Complaint Department

Hey, did you guys hear about this recently published scientific research arguing that women’s sexuality tends toward a more fluid character than traditional binary categories? No, you didn’t? Huh. Well maybe that is because the New York Times, paper of record, deemed it appropriate to publish this article in the FASHION section of today’s paper. Headed with a picture of Lindsay Lohan. Because “Omg hot girls making out” trumps “peer-reviewed scientific research” when it comes to mainstream journalism, I guess.

Anyway, I had some time to kill during my lunch break, and while ranting to my co-workers is fun and all, I felt that it was time for one of my favorite but least enacted threats, the Strongly Worded Letter:

Mr. Hoyt, Public Editor of the New York Times:

I am writing in reference to the article “What Women Want (Maybe)” by Andy Newman, published in the June 12th edition of the newspaper. I do not understand the decision of the New York Times to publish this article–ostensibly about recent scientific research suggesting that women tend toward a fluid sexuality–in the Fashion and Style section of the newspaper.

This is particularly distressing because the article itself reports that “Dr. Chivers’s work adds to a growing body of scientific evidence that places female sexuality along a continuum between heterosexuality and homosexuality,” yet “bisexuality still tends to be treated as a novelty, a titillating fluke, a phase or even a cover for homosexuality.” In placing this article in the “Fashion and Style” section (and relating it to celebrity gossip and the more prurient details of a single film’s afterparty), the Times is participating in the very act that the article itself claims to debunk: that of treating women’s sexuality as a novelty .

What is it about this type of peer-reviewed and published scientific research that prevents it from being presented in, say, the “Science” section of the paper? To me it suggests that the Times views any issue relating to women to be “light” news unworthy of the more “serious” sections of the paper, regardless of the content of that piece. Or is it that in this day and age the New York Times, of all places, still believes that only women would be interested in news relating to women and that those interested female readers would only go looking for it in the Style section?

I would not be as compelled to write were it not for the fact that this is not the first time that the only relationship an article in the “Style” section had to actual fashion or style was that it was an article about women. Case in point: “A Monster of a Slip” published on March 16th, about Senator Obama’s former adviser Samantha Power’s resignation. Who makes the decision to classify this story as “Style” rather than “Politics”? Would the same decision have been made if one of Sen. Obama’s male advisers had made the same comment leading to his resignation?

Sincerely,
Erica Lynn Warren
Brooklyn, NY

Tags: New York Times