For the last few days, the Republican Party has been reeling over the shockingly retrograde attitudes towards rape and abortion expressed by one of its senate candidate — attitudes that reveal an ignorance about, and disregard for, women and women’s health. But into the breach rides The National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson, ready to show American women (and the non-women who love them) that the Republican party is inclusive, open, and highly respectful to women:

From an evolutionary point of view, Mitt Romney should get 100 percent of the female vote. All of it. He should get Michelle Obama’s vote. You can insert your own Mormon polygamy joke here, but the ladies do tend to flock to successful executives and entrepreneurs. Saleh al-Rajhi, billionaire banker, left behind 61 children when he cashed out last year. We don’t do harems here, of course, but Romney is exactly the kind of guy who in another time and place would have the option of maintaining one.

Yes: a harem. The bulk of Williamson’s article is an argument that Romney should embrace his wealth and status — “Americans do not hate rich people. Americans love rich people,” he writes, citing Donald Trump, who is rich and beloved equally infrequently — and yet for some reason it starts with a three-paragraph explanation of “what women want” that makes pick-up legend Mystery look like Andrea Dworkin. It’s meant to be a joke, but it’s so beside-the-point and unfunny, and so contemptuous to women, that it might as well be a buried comment from Reddit’s “Men’s Rights” section. “Age is cruel to women,” Williamson explains,

and subordination is cruel to men. Ellen Kullman is a very pretty woman, but at 56 years of age she probably would not turn a lot of heads in a college bar, and the fact that she is the chairman and CEO of Dupont isn’t going to change that.

It’s a good thing Mitt Romney doesn’t hang out in college bars.

via Mitt Romney Could Have a Harem if He Wanted, Insists National Review.