Funny, smart, hot, expired

This just in from Salon: Funny women a turnoff for men.

*sigh*

Naturally, I'll capitulate and qualify everything first:
1) I don't fancy myself as funny. But someday, I'd like to be funny.
2) Yes, I realize most of these "studies" are seriously circumspect.

But are there any other Salon readers out there? If so, do you bother to even skim the new "letters" format? A while back, Salon underwent a horrible, nearly disfiguring facelift that makes site navigation fairly sucky, and went with a blog approach. In this facelift, they did away with letters to the editor and replaced that with comments on the blog articles.

The vitriol that female writers inspire in these comments is jaw-dropping. Seriously. Be it the outlandish Ayelet Waldman or the more flouncy (and seemingly harmless) Rebecca Traister or Ann Marlowe, when there's an article from a woman, and especially if that article relates to anything regarding sex, love, motherhood, feminism or the like, the backlash is nearly staggering. Always, always there's some assclowns (hopefully the same few assclowns) repeating the same things. They always say that the female writers are:
1) Untalented
2) Boring
3) Narcissists
and then they really rev up with these insults:
4) they're old and "expired"
5) they aren't hot
6) they're deluded or stupid (or both)

It's very depressing, and yet, kind of funny. The repetition and vehement backlash is so over-the-top it's nearly a farce.