MAGA, Misogyny and Matt Taibbi

My week in the culture wars.

My teeth are a little chipmunky, to be fair.

It’s been quite a week.  I published my  article in the New York Times about Positive Masculinity, and it triggered some big feelings all round, fast becoming a runaway freight train of culture war insanity.  First it showed up on journalist Matt Taibbi’s Substack, Racket News, along with a weirdly disingenuous  review of my book, Boymom (more on that later)  in which he called me the  “Robin DiAngelo of Gender.” (This was not a compliment- Taibbi once described DiAngelo’s White Fragility as “maybe the dumbest book ever written.”) Then the article found its way to Fox News where Greg Gutfield took a hilarious pass at my name, carefully enunciating each syllable- WHIPP-man eh?  APPROPRIATE RIGHT? RIGHT?  I guess SARAH BALLCRUSHER was taken…), and then made it all the way to Real Time with Bill Maher, who claimed that the piece was a prime example of the reason why the Democrats have a problem with young men. (In reality recent polls show  that young men actually favor Harris over Trump by 11 points.)

Soon the MAGA crowd were smearing their ids all over my social media feeds and email inbox in a barrage of abusive comments and messages. They called me a man- hating c**nt and a ballbreaker and a disgusting tw*t.  They told me that I was ugly and that I had “chipmunk teeth.” (My teeth featured prominently in their robust defense of positive masculinity.)  Many, if not most of the messages shared a common thread, which was some version of: You can’t get laid by a real man yourself, and your feminist beliefs are only a reflection of your bitterness and jealousy about this. (As my smart friend Yael pointed out; only a woman’s own unfuckability could possibly propel her to care about her rights as a human being.)  

This flavor of misogyny- while deeply unpleasant and occasionally vaguely threatening-  is relatively easy to dismiss.  Matt Taibbi’s review cut deeper, because he attacked me from a rawer angle- as a mother.  He had happened upon the Times piece, bought Boymom, “read” it, and written his review all within 24 hours. 

The review itself was weird and dishonest in multiple ways, full of distortions and omissions and quarter-truths.  “The incredible premise of BoyMom is demonizing babies” he wrote.  “Worse, a mother demonizing her babies.”  

By splicing unrelated sections of the book together, disregarding other parts that directly contradict his view and filling in the gaps with a range of bizarre suppositions and projections, he writes that in the book my “sons are depicted as monsters” and reaches the conclusion that  I am communicating to them that there is “nothing (they) could grow up to be that I would find appealing.”

One example of this Frankensteinian editing fuckery  is Taibbi’s description of what I wrote about the birth of my third son, Abe in 2017.  By quoting a totally unrelated passage from another part of the chapter as if it pertained to that moment, he writes the following: (the ‘creature’ he refers to is my newborn son.)

“When the creature escapes (we’re spared the scene), the author stares at the lump in despair. Note the horror-flick effect of the word “smash” wielded by the emotionally conflicted Mom so near to the infant:

“Disorientated, I veered wildly between disgust and defensiveness. While the feminist part of me yelled “Smash the patriarchy!” the mother part of me wanted to wrap the patriarchy up in its blankie and read it a story.”

As it happens the word “smash” or indeed any part of this paragraph was nowhere near the “infant.”  The whole passage is drawn from an earlier section of the book,  in which I was describing my conflicted feelings about what it meant to raise boys against the backdrop of the mounting evidence of systemic male harm that was revealed by the #Metoo movement.   What I actually wrote about the moment that Abe (or “the lump” as Taibbi calls him) was born and his older brothers’ reaction to him in the weeks that followed, was quite different  Here is that actual section in full:

“My third son.  My Abe.  My beloved.  We’d made it.  But we were only just beginning. 

I was euphoric after Abe’s birth.   He had a special sweetness.  Born a month early, he was tiny, a third smaller than my previous two babies, too new to be in this world.  His hair was still a soft fuzz, expecting a full month longer to grow in.   

In the early days, my mangled post c-section body could barely lift him out of the plastic hospital crib.  A kind nurse stuck him in the crook of my arm, and he nuzzled there for days, sleeping and eating round the clock, warm and safe next to my beating heart.

His brothers loved him on sight.  Solly made him a card out of red construction paper, with a crayon drawing of Abe wearing a superhero t-shirt and looking like a first grader himself.  “Wellekom to the family” he wrote.  “I love you allreddy.”  

At four, Zephy was warier, more jealous. But one morning in the supermarket, when a slightly unhinged man approached the stroller and started cooing at his three-week old brother in an overly intense and scary manner, Zephy puffed himself up to his full forty-two inches and roared, “GET AWAY FROM OUR BABY!”

Now I had three boys.  Three adorable, irrepressible, anarchic, creative, rambunctious, aggressive, big-hearted boys, the loves of my life.  I still had time, but not much.  Just a few years with them, to get this right, to help them learn to be good in a world which wanted to make them bad.”

Monsters.  Clearly.  There are various examples of this bad faith splicery and omission in Taibbi’s review, but this was likely the one that prompted a fair chunk of his 467,000 + subscriber base to restack the post, with my picture prominently displayed, and call me a child abuser, an unfit mother, and/or variations on the claim that I have traumatized my sons,  and that they will hate me in the future for writing about them in this way.  This was, to say the least, painful.  

There is, of course a legitimate conversation to be had about how we write about children in memoir, and the potential impact it has on them.  It’s something I have thought about a lot, and continue to think about constantly in relation to my own work, and I will not know for many years, if ever, if I got the balance right in Boymom.  But completely misrepresenting what I actually did write is not the way to have that conversation. 

Throughout the piece Taibbi’s tone is a strange mix of ridicule and extreme sanctimony. I’m both a laughable caricature of woke overreach and a dangerous monster. It’s unclear why Taibbi wanted to devote so much real estate to trashing my book (two full editions of his newsletter plus another mention in a subsequent one) or why a book by a relatively unknown author, that is clearly not marketed to him or his demographic, triggered him so specifically.  Why did the idea of a need for a moral reckoning around raising boys in the wake of the #Metoo movement touch such a nerve for Taibbi?  Whatever his motives, the irony is that his own history serves as a fairly good example as to why the book is necessary.

The time period that I was writing about in that opening to Boymom, when my third son Abe was born, is the fall of 2017.  This was a moment that brought up a lot for both me and Matt Taibbi in different ways.  We were a year into the Pussy Grabber administration, and the #Metoo movement  was exploding online.  Huge numbers of powerful men in public life had just been exposed as sexual predators.  As a feminist mother of sons I was wracked with many conflicted feelings and fears.

It was those feelings that pushed me to start writing the book, to investigate where we were going wrong with raising boys on a systemic level that had normalized this kind of behavior, and also, at the same time, to try to understand what growing up in the shadow of this huge cultural reckoning around toxic masculinity was doing to this generation of boys psychologically.  What I ended up finding out in the course of reporting and writing the book is complicated, nuanced and both challenged and confirmed my own preconceptions and fears.

In the same time period- the fall of 2017, Matt Taibbi was facing his own #Metoo- adjacent  issues.   While I was lying in the maternity ward, about to give birth to my third baby boy, Taibbi was being confronted with a couple of different accusations of misogyny and poor treatment of women in the workplace.   While he was publicizing a new book about the death of Eric Garner, a memoir that he co-wrote in the late 90s about his time running a satirical news magazine in Moscow had re-surfaced.  The book was packed with graphic “satire” about sexually harassing and assaulting Russian women, amongst other passages of breathtaking misogyny.

“We’d ask our Russian staff to flash their asses or breasts for us.” begins one such passage. “We’d tell them that if they wanted to keep their jobs, they’d have to perform unprotected anal sex with us. Nearly every day, we asked our female staff if they approved of anal sex. That was a fixation of ours. “Can I fuck you in the ass? Huh? I mean, without a rubber? Is that okay?” It was all part of the fun.”

Although the passages were a joke, and no one came forward to accuse Taibbi of actual assault or sexual harassment, journalist Kathy Lally wrote a piece in the Washington Post  accusing him of sexist workplace bullying, and generally demeaning behavior towards female colleagues, herself included.  According to a profile in the Intelligencer, Taibbi’s publisher then dropped him, canceled his speaking events and he apologized on Facebook, saying that he regretted what he wrote in the memoir, reiterated that it was satire and that the events depicted were untrue.  I believe him.  If Taibbi had assaulted anyone we would probably know that by now.  He is likely not an abuser.  This is a more complicated form of sexism.  

The “humorless ugly feminist”trap is familiar to Gen X women like me.  Taibbi is a few years older than I am- but we are essentially peers, and I remember this bait all too well.    We are part of the generation where irony was everything, earnestness was an anathema and misogynistic humor was a dominant flavor of male power.  The same progressive men who would never dream of satirizing, say the lynching of Black colleagues as a hilarious caper, were happy to banter about the sexual coercion of impoverished Russian women that they worked with- women who were likely financially tied to the job and unable to leave.  

Back then, and still, to some extent now, the ‘humorless feminist’ ruse casts any woman who objects to the sexism as an unattractive scold who can’t take a joke.  The conceit is essentially unfalsifiable- the more a woman objects or fights back, the more she proves their point.   Even back then, we knew that the whole thing was a set-up, and that as women, our options were limited - you could either be a complicit cool girl, going along with the whole rotten pantomime in the hopes of winning male approval- a shtick writer Caitlin Moran describes as “Vichy France with tits”-  or a miserable, ugly nag.   This isn’t just my reasoning or projection.  If you read his writing from that time, Taibbi himself doesn’t just luridly illustrate this point by example, but takes the trouble to parse it out for us explicitly.

 In a piece that he wrote for the Exile, back in 1999, he lays into another female journalist, Times of London correspondent Anna Blundy, who had written an article about Russian women being pushed by economic circumstance into sex work.  Taibbi dismissed her point, and her feminist concerns more generally, as - you guessed it- the sour grapes and jealousy of an unattractive woman, writing that Blundy’s article  “oozed  such obvious bitterness and desperation that it might as well have been a perpetually unanswered personal ad in the back of Sagging Breast Weekly.”  

In the piece he described Western women, and particularly feminists- as having “fat asses, formless clothes, and angry, makeupless faces” and posited that their concern for Russian sex workers was only thinly veiled envy,  because Russian women are more attractive to men like Taibbi with  “their tight skirts, blowjob-ready lips, and swinging, meaty chests.”  

He then went on to conclude proudly, that decades of feminism  have not “caused men to back away even slightly from viewing women purely as sex objects.” Well, speak for yourself Matt.  I thought I was supposed to be the man-hating c*nt around here, and even I don’t have such a dim view of your gender.  My life is full of great men who see women as actual human beings.  

In a separate piece back then,  Taibbi used similar tactics against Kathy Lally- the journalist who ended exposing him in the Washington Post.  When Lally wrote an article about the objectification of women in Russian cigarette ads, in a response piece Taibbi described her words as the “wild meanderings of an aging woman nearing derangement."

Taibbi’s attacks on Blunt and Lally are more eloquent than the MAGA guys emailing me to tell me that I’m an ugly c*nt with chipmunk teeth, who only became a feminist because I can’t get laid.  But it’s the same basic message.  Women: your worth lies in your fuckability, not your thoughts.  So stay in your lane.

Why dredge this up now? After all, it was over twenty years ago.  Taibbi has apologized since- or if not quiiiiite apologized- at least said that he regretted his  poor editorial decisions and misogynistic and cruel language at that time.  He was young and a jerk, back then he wrote, and hopes we can forgive him. He was nearly thirty at the time he wrote the Anna Blundy piece, but still- I’d be inclined to, generally.

But the reason why I think it’s worth bringing up in this context is that the glibness and dishonesty of his review of Boymom suggest he hasn’t learned. He certainly doesn’t need to like the book or agree with me on any of it. But rather than really listening to a woman expressing fears and feelings about the impact of just this kind of misogyny, and how this might impact her children, he is still prepared to lean on a string of distortions to ridicule and dismiss her. Taibbi mocks me for my fear that in a deeply misogynistic culture, my sons might one day turn into bad or sexist men. He might do better to listen and reflect and truly reckon with his own part in perpetuating that culture. If Taibbi is comfortable with the next generation of boys growing up to view women “purely as sex objects” without a moment of fear or conflict then so be it, but I, and many others, would like to aim for better.

If you want to discuss any of this (in good faith)- and by this I don’t mean Matt Taibbi, but raising boys, masculinity (toxic, positive, impossible) misogyny, feminism or my chipmunk teeth,  please come to the discussion group I am hosting TOMORROW, October 16th at 11am PT/2pm ET/ 7pm UK (PLEASE NOTE THIS IS ONE HOUR LATER THAN ORIGINALLY STATED).  Let me know if you are going to make it either in the comments or by replying to this email. For various reasons, not least my own safety, this group is for paid subscribers-- so if you want to attend- please upgrade to paid subscription, monthly or annual (and you can cancel at any time) Or if this is financially prohibitive, and you would still like to join, email me and I will comp you, no questions asked.  I will send out a zoom link to paid subscribers tomorrow morning.