Writing in The Nation:
So far, most of the eulogies of Christopher have come from men, and thereâs a reason for that. He moved in a masculine world, and for someone who prided himself on his wide-ranging interests, he had virtually no interest in womenâs writing or womenâs lives or perspectives. I never got the impression from anything he wrote about women that he had bothered to do the most basic kinds of reading and thinking, let alone interviewing or reportingâthe sort of workup he would do before writing about, say, G.K. Chesterton, or Scientology or Kurdistan. It all came off the top of his head, or the depths of his id. Women arenât funny. Women shouldnât need to/want to/get to have a job. The Dixie Chicks were âfucking fat slagsâ (not âsluts,â as he misremembered later). And then of course there was his 1989 column in which he attacked legal abortion and his cartoon version of feminism as âpossessive individualism.â I donât suppose I ever really forgave Christopher for that.
It wasnât just the position itself, it was his lordly condescending assumption that he could sort this whole thing out for the ladies in 1,000 words that probably took him twenty minutes to write. âAnyone who has ever seen a sonogram or has spent even an hour with a textbook on embryology knowsâ that pro-life women are on to something when they recoil at the idea of the âdisposable fetus.â Hmmmm⌠that must be why most OB-GYNs are pro-choice and why most women who have abortions are mothers. Those doctors just need to spend an hour with a medical textbook; those mothers must never have seen a sonogram. Interestingly, although he promised to address the counterarguments made by the many women who wrote in to the magazine, including those on the staff, he never did. For a man with a reputation for courage, it certainly failed him then.
Read the whole thing. (Via Atrios.)