Disconnect
Richard Cohen has successfully snuck another of his oblivious, hypocritical, self-incriminating columns past the editors at the Washington Post.
Today’s bit of outrageousness starts as a reasonable-sounding denunciation of the media’s unfair, sexist treatment of Monica Lewinsky (who recently reemerged in the news because of her successful completion of a master’s program at the London School of Economics). But then come these two paragraphs, one after another, without any hint of irony:
But she is now a woman with a master’s degree from a prestigious school and is going to be 34 come July. Her clock ticks, her life ebbs. Where is the man for her? Where is the guy brave enough, strong enough, admirable enough to take her as his wife, to suffer the slings and arrows of her outrageous fortune — to say to the world (for it would be the entire world) that he loves this woman who will always be an asterisk in American history. I hope there is such a guy out there. It would be nice. It would be fair.
It would be nice, too, and fair, also, if Lewinsky were treated by the media as it would treat a man. What’s astounding is the level of sexism applied to her, as if the wave of the women’s movement broke over a new generation of journalists and not a drop fell on any of them.
Indeed, if only the press’s treatment of her hadn’t been so offensively sexist, she might have found a man “brave” enough to “take her as his wife”!
(Note, of course: “any of them,” not “any of us.”)
Update: FYI:
In American English “snuck” has become increasingly common as the past tense of “sneak.” This is one of many cases in which people’s humorously self-conscious use of dialect has influenced others to adopt it as standard and it is now often seen even in sophisticated writing in the U.S. But it is safer to use the traditional form: “sneaked.”
If you were curious, as I was, now you know.
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