Every once in a while, as you work your dreary way through the Washington Post, a strange thing happens: You notice something! It can be refreshing but also, just as often, puzzling.
Consider the recent news that four former paramours of New York’s then-attorney general Eric Schneiderman say he beat them up. The news first appeared in the New Yorker but the Post put its own inimitable gloss on it.
In the fourth paragraph, the Post tells us that in his career Schneiderman “had advocated for women.” Before we are allowed to tease out the meaning of that curious phrase—the misuse of the verb “advocate” followed by the preposition “for” is just the beginning of the confusion—we learn, a few paragraphs later, that “Schneiderman . . . had been an outspoken advocate for women.” It’s a phrase so nice they used it twice.
For Post reporters, the phrase about advocating for women must have a self-evident, and probably highly tendentious, meaning. Our own translation, not at all tendentious, would go like this: “Schneiderman was an oily poseur who routinely made sanctimonious comments about feminism and the #MeToo movement that many suckers, including journalists, mistook for evidence of his moral superiority.”
But then, reading on, we got really stumped. The Post reporters describe a horrifying list of abuses the women suffered at the hands of Mr. Advocate-for-women: choking, repeated blows to the head, murder threats, and more. Unexpectedly, the Post reporters feel the need to clarify: “All four women said their physical abuse was not consensual.”
We struggle to think what “consensual physical abuse” would entail. One clue might be found in the continuing success of Fifty Shades of Grey and its successors, a serial celebration of sadism and masochism. It portrays a culture in which the only sexual act considered unwholesome is one that isn’t contractually entered into. “He used his body weight to hold me down,” one of Schneiderman’s victims recalls, “and he began to choke me. The choking was very hard. It was really bad.” This might be okay, the Post reporter seems to think, if the choking were “consensual.” But very not-okay if nonconsensual.
Having thinned its editorial ranks through attrition and buyouts and bulked up with young and untutored replacements, the Post often gives off a collegiate air. It seems at times to be put out by slightly precocious journalism majors fresh from their college papers. It’s not much of a newspaper anymore, but it has its uses. In the insouciance of these new hires, you start to notice things.
