matthew’s alibi

Virginity or Death! : And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time
Author: Katha Pollitt
Release Date: 13 June, 2006

Driving home one night last week, I got all geekily excited to stumble across Tom Ashbrook’s talk show On Point when one of the guests was Katha Pollitt. I cranked XMPR all the way up. (Is it even possible/appropriate to crank up XMPR?). Pollitt is one of my absolute favorite writers: she’s the reason I subscribe to the Nation. She’s smart and snide and insightful and funny. She’s got a new book coming out in June called Virginity or Death: and Other Social and Political Issues of our Time, which, if it’s in the same vein as Reasonable Creatures and Subject to Debate, will almost certainly be on my top 10 books of 2006.

Too bad she was paired off against Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield, whose new book Manliness has stirred up lots of annoying culture wars sound and fury.

I felt bad for Pollitt having to face off against this goon - he was smug and unabashedly reactionary, and Pollitt’s ideas and arguments are so much better than the nonsense Mansfield was spouting.

The fact that Tom Leykis has such a huge audience is evidence that Mansfield’s type of thinking is still frighteningly widespread. Even so, it’s one thing to hear sexist garbage on scummy talk radio, and quite another to hear it from an Ivy League professor.

Poor Katha Pollitt, who should really be discussing her own positions, was forced to take the quixotic offensive on Ashbrook’s show, and so she had my sympathy. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine someone better suited to challenge such foolishness. I refrained from calling in, deciding that support for Pollitt from West Hollywood would probably only confirm people’s suspicions about her politics. Also, I try really hard not to call talk radio shows, on the premise that this would make me irredeemably lame.

In any case, I only mention all of this for two reasons: first, because I just came across Katha Pollitt’s blog, and I’m pretty excited about that, and second, because I’ve been reworking the web page some today, and it occurred to me that I may well be the only blog on the internet that links Katha Pollitt and David Mamet side by side. I can’t imagine there’s very much overlap between the fan bases of the two writers, but I’m pleased to be squarely in the middle of that particular schizophrenic Venn diagram.