This blog is overrated.

The Times’ media reporter David Carr gives us an unsparing account of his life as a drug abuser. His life as a domestic abuser? I’d say that two offhand references to his violence against his ex-girlfriend in a sprawling, self-flagellating 9-page essay constitute a fairly sparing account. “I hit her, for one thing.” Oh, well, just for one thing. “If I said I was a fat thug who beat up women and sold bad coke, would you like my story? What if instead I wrote that I was a recovered addict who obtained sole custody of my twin girls, got us off welfare and raised them by myself, even though I had a little touch of cancer?” Yeah, I don’t know about you, but I like the story much better knowing that the domestic batterer ended up with custody.

It’s nothing new to see domestic violence treated with a lack of seriousness in the world of journalism. A couple years ago, firebrand Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg was charged with, and admitted to, hitting his wife. Steinberg’s bitter enemy, the Tribune’s Eric Zorn, proclaimed piously on his blog, “My hope is the hope I’d have for anyone laid so low–that he’s bottomed out, and that this terrible event marks the beginning of his recovery and of a reconciliation with his family.” Domestic abuse is a private issue, a “terrible event” that just kind of happens to a family, and certainly something that one should be polite enough not to discuss. Unless the abuser is using it to put the touches on a bad-boy image to sell a memoir.

Thoughts on the economics professor who sat in an office full of rotting food watching porn and e-mailing a friend about his strategies to seduce a “totally dumb” student whose “little girl set of mannerisms” appealed to him (”find out her weaknesses, flatter her, and then dig out more info to use to my advantage later”) and about his thing for the “teen girls who work at the thrift and dollar stores he frequents”):

1. Ick.
2. I’m surprised this violates university policy if there’s no evidence or complaint that he actually carried out any sexual harassment.
3. ICK.

Fumes Kathryn Lopez at National Review,

Are Men Necessary? Maureen Dowd asked that ridiculous question in her book, as you’ll recall. What is up with a culture that not only amuses the question, but in which our fundamental cultural institutions works to deride and undermine men, as if to say: “No, of course they are not necessary!”?

But it doesn’t stop there! Lord Peter Wimsey creator and noted woman-hater Dorothy L. Sayers once wrote a book titled Are Women Human? And law professor Catharine MacKinnon later used the same title. Clearly, then, they both believed that women are not human.

What is up with this culture, where such questions can be asked — sorry, amused — with impunity? Well, I’m off to work on my new book, Does Civilization Exist in Cities Other Than Ann Arbor?

Because there’s no better way to strike a blow against crass consumerism than by subversively altering ads to depict bloodily decapitated women. Smash the corporatocracy, boyz! (Via Metafilter.)