LAST SUNDAY, OUR friend Charlotte Allen wrote a gentle spoof for the Outlook section of the Washington Post on the general subject of feminine ditziness, suggesting that at times members of her and my gender could be ineffectual, overemotional, sometimes irrational, and, now and then, “dim.” Readers swooned, feminists shrieked (Katha Pollitt in a riposte on the Post‘s website), and Post higher-ups raised the white flag of contrition, unaware, so it seems, that exactly two days later–on Tuesday, March 4–the paper itself had run two major stories that proved every point Allen made.

On page one, a feminist warhorse, still mourning the death of the ERA many years earlier, told a room filled with unoccupied chairs that the reason men voted for Barack Obama was solely to thwart women’s hopes. “Would they like white man instead of a black man? Of course. But they’ll take a black man over a woman. I never thought, in 2008, that we’d still be dealing with this.” Well, neither did we, and that wasn’t the worst of it. Obama was being…polite. He had the gall to pull Hillary’s chair out when the debates started, “immediately establishing the upper hand in their interaction,” and putting the uppity girl in her place. “You can bet that’s a calculated move,” the feminist said, “and it’s absolutely demeaning.” Any day now, he may hold the door open, and things will really get ugly. Are there no depths to which men will not go?