Well, if that isn’t the mother of self-defeating arguments. He’s still relevant enough to get speaking engagements, which means he’s still relevant enough to handle criticism. If he wasn’t relevent, we wouldn’t be discussing him right now.

The 1960s were not the dawn of time. He did his work in a time when things were changing. He’s been around working since then. He should know better by now. He’s certainly old enough to know better.

So, your stance is that the words of a reporter shouldn’t be printed if they might reflect poorly on him?

You should feel ashamed for suggesting that Talese’s age is either an excuse for misogyny or a marker of irrelevance.

If he’s young enough to be speaking professionally at a major conference given by BU, he’s young enough for that speech to be criticized.

You realize there were prominent female writers in the 1960s, right? Taleses’ contemporaries include Joyce Carol Oates who out-wrote him in their competing works on Boxing, and the downtroden men who aspire to make their life in the ring or die trying.

84 year-old white guy = Establishment

I think it’s hilarious that you are sad for an 84 year old white man, because his legacy is being tarnished, when the whole point is that women don’t get a legacy at all, and are essentially dead to the world even while they are alive.

The problem with your logic is that he’s not irrelevant. He’s taught in every journalism program in the country. His words reflect the reality of powerful white men of his generation. It’s perfectly normal for this generation to reject his sexism. And for the record, Janet Malcom’s the Journalist and the Murderer is a…

Please nap.

I can see that you’ve been inspired by Norman Mailer though. I can spot his insufferable condescending tone in your writing.

How’s that fedora fit? Good?

If he’s so irrelevant and doddering universities shouldn’t be inviting him to speak, USC shouldn’t continue to have him as faculty for their masters professional writing program, and he shouldn’t have three projects under contract at present.

Dear god, CALM DOWN.

I see. Women are a recent invention, then, popping up somewhere around the time bras were being (mysteriously and apocryphically) burned. Before that, nothing.

In the mid 80s a college professor told me a (possibly apocryphal) story about a male student who wrote an essay arguing that women were inherently less rigorous writers- using George Eliot’s work as an example of the epitome of said rigorous male writing that no woman could match.

Oh, so shitting on women women writers is ok because generations of men have been doing it? Imagine if he said something like this about black writers? Would you likewise the defend the persecution of a poor old racist? You either believe in equality or you don’t and it’s a big disservice to those who have held women…

Where in this piece did the author say Talese should be dis-credited for his early work? In fact she does the opposite, she gives him his due. Does this make him above criticism.

I mean, she is 61, and has been around for decades, mostly writing for the literary magazine The New Yorker, which I’m sure this asshole has heard of. She actually has a new book out about dirty money in politics focusing on the Koch brothers. So if he actually paid attention to his peers without a penis, he would…

Okay a couple of things: