Did I Seriously Just Read This at the Washington Post?

Actual Headline of the piece by WaPo columnist Richard Cohen: Why is there no female Tiger Woods?

But what he really wants to know, which is the first line of the article, is: Why are there no female sex scandals?

He goes through the list: No professional female athletes who we hear about "hitting on every caddy, pool boy or masseuse," no female politicians, no female corporate CEOs, no female entertainers, except Madonna, who "was famous for bedding much of New York's outer boroughs," but it was okay because "she was not married at the time." (Did I seriously just read someone wheeling out a "Madonna's a slut" reference in the Washington Post? Seriously?!) "Nobody knows," says Cohen. And a second time. And a third. "Nobody knows" why there are no female sex scandals.

Oh, but he's got some ideas (emphasis mine):

We can guess. The first guess is that women are simply smarter than men. Say what you will about Woods, it's not his wholesome image that has suffered, it's his standing as a sentient being. A person with the wit of a mosquito knows better than to leave a voicemail message on a mistress' phone or to text women who, from the angelic looks of them, would sell their own dear mothers for a chance to appear on Inside Edition. Few women are that stupid. Few men aren't.

The other possibility that strikes me is that women seem not to have the evolutionary urge to couple with cheaply dressed strangers. They have a stronger need to mother — to have a child and then raise that child.

The male equivalents of the sort of women who have courageously come foreword to claim their reward money for entertaining Tiger are evolutionary bad material. No woman would want them as husbands and fathers. They are what Darwin called dreck, which is Yiddish for cocktail waitress.

Wow.

Dreck actually means trash, of course.

Which means that a columnist for the Washington Post, and at least one editor, thought it was perfectly acceptable to "joke" that every female member of an entire profession is "trash." Where, exactly, the humor is in using dehumanizing language against women I'm not sure, but then again I'm the Most Humorless Feminist in all of Nofunnington, not a comedy genius like Richard Cohen.

Ostensibly, Cohen's argument is that there are no female sex scandals because men are stupid, knuckle-dragging slaves to their evolutionary impulses:

Men, like the poor polar bear, have seen their ecology change. Their youthful aggression, so useful for wars of choice (not to mention necessity) or merely hunting saber-toothed tigers, is now just a social menace. Their urge to have sex with just about any woman with a pulse makes them crude laughing stocks. Tiger Woods has become a punch line -- and so have men in general. (Thanks, Tiger.) We are a sorry lot. Almost no one, save maybe lachrymose country western singers, will defend the cheatin' man.

—but, after "insulting" men by calling them totes awesome war-mongering sex machines, it's women (again) at whom Cohen has the last laugh:

But it could be that the urge to get closer to cocktail waitresses and denizens of dimly lit hotel lounges is in some way linked to the drive to conquer, to prevail — to succeed. It could explain why all this time into the Age of Feminism, years after women were liberated, women make up less than 20 percent of Congress and only 3 percent of those top CEOs.

The reason the Glass Ceiling has not broken is that women have other priorities — maintaining relationships and being a mother. This is the way it is, and this is the way it has always been. As any of Tiger Woods's cocktail waitresses could tell him, Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

N'est ce pas?

The unmitigated temerity of claiming women have been "liberated" from their oppression in the same column as he concludes that women have no drive to succeed because they want to be mothers is absolutely breathtaking. He literally repeats the same diminishing, marginalizing stereotypes about women against which feminists were fighting decades ago, only to conclude it must be biological destiny that women aren't more successful.

One would think a self-interested reluctance to be regarded as a manifest wanker would stop one from promulgating narratives of the patriarchy while simultaneously denying its existence and influence, but apparently Cohen is so invested in his privilege he's willing to look like a total dipshit to protect it.

The Washington Post doesn't have to allow him to use their pages to do it, however.

Contact the Washington Post's ombudsman.

[H/T to Shaker Falconer.]