I'm debuting a new feature on The Sexist today—the  Misogynist of the Week. Who truly hates women and who's merely phoning it in? Let's take a spin on the Internet misogyny whirl-a-gig and crown ourselves a winner!

CANDIDATE: Roissy in D.C., "Keys to a Healthy Relationship"—manages to make "whey protein" even fucking lamer than it already is!

After you’ve shot your whey protein-boosted load across her chest, admire your handiwork for a bit, get up, grab a towel, and throw it in her face while saying 'You’d better clean yourself off, babe.' This is catnip to chicks. I don’t know why. Just run with it.

CANDIDATE: Tucker Max: "The Celebrity Tipping Point"—manages to offend both women and the disabled!

"shit man, I've fucked a midget, and amputee and a set of twins, raise your hand if you've ever done that!"

CANDIDATE: Linda Hirshman, "How Jezebel Hurts Feminism"—manages to incoherently label real, live rape victims as "symptoms," and also accuse these symptoms of being incoherent—incoherent symptoms of weakness, these women are.

Women can pretend they’re female chauvinist pigs, but it’s still women who are more sexually vulnerable to stronger men, due to the possibilities of physical abuse and pregnancy. These Jezebel writers are a symptom of the weaknesses in the model of perfect egalitarian sexual freedom; in fact, it’s the supposed concern with feminism that makes the site so problematic. How can Tracie, who posted this picture, criticize the men who go to Hooters? How can writers who justify not reporting rape criticize the military for not controlling…rape? It’s incoherent.

Do I have to choose? The winner, after the jump.

WINNER: Let's give it to Roissy. He's a local, and he offers this irresistible bonus misogyny at the end of his post: "Cum in her mouth and hold it closed until she swallows it. Also known as: Pair bonding." Yes, but how can you cum in her mouth and throw a towel at her face at the same time?

Photo by SantaRosa OLDSKOOL

Tiger Beatdown, of course, has hit the nail on the head. As part of her informal "Anti-Feminists Say the Darnedest Things Week," Tiger Sady explains the Hirshman phenomenon:

That's how these conversations go, and I have been through them one million times (in e-mails, in blog comment sections, in real life):

1. Somebody makes a dick move.
2. You say, "wow, that was a dick move."
3. They say, "OH MY GOD TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR ACTIONS STOP PLAYING THE VICTIM."

This allows the maker of dick moves to avoid owning up to his or her own dickishness, or the fact that s/he is the aggressor in the situation, and to pretend that the real problem is that you object to the situation s/he has created. Now, there is something that a person who employs such a tactic is, very obviously, not taking – it begins with the letter R, and rhymes with "phlesponsibility for one's actions."

Ahh yes. THANK YOU. Linda Hirshman is every ex-boyfriend ever. I knew I recognized her somewhere!

Feminism: Oooooooooover it.

In this edition of Sexist Beatdown, Sady of Tiger Beatdown and myself of the Sexist talk of DoubleX, Slate's new online magazine for women—it's just like us, except we're the problem! Also, people who don't report their own rapes. It is mostly them (and not, saaaay, rapists) who are the problem.

Oh, problems. They create so many pageviews, which, in turn, solve our main problem ($$$). I think it's about time for Sady and I to CASH IN: What's the problem with DoubleX, anyway?

SADY: hello! are you ready to speak? or are you too busy KILLING FEMINISM?

AMANDA: i actually just thew up a blog post, which, as you shall see, is what i actually think is "killing" "feminism." let me start with the Bust quote on DoubleX's dead feminism obsession, though: "We don't know about you, but we're disappointed. (And we also need to figure out the best way to fight off this new undead feminism before it eats our brains.)"

SADY: yeah. I mean: any new publication that focuses on lady issues is exciting! And, Katha Pollitt! Latoya Peterson! That is super exciting!

AMANDA: did you follow XX Factor religiously (or, subscribed to the RSS) like i did?

SADY: Yes, I did! Every single day! So this new DoubleX thing, with its lead off of

7 reasons why feminism is boring/stupid/dead/anti-feminist" is kind of puzzling to me. the quote of the day on the first day was about hating feminism!

AMANDA: ... april ... fools

SADY: fortunately, today, it is about how dolphins are rapist babykillers. which is a slightly less controversial opinion. FUCKING DOLPHINS, man. they think they're SO GREAT.

AMANDA: it's just kind of bizarre, i think maybe the "conversation" format which worked so well for the blog hasn't really panned out as a "magazine" yet

SADY: yeah, exactly. on XX factor you got to see people talking back and forth, which was exciting! this time around, it's just weird and hard to navigate, because you don't know who's saying what or if anyone has yet spoken up to disagree with them.

AMANDA: yeah. did you read breslin's piece about how DoubleX is an entity "beyond" feminism after its death? her point is, basically, "let's shut up and just do it." But isn’t the point of writing in general to "not do anything and just talk about it"? or more positively, "do something BY talking about it"?

SADY: oh, susannah. i'm happy that she writes in-depth stuff about porn and all, and i like what she writes, but every once in a while she's just like "feminism! I hate it! I ran it over with my truck! Now it is dead! You are all victims!" And it's just like, huh. I like your reading of it, though. That makes more sense than mine. And, you'/Susannah are right, it does make more sense for folks of this generation to LIVE their feminism, given that we have more opportunities to do that than elsewhere.

AMANDA: i don't mind the "death of feminism" so much—hell, i've written a eulogy for feminism before, mostly because it's kind of fun and pretty easy—but the way it's weirdly tied in with rape victims is unsettling.

SADY: yeah, and that "Jezebel is hurting women" piece – it made no sense at all, or rather, made sense on a level I really can't get down with, which was: (a) Megan Carpentier has taken exception to my stuff before, so I will write about how she is a bad rape survivor who makes ladies get raped, or something, and (b) what is a way to get traffic for our feminist blog? Attack another feminist blog in a way that is certain to cause controversy!

AMANDA: rape + Jezebel = $$$$$$$$

SADY: it's odd. i am the first lady in the world to say that feminist (or "post-feminist," whatevs) disagreements are enlightening and good and awesome. HOWEVER. It seems weird to me to lead off your (initially marketed as feminist) site with all of this stuff that is, basically, contrarian for the sake of contrarianism.

AMANDA: and i think that's a problem that affects the blog/commentary world in general: what's around, and how can we be different—let's find something to criticize about something else. i do it all the time, you do it all the time — we just choose different targets. and if they think feminism is boring, i think that's okay! but it's more interesting than talking about why feminism is boring. i'd rather they talked about the dolphins.

SADY: RIGHT? we have got to end this mindless social acceptance of dolphins. and, you know, it's fun to make fun, or to criticize, and sometimes it's easier to define yourself in opposition to something else. like, "see, this is what I DON'T believe, so now I can talk about what i DO."

AMANDA: i think they should have gone meta and asked their contributors what the problem is with DoubleX instead of what the problem is with "feminism"

SADY: yeah. and, you know, probably all of this "AUGGGH DOUBLE X LAUNCH" is going to open up conversations that we can use. at some point. i have a story with a moral about snarky blogging. can i tell you my story?

AMANDA: yes.

SADY: okay. so, a million years ago, when i was a tiny little blog person with a blog that was read by 3.5 people in the whole world, i wrote a very snarky post about john devore from the frisky. and this morning, when i opened my e-mail, there was a message! from john devore of the frisky! telling me he liked my blog! and i was like, "ha ha, um... THANKS?!?!" but the moral of the story is that this dude i wrote a cranky post to make fun of turned out to be a totally reasonable dude who writes very nice e-mails. and this established for me some of the things that you DON'T know when you sit down to write a weinery post about somebody else on the Internet. and, yeah, i like the fact that double x is committed to writing stuff that can be snarky (MUST STOP WRITING THIS WORD) or harsh or controversial. still. maybe peeing all over feminism's bloody corpse is not the best tactic, given the fact that the people who are going to read your new lady blog are likely to be... you know. feminist, and stuff.

AMANDA: definitely. and maybe we should think about why it's almost a guarantee that people who write mean blogs also write really nice emails. ALWAYS TRUE. So i usually just write the blog stuff off as a big game that we're all trying to win, but isn't personal—but that gets complicated when you write about personal stuff (rape experience) and a writer takes that personal life (not reporting your rape) and turns it into snarky commentary. in short, bloggers are people too. people who need pageviews.

SADY: ha. yes, we do. which is why my latest story, "How Linda Hirshman Is Hurting Women, and Me Specifically, Because She Made Dolphins Give Me an Abortion" is going to be SOLID INTERNET GOLD.

Why do women stay in abusive relationships? That's the question Slate's Linda Hirshman poses in her review of the new abuse memoir Crazy Love. Hirshman thinks the question is a "terribly important one" to ask women, and that it is a "mark of respect" to do so.

And yet, Hirshman's question remains a rhetorical in her review of Leslie Morgan Steiner's book—because Hirshman never attempts to answer it. She writes:

In the press kit for Crazy Love, Steiner says it's easy to see why she married someone who choked her on a regular basis. She was, she says, "kind, insecure and desperate for intimacy. … It is not difficult to understand why anyone … could become trapped in an intimate manipulative relationship."

. . . Steiner is wrong: It is difficult to understand why she stayed in this awful relationship, given that she was not risking starvation and had no children with her abuser.

Hirshman's theory isn't an attempt at understanding why a woman would stay. In fact, Hirshman argues, it is that very attempt at understanding that is to blame for the perpetuation of abusive relationships. Hirshman calls this "the soft bigotry of low feminism"—when we try to understand why women stay with their abusers, we stop focusing on empowering women to get out.

Hirshman has a point here. Women are not helpless. They have agency. They can make choices. There are escape routes from abusive relationships, and women can take them. Acknowledging this is not the same as blaming the victim—-it is, however, often the only way to make the abuse stop.

But listen to how Hirshman now rephrases the question. It's not "Why do women stay in abusive relationships?"—it's "Why do women's self-destructive fantasies drown out the warnings that years of old-style feminism have alerted us to?"

Yep, after ticking off the only reasons Hirshman deems rational for staying—it's not money, and it's not kids—she decides to rationalize it for herself in perhaps the most offensive way possible:

The victim stays with the abuser because she likes it! She is living out her fantasy. What's more, she just doesn't listen to those who know better—why, old feminists, of course. What a crazy, stupid victim.

It's telling that Hirshman points only to physical reasons for staying with an abuser (money and children), because throughout, she fails to address that abusive relationships are rarely solely physical affairs. She doesn't mention that abusers employ emotional manipulation and social pressure deliberately and constantly to make sure their victims don't leave. Instead, she points to an 11-year-old girl "who got wind of her impending genital circumcision and walked 25 miles through the Kenyan bush at night to reach a Girls Rescue Center"—a daring physical escape, to be sure.

The escape routes for emotional and psychological abuse are often more difficult to discern. And when you fail to address that, asking a woman why she stays in an abusive relationship isn't a "mark of respect"—it's a mark of condescension.

So, Hirshman reads a book intimately detailing Leslie Morgan Steiner's four-year abusive relationship, puts it down, and writes an essay asking, "What was this woman thinking?" I haven't read Crazy Love, but I assume that's the point—understanding the victim's perspective. Why don't we listen to her?