Look, I know in America the new favorite past time is being outraged, but this was just a dumb stunt.The article should be IGNORED and it will go away. I subscribe to playboy and I doubt I would have seen the article if it was not posted here.
The article was in poor taste. It was removed. The more you talk about it here, the more the AOL guy talks about it, the more it is out there. If YOU and CONSERVATIVES stop talking about it, it will go away.
Why are you giving Playboy so much credibility? Is their influence so great that every word they write is a literary movement? You ask why MSNBC talks about Rush all the time. This is a dumb non-story that will go away as soon as we are finished with our favorite past time of being outraged - which should be common in a free country.
ThackerAgency on June 5, 2009 at 9:30 AM
Hey, Thacker, maybe you've been too busy with your one-handed "reading" to notice, but the leftist practice of demeaning conservative women through fantasies of forced sex is by no means a new phenomenon. It has been "out there" for at least a decade on the Internet, and probably before then. However, until that Playboy.com piece, it had been limited to the world of individual orifices who sent hate mail/email or posted in newsgroups and free-for-all leftist blogs (Hello, Matt Taibbi). The lovely Michelle Malkin had been the subject of "hate f*ck" screeds (commonly referring to her Asian and/or Filipina heritage) long before they had that name. That was even before she had her own site and her detractors had only a tiny .jpg atop her syndicated columns to (ahem) work with.
Even Hustler's self-aware sleazebag founder Larry Flynt, in all his years of sliming Christians, Republicans, and decent people in general in deliberately shocking fashion, hadn't published anything (to my knowledge) targeting political opponents for rape fantasies. I presume that Flynt's porn movie parody of Sarah Palin doesn't involve her being raped, because that would have (I think) have gotten out. But it was the relatively prudish Playboy that actually dug deep, plumbed the depths of the liberal soul, and gave a mainstream imprateur to the idea that speaking of fantasies of sexually sullying women you "hate" is acceptable political discourse.
Anne Schroeder Mullins, a Politico.com blogger, all but endorsed the idea by excising the misogyny from the Playboy piece with a scalpel and pretended it was about "Hat[ing] to Love" beautiful conservative chicks. That is not shocking to me, because liberal women have commonly tolerated sexism practiced by men who are sympatico with their most valued ideal: the right to abortion on demand. Uber-feminist Gloria Steinem, among the loudest voices targeting then-SCOTUS nominee Clarence Thomas for destruction (ostensibly) due to contradictory sexual harassment allegations, authored a editorial published in the New York Times on March 22, 1998 titled "Feminists and the Clinton Question" defending pro-choice then-POTUS Bill Clinton against more credible allegations of harassment by implying that every boss is -- and always has been -- entitled to one free shot at hired hotties:
[...]The truth is that even if the allegations are true, the President is not guilty of sexual harassment. He is accused of having made a gross, dumb and reckless pass at a supporter during a low point in her life. She pushed him away, she said, and it never happened again. In other words, President Clinton took "no" for an answer.
In her original story, Paula Jones essentially said the same thing. She went to then-Governor Clinton's hotel room, where she said he asked her to perform oral sex and even dropped his trousers. She refused, and even she claims that he said something like, "Well, I don't want to make you do anything you don't want to do."
Now, Thacker, you WON'T find that piece on the New York Times website -- which is supposed to contain archives going back to the 1920's -- but you will find it on an obscure educrat newsgroup, where it was posted in a "Women's Equity" section two weeks after it was first published over eleven years ago. A letter to the editor objecting to Steinem's vapid point three days hence is still online at nytimes.com.
Why can't you find it in the New York Times' archives? Because some people -- likely Steinem herself -- wants it to "go away." Why? Because it reveals her to be a fool and a hypocrite. She knows that if that editorial stayed within easy access, the next time she opened her trap about sexual harassment, it would be held in her face like she was a dog learning to be housebroken. And rightly so. Playboy.com, Politico.com, and everyone else who is suggesting that this should just be allowed to blow over should be made to take a deep breath and inhale their handiwork, with the reminder that's what they can expect every time they cross that line.
Saying "if CONSERVATIVES stop talking about it it will go away" is an argument that Playboy understands well, because it doesn't want to face the consequences of its contribution to the coarseness of the political debate. On the other hand, LIBERALS never stop talking about misstatements and errors conservatives make, and aren't above simply making schtuff up out of thin air and pretending it's established fact. Just in the past week, Katie Couric furthered the lie that Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from her house, and Rachel Maddow -- defending Judge Sotomayor -- repeated a specious, Wikipedia-sourced, apochryphal alleged decade-old quote from Rush Limbaugh that Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassin should have been given the Congressional Medal of Freedom.
You may enjoy the double-standard of "being outraged." I don't. Conceding the internet and the airwaves to dirty liars on one side of the debate may be for you, but it's not for me. If you've got nothing to say, get outta the way.
You may now resume your "reading," Thacker. Lock your door and close your blinds.
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UPDATE: Anne Schroeder Mullins has given a half (ahem)-hearted mea culpa on her giggly post on the Playboy list and the link to the later-deleted post. Here's what has replaced her original post of the list of "10 Conservative Women We Hate to Love":
I don't buy her story as 100% truthful, but can't disprove it. What it does prove is how sloppy and lazy Ms. Schroeder Mullins and/or her editors are. Yet another example is how Mullins -- either by design or in an attempt to cushion the blow of the outrage -- refers to the list of women Playboy "love to hate" when in fact, it was the women they "hate to love."
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