WASHINGTON -- These are vexed times. The country is at war
on two fronts. Rogue states are edging towards acquiring
strategic nuclear weaponry. We have been through a very serious
recession from which we may not emerge into the bright morn of
economic health for years. The dollar is frail. The future of
national healthcare, finance, and corporate governance is in
doubt. Yet that is not all. Over at the New York
Times an issue that continues to torment the
bien pensants is.... Well, let me quote the
first sentence of a front-page
tocsin that began the controversy on October 25: "Does the
White House feel like a frat house?"
The proximate cause for this troubling query was that
President Barack Obama had hosted "a high-level basketball game
with no female players." Yet there was more. Apparently, there
are anonymous women on the White House staff who feel
uncomfortable in the presence of the President and his male
associates even when they are fully dressed and not playing
basketball. Reports the Times: "In
interviews, five women who work in the White House or advised
officials there described the culture with more of a collective
eye-roll than any real sense of grievance or discomfort." The
sentence is contradictory. The ladies collectively roll their
eyes. Yet they have no grievance or discomfort? Are they having
trouble with their contact lenses? What precisely is the
problem?
One of the ladies, though still anonymous, gave a hint.
Without wanting to sound "publicly critical" of the Obama White
House, she confided to the Times' reporter
that the "'sports-fan thing at the White House' could become
'annoying' and that her relative indifference to athletics could
be mildly alienating." The Times
elaborates, "sports bonding can afford a point of entree
with the boss."
Would it have helped if the President had invited this
troubled woman to play basketball? He is 6'2" and presumably
those who play with him are of above-average size. What are they
to do with an average-size woman on the court? Or is she quite
large? Nonetheless Obama's basketball players must be pretty
strong -- at least as compared to women. Yet maybe the
eye-rolling women are pretty strong too, but as strong as these
men? Is that likely? I know that men and women are equal (which
to feminists means identical),
but are women equal to men on the basketball court? Why are
none of our female college basketball players playing in the NBA?
Oh yes, and how did talking sports with colleagues become
controversial and exclusionary? I thought there were a lot of
women in the country interested in sports.
Subsequently Times columnist Maureen
Dowd has attempted to explain the troubling atmosphere in the
Obama White House. "Men have always craved private realms -- the
golf club, men's club, garage, workshop, shed; a place to get
away from the chatter and clatter of women and kids," writes
Dowd, who has never been married and has no children. In fact, in
an embarrassing book she has lamented over how difficult she has
found it to be in close contact with men. Yet on she goes about
men, explaining that Obama may need "a testosterone break from
his estrogen nest," though testosterone does not break and
estrogen does not nest. Temporarily off the topic of the Obama
frat house, she then lets fall that President George H. W. Bush
-- she calls him "Poppy" -- "liked racy humor." That is news to
many of us who knew him pretty well. Moreover, "So male advisers
bonded with him by telling dirty jokes" -- well, he had a lot of
advisers. Some might have, but Dowd offers no evidence of dirty
jokes.
Now if there is a serious point being made here amid all
this girlish petulance it is that some of these White House women
want to gain more influence in the White House by playing the
gender card. In a party that has fragmentized itself with
identity politics there is the gender card to play and the race
card and who knows how many other divisive cards?
So what is Dowd up to? Aside from revealing once again why
she has so much difficulty getting a boyfriend, she reveals that
she wants to play Scrabble with the President. In her
stupendously undignified column she admits it. Her colleague Tom
Friedman was invited to play golf with the President in
September. Now, she writes, "Since the President is finally
willing to let women in on the games, I offered [?] up my own
challenge, Scrabble." Whereupon she makes some gender related
jokes about words that start with X and Y to challenge "the
smarty-pants Y chief executive."
Sometimes one reads about the controversies such women have
over the men around them, and one remembers how happy one was to
get out of high school all those years ago.
topics:
New York Times, Feminism, Maureen Dowd
