Slutty Women of Washington...Put Down Your Pens!

So even though I am now far away from 14th Street and all that DC offers, my sensibilities still managed to be assaulted at a distance. And by preface, it goes without saying that DC is still a man's town - we've all been in that meeting in the Pentagon where a general is staring you down like "what could YOU possibly tell me, chickie?" So I'm all in favor of women asserting themselves, using their wiles to outwit and manuver around the white-haired creaky creepys that run the town.

However.

Washingtonienne was bad enough, but we've all been interns and know that skeeviness comes with the territory, and that Jessica what's-her-name actually did us a favor by exposing the system in which so called powerful men with tremendous egos and family values will fork over dollars to get spanked by some pissant intern. Hell, just ask Julia Allison - if Washingtonienne had been just a tad more circumspect in her blogging, she'd probably be a columnist or Chief of Staff by now. However, despite exposing the men as horny scumbags, she also cast a pall on the hard working, serious women still stuck in crappy jobs on the Hill.

Then someone sent me a link to the Pentagon Diva. If you haven't just eaten, PD is someone who clearly has hooks into the upper echelons of the Pentagon, blogging about Cohen's bow-tying prowess as an indicator of his S&M capabilities or which way David Kilcullen is hung. She was recently exposed as Mongomery McFate, which anyone who has spent more than 15 minutes in the parking lot of the Pentagon knows better as the anthro-gal who's major crime thus far has been to sell a grasping-at-straws US Army the concept that "culture is important". As in, you should probably know the hand gestures an Iraqi is making as you shoot him. While I could go on and on about La McFate and what an utter phony she is (I had the pleasure of being forced to a dinner party in her company some years back, during which my first comment was "if her husband was ever legitimately Special Forces, I'll eat my stilettos" and my brother's - a finance geek and uninitatied into the strange tribes of Washington - second comment was "don't ever make me hang out with tools like that again" - but that's another story), the real crime is again, some girly-come-lately to the Washington game screwing it up for the rest of us who were doggedly rising through the ranks by being smarter, tougher, and twice the men that the men were.

By all accounts, McFate was (undeservedly) embraced by the Pentagon "elite", so to speak, given contracts and latitude to peddle her enormous mound of steaming poo in the form of "human terrain", and this is what she has to show for it - not parlaying it into a position where she could affect change, not breaking through the toughest glass ceiling of the E-Ring, not changing one single man's perception of women in this industry, but rather reinforcing it tenfold with her idiotic and calculated-to-shock blog. All of which reads as far too desperate to try to shock and get a gasp! than anything that could be remotely construed as sexual or titillating.

Now of course La McFate would say she never asked to be a role model and well, gosh, she's counterculture, so what did we expect? Bullshit, I say. It's indicative of how little she understands the culture in which she was mucking about to not know the table at which she'd been given a seat, and how much crap women have put up with to sit in the chairs that line the room around that table. Actually, even if she had the ability to see that (being an anthropologist, I highly doubt it) I'm sure she didn't care. Well, the blog's taken down now and I'm sure her contract will not be renewed any time soon, and we can all go back to studying culture rather than "human terrain", and she'll be yet another annoying footnote to this war.

However, I suppose the real issue here though is the fallability of men (and women) for thinking that this snake-oil saleswoman actually was peddling something of value in the first place. You created her, Elliott Cohen et al, by giving this two-bit "human terrain specialist" a platform instead of leaning on the thousands of scholars and practicioners in the intelligence and defense communities to help you fight this war. So strap on your leather and get what's coming to you, because you deserve to be fed Montgomery McFate's steaming special.