Bloggingheads!

It's me and Garance Franke-Ruta.

Topics and times:

Do women like looking at women? (07:41)

'Momoirs' and third-wave feminists (10:23)

Polygamy in NYC, wife-beating in Germany (09:25)

Too much Gore in 'An Inconvenient Truth'? (09:30)

Candidates and their wives and husband (08:20)

Is Ann a conservative? We don't know, but she gets really mad here (10:36)

Whew, that's over. Let's talk about things guys write on the web about women (17:01)

ADDED: There's an interesting discussion in the first segment about the ways of the journalist. Garance says, "I'm used to sitting quietly and using awkward silences to learn things." This makes me ask her if this is "a sort of a trick."

GARANCE: It's one of the ways that people report. It's a reporting technique. Being incredibly awkward. It's a reporting technique. There's also: seeming like you don't know what you're doing.

ANN: Oh! So it's a scam?

GARANCE: Well, I mean, that was the whole book: "The Journalist and the Murderer." Right? I mean...

ANN: Yeah, I read that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

GARANCE: I mean, there's this idea that a journalist is inherently a somewhat... I mean, you're forging a bond in which it's very instrumental. It's a very instrumental bond.

Althouse thought: So is this what you're going to try to do to me in this diavlog?

ANN: But it's interesting that there's a pretense of ineptitude. It does remind me of sort of like a stereotypical male-female dating where the woman acts sort of helpless and is actually really thinking about everything that's going on and trying to control the situation by appearing helpless.

GARANCE: Right! Right.

ANN: You think there's like a gender relationship in journalism?

GARANCE: Maybe. I mean, maybe only because you're in the questioning role, and you're sort of putting yourself in that subservient questioning role.

Althouse thought: Does this make me the boy here?

MORE: There's a lot of discussion about how angry I get in that one segment. Some folks think I should pull my punches and adopt some sort of mentoring role. Ridiculous! Garance is an adult. She's over 30 years old and a senior editor at a major newsmagazine. Either I am in a debate with her or it's a mismatch.

UPDATE: Here's a neutral starting point if you want to peruse the evidence that this episode has gone viral. I hope Bob Wright is happy!

ANOTHER UPDATE: So a huge swarm of lefty bloggers in unison declared me to be an absolute witch for getting angry for one minute when Garance -- the woman who began the dialogue by owning up to the technique of "seeming like you don't know what you're doing" -- sprang a touchy old subject on me. What does it all mean? I think either: 1. ordinary human emotion frightens bloggers out of their wits or 2. the lefty bloggers are demonstrating my point that they are vicious and nasty. Of course, I think it's #2. I really find it too hard to believe that they are so numb or robotic that anger seems bizarre and insane. I could be wrong, but I think that's terribly sad. Or are you thinking: Ooh! Sadness! How crazy! No, no, you guys are just boring politicos -- still ready to do anything to defend your man Bill Clinton and to say whatever you must to deny that he set feminism back 20 years.