Never heard of him.

Sounds like a jerk.

Who is this "Will in Seattle" guy? Never heard of him.

Sounds like a jerk.

Wow. Every Slog comment thread ever has just been encapsulated in two comments. Go home, everybody, we're done.

"I came to bury Ceasar..." Yes, the guy had faults. Maybe even misogyny. And he drank too much. I also heard him say that he, too, had concerns about hedonism if religion were harmed. Something he should have saved for hedonistic religious leaders. But, and this is a big but for me, he challenged the Catholic Church. He did it eloquently and bitingly, choosing his examples carefully and nailing every complaint down with facts. For that alone, he will forever be my hero.

Anyway, yes, one of Hitchens' many faults was his tendency to be pompous, scornful, and dismissive toward anything he hadn't really bothered to pay attention to - including, broadly, women.

I loved it when people embrace nuance.

Hey, I know he was wrong about some pretty important things. I also know he was pretty sexist (in his attitudes, not in his policy advocacy). But darn it all, I kinda loved the guy. I don't really know why. And I don't really love Katha Pollitt. I'm sure she's a more sober, responsible, sensitive, upstanding citizen. But there was just something about the Hitch, something magic.

I'm really gonna miss that son of a bitch.

Take that, dead guy!

Reading this piece reminds me of the outsider-ness of women, even in the 21st Century. Here was a guy who wrote with great confidence and elan on so many subjects, but when faced with subjects he knew next to nothing about, including all women's issues, his ignorance was no barrier to his proclaiming his opinion in print.

I dunno. I liked Hitch, but I'd have liked him better with a little more intellectual humility. Or at least some pretense of concern for the welfare of half of the world's people.

She's absolutely right. One of Hitch's characteristics was to throw off his enormous erudition in ill-thought-out dismissive bursts. She's probably right; a lot of these articles were tossed off in 20 minutes.

But he had the erudition. He could do it in 20 minutes, which most people couldn't. And when he focused he could be brilliant. But offhand? Yes. Hard-working and lazy at the same time.

I think Hitch would have accepted this kind of negative eulogy as well as the more glowing ones.

I love her so much. @10, I bet he would have railed against it, but admiringly.

On the subject of feminism, Joan Didion makes Christopher Hitchens look like an asshole and an idiot. And she agreed with at least his core sentiments.

For all Hitchens' intelligence and wit, he regularly behaved, in public and private, like the belligerent, spiteful, impulsive, and foolish drunk that he was.

I think this is a pretty awkward and weak critique of Hitchens' faults, and as a writer, she should have had it out with him publicly while he was still alive to engage in the debate. Bringing up your disagreements with someone after they've died seems kinda awful to me. If you want to address someone's passing who you didn't like, address their followers as Hitchens did with Falwell and Mother Theresa.

I think if she did that, she wouldn't find very many of the people who have said nice things since his death that are unaware of his many flaws. I certainly disagreed with him on everything she listed and more, but immediately after someone dies it's a lot more enjoyable to remember the good things they did than their many mistakes.

I greatly admire Christopher Hitchens. His eloquence and wit were second to none. Although I don't agree with everything he said, his attacks on totalitarianism and dictatorship, in its varying forms, far outweigh any of his personal/professional failings...in my opinion, of course.

Agree with @14. I admire albeit somewhat guardedly Christopher Hitchins, the man and his opinions. I saw him at Townhall a few years ago and found him most entertaining as well.

BTW, here's an interesting piece on writers and drinking:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_p…

Uhh, 13, you clearly didn't read the whole piece. She DID bring it up with him. She worked with him. He promised he'd address her critiques and the critiques of his female readers. He just failed to keep his promise....apparently because women's issues and women's opinions were not important enough to him to warrant the kind of intellectual effort he gave to other subjects.

But that didn't keep him from writing about them...

I'm a feminist and a fan of Katharine Pollit, but one thing I dislike is the tendency of some feminists to label anyone who disagrees with them as misogynist. Lots of feminists are pro-choice, anti-abortion just like Hitch was. It's possible to hate abortion and support the right to abortion at the same time, and it does not make you anti-woman to do so. Thst said, he WAS a raging sexist at times, but so was my dad...and I still respect them both. :) I do think that it's important to listen to feminist criticism, but that criticism should be balanced, and a lot of what I've read in the feminist blogosphere has not been.

Katha Pollit can rest easy knowning that she has done more to contribute to the image of feminists as humorless, self-centered, and ideologically puritanical than Hitch ever did.

It seems Christopher Hitchens eulogies tend to follow a simple pattern: criticize the hell out of the guy, point out the mistakes he made, the topics he didn't address (or addressed poorly), go on and on about how exasperating, how dismissive he could be.

To finish with a last paragraph or two to the effect that he will be missed, because there isn't quite anybody who is like him, who can say the things he said, who shook people and made them think and react quite as much as he did.

Strange guy. You'd imagine that people liked him precisely because they didn't. Or vice-versa. He had something, everybody agrees, though it's hard to say exactly what. Hating him made you want to come close to him, rather than move away from him. Strange guy, indeed.

@17, I've had similar thoughts for quite a while. Perhaps because feminism was ignored for quite some time, perhaps because it saw itself first and foremost as a transformative activism rather than as a kind of scientific inquiry trying to understand reality, feminism(s) do often seem to create spaces in which unbalanced criticism ('echo-chambers') flourish. I'm hoping that this will change with time. There are many excellent individuals who are going in this direction.

@17, I think she makes it clear that he was something of a misogynist not because he disagreed with her but because he said misogynistic things and exhibited misogynistic behavior, which she quotes and describes. I'm mystified that you read the article and admit yourself that he was a "raging sexist" but you're still so dramatically missing the point.

@18, and you can rest easy knowing that you've done your share to contribute to the idea that there are a lot of unfortunate people in the world who think there's humor or idealogical ambiguity in believing that women who abort are inherently ignorant that feminist writers are just failing to pick up on.

Seriously, most of use care more about Kim Jong Il.

@12: Two free passes to grossly abuse the sacred apostrophe in exchange for that marvelous comment.

@5 I agree. Hitchens did, to his credit,repeat that the key to ending poverty is women's empowerment, including access to birth control. Hitch, like all of us, was imperfect, and he did paint women with a broad brush. The "Why Women Still Aren't Funny," article, which argues that successful female comics have only ever achieved their success by acting masculine, to me shows that Hitch held women to out-dated standards of femininity. Apparently, Lucille Ball is too butch for Hitch.

Yeah, but his takedown of that sanctimonious hypocrite Mother Teresa was spot on.

@24 Totally.

@24 and @25 - and his takedown of Mother Teresa was based on the fact that liberating women and allowing them the freedom to dictate their own reproductive lives raises people out of poverty. It was an argument rooted in feminist humanism.

Come on, Hitch-defenders: He dished it out - he relished in dishing it out - and he can take it, too, even when he's dead. He was no saint and no fan of canonization, either. Treating his memory like off-limits, hallowed ground is a disservice to his whole contribution.

It is refreshing to see a more balanced take on him. He's been pretty much otherwise deified since his death, which I think is ridiculous.

He was a very, very smart man, who was a (more than!) capable defender of atheism, and who wrote extremely well. His final series of articles ranging around his impending death were must reads.

He was also (aside from his atheism, which really has a proud tradition within conservatism than the modern day wingnut contingent likes to admit) *extremely* conservative, a war hawk who gleefully cheered on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and whose last article in Slate was a defense of the whole War Without End (Amen) on "terrorism".

Pollit has covered his shortcomings with respect to women.

Any evaluation of Hitchens must cover all aspects of the man, not just the attributes the eulogizer most prized. It's been unreal seeing the reaction to him.

It seems to me that most of us atheists get so excited when someone with influence can discuss and defend atheism that we are willing to overlook damn near anything else that person says or does. Hitchens was a conservative, a hawk, and an asshole. Most of the people defending him here most likely agree with nothing he has ever said, apart from "there is no god." If Hitchens had been just as brilliant a writer, but also a Christian, no one here would be mourning him. This article says everything I've wanted to say since his death. It may not be an issue to many of the people here, but I've never been able to forgive the man for writing and speaking as though I'm a second class citizen who should shut up and make babies. And @18, sorry, but I don't find casual, unthinking sexism any funnier than I find racism or homophobia. If that makes me a humorless bitch, then so be it. At least I'm not a jackass.

Look, if anyone wouldn't have minded being criticized shortly after his death, it was Christopher Hitchens, master of the Takedown Eulogy. Consider this selection of his work: http://www.screenjunkies.com/tv/tv-news/…

@ 22, what are you talking about? He used the apostrophe correctly.

Let's get this one thing straight: "Why Women Aren't Funny" shouldn't be taken on its face (never mind the fact that he probably didn't write the headline.) What Hitchens actually argued was that humor is a distinctly masculine realm, and that even the most successful comediennes reflect a humor that is conceived and structured by a distinctly masculine paradigm. Now, deep breath, it was a commentary on the way things are not as they should be.

I consider myself a feminist but I cannot abide lack of reading comprehension.

Started out by rolling my eyes but reading the whole article it actually seems a fair assessment of her experience with the man.

I think she's right in her assessment that the wannabes will confuse his lifestyle, drinking, and bombastic manner as the key to his success instead of hindrances.

This is similar to those who may read Steve Jobs' autobiography and take away that being an incredible asshole is ok because Steve was successful.

Anyway, I'll miss watching/reading Hitchens attack other people's sacred cows. Always entertaining.

@20 I think you missed MY point. :) Let's not forget that the definition of misogynist is one who hates women. Disagreeing with abortion and holding sexist views on certain issues doesn't make someone a woman hater. I just think we (feminists) need to be careful about applying that label so liberally. Right now, it's used on anyone who disagrees with certain hardline feminist views, from abortion to sex work, despite the fact that these views are in hot debate among feminists themselves. Hitch may not have been a feminist, but he was definitely not a mysogynist, either. At least not in my personal opinion, but if you care to disagree feel free to give specifics, and I'll be happy to consider other points of view.

I'm not sure who's more obnoxious, Christopher Hitchens or people who refer to him as "Hitch".

It's been instructive, and depressing, watching my friends eulogize Hitchens. The best obit I've seen so far is from his fellow atheist curmudgeon Amanda Marcotte: http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/oblig…

Katha Pollitt, if anything, pulled her punches.

I think it's far too simplistic and not at all accurate to call Hitchens a misogynist. After all, one of his biggest criticisms of Mother Theresa was that she actively worked to prevent women from gaining social and financial equality and independence, and he consistently argued that empowering women was the key to ending poverty. Misogyny and the inequality of women was also one of his major criticisms of Islam.

I found it alternately instructive and infuriating to read Hitchens. I have been a committed atheist my whole adult life, but Hitchens was so animated by hatred of anything religious that it just got tedious. It got to a point where I could see the headline, predict the entire article, and just respond "yeah, yeah, give it a break." It is the same reason I no longer read Glen Greenwald. At some point the hysteria and dead horse beating just gets to be too much.

On the other hand, there are times when I would read something he wrote, including on religious issues and see the world differently. The Mother Theresa article was one of those times. I had heard some slightly sketchy things about her, but he gathered everything in one place and laid the case against her very well.

In the end, he wasn't someone who I was willing to read consistently, but I would often give him a couple of paragraphs to establish his tone and then read on if it seemed like the article was not just going to be piling on.

@36 Actually, the OED defines misogyny as "Hatred or dislike of, or prejudice against women." (http://oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry…) Arguing that Hitchens isn't misogynist because his clearly expressed prejudice against women seemed rooted in dismissive contempt instead of outright hatred is like arguing that an anti-gay bully isn't homophobic, because his prejudice isn't rooted in fear. It's an argument based on an incorrect understanding of language, and one that seems designed to divert attention from real social justice issues and mire the debate in useless semantics. :)

I personally think people took the "Why Women Aren't Funny" article way too seriously -- his tone was very playful and the whole piece basically amounted to an admission that most men are pretty shallow and are far more likely to be seduced by a woman's looks than her personality, which is absolutely true. Sorry.

I also don't think viewing abortion as a conflict-of-rights issue is inherently misogynistic. He might have been snarky and dismissive in how he expressed his views, but he wasn't snarky and dismissive exclusively toward women or exclusively about abortion. His "anyone who's ever seen a sonogram" line is dismissive of pro-choice OB-GYNs, male and female alike, right?

I heard him say in an interview that he didn't have any problem with his wife working outside the home if she wanted to, but he didn't want her to feel that she had to. "I will take care of her", he said. This might seem extremely old-fashioned, but it doesn't seem particularly hateful to me.

Anyone have a link to the blogs/comments bashing Dan as a misogynist so we can post them as soon as he dies? Geeze Dan, Class Up. For someone who can be interpreted as called women part parts gross in the past would show a bit more respect to other writers who have also had their words twisted to be labled misgyonistic.

"Asking for my opinion on vajazzling, VAG, is like asking a vegan for her opinion on the wallpaper in a steak house. I'm simply too revolted by what's on the menu to take much notice of the decor" - Dan Savage

Tried to read a hitchens book and it was really boringly written and noneruditic. he always seemed to have something momentous to say but what the hell was he saying? pollit's eulogy is brilliant. if anything, she is too soft on the guy.