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The Washington Post: Chimp Chump

In its Sunday Magazine section yesterday the Washington Post ran a perfectly innocuous (and not very funny) humor column, ?Below The Beltway,? by Gene Weingarten on the sexual appetites of men and women. It began:

In a study described recently in the New York Times, men and women were shown various types of sexually explicit videos, and sensors were attached to their private parts to measure their physical arousal. The subjects were also asked to rate their degree of arousal themselves.

The study found that men were completely predictable: Straight men reported they were turned on only by images of women, and the machine confirmed that. Same with gay men and images of men. But while women of both orientations reported similarly gender-specific responses, the machine called them liars. The sensors reported that all women were turned on by absolutely everything ... including videos of bonobos having sex. Bonobos are apes.

The Times treated this as social anthropology. The story droned on for what seemed like 200 pages and wrestled with grave epistemological issues involving the Cartesian nexus of mind and body. I opted instead for a few minutes on the phone with my friend Gina Barreca, the feminist scholar.

The rest of the article consisted mainly of a report of this conversation. It?s tone, and indeed its substance, can be gleaned perfectly from this first exchange:

Gene: So, from a highly scientific perspective, can we agree this study establishes that, deep in their hearts, all women are slutbunnies?

Gina: How many pairs of shoes do you own, and when was the last time you altered your hairstyle?

As I said, a not very funny humor column. But what was humorous, or would have been were it not pathetic, was an apology the editors felt they needed to print on page A2 of that same edition of the paper:

The headline, illustration and text of ?Below the Beltway,? a column in The Washington Post Magazine today, may cause offense to readers. The magazine was printed before a widely publicized incident last week in which a chimpanzee attacked and badly mauled a woman in Stamford, Conn. In addition, the image and text inadvertently may conjure racial stereotypes that The Post does not countenance. We regret the lapse.

I regret it, too, but the lapse I regret is the Post?s politically correct kowtowing to the overheated racial sensitivity that was also manifest in the inflamed reaction to the New York Post?s cartoon about shooting the mad chimpanzee that had attacked someone. (But wait! If The Post?s editors alway kowtow to politically correct orthodoxy, can this episode really be called a lapse?)

Read Weingarten?s column, take a look at this graphic that accompanied it, and decide for yourself whether they could possibly ?conjure up racial stereotypes? for any remotely sane person. As my friend Roger Clegg commented to me in an email (I quote with permission):

Suppose every time you made a reference to a monkey or ape, you turned to your African American friend and, said, ?No offense? [or my counter-example: ?present company excepted?]. Would that be a good idea? Such hypersensitivity is silly at best, and really quite insulting. But yesterday, The Washington Post apologized in advance for any racial offense (or offense to those recently mauled by chimps) given by Gene Weingarten?s column....

The apology offered by the The Post?s editors is a good example of why ?sensitivity? is getting such a bad reputation.

Full post as published by Discriminations on February 23, 2009 (boomark / email).