When The Joke's On Women

Yesterday, Playboy.com posted a provocative story: "So Right It's Wrong." The piece was written by Guy Cimbalo, and its premise was to target those conservative women that he would like to, as he put it, "hate fuck." But if you click on that Playboy.com link, you'll find the piece is no longer there. And that's because the blogosphere went crazy after Playboy published it, going so far as to call for a boycott, and Playboy pulled it.

If you want to read the piece in full, conservative blogger Caleb Howe has reproduced it in a series of screenshots here. The piece begins thusly:

Obama promised us the dream of post-partisanship—a cuckoo land where party affiliation and factional animosity were forgotten. Turn on cable news or open any newspaper, however, and you’ll quickly discover that the dream has yet to materialize. But there is a way to reach across the aisle without letting principles fall by the wayside. We speak, naturally, of the hate fuck. We may despise everything these women represent, but goddammit they’re hot. Let the healing begin.

What follows isn't, well, pretty. It's a listicle that eviscerates every conservative female that crossed Cimbalo's radar as someone who was at least in some regard physically attractive and yet whose personal politics he found to be utterly loathsome. The list includes Michelle Malkin, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Laura Ingraham, and Peggy Noonan.

On Malkin: "Worse than fucking Ava Braun." On Ingraham: "Vagina dentata would be an improvement." On Noonan: "Imagine fucking your grandmother. Now imagine your grandmother coined the phrase 'a thousand points of light.' It's worse than that."

In response, the female blogosphere had a collective seizure, converting Cimbalo's "hate fuck" wish list into a rapist's screed: "

Writer Guy Cimbalo Shares Top 10 Republican Women He'd Like to Rape." Male bloggers weighed in with mixed sympathies. Salon: "Cimbalo managed to get one or two guilty smiles out of me, but the overall effect is beyond creepy." The Sundries Shack: "I Don't Know Guy Cimbalo, but I'd Enjoy Punching Him in the Mouth." Meanwhile, Politico's Anne Schroeder Mullins linked to the Playboy post and listed the names of the women but reposted none of the attendant raunchy prose, a move for which she was trounced; in response, she altered the post and added an apology. For once, it seemed, women on the left and the right were in agreement. "***** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE *****": "Conservative Women's Group Condemns Hate-Filled Playboy Article."

Apparently, free speech is so over when the masses rule the media: "It's only OK if I think it's funny. It's only OK if it fits my politics. It's only OK if I say it is." I wish Playboy hadn't pulled it. Censoring the piece doesn't make it any less real, any less politically incorrect, any less true. Attempting to police human nature is the real joke here.