Fox News anchor Monica Creepy-Crowley strikes again.
I once appeared on Monica Crowley’s Faux News program, during the Terry Schiavo affair. It was among the most unpleasant experiences of a lifetime, even though I skewered her soundly enough that I was never invited back. Ever since, I’ve called her - when I had the misfortune of thinking of her at all - “Monica Creepy.”
Today she showed why. When Sandra Fluke - remember the student who wrote about another student’s need for contraception and was made fun of by all of Wingnuttia for her allegedly insatiable appetite for men? - announced her engagement, Creepy tweeted “To a man?”
No, it doesn’t make any sort of sense whatever, as a serious comment or as a joke. It’s just pure ugliness. Creepy isn’t old enough to have the face she deserves; if she were, you’d pay for her to wear a veil.
Remember, if you vote Republican, or fail to vote, you’re helping put Creepy and her crew in charge of the country.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
View all posts by Mark Kleiman
please reflect on the punchline to your previous post-
“I’m starting to understand the Red Queen’s spiritual discipline. If you believe six impossible things before breakfast, nothing stranger will happen to you that day.”
Please, no adversions to women’s looks on this blog.
I share Mark’s disgust with Scalia, Crowley, and gang, and appreciate the temptation to pay those creeps in their own coin. But.
Ebenezer, please read again. I said that *if* her appearance matched her moral stature, she’d be pig-ugly. I think that’s right. But I admit that they don’t match (yet).
Mark, please read again. I said “no adversions”, not “no unfavorable adversions.” I parsed it the way you meant it, but still didn’t like it. ymmv, of course. But women are judged way too much on their looks, both good and bad. I think it is better to just keep it out of the discourse, except where it is clearly necessary for the point being made. Gloria Steinem’s good looks were historically important for example, and are perfectly acceptable in many discussions of 1960’s-1970’s feminism.
The problem is that this still perpetuates the idea of the appearance and the value of a person being related when, in fact, they’re not. Yes, in Cinderella the nice girl is pretty and her nasty stepsisters are ugly. But Cinderella is a fairy-tale, a myth, and phrenology is junk science.
People in general get judged by their looks too much, especially (though hardly only) women. Being attractive helps with landing jobs, winning elections, and getting acquittals in jury trials. Being unattractive hurts you. And that’s not a good thing (and I’m pretty sure you agree with that).
But the consequence of saying that someone “deserves” to be ugly is the implication that being ugly is fair punishment and lends undeserved support to such shallow judgements.
Mind you, I don’t really blame you — my own immediate reaction to Monica Crowley’s rather sick sense of humor, or what passes for humor in Fox News circles (the not really funny implication that feminists can’t get men, and, after all, getting married is all that a woman should care about) was not exactly of the dignified, high road variety, either. But in the end, you can make a much stronger case against her substandard ethics without such visceral statements.
Another good thing — and I am doing my broken record routine here — is to *not watch* the shows of people who are petty and trivial. I don’t know who this person is and I am so glad! Turn off the tweeter!
Living in Scotland, I have to make do without Fox News, alas (cue the crocodile tears). I also avoid Twitter like the plague, but sometimes this stuff gets forced on you by friends and relatives. Rampant idiocy seems to have a tendency to bubble to the top of the news cycle — I will not and dare not speculate on the reasons for its high buoyancy.
Just an empirical point to add to Katja’s post. Attractiveness (in either gender) is certainly a plus: more so with women. But I wouldn’t want to be a woman with drop-dead good looks, unless I was interested in the entertainment business or the like. It evokes a lot of weird behavior in others.
I’m in total agreement with Ebenezer. “Creepy” is fine; no need to criticize her looks or Scalia’s ethnicity.
He didn’t criticize her looks. In fact, he says she deserves to be ugly, but she isn’t. She doesn’t “have the face she deserves”.
More accurately, he suggested she deserves to be ugly, in the way that (all?) old women are ugly. I don’t think he really meant it that way - I took it to be much more a Portrait Of Dorian Grey type idea in which it’s unjust that someone’s outward appearance doesn’t display the ravages upon their soul of their awful deeds. But that is what he wrote.
No, I was reflecting on Orwell’s observation that by age 50, everyone has the face he (or she) deserves. Of course not all old women are ugly. But if Orwell was right, Crowley will be ugly at 50.
If Orwell said that, it was a stunning brain fart on his part. He would have been well aware of what life can do to people. In many cases, a person’s face reflects lots of sling and arrow wounds.
Yes, Portrait of Dorian Gray was how I interpreted Mark’s post.
I can detect no references to Crowley’s actual looks. If anything the implication is that her visual appearance is OK.
I didn’t read an attack on her appearance in this, but I gotta say, I really dislike making up mean nicknames for people one doesn’t like. It bothers me when Republicans do it, and it bothers me just as much when it comes from people I generally agree with.
When I have seen Monica Crowley on TV, she seems to me to have the appearance of being delighted with herself for just having scored a real zinger against a bunch of perfect fools called “liberals” who will be left sputtering and speechless in the face of her absolute brilliance. When she tweets “to a man?” she is probably certain that she has nailed these liberals so directly that they will be left to collapse and implode in impotent shame at just having been exposed for who they are: pukes and wimps who do not pack the gear to survive in the real world. She has created these liberals in her own mind, but supposes herself to have observed them outside her mind.
If this tweet could be unpacked and fully unwound, it would fold out to reveal a map in which a certain kind of landscape would be revealed. Consider the prisms and lenses and filters which give rise to the landscape. Compare the Sandra Fluke on the map with the Sandra Fluke who worries about her friend who needs oral contraceptives for a gynecological condition for which contraceptives are normally prescribed and which these agents can alleviate. Notice the smallness, constriction, and flatness of the former and compare it with the reality which the map supposes itself to represent.
Something of the structure of modern movement conservatism would be delineated by considering how its map making represents other realities. The processes that represent Sandra Fluke on the map are the same processes that represent union workers, poor people, Keynesian economists, Palestinians, and countless other three-dimensional realities.
These are deeply creepy processes, and are much to be dreaded, lest we begin to employ them in our own map-making. If the entire world was subjected to representation by these processes, and the product made visible, the result would be hideous to behold.
That is my read of what Mark is driving at.
If Gary Trudeau’s observation today in his Doonesbury strip is a truism, I wonder, when was the last time the Dear Monica was sober?
Media Matters reports that Crowley’s response to criticism of her Tweet was that liberals have no sense of humor.
I have no doubt that her original Tweet was intended to be humorous. The problem is that it reflects a 6th grade level of “humor”-calling anyone you don’t like or who says or does anything you don’t like “gay” or a “lesbian”. The tweet was totally unprofessional, and to call it sophomoric would be too kind.
I’ve only seen Crowley in the past in her appearances on the McLaughlin Report, where she replaced Tony Blankley as the regular conservative. While Blankley could be extremely annoying, he at least showed evidence of real thought and the existence of an independent mind. Crowley, on the other hand, never to my knowledge made a comment that showed any real thought or analysis. Her contributions to the program consisted entirely of either snide comments or regurgitations of Republican talking points. She was consistently extraordinarily superficial; she was glib but completely unoriginal. It was my impression that McLaughlin had little or no use for her.
Media Matters reports that Crowley’s response to criticism of her Tweet was that liberals have no sense of humor.
Perhaps “Creepy” reads the comment space of this blog.
After all, every time Mark pens something just a touch saucy a general demand for an apology stirs the air…
Maybe Crowley’s spite is jealousy?
Mark:
Do you have a youtube of your appearance with her?
Interesting that you would be invited to opine about Schiavo. I am sure you made better arguments than Ms. Crowley, but end-of-life issues or bio-ethics is not your area of expertise, unlike say drug or crime control policy, so I am surprised they invited you at…
Frank
I second the request, it should be fun to watch….
No, as far as I can tell that segment never got posted. This has happened to me a couple of times on Murdoch-owned sites. Presumably I got picked because I was blogging incessantly about the Schiavo affair. One of many here. And that’s the point I made to Creepy: we regarded the behavior of her and her co-conspirators as immoral.
*Now* I know who Monica Crowley is - that thoroughly offensive kneejerk airhead conservative on The McLaughlin Report. Goodness I hated her glib, self-righteous, self-confident rubbish. I don’t see that show any more.
That said, I agree with Katja about the problem with associating looks with moral merit. Even saying ‘she deserves to be ugly’ suggests that ugly people are unworthy by that fact alone.
So: criticize, please, strongly, please, picturesquely if you please, but keep looks (and ethnicity) out of it. It’s the reality-based community, but the reality of ‘lookism’ should be kept explicit, not implied in snark.
Your reaction to being on Crowley’s show reminds me of Chris Hedges’ reaction to being on some Canadian news show and talking to the resident idiot Kevin O’Leary. Hedges was his usual full on self and O’Leary was taken aback at someone unwilling to mince words. Hedges was withering in his contempt for the questions and reactions of O’Leary. When the host thanked Hedges for appearing on the show, they cut to him tearing off his mike, saying that he wouldn’t ever make the mistake of coming on the show again. I wish more guests would be this frank.
I love Hedges. He never pulls his punches. Instead boom! They land on any clueless interviewer’s nose repeatedly.