Yeah unfortunately that one sentence has overridden this whole article because of the nature of Twitter--people keep retweeting and piling on without ever reading the article. It was a really dumb statement though. I don't even understand how to begin with that. Wouldn't you assume audience is more related to content than how positive or how many vaginas someone has? This just seems to focus on the wrong thing...
I wonder if there would have been the same reaction had Salmon instead written his observation with leftish-academic word choice:
To a certain extent, this is a gendered phenomenon: positive happy bloggers are disproportionately female, as are their readers.
Same idea – which may or may not be true, but it seems plausible enough to entertain for the purposes of casual opinionated discussion. The rephrasing gives it more intellectual and euphemistic padding, as a defense against knee-jerk outrage.
I was reading along, thinking 'this guy seems to have his head on fairly straight' - an even-handed evaluation of the situation. When I read what I quoted above I experienced (maybe more clearly than I ever have before) the classic 'wait, wut? [sic]'. The first thing that came to mind:
