Now, this guy, a counterprotester at the protests outside Augusta National Golf Club, sounds like a misogynist. But I noticed that quite a number of commenters on that post applied the same term to the club itself. This is very silly. Absent special circumstances, it’s pretty reasonable to assume that a club or group seeking to limit itself ot one ethnic group is racist. Absent special circumstances, it’s patently ridiculous to assume that a group or club seeking to limit itself to one gender is misogynist. Is that a “double standard”? Yeah, because two standards are appropriate. Gender is not race. It’s concievable that some people, of either gender, sometimes want a five minute break from interacting with the opposite sex without being misogynistic or misandric. This is not some uniquely patriarchal desire: any number of feminist groups either cater exclusively to women or have women-only sessions or spaces at various events.

UPDATE: Marie reminds me that, in fact, women can play and dine at Augusta, they just can’t be voting members. Ironically, this extra inclusiveness strengthens the case for the membership policy being in place for venal reasons. So, err… never mind, I suppose. Though the “classiness” point seems less important… I don’t think there’d be any more of a problem if, say, Smith were as well regarded as Harvard. [End of Update]

Now, even if they were a bunch of rampant woman-haters, I’d say that as a private club, they can set whatever rules they like as a matter of law—but I’d also join in advocating a boycott of the Masters, and hope that the organization would remove it’s tacit endorsement of an ugly and retrograde attitude. I can’t work up any sympathy because I doubt that’s the basis of the policy. At least for heterosexuals, mixed-gender interactions are just inevitably charged in a way that same-gender interactions aren’t, whether or not anyone is trying to sleep with anyone else. There are conversations most men would prefer not to have in front of (most) women. There are conversations most women would just as soon not have in front of (most) men. Maybe in the shiny Star Trek future we’ll all be sufficiently androgynous that nobody cares, but in the real world now, people may want to create gendered spaces without anything insidious being afoot. Just anecdotally, it seems as though it’s now women more often than men who are interested in creating gendered spaces. There are something like 20 men-only colleges in the U.S., many of them seminaries, and around 57 women-only colleges. Nobody would protest a major event held by Smith College. And is there something not a little preposterous about this protest being led by someone who heads an organization that represents (it boasts) six million women?

But that’s beside the point, really. I wouldn’t join a club like Augusta, but I also wouldn’t want to get bogged down quibbling with people who think it’s pathological not to want all spheres, even private spheres, to be mixed-gender 24/7. What I really wanted to focus on is that even people who don’t like the policy, I think, must realize that “misogynist” isn’t really the right word. It’s just that it’s a short, punchy way of saying “we don’t like this policy.” The problem is, the attempt to borrow the power of words usually just diminshes them when the use is expanded too liberally. The same thing happened to “racist”—it got overused in such transparently ridiculous ways, mostly by folks on the left, that it lost a lot of its bite. The same thing has happened to “Nazi.” It’s sort of sad to contemplate, but I doubt I’d blink at being called either a “racist” or a “Nazi” in the midst of a political argument. They no longer mean anything, because they’ve been used to mean almost anything—they’ve been deployed too often as loose rhetoric. They’ve become synonyms for “we disapprove.” (As both sides of the debate over the war have demonstrated, any person of whom you disapprove is exactly like Adolf Hitler.) I would probably still blink at being called a misogynist (though perhaps the comments on this post will inure me to that), but it’d be sad to see that word too lose the potency it ought to have.