“Is he more fun than me? Is he more fun than me?” Lou Dobbs asked Megyn Kelly as she wrenched a Fox News panel away from his warnings that single parenthood is tied to “great psychological illness” and back to whatever it was that Erick Erickson was saying, about how a woman contributing more to a family’s income than a man is unnatural. Earlier, Erickson had appeared on Dobbs’s show to talk about the results of a new Pew Research Center study showing that women are the primary breadwinners in forty per cent of households, a trend he warned would lead to the dissolution of society and general moral collapse. Erickson had followed up with a blog post saying that “many feminist and emo lefties have their panties in a wad over my statements,” but that it was a biological truth that “kids most likely will do best in households where they have a mom at home nurturing them, while dad is out bringing home the bacon.” One of the more striking parts of Kelly’s interrogation of that position came when she asked him, with what it would be inadequate to call skepticism, “Eco-liberals? What did you call them?”
Kelly, as she said, does not describe herself as a feminist, which may be why it’s all the more fascinating when, every now and then, she decides to act like what others might describe as one. So is watching how she pulls it off while keeping her Fox faculties intact. It says something about the climate Kelly operates in that she referred to Dobbs’s doomsaying about single mothers as “safer territory” for the two men than Erickson’s assertion that the simple fact of a wife earning more than her husband—or earning anything—is dangerous. (As Erik Wemple of the Washington Post pointed out, Kelly is pregnant with her third child and, obviously, working.) She won this exchange because she separated what Dobbs and Erickson had clumsily conflated: economic fairness and the particular situation of single mothers. (Margaret Talbot has more about what the Pew study actually shows in that regard.) She was efficient, if not entirely ecumenical, at least from the perspective of single parents.
She was also entertaining: “So I’ll start with you, Erick. What makes you dominant and me submissive, and who died and made you scientist-in-chief?” He wasn’t sure. “What’s unstable about having a working mother and a nurturing, loving, stay-at-home father?” (Erickson: “You know, if it works for you, God bless you.”) Those studies she mentioned backed her up; for good measure, she added studies showing that the children of gay and lesbian couples did fine. Erickson responded that the numbers had been distorted by the overinclusion of problem-free “high-income lesbian families.” (Does that mean he sees two women, both with high salaries, as less of a problem than a man and a woman in the same situation? Perhaps the problem isn’t what women earn but what men resent.) It was also telling to see what ammunition the men reached for when they were losing: “Let me just finish, if I may, Oh Dominant One,” Dobbs said. This was still Fox.
Kelly, as I’ve written before, is the brains of the Fox News operation, and, occasionally, she stops caring whether the men around her notice. Sometimes it’s an emergency intervention, when a Supreme Court decision or election returns are coming in. And, every now and then, the ideological blindness seems too much for her, and she makes it clear that she’s smarter than the men around her, rather than deftly letting them think they are. She’s done it before on women’s issues, when a Fox commentator called maternity leave a “racket”; perhaps that makes it easier for her colleagues to reassure themselves that it was a girl thing, and pretend, as they fall through the holes in their logic, that the ideological ground under them is still there.
