Comments Elsewhere

Jeanine—points well taken. (They apply elsewhere in public life, too; one of my favorite responses, when people started going on some aimless tear about, say, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s appearance, was to ask whether they could think of anyone uglier than Jesse Helms or Strom Thurmond.)

On exceptions:

“Catherine MacKinnon, for instance, is a beautiful woman by conventional Western feminine standards.”

This is true—it’s also been said of, e.g., Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf. But if anything these are actually used as grounds to dismiss feminist conventionally attractive feminist thinkers—“Naomi Wolf wrote a book about the corrosive effects of gendered beauty standards, but she is herself conventionally beautiful!” If some man is supposed to find a particular feminist unattractive, then she’s attacked as ugly and resentful; if some man is supposed to find her attractive, then she’s dismissed as a bimbo and accused of exploiting the patriarchal standards she criticizes. As usual, it seems, the standards of criticism for feminist writers seem to be that if you want to be taken seriously by certain people, you had best not say anything about feminism at all.