Joel Mathis

Via Andrew Sullivan , linguist Mark Lieberman gets into the Kathleen Parker "Obama is a woman" column that got me so irritated yesterday. Parker suggested that the number of "passive voice" sentence constructions during his big oil speech were proof that he lacked a certain "rhetorical testosterone." Lieberman makes an observation similar to one I made: The first thing to say is that there isn't the slightest evidence that passive-voice constructions are "feminine". Right. But if Parker does want to play that game, well, there's some unsettling evidence: Women don't use the passive voice more than men, and among male writers, number of passive-voice constructions doesn't appear to have any relationship at all to real or perceived manliness. The "passive is girly" prejudice seems to be purely due to the connotations of (other senses of) the term passive, misinterpreted by people who in any case mostly wouldn't r

Seems like it was just last week that Kathleen Parker was complaining that conservative women can be feminists too, darnit ! Since then, of course, she's agreed to host a TV show with America's most famous patron of prostitutes. And today she offers up the theory that President Obama is a bit of a girl . I say this in the nicest possible way. Well, sure. She just doesn't mean it in the nicest possible way, though she tries like the dickens to act like she's not being, well, terribly sexist. Generally speaking, men and women communicate differently. Women tend to be coalition builders rather than mavericks (with the occasional rogue exception). While men seek ways to measure themselves against others, for reasons requiring no elaboration, women form circles and talk it out. Well, that doesn't sound so bad does it? But that's not really what Parker's getting at. Obama's not like a woman because he talks things out. He's like a woman because he's