Megyn Kelly dominates the males who strain to assert that the male is dominant.

They probably had to let her smack them around. Probably some uber-male at Fox News told them — Erick Erickson and Lou Dobbs — that they had to sit still for their punishment. Or maybe this is male dominance, like in those old movie melodramas where a big strong male stood still while his woman pounded her little fists on his chest until she broke down in tears and he could comfort her in his big strong arms. Except Megyn Kelly never breaks down. And Lou and Erick end up beaten to a bloody pulp.



Here's Amy Davidson in The New Yorker, quoting some of the best quotes:

Erickson had followed up with a blog post saying that “many feminist and emo lefties have their panties in a wad over my statements,” but that it was a biological truth that “kids most likely will do best in households where they have a mom at home nurturing them, while dad is out bringing home the bacon.”...

KELLY: I don’t know what it is, but I don’t think I’m an emo-liberal, and I don’t describe myself as a feminist —

ERICKSON: I don’t think you are either.

KELLY:—but I will tell you, I was offended by the piece nonetheless. I didn’t like what you wrote one bit, and I do think you are judging people. To me, you sound like somebody who’s judging but wants to come out and say, “I’m not, I’m not, I’m not, now let me judge, judge, judge. And, by the way, it’s science, science, science, it’s fact, fact, fact, fact, fact.” Well, I mean, I have a whole—this is a list of studies saying your science is wrong and your facts are wrong.

If you're going to play the science card, make sure you have a good science hand, because — unless you're just playing at home with a few lazy/dumb/weak friends, your bluff will be called.

Davidson portrays Kelly as bucking the system over there at bad old Fox News:

And, every now and then, the ideological blindness seems too much for her, and she makes it clear that she’s smarter than the men around her, rather than deftly letting them think they are.

Davidson thinks that the Fox News regulars who find themselves in the Erickson/Dobbs position "pretend, as they fall through the holes in their logic, that the ideological ground under them is still there." But I think it's more likely that the whole scene was planned that way, that it served the well-understood interests of Fox News, that Kelly had the role of dominant female delivering a beating, and Erickson and Dobbs knew that they had to receive 50 lashes of female retribution and restorative justice in order for the Fox News machine to move forward with the 2 of them as component parts.