Jake Tapper, ABC News Senior National Correspondent, in his blog “Political Punch” June 27 post “McCain Gambles with Awkward Joke” started a bit of a blog-o-flap among some feminists who though the senator’s remark about wife beating grossly inappropriate and perhaps insensitive to domestic abuse. Here’s the relevant excerpt:

In an interview with the Las Vegas Sun, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was asked by columnist Jon Ralston why he didn’t choose Gov. Jim Gibbons to chair his Nevada campaign…
Maybe it’s the governor’s approval rating and you are running from him like you are from the president? Asked Ralston in a question McCain clearly found loaded.
Said McCain, chuckling, “And I stopped beating my wife just a couple of weeks ago.”

Whatever the outcome of this election year, women’s treatment by the media has been outed and it isn’t going back into the closet anytime soon. On May 23, The Women’s Media Center and Media Matters launched a new and powerful campaign called “Sexism Sells, But We’re Not Buying It,”

I’ve been interviewed many times over the years by AP reporter David Crary, and he always does a great job of capturing sensitive and complex cultural issues that many other journalists can only simplify into polarized extremes. His byline article today, in which he also interviews several of my most esteemed colleagues and fondest friends-with whom I don’t necesarily agree on this issue–is no exception.
FEMINISTS SHARPLY DIVIDED BETWEEN CLINTON, OBAMA…

For the last few days, the internet has been buzzing with impassioned presidential endorsements by feminists, many of whom have been in or even leading the movement for decades and others who are the bright young voices of the present and the future. This extraordinary piece of cultural criticism by Robin Morgan is my personal […]

You know Hillary is no longer seen as the inevitable front runner in Iowa when Maureen Dowd (almost, at least till she gets to her punch line) writes something positive about her.
In response to the latest Drudge-Limbaugh-sexist bloggers’ echo chamber campaign to denigrate Hillary for—gasp!–looking like a 60-year-old woman, when men of that […]

When it comes to Chris Matthews’s interpretation of Hillary Clinton’s words—any of her words—she’s damned if she yeas and damned if she nays.

Sex educators (before the abstinence only people made them stop talking about sex at all, which is a whole other story), use a technique called “desensitization” to help people get to where they can talk sensibly about previously verboten facts such as the proper names for body parts. Secrecy creates mystery and imbues a word […]

“Another of those silly jokes she forwards to her whole list,” I thought as I warily opened the e-mail from my friend and former U. S. Senate candidate, Claire Sargent.
But this was no joke. Claire had forwarded a message from another long time tiller of the women’s equality fields, Paula Cullison, who reported that […]

My friend Friedrike Merck suggested that I create a section on my website called “Salon Refusee”, in which we could archive the many letters-to-the-editor that we write but they don’t publish. Perhaps I will someday, but meanwhile, here is my latest letter that didn’t get published:
To the Editor, Washington Post :
Re: “Hillary Clinton’s Tentative Dip […]

Last week, I noticed The Catholic League’s scurrilous ad attacking Barbara Walters in the New York Times. Since I have often had to go up against the organization’s garrulously sexist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic president, William Donohue, in the media, I was moved to drop Barbara a note of support. She responded to it warmly.
Imagine, […]