Peter A Clarke

Sushi Das isn’t a bad journalist.  She is a columnist who purports to deal with the hard issues.  She has a few hot button issues that get an outing; race/cultural issues, fertility/abortion, feminism/gender issues.  Comfortable Baby Boomer come Gen X soft left journalism that the Age cultivates so carefully. 

Her latest offering Let’s hear from the boys on feminism is an innocuous anodyne piece on feminist writers and feminism which doesn’t offend, uplift or provoke.  Otherwise forgettable but for the fact that it is a pale imitation of a Village Voice’s 14 November 2005 article Girls Just Want to Have Fun.  Both articles consider with Maureen Dowd’s article, Are Men Necessary in the New York Times Magazine and  Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvanist Pigs as two case studies .

Is it plagiarism?  No.  Walter Mizner quipped that if you steal from author it’s  plagiarism; if you steal from many its research.  There is no obvious lifts in Das’s piece and Das develops some insipid theme about feminism now being about confusion and infighting while the boys enjoy the spectacle (perhaps because we like to watch) which  Press leaves these ridiculous theory alone.  Probably because she is a better writer.  Press is a delight to read, in a very New York style she skewers Dowd and gives a nod to Levy. 

Das would have been better served plagiarising the Village Voice.  It is so much a better article.  Das won’t end up on Media Watch.  She is too smart for that.  But her piece is just plain lazy.