With two words, the governor of California has managed to highlight the confluence of anti-gay bias and misogyny. Open contempt for “girlie men” would have raised fewer eyebrows in the past. Reactions to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s put-down of Democrats in the state legislature — “if they don’t have the guts, I call them girlie men” — tell us a lot about how far we’ve come. The good news is the media outcry; the bad news is that the outcry hasn’t been stronger.
As a rough gauge of media progress on gender-related issues, consider two editorials that appeared — 88 years apart — in the same newspaper.
About 10 months before the United States entered World War I, the writer Upton Sinclair aimed some barbs at flag-waving militarism…
Read the full column.