Slate, that sprightly but exhaustingly contrarian online journal that was the subject of Jonah’s brilliant takedown a week or so ago, has another exhaustingly contrarian article on its site — in which Meghan O’Rourke defends and praises the writing of Linda Hirshman. If you haven’t been following the Linda Hirshman debate, she’s the feminist who has made a big splash by insisting that women of small children simply must work if society is to be fair and free. Hirshman is, not to put too fine a point on it, an intellectual embarrassment — indeed, “blithering idiot” isn’t too fine a term to describe her ludicrous argument that women of small children are doing injury to their gender if they stay home to raise them. Here’s O’Rourke’s admiring summary of Hirshman’s new book:

“If you are a woman who is committed to gender equality, who doesn’t believe that a woman’s place is necessarily in the home, she argues, then you have to think about how your choices shape the collective good. Her stubborn insistence is refreshing. Unlike others, she is willing to come out and say, in no uncertain terms, that the luxury of making our own decisions as if they had no larger implications isn’t ethical at this point in time….If you buy her argument, then even if you find it hard to leave your baby at home, and even if you find the workplace sometimes less-than-fulfilling, it’s important—to society as a whole—that you work. This sounds extreme, but of course it’s the lesson every man is taught when he’s a boy: Your responsibility to society—the way to become an adult—is to work.”

Okay, it’s time for the “what planet are these people living on” paragraph. Every man is taught when he is a boy not that it is his responsibility to work but that, basically, he is going to be out in the gutter starving and homeless if he doesn’t. Turning work into an abstract “this is what it means to be an adult” thingy is ludicrous — more like what rich people must teach their kids who don’t really need to have jobs. People don’t work to be adults. They work to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, and they derive primary satisfaction from that act — not because they are laboring in the workforce for the good working order of their “society.”

I don’t take a position in the women-should-stay-home debate. My mom worked. My wife works. My sisters stayed home. But the notion that women “should” work simply so that they can be of aid in the gender revolution is precisely the kind of ideological-feminist b.s. that turned the word “feminism” into a pejorative.