Last night, the university Literary and Debate Society hosted Noam Chomsky via teleconference. The lecture hall was packed (capacity about 350) and people were really psyched for it. He was being questioned by the president of the society, a law prof, a philosophy prof, and an Irish columnist, Nell McCafferty (the only woman on the panel). It was interesting to listen to him, but he may as well have been giving a talk, for all the softballs the male panelists were throwing to him.

Then Nell spoke up. Noam had made some comment early on, when asked his opinion of the American presidential candidates, about Obama being the candidate seeking some ever amorphous notion of change and about Clinton being 'the one who cried.' The audience had laughed when he said it, and Nell took her time in getting around to asking him about it, perhaps generously allowing him a chance to retract the seeming wholesale dismissal of her. When she piped up about it, she absolutely grilled him, asking whether he could more substantively describe his aversion to her or whether he was fine with the 'casual, comfortable misogyny' he had just perpetrated to the chilling satisfaction of the large audience listening to him. The audience was stunned that she would put such a question to him. He rebutted that he was only characterizing the candidates as they are characterized by American media and their own P.R. managers, that he hadn't himself made that dismissal of Clinton. But Nell didn't let it go (pretty awesome). She pressed him harder until he finally made a weak apology for 'how the audience might have interpreted it on that end.'

It was great to watch, and the audience had clearly been uncomfortable, some impatient with her pressing the issue. When I left the theatre at the end of the event, I was alone and so listened to some of the conversations around me. All of the groups of women I heard were talking about his encouraging views on U.S. freedom of speech or about something he'd said about Iran. The groups of men I heard, on the other hand--and I heard a few--were talking about how obnoxious Ms. McCafferty had been in pressing Chomsky on Clinton. Hmm.

Anyway, just an interesting snapshot, I thought.