I couldn’t figure out why Gawker is so hard on Slate’s Jack Shafer. Every other week there’s a post making fun of him specifically, usually without much cause.

In contrast I’ve looked favorably on him in general, thanks to his eagerness to dispute press-fueled drug scares. (It’s a little weird that I hear him complaining about the scare more often than I hear the scare itself, but still.)

Now the Shafer suckiness is starting to become apparent. Outside of the drug-debunking, his Press Box column is of shockingly little interest. It’s in the same playground as Gawker, but it doesn’t have any friends. And then Shafer had to go and write this player-hating piece few years back.

Lately the only way I end up in Press Box is through some wild headline that disguises the boring section holding the article. This weekend I noticed a “most read” commentary from Wednesday on the don’t marry a career woman affair and just had to click.

Like the Forbes article that started it all, this Press Box entry seems to have gone through a few sad revisions. The words that are still its page title, “Forbes is right about career women being divorce-prone,” were once its proud headline.

I kept reading, sort of, even after I saw the byline. Shafer’s subtle thesis is that the bloggers have overreacted, and that the Forbes piece is wrong only for the specific reason he comes up with. Fun!

Along the way he cites various clumsy posts he found on Technorati (making Shafer one of hundreds of people who find Technorati useful) that mostly pout about its misogynistic tone. And though he’s certainly read it and is reacting to it, he skips right over Gawker’s beautiful lampooning of the story. The far-reaching comic fodder Gawker made out of it, and its idiotic photo series, made my week.

But no. Shafer portrays the reactionary bloggers as a bunch of whiny bitches, and though he discusses the beauty-that-was photo series, he skips over the chef d’œuvre #6 reason not to marry a career woman, “Your house will be dirty.” Thank God we have Jack Shafer to leave out everything that is fun about a story so he can get to his earth-shaking conclusion, that marriages to women with decent jobs are more likely to end in divorce because the wives “can better afford to get out of an unhappy marriage.”

That’s more consideration to the numbers than Michael Noer’s clueless piece deserves (in its original form or its current castrated mess). He’s lucky to have friends like Shafer to play along. The rest of us will keep pointing and laughing at his d.b. extraordinaire portrait.

*******

Those seven asterisks (why not an <hr>, dude?) are Shafer’s patented signal flare, where he goes from being boring and sort of mean to just saying whatever the hell he wants. In this case, it’s “Don’t ask me to get upset about slide six … What upsets you about the piece? Bore me with your fury at slate.pressbox@gmail.com.”

What an asshole.