The Washington Post: Chimp Chump

[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]

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.

UPDATE [24 Feb.]

On several occasions I have commented on syndicated columns by DeWayne Wickham, such as here and here. If you’ve read those posts, and others, you will know that when I say that his piece in USA Today is one of his more interesting ones I’m not offering much of a compliment (HatTip to Roger Clegg, whose comments on it will appear on National Review Online’s The Corner later today).

Given all the recent monkey business (“no offense,” “DISCRIMINATIONS readers excepted,” etc.), Wickham took it upon himself to consult with Prof. Philip Atiba Goff, an assistant professor of psychology at UCLA who specializes in, among other things, “Mental representations of minority groups,” who, Wickham claims, probably with good reason, “knows more than just about anyone about the metaphorical linking of blacks to apes … [and] has spent years probing the psyche of whites for an understanding of why so many of them tend to, consciously or unconsciously, associate blacks with apes, monkeys, baboons or gorillas.”

So, what do Goff/Wickham suggest we do? I’m sure you can guess, if you haven’t already:

It’s time the nation has an adult conversation about the long legacy of portraying blacks as monkeys, Goff said. But as the Post’s response shows, this won’t be easy.

Attorney General Eric Holder was right when he said during a Black History Month speech at the Justice Department that “in things racial, we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.” Talk of racial issues is too unpleasant for those who believe Obama’s election has ushered in a post-racial era.

Thanks to the response to the New York Post’s cartoon by Al Sharpton, the NAACP, et. al.; the Washington Post’s editors; and Prof. Goff via DeWayne Wickham, talk of monkeys has now become one of the “racial issues” we as a nation (or at least the whites in the nation) are too cowardly to discuss.

I suppose the transition from fighting actual discrimination to ferreting out hidden, unconscious bias represents progress of a sort, but all too often it seems to result in wallowing in pits of rhetorical muck at the bottom of a long, steep, slippery slope.