JAMES TARANTO: JOHN Q. FEMINIST- A HILARIOUS DEFENSE OF ELIOT SPITZER
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323477604579002791217570508.html
Have you ever noticed that you can change one letter of “Puffington Host” and make it read “Puffington Hoot”? That name would not be unfitting, because sometimes the site can be a real hoot.
What prompts this observation is a Puffington Host post by the (as we shall see) delightfully named Lynn Parramore. She weighs in with a defense of a Democratic former elected official who resigned in disgrace amid a sex scandal and is looking to revive his career by running for citywide office in New York. No, not Anthony Weiner. The great city of New York has more than one politician who fits that description.
The title of Parramore’s post is “5 Things Women Should Know About Eliot Spitzer.” Apparently “He likes to keep his socks on” is No. 6. But some of her picks are equally hilarious.
Our favorite: “1. Spitzer is a feminist: Yes, that’s right. Recently on MSNBC, Spitzer was asked if he was a feminist. He immediately said yes. That answer emphatically distinguishes him from the vast majority of men, four fifths of whom polls show do not consider themselves feminists, and even many prominent women, such as Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer.”
He’s part of the 18%.
To back her assertion that 80% of men don’t consider themselves feminists–not that we doubted it–Parramore links to a Wikipedia page, which cites a Gallup poll from 2001. Wikipedia’s link in turn goes to an inaccessible Google Books page. But YouGov.com conducted a poll this past spring with similar findings: Only 18% of men described themselves as feminists.
The YouGov findings were a bit more complicated, though. When men were given a dictionary definition of feminism–“someone who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes”–the proportion rose to 47%. Apparently abstract feminism is considerably more appealing than actual feminists–which is consistent with Eliot Spitzer’s being one of them.
Women, not surprisingly, were more apt to describe themselves as feminists–by 20 points in both formulations of the question. That is, 67% of women described themselves as dictionary-definition feminists, up from 38% when they were left to define it from their own experiences.
The YouGov findings about women are actually more interesting than those about men. It seems that fully 1 in 3 women do not believe in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes, or at least are willing to give the impression that they do not if the alternative is to accept the label “feminist.” And a large majority of women–62%–reject that label when not pushed to accept it.
We suppose one could make the case that Spitzer is praiseworthy because he has the courage to embrace an unpopular point of view. But that’s not Parramore’s point. Everything in her post suggests she is one of the minority of women who unreservedly call themselves feminists.
Anyway, given that such women (and men) are vastly overrepresented in a Democratic primary in famously liberal New York, he doesn’t really deserve points for bravery. In fact, by calling himself a feminist he merely proves he can be a panderer as well as a panderee.
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