A great many Fox News hosts and contributors publicly criticized Donald Trump’s latest Twitter swipes at Megyn Kelly. This raises a major pot-kettle issue, claims lefty writer Amanda Marcotte, in that these high-profile personalities who objected to Trump’s sexism work for a channel that disseminates one sexist message after another.
“The position at Fox News and elsewhere in the conservative media on women who talk back to men, or even just have the power to talk back to men,” wrote Marcotte in a Wednesday column for Talking Points Memo, is that “they are to be put in their place, with a vengeance. Any woman who has been targeted [by] the right wing flying monkeys of Twitter can attest to how well the audiences have absorbed this lesson. Screaming at bitches who don’t know their place is both a sacred cause and just a rowdy good time, in right wing circles…No one should understand this better than the people at Fox News. After all, this is the monster they created.”
From Marcotte’s piece (bolding added):
It’s almost touching, watching all these conservative media people who usually profit at peddling sexism choose, this time at least, to join together in an effort to stop this one particular instance of it…
Conservative media and Fox News in particular have spent years - decades, if you count talk radio - training their audiences to believe that exhortations against sexism and racism are nothing but the “political correctness” police trying to kill your good time…
…[T]here are entire sectors of the conservative media dedicated to getting the[ir] audiences to spend all day and night trying to piss off liberals, believing themselves to be courageous freedom fighters against the P.C. police. Women, in particular, are favorite targets. There’s apparently no getting tired of the pleasure of feeling naughty because you say mean things about women and racial minorities for conservative audiences.
Well, conservative media built Twitchy Nation, and now it looks like they have to live in it…
“Bossy” women are treated, in conservative media, like the great Darth Vaders of the world who need to be harassed and resisted and abused at all costs. Of this, there can be no doubt. Michelle Obama started a program to encourage exercise and healthy eating, and conservative media reacted like she was holding a gun to your dog’s head and telling you to eat broccoli or the pooch gets it…
The position at Fox News and elsewhere in the conservative media on women who talk back to men, or even just have the power to talk back to men, is not obscure or confusing. They are to be put in their place, with a vengeance. Any woman who has been targeted [by] the right wing flying monkeys of Twitter can attest to how well the audiences have absorbed this lesson. Screaming at bitches who don’t know their place is both a sacred cause and just a rowdy good time, in right wing circles…
No one should understand this better than the people at Fox News. After all, this is the monster they created.
