I wonder, this morning, as I scan the comments on yesterday’s post, “Whatever you think of [Dylan] Mulvaney’s transition, or her rather cloying girlishness… [s]he traffics not in anger or cruelty, but in whimsy and joy.”*

Here’s what I’m seeing (boldface added):

Sebastian: “Exuberant mockery of women, subversion of common sense, and in-your-face-take-that-deplorables-middle-fingerism….

Michelle Dulak Thomson: “[A]ll I can say is that he doesn’t traffic in ‘whimsy and joy.’ He is a sick individual who mercilessly mocks women. Which is evidently OK these days….”

The Vault Dweller: “I don’t think Dylan is setting out to mock women or ridicule women in general.” And Quaestor came back with: “Is blackface acceptable if it’s not intended as mockery?”
RoseAnne: “Is Mulvaney mocking women? Absolutely. Is Mulvaney doing it out of hatred of women? I don’t know. Mulvaney may simply be taking advantage of the opportunity that is making so much money and not thinking very hard about HOW the money is being made….”

Bender: “LARPer Mulvaney traffics in womanface minstrel-show mockery. Which is nothing but malice.”

Is this a special-purpose sensitivity to the mocking of women? Is the outrage of a piece with anxiety about the transgender movement or do these commenters also object when male standup comedians mock women and when comic actresses embody female stereotypes? 
Women represent a huge comic target. We are, perhaps, the biggest comic topic. We are mocked all the time. Do you want a new rule making women sacrosanct? Do you want to be the one stamping your foot and saying — in all seriousness — the punchline of one of the oldest jokes that mock women? 
___________________
* My post title is a quote from Megan McArdle’s WaPo column “For conservatives, Dylan Mulvaney should be a role model.” And I’m only noticing now that my use of brackets — in “[s]he traffics not in anger or cruelty” — might give the impression that McArdle used the masculine pronoun “he.” No, McArdle had a capital “S” on “she,” and my elision combined 2 sentences, so I needed a lower-case “S.” I’ll add a note about this to the original post. Here I am following a routine editing practice — using brackets where I need to change something in the post — and I’m unwittingly exposing McArdle/myself to criticism about pronoun choice!