time once again to smack down judith warner, who obviously has more education than a person with female gonads could normally handle. that education, however, didn't really coax her toward coherence, or succeed in inculcating in her a distinguished prose style. but i cat. truly, i do not understand that piece. it takes this wacky, tiny case from bozeman, montana as a demonstration that people like me, judith warner, are oppressed, in virtue of our privilege and excellence and wealth and stuff. the only other example of the stunning attack on educated women today is the mere existence of sarah palin.
that there's some sheriff out there who is a reverse snob and kind of comes down hard on professors is sort of too bad. but it might occur to you that a far bigger problem is sheriffs who despise poor people, black people, uneducated people - many of whom are women - and treats them more harshly than middle-class white people. now, if you were to produce a statistic that showed that female ph.d.s were disproportionately being arrested or imprisoned, or abused while in custody, that would be interesting. here you just vaguely show that someone somewhere has some kind of class resentment. and you congratulate yourself and your kind on your excellence and merit.
of course, reading judith warner might make you sort of realize how some dude in bozeman might roll his eyes at her ilk. but the strategy is to put her ilk above criticism, an ad hominem defense: criticize me and you show your politically-significant discomfort with the strides that women are making etc. of course, this makes the actual grounds of criticism irrelevant.
i like the last line: "Think of this for a second the next time you’re inexplicably moved to put an “elite” woman in her place." the use of the second person is odd, because surely "elite" women are more or less the entirety of judith warner's audience. but i guess she means me and this very blog entry! fortunately when i do stuff like that it's explicable, though execrable.