The Media Research Center has a bit of a misogynist streak, and that popped up again in an Aug. 12 post by Tim Graham (bolding in original):
The Washington Post is so “progressive” that even the Food section has to channel a feminist message. Social media sites have spotlighted something they call “Girl Dinner,” which is more like “girl snacks,” pictures of grapes and cheese and bread, something you eat when no one else is around. There’s nothing wrong with a woman enjoying solitude with whatever she wants to munch.
But writer Emily Heil went out and located experts to shift the narrative into abortion and male chauvinism. The headline was “Is Girl Dinner a simple nosh or the end of the patriarchy?”
Emily Contois, a media studies professor at the University of Tulsa who studies food and gender, likes the pure idea of Girl Dinner — that women can be freed by the expectation of society to nurture and provide for others, that they can enjoy the kind of self-indulgent “you do you” eating that men have long felt entitled to. “Especially in the early videos, there’s this lovely connection among women, this sort of like happy, open-mouthed grin of recognition and understanding a sort of camaraderie,” she says.
But the term might not be as innocent as it seems, she says — after all, we’re not living in the utopia of Greta Gerwig’s Barbieland. “Outside the patriarchy, ‘girl’ isn’t diminutive or derisive or condescending — ‘girl’ is complete and wonderful and fulfilled on her own terms,” Contois says. “But we are not in that place, right? Like, we are in a moment where in the United States women have fewer rights over their bodies than they’ve had for a really long time.”Does everything have to be “gendered”? Can’t a plate of grapes and cheese be gender-neutral?
Graham grumbling about things being gendered is hilarious given the rampant transphobia he and the rest of the MRC display, in which they loudly insist that there are only two possible genders and never the twain shall meet. The same day, a post by subordinate Alex Christy ranted that a CNN article “now seeks to turn words like ‘leaf,’ ‘sun,’ and ‘star’ into pronouns. This is not satire.” When a person in the article is quoted as saying that “Refusing to let people self-identify is a way of excluding them,” Christy retorted: No, refusing to identify a human being as a leaf is not ‘a way of excluding them.’ That is simply incorrect.”
Neither Graham nor Christy explain why their narrow gendering and pronoun rules should be imposed on everyone or why people they don’t like are not permitted to identify themselves as they see fit. Instead, Graham spent the rest of his post petulantly sniping at Contois for having written a book about food and gender.