There Is No Obligation To Keep Hitting Yourself

I was busy enough this week to have missed Jezebel’s bizarre decision to run a piece defending catcalling and public groping with a bunch of bullshit about how in France women are less uptight and totally don’t mind the catcalling and groping. As Sady Doyle points out, this is the strangest part of the subsequent non-apology:

I believe that we’re not always doing our job if we don’t ourselves publish and discuss that with which we may disagree — or outright oppose. [My emphasis.]

Kind of sums up the kind of liberalism that leads us to such happy outcomes a “two Democratic houses of Congress and a Democratic president debating whether to extend tax cuts to everyone, or just to everyone but millionaires,” doesn’t it? I don’t know why a feminist site would feel an obligation to publish witless posts defending sexual assault anymore than I feel compelled to commission posts arguing that Sam Alito is a moderate liberals should support or that Roe v. Wade is worse than Dred Scott. The internet is a big place; I trust my readers to find such arguments themselves if they’re so inclined, and they certainly don’t need to be legitimized.