things that get taken too far

Fox News Commentator Makes Connection Between Jenna Lyons’s Alleged Girlfriend and Her Son’s Pink Toenails

Jenna Lyons with her pink-toenailed son, Beckett.
Jenna Lyons with her pink-toenailed son, Beckett.

Last April, Fox News commentator Dr. Keith Ablow slammed Jenna Lyons for depicting her son with pink toenail polish in a “Saturdays With Jenna” feature in the J.Crew catalogue, calling her “hostile to the gender distinctions that actually are part of the magnificent synergy that creates and sustains the human race.” Dubbed “Toemageddon” by John Stewart, Ablow’s statements were widely dismissed as homophobic bluster. Of course, there was a tinge of irony when the Post reported this week that Lyons has divorced her husband of nine years and is now allegedly dating a woman, and we surely weren’t the only ones who wondered if the Fox News camp would hazard an absurd connection.

charmant: I bet Fox News has some conspiracy theory about Jenna that goes back to the gay toes.

dianashreds: I was TOTALLY thinking that too, when the news first broke.

Sure enough, yesterday Ablow posted an essay last night on the Fox News website titled, “Jenna Lyons, You and J. Crew Wanted Your Son to Stop Being Such a Boy.” Of Lyons’s rumored divorce and supposed homosexual relationship, he writes:

What it says is that my worry that Ms. Lyons might be expressing her own discomfort with masculinity and projecting it onto her son—and mine, and yours—seems to have been justified.

It says that Lyons does seem to have been promulgating her perspectives on gender roles having no value.

It says that she was, indeed, apparently using J. Crew—a brand so many of our kids gravitate toward—as her launching pad for a mini-campaign to change the way our kids think about their bodies and their gender identities.

See, I don’t think it’s so terrible that boys are different than girls. I think it’s just fine, in fact, that a central supporting beam of the architecture of most boys’ senses of self is that they look like boys and act like boys and feel like boys. I don’t think that’s pathological. But I think that Jenna Lyons—and maybe J. Crew—would disagree with me.

Well, stay tuned for updates. And don’t be surprised if Ms. Lyons is cast on a reality show in the future.

Gay relationships, pink toes, and reality television: It’s a trifecta, really. They should probably start filming it soon before the Rapture happens for real.

Jenna Lyons, You and J. Crew Wanted Your Son to Stop Being Such a Boy [Fox News]

Fox News Commentator Makes Connection Between Jenna Lyons’s Alleged Girlfriend and Her Son’s Pink Toenails