The Contempt of Women

Article here. Excerpt:

'In the constantly progressing and deteriorating and rapidly revolving kaleidoscope of misunderstanding and disgust and hunger that constitutes gender relations in the twenty-first century, a new gesture has emerged to define us: the sneer, the female gaze of contempt.

Feminine contempt is suddenly everywhere, subtly and invidiously panoramic, in public life and in private life, in the bedroom and on television and in bookstores and on the campaign trail. The sexuality of the moment is all about contempt. In Lena Dunham's hit show Girls, which has succeeded so admirably in providing American critics with a moment of convenient generational definition, the men are pitiable and grotesque. Whether rough or tender or vanilla, they fail. In Sex and the City, the women commoditized men, often in the most banal way, but at least they liked what the men had to offer: cocks and money and status and sometimes even support. ...
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Eventually, the sexual always morphs into the political. Contempt for men has become so widespread and acceptable that it's a commonplace for politicians' wives. Michelle Obama loves to describe her husband's morning breath and struggles with smoking and failure to put away his socks. Her pull quote: "He's a gifted man, but he's just a man." Got that, boys? You can be editor of the Harvard Law Review, first African-American president, director of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, loving husband and father, and an innovator of "absorption marijuana ingestion" to boot, but in the end "just a man." Michelle uses that hokey line because it inevitably provokes warm ovations and knowing laughter. The wife of the British prime minister, David Cameron, has borrowed the technique, moaning about how Cameron "makes a terrible mess" when he cooks and can be "quite annoying." This is what the political operatives call "humanizing the candidate": Contempt for men is what ordinary women understand.'