Fresh off her attempt to explain how the left's crusade to have full-grown adults discuss sex with your five-year-old is not grooming, Washington Post style editor Monica Hesse is back to explain how extremely complicated it is to define a woman.
Keep in mind as we dissect this that people who aren't very smart always try to complicate the very simple. It's how they mimic smart people without having to actually be smart.
Ever hear someone use ridiculously polysyllabic (and occasionally made-up) words to explain the most basic things, like the copier salesman who goes on about the "the expeditious paperosity" of the Xerox B315?
Like that, only dumber. And more insidious.
The headline sets up "gotcha" expectations. Given the Republican array she lines up, none of whom I consider to be the intellectual titans of the party (and that's a pretty low bar), I fully expected one or more to have completely flubbed the question, "What is a woman?"
As it turns out, not so much.
This is how Hesse starts the piece.
Before we get to the fact that I spent my lunch hour emailing with an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary to find out whether "tallywhacker" was an officially recognized euphemism for "penis,"...
I can tell you right up front, that while I have never heard the term "tallywhacker," I, and nearly every thinking English-speaking adult, knew what that meant instinctively, particularly considering the context.
But no, she had to spend her lunch hour "emailing with an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary" - instead of the lunch minute it would have taken her to consult Wiktionary - in order to make absolutely certain readers understood that she routinely emails editors of the English Oxford Dictionary.
Incidentally, that opening paragraph is a perfect example of what passes for humor among our self-appointed intellectual class. A bizarre mix of smarty-pants snark, painfully insecure name-dropping, all while displaying a woeful lack of exposure to the real world.
She goes on to recap Senator Marsh Blackburn's genuine "gotcha" question that had so flummoxed Supreme Court nominee and renowned not-a-biologist Ketanji Brown Jackson: "Provide a definition for the word ‘woman.'"
She then lines up her all-star cast of cherry-picked Republicans and subjects them to her butter-knife-sharp intellect.
First up, Marjorie Taylor Green, or "MTG."
"I'm going to tell you right now what is a woman," Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) informed the audience at a GOP event after namechecking Jackson. "This is an easy answer. We're a creation of God. We came from Adam's rib. God created us with his hands. We may be the weaker sex — we are the weaker sex — but we are our partner — we are our husband's wife."
Not the most eloquent response, and a shorthand version to be sure, but as spoken statements go, from a woman who is not ashamed of her Christian beliefs, not bad.
You can tell that Hesse thought this was going to be like shooting fish in a barrel!
Christians! What are you going to do?!
Next up was Cawthorne.
Meanwhile Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), already in the news cycle for implying that cocaine and orgies were par for the course on Capitol Hill, decided to extend his moment in the sun by lecturing Nancy Pelosi from the House floor. "Science isn't Burger King; you can't just ‘have it your way,'" he said. "Take notes, Madame Speaker. I'm about to define what a woman is for you," he said. "X chromosomes, no tallywhacker. It's so simple."
The Burger King reference was pretty clever, but otherwise he stated an obvious thing that everyone outside of the Washington Post newsroom understands.
Before moving on to Hawley, she had to spend more time on the mysterious "tallywhacker" just in case you forgot that she routinely emails an editor at the OED (this is a town of acronyms).
That, or she just likes to write about tallywhackers.
🤷♂️
And this is where I got the poor OED editor involved, just to make sure I understood exactly what Cawthorn was talking about. She explained that "tallywhacker" is likely an Americanism, a variant of the word "tallywag," which means "the testicles; the male genitals,"…
We got it, really, we got it the moment we heard it, no need to consult your old Bryn Mawr classmate.
And yet she still wasn't done with this.
… though Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as "a sea bass of the Atlantic Coast."
See, maybe Cawthorne thought you can tell someone is a woman if she doesn't have "a sea bass of the Atlantic Coast"?
Does it get funnier than that?
She moves on to Hawley.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) was asked by a HuffPost reporter to define "woman," and replied, "Someone who can give birth to a child, a mother, is a woman. Someone who has a uterus is a woman. It doesn't seem that complicated to me."
Before moving on to her own analysis, Hesse couldn't resist pulling out possibly the dumbest retort there is on this subject.
When the reporter asked him whether a woman whose uterus was removed via hysterectomy was still a woman, he appeared uncertain: "Yeah. Well, I don't know, would they?"
Hawley could have been clearer on this, because again, not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but everyone on the planet understands what he means here. A table doesn't cease being a table if it's missing a leg.
And remember, they are the smart ones.
Before she embarrasses herself addressing these responses one by one, Hesse first embarrasses herself with a summation:
So, to review, here's the GOP tip sheet: If you want to know whether someone is a woman, you should simply walk up to them and say, "Pardon, are you of Adam's rib?" Alternatively, you could demand to see either a uterus or a "tallywhacker."
If Monica Hesse were an Army of wit, she'd be the Russian one.
She starts again with MTG.
Let's assume some basic things: that Marjorie Taylor Greene believes that all humans, not just women, are "creations of God"; and that Greene considered herself a woman long before she became her "husband's wife." Presumably she is not suggesting that a woman who is unmarried is in fact a man.
This is an ancient and small-minded rhetorical tactic. "Let's assume…" is another way of saying, "let's not assume," or at least let's call it into question by raising it, because yes, of course, any literate adult would assume those things, including MTG.
Hesse, who has a masters in nonfiction writing, thinks this is clever rather than juvenile and transparent.
Greene is known for her vigorous workouts and her sculpted biceps. Such a strong woman would certainly acknowledge that "weaker sex" often depends on the category in question (mental, physical, emotional) and on the individual specimen. Does Greene believe she is inherently weaker, on any of these dimensions, than, say, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)? How about President Biden?
This is another rhetorical tactic best left to middle-school debating contests. She is of course speaking in group terms, and yes, overall, women are weaker in a physical sense. That does not mean that any given woman could not beat me into a pulp, but if it were not otherwise generally true, why have "women's" sports? Why have Title IX?"
She is curiously silent on those topics and for good reason.
That leaves us with the "Adam's rib" bit, an allusion to the biblical origin story of women. Which, fine. But I'm not sure how much closer this gets any of us to a definition of womanhood that we can actually use in The Year of Our Lord 2022. How is a women's college or women's athletic team supposed to incorporate the Adam's rib test into their eligibility policies? Is there a swab for ancestral rib residue?
If Hesse sneers any harder, she's going to pull a muscle.
Of course, riffing on the Bible is a progressive's favorite pastime, primarily because they don't understand it at all.
On to Hawley.
Cawthorn's definition (XX chromosomes, tallywhacker-free) made me wonder what the congressman would make of former gymnastics champion Melissa Marlowe — or the other millions of women with Turner syndrome, a genetic disorder defined by a missing X chromosome.
First, Hawley never said "XX chromosomes," he said "X chromosomes," the plural of which could just as well have been a reference to "women" rather than "woman," and in any case was obviously intended to highlight the absence of a Y chromosome.
I wonder how he would determine the gender of an intersex individual who had reproductive characteristics of both sexes. Via a coin flip? A ruler?
That's a real tough one, Hesse, but I'm going to go with "intersex," because that's kind of what the word means.
Progressive's use of the "intersex" retort has become Pavlovian. Ring a bell about gender, and they start salivating "intersex," as if they think a rare genetic disorder somehow upends millennia of our understanding about gender and sex.
As for Josh Hawley, I'll say only that I can't wait to inform my mother that since her uterus was removed when she was 35 via a medically necessary hysterectomy, she hasn't been a woman in 26 years.
That is so not the zinger she thinks it is. It is the opposite of zinger. It's a regniz.
I'm not trying to pick at Greene, Cawthorn or Hawley for the fun of it.
They had suggested that defining "woman" was simple, and I'm here to say that it's not. Not when you take the question seriously, and look for answers outside your own immediate experiences and intuitions. Which is why when these lawmakers attempted to show how much smarter they were on gender science than a judge who takes things seriously for a living, what came out was gobbledygook.
The projection is strong in this one.
Hesse is the one who thinks she is so smart, and for her to characterize their simple if clumsy definitions, definitions that everyone understands and that were accepted as putative five minute ago as "gobbledygook" is telling, particularly when she presents this in presumed contrast.
I think what they were expressing was not a knowledge of biology, but rather a fear of living in a world they could not easily categorize based on what they already think they know. One in which women might not look or sound or behave exactly as they believe women should, and so the best way to define "woman" is to ask the woman in question. Does she live as a woman? Does she undergo the trials and tribulations and joys of a woman? Does she believe she is a woman?
"Does she believe she is a woman?"
And that, right there, sums up the utter fantasy world in which Hesse and her like live, a world in which wishing something were true makes it so, where the mind overcomes matter and the imagination overcomes reality.
In short, the world of children.
"Provide a definition for the word ‘woman,'" Blackburn dared Biden's Supreme Court nominee.
Ketanji Brown Jackson could not do so. And neither could the people who said it should be easy.
Yes, they could, because they live in a world inhabited by adults.
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