margaret Thatcher, and Condoleezza Rice. Did any of these women attend any of these on-air chat fests?

Men, on the other hand, are quite capable of holding forth intelligently among themselves, as commentators have done through the years. You don’t have men squealing “Oh, I love your tie!” as they set to embark on a discussion about the future of free world.

The kind of silly women who don’t deserve the vote are liberals. The ones who do are Just Like Men, and have ladyballs. Thatchers, as Stephen Colbert calls them.

Except Colbert is playing a character. Grabar is not. And she’s unconcerned, UNCONCERNED, I tell you! that women — most women, women not like her, women without Thatchers — will be upset with her. She’s contrarian like that, yo.

I know many women will disagree with me. They will be hurt. Maybe angry. There may be some tears. The lesbians will come to their defense. All the Rosie O’Donnell’s will give them big hugs, maybe even pull them on their laps as Rosie did with Danny DeVito.

So what.

See Shakes for a discussion of the homophobia throughout the article (the husbands of the women who watch The View are Not Real Men and probably drive Volvos and are nurturing English professors who sit down to pee).

What’s so interesting to me is that so many MRAs and antifeminists think that feminists are out to erase all differences between men and women, and get very, VERY up in arms about the whole thing because they can’t grasp that “equality” is not the same thing as “sameness.”

And here we have a woman, an antifeminist, declaring herself proudly Not Like Other Women and Really, When It Comes Down To It, More Like A Man So Please, Please, Don’t Take It Seriously When I Say Women Shouldn’t Get To Vote, At Least Not In My Case:

I admit I’m not a typical woman.

When I was a graduate student, for $50, I participated in the Psychology Department’s study and took the Myers-Briggs personality test and came up, not surprisingly, as an INTP. My type is the absent-minded professor, which I learned was very rare among women. . .

No I’m not a typical woman. I read philosophy. I hate to shop. I don’t care what I’m wearing. Nothing in my house is coordinated. If I had been on The View I probably would have taken that old-lady-Elizabeth-Taylor-perfume out of the handbag that Rosie pulled up and dumped it on her head.

But I’ve read Aristotle, Saint Paul, and John Milton, and I think they have very good things to say.

OOOOOOH. She hates to SHOP! She reads philosophy! She’d dump that perfume all over Rosie’s bulldyke head! Check her for a penis, stat!

The antifeminists depend on useful idiots like her, who want so badly to be in the club that they’ll shit all over other women and suck up to the men, thinking that surely the very rules they’re applying to OTHER women don’t apply to THEM. And in the meantime, they lend a female face to the oppression of women, allowing them to claim that women can’t really be oppressed after all if some of these nice pets of ours are perfectly happy in their gilded cages.

Well, as Serena Joy found out, that doesn’t always work out so well.


49 thoughts on Shorter Mary Grabar: I’m Serena Joy and Phyllis Schlafly all rolled into one

  1. So the View is proof that women shouldn’t have the right to vote.

    Do I get to take Girls Gone Wild, Everybody Loves Raymond, and anything featuring Bill O’Reilly as proof that men should be disenfranchised and subject to GPS monitoring tags?

  2. Has this woman ever watched a group of guys sitting around watching football? If men as a group are the ultimate litmus test of intellect, then I guess the women on The View aren’t all that bad.

    Oh, I also don’t care about fashion, read philosophy, hate to shop (unless it’s at a bookstore) and am hopeless when it comes to home decorating. What the heck does that prove?

  3. I’m not nurturing or empathetic, and I hate babies and dogs. I think I’ve got Ms. Grabar beat.

    “not that I have anything against other women” … uhhhh … sounds to me like she has a WHOLE LOT against other women.

  4. ahh god. people have some seriously weird complexes. think of how many women there are in the world and your saying your diffrent from most all of them? are you kidding? how is that even possible, if your not a “typical” woman, than obviously there are other women that dont fit lame ass stereotypes too. at least thats how i always looked at it, kind of “hey if IM not like what they say a woman should be, then obviously, stereotypes arent true!”. not too hard a concept to grasp i thought.

  5. Someone who trades in stupid generalizations is obviously not as familiar with John Milton as she says she is (laying aside my own problems with Milton – he’s not nearly as stupid as this woman).

    Perhaps Grabar’s parents really wanted a boy. And kept telling her so after she was born. Who knows.

  6. Quite frankly, given that the MBTI has considerable flaws and is not at all “settled” as a psychometric tool, to use it as a justification for not being a “typical” woman is not a very good argument.

  7. What is wrong with these people? You know that after this article denigrating femininity (although femininity does not equal woman) that they will be shrieking to high heaven a la Ann Coulter about masculine women who aren’t pretty or want to go into the military or be scientists. Frankly, I thought that the wingnuts *like* women to be cookie-cutter feminine stereotypes … otherwise they might be LESBIANS (horrors!).

  8. 1. Soooo…let’s say women’s rights are taken away, including those of Ms. Grabar, is she ok with that? Is that what she is advocating? That since she is a woman, she’s a blubbering idiot therefore shouldn’t be allowed to vote without male guidance? You’d think with all the philosophy training she’d see the flaw in this. Because even though she likes to pretend she’s better than other woman, she is still a woman. And anything that impacts us, impacts her. That strap-on she likes to wear all day is not going to help her. I can’t believe anyone would take her seriously.

    2. Who’s Serena Joy and what happened to her?

  9. INTPs are a rare type in the population as a whole, so there are not many male or female INTPs. NTs overall are only 7-10% of the population and INTPs are only somewhere around 1%.

    A third of Ts are female. Not exactly a tiny percentage. Considering that women are socialized to answer questions in a way that would have them come out as Fs, none of this should come as any surprise.

    I’m an INFP but I could manipulate the test to come out as an INTP if I wanted. I find that presenting as an ENFJ is much more helpful in the work world, though, so that’s what I do my best to extravert.

  10. Heh. I score INTJ on those tests when I’m being honest and INFJ when I answer as if my mother is watching.

  11. I’m confused again – does this mean women are supposed to sit around and talk about their hair, or not? Does this mean when my friends and I sit down to have coffee and spend long hours talking about activism, slash fiction, and whether or not one should have feminism101 conversations with our friends (such a difficult topic), we’re being un-womanly?

    Damn it, why won’t the people who want to tell me what to be explain if I’m doing it right or wrong? I just can’t handle it!

  12. Men, on the other hand, are quite capable of holding forth intelligently among themselves, as commentators have done through the years. You don’t have men squealing “Oh, I love your tie!” as they set to embark on a discussion about the future of free world.

    Yeah. Because men have NEVER gotten together without women and done silly, frivolous things. Frathouses and sports bars are notorious for their highbrow happenings.

  13. I’m right on the borderline between INTP and INFP. I’m in a male-dominated academic field. (Undergrad in my school in my field: 30% women. Master’s: 15%. PhD (like me): 7%). My husband is a homemaker. I don’t shop, decorate, clean, care what I wear, wear makeup, heels, or skirts, or gab with other women on traditional “female” topics (except feminism). Ok Ms. Grabar, have I established my covert male identity enough to be allowed to speak?

    Good, now shut up! You are not special. The things you are devaluing are devalued specifically because they are feminine. Just because you don’t enjoy them doesn’t make you superior. And comparing the best of traditional masculine behaviour (serious political debate, philosophy) with the “worst” of traditional feminine behaviour (complimenting each other on appearance, having breasts) is just stupid. You might as well say (as some antifeminists actually do) that since women traditionally raise children and men traditionally watch sports involving people punching one another in the head, women should be making all the decisions.

    I used to be a little like you, Ms. Grabar. Not that I hated women, just that I felt myself outside of the standard female fold. Most of my friends were men. Until I started university in a technical field. Then I found a great group of female friends. One thing we all had in common was that we used to have nearly exclusively male friends. I hope you can find other women you get along with so that you can get over the hatred of your own gender. There’s a wide variety of us out there.

  14. Serena Joy is a character in The Handmaid’s Tale. From SparkNotes:

    Serena Joy – The Commander’s Wife, Serena worked in pre-Gilead days as a gospel singer, then as an anti-feminist activist and crusader for “traditional values.” In Gilead, she sits at the top of the female social ladder, yet she is desperately unhappy. Serena’s unhappiness shows that her restrictive, male-dominated society cannot bring happiness even to its most pampered and powerful women. Serena jealously guards her claims to status and behaves cruelly toward the Handmaids in her household.

  15. IIRC, Briggs of Myers-Briggs is a woman. Myers may be too, I don’t know. So Grabar is counting on a test designed by a woman to demonstrate that she’s superior to other women. Something strange there…if most women are so dumb, how can she count on a test developed by one to prove her own superiority.

    Incidently, I test as an INTP too. Not sure the test is meaningful. And I hate to shop and had never even heard of “The View” before reading this post. Also I’ve read Kirkegaard, Kant, and Hume, all much more respectible as philosophers than Aristotle, St Paul, or Milton. But I have to admit that I didn’t much care for them, so maybe I don’t have to go out and grow a penis just yet.

  16. Who’s Serena Joy and what happened to her?

    She’s a character in The Handmaid’s Tale. The gist of it is that she made a career out of screeching about traditional values. Traditional values come to pass, and she’s just as oppressed as all the rest of the women.

  17. Not that there is anything wrong with such gatherings and not that I have anything against other women. In fact I have a few female friends.

    Did she really just say “Why, I’m not prejudiced–some of my best friends are women!”

    Note to Mary Grabar: there are easier and less embarassing ways to attract dick than screeching about how you’re not icky like all those other girls.

  18. It’s a good thing we’ve got Mary to set all us girlies straight. Now I can quit thinking and blogging and get back to planning dinner and watching The View. And after I quit my job, my husband can stand proudly when he pees.

  19. Note to Mary Grabar: there are easier and less embarassing ways to attract dick than screeching about how you’re not icky like all those other girls.

    Heh. To paraphrase Lynda Barry, just go sit on his car.

  20. Well, I don’t like to shop. Neither does my husband, so we do it together for mutual support. I know I’m not a typical woman. But by god, I am a real woman. I got my doubts about this person however.

  21. How can all those stay-at-home moms who watch the view be liberals!? I thought liberals hated stay at home moms… I wish these people would at least be consistent about their stereotypes.

  22. Is the ‘typical woman’ really who we imagine she is, anyway? I don’t like shopping and fashion, don’t wear perfume or makeup, and have never been known to ‘squeal’, and I know plenty of women who don’t like these things either. Perhaps ‘stereotypical’ woman is a better description? I’m not sure that they’re actually such a majority as we imagine. And, you know, I just happen not to like these things, I don’t imagine it makes me morally superior or more intelligent or logical or whatever.

    And then there’s the very odd assertion that an interest in fashion etc. automatically makes a woman ‘illogical and frivolous’ and unable to behave responsibly or make decisions. I can imagine a lot of intelligent, ambitious, successful (and impeccably dressed) business-women, and others, taking exception to that one!

  23. And then there’s the very odd assertion that an interest in fashion etc. automatically makes a woman ‘illogical and frivolous’

    As opposed to an interest in football scores and NASCAR…

  24. Men, on the other hand, are quite capable of holding forth intelligently among themselves, as commentators have done through the years. You don’t have men squealing “Oh, I love your tie!” as they set to embark on a discussion about the future of free world.

    Actually, this fool would be very surprised. Guys do, in fact, gossip about clothes; apparently, they just don’t do it in front of her. Thursday afternoon at work, I overheard two men occupying adjacent urinals discuss where they go to find nice ties.

    As far as color-coordinating goes, my dad (who loves NASCAR, played college football, and votes moderate-conservative) quilts as a hobby, and takes great pride in producing intricate patterns in coordinating colors.

    I’m not sure what any of this proves, but as long as conservatives are accepting personal anecdotes as unimpeachable and universal evidence, I thought I’d throw mine out there.

  25. A sportswriter I used to work with once entertained me with a long diatribe against Sci-Fi fans. He went on and one about what losers these people who dress up for conventions are while wearing a hockey jersey. Nothing geeky about that, nosir.

  26. Ya know what Mary Grabar? Maybe I am that typical woman you abhor? After all, last night at work, I did tell my co-worker that her hair was cute, and I squeal at babies and the powder blue heals I bought on eBay. Yes, Mary Graber, I knit and sew, and cry during Hallmark commercials. I’m stupidly happy when my jeans are a little looser.

    So yes, I am your “typical woman,” and I don’t plan on apologizing for this state of affiars. Because I know you can’t be serious. As a typical woman, I’ve also been college educated, have a 403(b) retirement plan at age 23, and have never missed a student loan payment. I am also more well versed in politics than most of my male peers. So I know, deep down, it’s not my low cut shirts or my penchant for making kissy faces at small dogs that’s really the reason you want to revoke my right to vote. I think it’s because you know that women like me are likely to be pro-choice (at least politically), pro-birth control, anti-Bush agenda. We’re the generation that embraced concsiousness raising via The Vagina Monologues. We’re just terribly unorganized. But you know, if we ever got it together, we’d have the power to change the face of politics in this country. And you’re scared as hell that it might actually happen.

    Mary, you’re also a clasic illustration of female internalized sexism. You just hate anything that isn’t “manly” or “unfeminine” in yourself or others. I’d bet you hate femmy guys (gay or straight or bi) also. Dude, you’ve internalized the patriarchy’s message so much that you’ve tried to erase every bit of what you interpret as feminine in yourself. You can’t quite swing it though, so you turn your ire on other women to make you feel better about yourself. To hear men praise you for denying the rights of other women. Does that make you feel better about yourself? Do you feel like you’ve bought a ticket out of other-hood by identifying with the oppressing class? But you know what, Mar? They don’t see you as an equal, they just pat you on the head, and think you’re pretty good – for a girl.

    Even at this point, Mar, I don’t think you’re a lost cause. Here, start by reading The Second Sex by Simone de Bouvior and Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman by Phyllis (no, not that Phyllis) Chesler. Then, come down to where I work, sit with the women I see everyday, and let them tell you about how she stopped thinking of it as rape because she couldn’t mentally handle the thought of being raped everyday, or how he pushed her down the stairs and made her deliver the baby two months early. Come see the consequences of woman hating. I’m just giving you an opportunity to understand the consequences of your words and actions here, Mar. This is purely and act of love.

    /rant.

    Apologies for the longest post I ever made here. She’s just been bothering me all night.

  27. There was a time I did not identify with other women very strongly either and was occasionally obnoxiously misogynistic as a result because their personal interests were not the same as mine.

    I never assumed that meant our political and economic interests were not still aligned.

    I was young and foolish but I was never as short sighted as this.

  28. Pingback: The Debate Link
  29. Johanna: Dead on! Loved your post.

    About half of my non-slacker time yesterday was spent on my honors thesis in computational linguistics, and the other half was a Macy’s shopping marathon. I loved both, and probably made the same squeaky noise when either one worked out the way I wanted. : )

    What’s the mental skill used most during shopping? Math. Yet you never hear that women’s interest in shopping reveals their drive to categorize things and crunch numbers. Wait…Shopping, coordinating, and keeping the house organized are “girly”. So why the stereotype that males analyze and categorize? I can’t think of any stereotypical “guy” behavior that’s as analytical as the ones expected of women.

  30. You know Ms. Grabar, I struggled through internalized misogyny similar to what you demonstrate. But I knew the source of it; I had a father who hated women. Its a bad place to be in, to grow up a girl-child hearing women denigrated daily, I also didn’t have a mother around and I was plenty angry and conflicted about that as well. These type of things have their effect you know. I’d guess something has hit you deep in your emotional development as well.

    Some therapy might help you to overcome this internal struggle, to be at peace with who you are and to let the stereotypes rest. Only those who wish to restrict women would ever bother to categorize them in such degrading terms.

    Oh Ms. Grabar! Free yourself and join the feminists! We only wish for you to be able reach your full individual potential and shine your light everywhere! Build rocket ships, build houses, build teh perfect souffle, paint the walls, paint the canvas, paint your nails! Fill the spreadsheets, fill the washer or fill your soul! Get a degree, get laid, get a manicure! Be human, be multi-faceted, be free! We liberals implore you to free yourself, love yourself and others and live!

  31. Ok, a little OT but re: the Myers Briggs Type Indicator – from what I understand Isabel Briggs-Myers (and her daughter) developed this way of discussing personality traits so that people might be able to understand and tolerate each other more. It’s not a test, like a DNA sample, it’s just an indicator of preference. And the developers had a lot to say about how some preferences are valued in our culture and some are devalued, and they speculated that the preferences that appear to be more “female” are devalued precisely for that reason, depriving men and women with those traits of the joy of using their gifts, and making women with the “male” traits feel freakish or innordinately proud of themselves for being more like the dominant group. Anyway, I have a lot of respect for the MBTI and I’m glad it’s getting more press, but I’m sorry that it seems to be being used in a superficial way. PS, if you look it up on the net there is a lot of misinformation and oversimplification. It is not a 20 minute “test”. A good book is “Gifts Differing”.

  32. Penny- thank you for bringing some perspective back to the Myers-Briggs. The only reason I know that I’m INFJ is because a community I lived in used it to help us with conflict resolution. Since we knew that most of us were I’s, we knew that talking about conflicts would be difficult, so we had more respect and kindness for the one that actually got up the nerve to bring an issue up.

  33. mythago Says:

    Not that there is anything wrong with such gatherings and not that I have anything against other women. In fact I have a few female friends.

    Did she really just say “Why, I’m not prejudiced–some of my best friends are women!”

    Yeh, and I love her Seinfeldian “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

    Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I’m going to go ahead and use it as rationale for wanting to reverse the hundred or so years of progress that now enable me to publish my own display of shoddy female thinking.

  34. I suppose it would be hopelessly unfeminist and Wrong to simply respond to Mary with,

    if that’s how you feel, great; so, shut up, woman, and go make us a chocolate chicken pot PAH.

    and any further protests of how she’s DIFFERENT or anything else with

    “blahblahblahblahblah, buzzbuzzbuzz! where my PAH?!”

  35. What’s amusing about this Grabar twit is that her own behaviour is stereotypically feminine – catty putdowns of other women and uncritical endorsements of pop-psychology quizzes are more typical of Cosmo-reading girly girls than they are of lofty intellectuals.

  36. I suppose it would be hopelessly unfeminist and Wrong to simply respond to Mary with,

    if that’s how you feel, great; so, shut up, woman, and go make us a chocolate chicken pot PAH.

    and any further protests of how she’s DIFFERENT or anything else with

    “blahblahblahblahblah, buzzbuzzbuzz! where my PAH?!”

    Can we start calling these people South Park anti-feminists?

  37. I suppose it would be hopelessly unfeminist and Wrong to simply respond to Mary with,

    if that’s how you feel, great; so, shut up, woman, and go make us a chocolate chicken pot PAH.

    and any further protests of how she’s DIFFERENT or anything else with

    “blahblahblahblahblah, buzzbuzzbuzz! where my PAH?!”

  38. Can we start calling these people South Park anti-feminists?

    Consider it started. Perhaps “Parkies” would be good shorthand.

  39. ARISTOTLE ARGH FLAIL DESTROY

    LMAO. A bit off topic, that’s exactly what I said after I took my first upper-division philosophy final.

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