Update (3/18): Howard Kurtz quotes me.
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Update: To the troll with the anti-La Shawn web site (not Justin’s site) who blogs under corny aliases, I’m hearing disturbing rumors, and you need to know this for the record: I have never nor will I ever comment on your blog. If someone is doing so under my name or by implication, I’m being impersonated. Whoever it is, they are just as cowardly as you are.
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Blogger Jason (I can’t even remember his name!) Justin wrote: “LaShawn, as much as you preach, I wonder if you have a HUSBAND and a FAMILY??? Probably not.”
Unfortunately this sort of response is what women, married or single, have to deal with from disgruntled men. A woman with strong opinions is a shrew. If she’s unmarried, it’s because of her “preaching” (read: nagging).
This is a great follow-up to the controversy about the “dearth of female political bloggers” and political writers on American newspapers’ op-ed pages. Maureen Dowd (reg. req.) wrote about this subject last Sunday. Although she got a lot of criticism in conservative circles, I actually liked the column. Dowd writes:
Men take professional criticism more personally when it comes from a woman. When I wrote columns about the Clinton impeachment opéra bouffe, Chris Matthews said that for poor Bill, it must feel as though he had another wife hectoring him.While a man writing a column taking on the powerful may be seen as authoritative, a woman doing the same thing may be seen as castrating. If a man writes a scathing piece about men in power, it’s seen as his job; a woman can be cast as an emasculating man-hater. I’m often asked how I can be so “mean” – a question that Tom Friedman, who writes plenty of tough columns, doesn’t get.
Even the metaphors used to describe my column play into the castration theme: my scalpel, my cutting barbs, razor-sharp hatchet, Clinton-skewering and Bush-whacking. “Does she,” The L.A. Times’s Patt Morrison wondered, “write on a computer or a Ronco Slicer and Dicer?”
It is true. Some men probably feel emasculated when I criticize them and/or kick them off my blog.
The person who left the comment (since deleted) is a sour grapes blogger who has experienced my wrath on more than one occasion, and he is not welcome to comment on this blog. Why he’s drawn to it is clear. Despite his belief that husbandless women are in that “condition” because they are very opinionated, he obviously likes being put in his place by such a woman.
I will comply every time. 
Addendum: Did Scott Peterson kill his wife because she was a shrew? Whatever the reason, the judge upheld his death sentence. He’ll have an eternity to think about it.
Chris Nolan has more to say about Steve Levy’s column.
Commenter JaySwash: “I find it amusing that so many of the same people who will rail against society’s “forcing” of judeo-christian values upon them will turn around and belittle anyone who isn’t married with family.”
From another opinionated woman:
Let the public see what the Democrats have been doing for the past four years by accusing people like Charles Pickering of being racist. Show them the content of the memos that show the Democrats being manipulated by liberal interest groups and expose the real racists that would deny a nominee an up or down vote because, among other things, “he is Latino.” I repeat: Don’t screw it up. This is something that we need to get right.
From Carol Platt Liebau: “We want equality of opportunity and fair treatment — but no bean counting. We want to succeed because — and only because — we’re good. Not because we’re women.”
I second that.
