The Atlantic published a piece by Connor Simpson ridiculing conservatives’ reaction to the Obama Virgin Voting ad by pointing out that it is conservative old white men who are “outraged.”
Simpson posted screen shots from four white men, linked a few other white men, and proceeded to write an entire article about the collective outrage of old white men:
President Obama teamed up with the most divisive 26-year-old in the world to make a suggestive ad encouraging young people to vote, but it seems to have upset some old conservative men on Twitter….The outrage is ridiculous. The ad is aimed at people who are between 18 and 22 years old, people who are young enough to have not voted in the last election but who are eligible now. People who probably know who Lena Dunham is, because she’s basically the voice of every Millennial ever, didn’t you know? But these men, these old, grey-haired men, are upset because sex and voting are not the same thing, and, and think of the children!
Simpson then tweeted:
Where to start? Perhaps I’ll put my market research hat on and suggest that this isn’t exactly a representative sample; that it’s in fact the opposite–but that’s beyond obvious.
Also, Simpson cites Erick Erickson, Ben Shapiro, and Kevin Eder. Shapiro is in his twenties, Erickson somewhere near his thirties. Keven Eder appears to be in his twenties as well. Ok so, shocker, Simpson not only picked tweets to support his position, but he called people in their twenties and thirties old.
Then, on his own blog, Simpson posted a screenshot of tweets about the ad. Interestingly, of the seven tweets he posts on his blog, at least four appear to be from women. Hmm. Just below the screenshot, Simpson wrote,”My first conservative Twitter bombing.” It’s not really worth dissecting Simpon’s piece beyond this.
What is worth questioning is why The Atlantic would publish it. (Or do we know the answer?)
Well, I too can cut-and-paste tweets. Even though I’m a woman, and Connor Simpson, it appears, would like to think I don’t exist. For the record, many women, many women of color, and many young women of color, even liberal women, found the Obama ad to be odd, off-putting, sexist, and weird:
And my own reaction:
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