The interview was almost surreal. Colbert’s conservative guests always have the hardest time, because how do you argue with a guy who just agrees with you to extremes that you don’t agree with, but this time, he just couldn’t outflank the guest. Whatever preposterous position he took, she just agreed with.
You could tell Colbert expected her to disagree with the whole feudal “my wife isn’t putting out, she’s officially crazy” position, so much so that when she agreed with it, he tried to run it by her again, this time adding lobobomy, in hopes she’d realize how crazy it sounded.
also, when he said “you must be the perfect woman,” did anyone else detect a pause after “you must be” ? If so, did you insert insane into the pause?
I honestly couldn’t figure out if she was serious or just out-deadpanning the master of deadpan. I think she was serious, but am having a hard time accepting that anyone could actually take that position.
Oh, and the bits about the PBS shows had me rolling. Great episode!
The guest was “anti-feminist” writer Caitlin Flanagan, and yeah, it was a weird interview.
I loved the interview Tuesday night, though. I think it was probably the best that Colbert has done. He almost never let his guest (ACLU Director Anthony Romero) finish a sentence! I think Romero got through two complete thoughts. They’ve done funnier interview, but it was a perfect parody of the show’s targets. It adhered beautifully to Scarborough’s rule about never letting your interview subject speak for more than seven seconds without interruption.
By the way, the guest tonight is Ralph Nader. I’ve been looking forward to this all week. I’m hoping Colbert thanks him for allowing Bush to win the Presidency in 2000.
Yeah, she was a little over the top on the show, but those are her true beliefs.
And of course, like most anti-feminist female intellectuals, she doesn’t see the contradiction between being a writer and semi-famous person while exhorting other women to stay barefoot and pregnant and at home.
I only saw the interview, and I’m unfamiliar with her work, but I don’t really buy it. She seems like a troll who’s found a way to make it pay.
It’s brilliant. She sells books to people who are so stupid as to be beyond hope, but makes no attempt to qualify her core argument in any way that might make it palatable or persuasive to anyone with a shred of intellect, thereby making it a zero-damage endeavour.
Why else would she simply agree with Colbert when he says that the main thrust of her argument is that (instead of having a job and some self determination) it’s much better for a woman to be 100% dependant on a man, even if the man is no good? Hell, it would be trivial to answer that in such a way that sticks to the core idea that the 1930s household arrangement was ideal for women, by allowing that women have at least the self-determination to exercise control over their alliances, and that men have a tremendous responsibility to their wives in such an arrangement. Actually, I’d just prefer to believe this, since the alternative is horrible. Maybe she deliberately modified her behaviour to be as appealing as possible to TCR viewers, some of whom may pick up her book and be convinced.
Digging around a bit, I see that she is married to an executive for Mattel, and spectacularly wealthy (servant-wealthy.) I guess it’s easy enough to argue that feminism is a raw deal for women and be super-critical of working mothers if you’re speaking from a position of privilege. We don’t have a 1950 economy any more. It’s one thing to lament about what kids are missing out on by not having a tray of fresh-baked cookies waiting for them when they get home from school, but for most families you aren’t going to manage that without sacrificing in other areas – like food on the table, or a decent post-secondary education. (But then, I guess you can make some savings there if you have daughters. :rolleyes: )
Larry Mudd, as brianjedi says, you should check out her writing. She was over the top on Colbert, but nothing she said was inconsistent with the things of hers I’ve read. Whether she’s sincere in her beliefs, I dunno. She may be doing social conservative shtick to sell books, but I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. Unlike, say, Ann Coulter, she’s smart and fun to read, and even has an insight here and there. She seems utterly blind to her own hypocrisy. The fact that she is wealthy enough to have servants–I did not know that–makes me roll my eyes at her even more.
The nastiest crack about Caitlin Flanagan came from the review in Entertainment Weekly:
She’s talking about a tiny segment of America, a sliver of overprivileged people in NYC and LA that, unfortunately, make up the core of the media so she gets notice far beyond her value.
But she was terrific on Colbert. She schooled him and played him and out-deadpanned him and made him look like an amateur at his own game. If the politicians he had on could be that good, he’d stop having interviews immediately. She crushed him, and did so deliberately.
Does even she believe her own schtick? Probably not. The New York Times review said that:
The review rips apart the book in any case.
She’s just an extreme version of the adage that everybody thinks secretly that “the rest of the world is just like me.” But she’s dynamite on television, so we’ll be seeing her around for a long time.
The nastiest crack about Caitlin Flanagan came from the review in Entertainment Weekly:
She’s talking about a tiny segment of America, a sliver of overprivileged people in NYC and LA that, unfortunately, make up the core of the media so she gets notice far beyond her value.
But she was terrific on Colbert. She schooled him and played him and out-deadpanned him and made him look like an amateur at his own game. If the politicians he had on could be that good, he’d stop having interviews immediately. She crushed him, and did so deliberately.
Does even she believe her own schtick? Probably not. The New York Times review said that:
The review rips apart the book in any case.
She’s just an extreme version of the adage that everybody thinks secretly that “the rest of the world is just like me.” But she’s dynamite on television, so we’ll be seeing her around for a long time.
I just saw the rerun last night. I think she only believes a tiny percentage of what she says, that she knows that she has a schtick that brings in a lot of attention and money for her and she plays it for all it’s worth. I saw a smile in the corners of her mouth almost the entire time she was talking to Colbert, but she was very good at keeping her face essentially straight.
I only wish Colbert had had the nimbleness of mind to ask her how we could make our society more like Saudi Arabia’s, where they obviously have a better idea of the value of motherhood and what women should do with their lives.
Hell, I’m a feminist and I agreed with the majority of what she said on the show, anyway. If you’re going to be a wife for a living, you ought to put out for your husband whether he takes you out for date night or not.
The information about her home life and nannies makes it that much more interesting. It’s a shame that she has any credibility, and I’m sorry that there are impressionable young women out there who might read her stuff and take it at face value, not knowing that it’s just her gimmick.
It’s things like this that make me think the Colbert Report isn’t going to last very long. I like Steven Colbert, and thought he was great on the Daily Show, but I find the Report to be monotonous. The Daily Show is built around pointing out inherent absurdities. The Colbert Report relies too much on creating absurd situations. We pretty much always know what the next thing to come out of Colbert’s mouth is going to be.
I understand that Colbert is probably too dynamic to confine himself to five minute spots on the Daily Show, but I think Comedy Central would have been better off giving him several one-hour specials during the year and having him occasionally take over anchor duties for Jon.
While I’m sure that she agrees with most of what she says, it was clear that she was being deliberately extreme to avoid having Colbert outflank her from the right.
This was most clear when Colbert said a woman should consider herself stuck with a relationship no matter how bad it is (I think this is the part I’m remembering). She started to reply by saying something like, “Well, that is starting to press the point,” which sounded to me like a concession that Colbert had reached the limits of what she would argue. But she caught herself right way and granted the extreme view without reservation.
This is why politicians can’t really use her strategy here. Since she makes her living from controversy, there’s really no limit to how extreme she can be. There’s really no down side for her. Even if she should manage to go beyond what her readers would accept, she can just say she was kidding or playing along.
Politicians don’t have that liberty. Anything they say can and will be used against them in the court of public opinion, no matter what the context. That’s why I think Colbert schtick can still work.
I agree. Some of the representatives in the Better Know a District segments get pretty annoyed at him even though they know what they’re getting into when they go on the show.
