We imagine asking Harper’s, What about women? Their response would probably be, Well, what about women? The voice of Harper’s is pitched so that the question can only be asked rhetorically. Matters of gender and sexuality do not actually matter. In one of the few instances where they were even raised, when Thomas Frank wrote about abortion in October 2011, the case was actually made that the pro-life movement is ineffective, and that abortion rights are a non-issue. Frank suggests that what happens on the state level just doesn’t matter, because it’s not on the national stage […].

Does Frank not know about states? Of course he knows about states, he wrote a whole book about Kansas! The guy loves states. But this is the Harper’s way, to will things out of existence, to hope if you say it doesn’t matter—whether “it” is a woman’s status as equal citizens under the law, as autonomous individuals, or “it” is the entire internet—that it won’t actually matter. And that would be great, because if it doesn’t matter—if the culture wars are just imaginary, ignorable skirmishes, and the internet is only a passing fad—then nobody, and nothing, will ever have to change.

The Editors of n+1, “Let Them Eat Print”