The Mommy Job

Here’s what I thought about when I read this New York Times article about the “mommy makeover,” a cosmetic-surgery package meant to undo the ravages wrought by pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding.

When I read this passage

Many women struggle with the impact of aging and pregnancy on their bodies. But the marketing of the “mommy makeover” seeks to pathologize the postpartum body, characterizing pregnancy and childbirth as maladies with disfiguring aftereffects that can be repaired with the help of scalpels and cannulae.

I thought about how the medical establishment used to treat pregnancy and childbirth themselves as though they were a disease to be cured with drugs and forceps. I thought about how hard women’s health advocates—and mothers themselves—have fought to change attitudes and standards of care so that birth is regarded as a normal activity, one that most healthy women can accomplish with a modest amount of loving, respectful support.

And then I thought about Pushed, a book about the endangered state of physiological childbirth that I reviewed in the latest issue of Bitch. I thought about my own induction into motherhood, and the emergency c-section that I’m still very sad about. I thought about how we, as a culture, seem to be changing our minds about the naturalness and goodness of childbirth—or, and this may be worse, we’re letting our doctors change our minds for us.

I thought about how we use cute nicknames like c-section and tummy tuck and the word “procedure.” I thought about how doctors print up glossy, glamorous brochures describing surgeries as if they were no different than a haircut or a pedicure. I thought about how the popular media frame both the cesarean section and breast augmentation as just a couple more consumer choices. I thought about how this pathologizes a mother’s body, too. If I have sagging breasts and a flabby belly, it’s because I was too cheap, too lazy, too crunchy, too whatever to do something about it. It’s my choice, which really means it’s my fault.

And I thought about how, until really quite recently, womanhood itself was viewed as a deformity. Well into the modern era, the woman’s body was just a flawed copy of a man’s. It was weak, incomplete, and, above all, permeable, and pregnancy and childbirth were, clearly, just the most grotesque symptoms of the malady of womanhood. As I read this article, I thought about how maybe our conception of the female body hasn’t changed that much after all.

Unretouched: Jezebel on the Airbrushing of Faith Hill

I know that airbrushing happens. Nevertheless, I find it difficult to keep that in mind when I’m standing in the checkout line, staring at the covers of the women’s magazines and thinking, “Isn’t she, like, at least as old as me? Why doesn’t she have any crows’ feet? She doesn’t have back-flab pudging out over the top of her strapless dress, either. And look at those arms! They’re the arms of an undernourished adolescent. Jesus, I am such a fat, fucking hag.” That’s why Jezebel’s analysis of the July cover of Redbook is so awesomely valuable. I realize that this has already been all over the Internets—and even the TV—but I really consider it a public service to make sure every media-consuming woman in America sees it. So, here’s the original post, here’s a helpfully annotated version of the un-retouched photo, and here’s the Today Show segment with the adorably naïve title, “Are Magazine Covers for Real?”

The Sanctity of Human Life

Gonzales v. Carhart feels like old news already (which is not to say that its legacy won’t be with us for a long, long time), but I haven’t been able to think about it and write about it as much as I would like—well, I don’t really like talking and thinking about it, but I do feel compelled—because caring for my baby takes up so much of my time and energy. Of course, the fact that I care about my baby at nine months as much as I cared about her before she was born is one of the reasons I find the anti-choice ascendancy so upsetting.

This New York Times article about escalating rates of infant mortality in the South seems to be archived now, but Lawyers, Guns and Money and Feministe both offer succinct analyses of the material, and a brief look at Mississippi tells you pretty much everything you need to know: As a governor who has backed a number of anti-choice laws, Haley Barbour is proud to call his state “the safest place in America for an unborn child,” but he has also presided over welfare and Medicaid cuts that have made Mississippi a decidedly unsafe place for children who have actually been born. Barbour has commemorated the anniversary of Roe v. Wade by calling for “a week of prayer regarding the sanctity of human life,” but his policies are a perfect reflection of Barney Frank’s famous and sadly perfect formulation: While they might call themselves “pro-life,” most anti-choice advocates “believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth.” Fetuses are sacred. Babies are expendable.

Thank you, Justice Kennedy, for protecting me from myself.

You want to know what bothers me the most about the Supreme Court’s ruling in Gonzales v. Carhart? It’s not that doctors are confused about what, exactly, has been outlawed, since “partial-birth abortion” is not a medical term, but, rather, an inflammatory phrase concocted by the marketing department of the Christianist right. It’s not that it encourages the antichoice movement to launch even more audacious attacks on the American citizenry’s reproductive rights. It’s not even that there’s no exception protecting the health of pregnant women. It’s the breathtakingly paternalist rhetoric Justice Kennedy employed in his explanation of the ruling:

“Respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child…. It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form.”

If that doesn’t chill you to the bone, maybe you don’t get what Kennedy is saying.

He is saying that women are not fully rational. That they cannot be trusted to make vital decisions. That they must be protected from themselves. That they are, essentially, children.

I can’t help but wonder what’s next. Perhaps states might make it illegal for women to have sex outside of marriage, as a woman who engages in a one-night-stand might wake up the next morning and realize that she’s a slut. Maybe the professions should be closed to women, lest they reach their late 30s and discover that the corner office is not as fulfilling as they thought it would be and now it’s too late to have a baby. Maybe women should be barred from higher education, since men don’t like girls who are smarter than them. Maybe women should be denied access to desserts because, you know, they might feel all guilty and fat when they realize that crème brûlée has, like, a gazillion calories and three times the recommended daily allowance of saturated fat. I just don’t know. Maybe I better ask my husband.

“Anorexia of the Soul”

I read “For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too”—from the front page of yesterday’s New York Times—with interest and a mounting sense of despair. It’s a profile of high-achieving teenaged girls, and this quotation, I believe, captures the essence of the article:

If you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything. What it comes down to, in this place and time, is that the eternal adolescent search for self is going on at the same time as the quest for the perfect résumé.

This is such a bummer. It’s a bummer because the idea that a girl can do anything was supposed to be—and, for many, has been—liberating. It was supposed to mean that a girl could take advanced science classes or run on the track team or be class president; now it seems to mean that a girl must take advanced science classes and run on the track team and be class president if she wants to get into Princeton or Stanford or Reed or Wellesley. Pursuits that should be passions, that should be a source of joy, become an exhausting exercise in brand-building.

Continue reading over at my other blog…

“Is There a Post-Abortion Syndrome?”

Nothing is easier to love than an unborn child.

An unborn child never cries all night. She never spits all over your shirt. An unborn child doesn’t bite the other kids at preschool. He doesn’t hurl food from his highchair to the floor. An unborn child doesn’t sneak out of the house at 3 A.M. An unborn child doesn’t get drunk and smash up the car. An unborn child never aggravates, upsets, or disappoints.

When I had a miscarriage, I lost an unborn child. Since having had a baby, I’ve thought a lot about the difference between the unborn and the born. One thing I can say for sure is that the born are a lot more work and a lot more mess. They make physical and emotional demands that the unborn do not. They’re not harder to love than the unborn, but it’s a different kind of love. My love for Frances is love for a real and willful individual, a human being who is changing and growing everyday and over whom I have little real control. The unborn child I lost was real, too, but what I mourned was a dream—my hopes for what she might become. The fact that those hopes will never be realized gives them a paradoxical power: They are impossible to fulfill, but also impossible to destroy. The unborn child is pure potential, and when she is lost, she attains a state of permanent perfection.

Emily Bazelon touches on this dynamic in “Is There a Post-Abortion Syndrome ?”, her cover story for yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, as she describes a ceremony conducted at the end of a 10-week program for women—in this case, prisoners—who have had abortions:

Inside the Tom Baker Chapel of Hope at the jail, Harper and Kimbrough arranged long pieces of gauzy white cloth over the altar and onto the floor, so that the material lined a short aisle. Into the cloth they tucked white teddy bears with red hearts around their necks that read “Happy Mother’s Day” and “No. 1 Mommy.” Kimbrough sprinkled silk rose petals over the altar and floor. On a side table, Arias placed baskets of cloth “heritage dolls.” Their heads and hands were tied with thin ribbons. Their faces were blank. Heitzeberg erected a curved metal frame over the altar and draped it with more white cloth. Kimbrough climbed on a chair to hang a string of Christmas lights over the top. Arias surveyed the altar. “It looks like a bassinet,” she said approvingly….

Arias wove a sermon from Biblical stories: Jesus meeting the woman at the well in Samaria, Hannah praying to God to give her a child, Eve celebrating the birth of her sons. It was time, Arias told the inmates, to release their babies to the Lord. Kimbrough and Harper passed around the baskets of heritage dolls, telling the women to take one for each baby they’d aborted or miscarried. The women rocked the blank-faced dolls, many holding three or four. Their faces dampened with tears….

She instructed the women to stand up, speak in memory of their lost babies and take their heritage dolls to the altar. The women stood one by one. They clutched their dolls and said they were sorry. They imagined a baby with his father’s dimple or curly hair or green eyes. One woman mentioned a child who had been born and taken into state custody, and the woman who kissed the pictures of her daughters sent them her love. For the most part, though, the messy mothering of living children — and the reality of their lives outside the prison — did not intrude on the ceremony. The women focused on mourning the elusive, innocent loss represented by the dolls. They gave them fairy-tale names: Sarah Jewell, Angel Pillow, Xavier Dante. At a side table, Kimbrough and Harper wrote the names on certificates for children “expected to be born.” The documents promised, “By virtue of being conceived, the spirit of this child lives eternally with Jesus and in the heart and the mind of the mother, now and forevermore.”

I can’t think of a better symbol, a better embodiment, of the unborn child than this heritage doll. It’s a blank canvas onto which one can project a fantasy child, a perfect child. To the extent that it suggests anything, it suggests an angel. The extent to which this meshes with Rhonda Arias’s description of aborted babies hugging their mommies in heaven suggests that the resemblance is intentional.

Should the anti-choice movement decide to start using heritage dolls instead of blown-up photos of aborted fetuses, it’s going to be bad news for reproductive rights. Those photos are arresting, yes, but they are also gross, and I really do believe that some of the bad feeling they engender bounces back on the people who display them. I do volunteer work at the Planned Parenthood in my town, and we’ve had our share of protestors. I’ve had occasion to talk to a few people who are disturbed and offended by the fetus photos—not because they’re staunch defenders of a woman’s right to choose, but because they don’t think they should be subjected to horrifying images while they’re driving to work or to Wal-Mart. I’m guessing that if you show these same people the haunting absence of the heritage doll, they’re going to see their own baby or grandbaby or lost baby. If you show them a thousand heritage dolls, they’re going to see a holocaust.

Similarly, when the anti-choice movement depicts a woman who has had an abortion as a monster and a murderer, the hyperbole and lack of compassion demonstrated by such an image reflects poorly on the movement that creates it. Bazelon hints at a future in which the anti-choice movement will instead represent the woman who’s had an abortion as a grieving mother duped into killing her little angel. As Bazelon writes at the conclusion of her article, this is a very powerful trope:

At the prison the day before, I watched the inmates drink in Arias’s preaching…. Abortion-rights leaders would accuse her of manipulation, of instilling guilt in women to serve the anti-abortion movement’s political ends. But Rhonda Arias ministers from the heart; the lack of scientific support for her ideas merely underscores that she is a true believer.

Her ardor and influence is better explained, perhaps, by the theory of social contagion, which psychologists use to explain phenomena like the Salem witch trials or the wave of unfounded reports of repressed memories of sexual abuse. Reva Siegel of Yale compares South Dakota’s use of criminal law to enforce a vision of pregnant women as weak and confused to the 19th-century diagnosis of female hysteria. These ideas can make and change laws. The claim that women lacked reliable judgment was used to deny women the vote and the right to own property. Repressed-memory stories led states to extend their statutes of limitations. Women who devote themselves to abortion recovery make up for the wrong they feel they’ve done by trying to stop other women from doing it too — by preventing them from having the same choices.

And then there is the relief in seizing on a single clear explanation for a host of unwanted and overwhelming feelings, a cause for everything gone wrong. When Arias surveyed 104 of the prisoners she had counseled in 2004, two-thirds reported depression related to abortion, 32 percent reported suicide attempts related to abortion and 84 percent linked substance abuse to their abortions. They had a new key for unlocking themselves. And a way to make things right. “You have well-meaning therapists or political crusaders, paired with women who are troubled and experiencing a variety of vague symptoms,” Brenda Major, the U.C. Santa Barbara psychology professor, explained to me. “The therapists and crusaders offer a diagnosis that gives meaning to the symptoms, and that gives the women a way to repent. You can’t repent depressive symptoms. But you can repent an action.” You can repent an abortion. You can reach for a narrative of sin and atonement, of perfect imagined babies waiting in heaven.

This is a powerful narrative, then, not just for women who have had abortions, but also for the rest of us—for everyone who gets to cast a vote for or against a ballot initiative outlawing abortion, for or against an anti-choice candidate. It’s an emotional appeal with an easy-to-follow plot that absolves us from making difficult decisions about abortion, and from dealing with the complex socioeconomic realities that make abortion such a huge issue in our country.

As Bazelon points out, just about half the pregnancies in America are unplanned. One would think that honest education and access to birth control would be the first steps in any attempt—private or public—to address the demand for abortions in this country. One would, of course, be wrong. Rhonda Arias, the preacher and activist that Bazelon profiles, discovered during the course of Bazelon’s research that her 17-year-old daughter was pregnant (the father was a boy she met at church). This woman who had 4 abortions herself, and who has devoted her life to stopping other women from having abortions, explained that she talked to her daughters about chastity before marriage, but she didn’t talk to them about contraception. “‘Abstinence works better than birth control, really,’ she said. ‘It’s just that people don’t do it.’” This is one point on which Arias and I agree, even if we draw different conclusions from it. She doesn’t believe in birth control. I believe that making honest family planning and safe, effective contraception available to everyone is the best way to reduce the number of abortions performed in this country.

I don’t believe in “post-abortion syndrome,” but that doesn’t mean that I believe abortion is easy. Any woman who has ever had a child—or lost a child she desperately wanted to have—can tell you that it’s disingenuous to call a fetus “a blob of tissue,” and it’s equally misleading to refuse to acknowledge the fact that—for some women, at least—an abortion is more traumatic than, say, a bikini wax. Whether or not the anti-choice movement decides to shift its focus from the aborted fetus to the woman who aborts it, I think that pro-choice advocates need to make room for more open, more honest conversation about abortion. I know that a lot of activists are afraid that such a conversation would be a gift to anti-choice forces. I’m familiar with the slippery slope argument. But I would counter that, for most Americans, abortion is already a slippery issue. Polls affirm again and again that we don’t really want it to happen, but we do want it to be legal. I don’t see a position that reflects that ambivalence as a weak position. I think it’s an honest one, and I think anything less is a tragic disservice to the very women we hope to protect.

[PHOTO BY TOM SCHIERLITZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES]

Folic Acid and Pouilly-Fuissé

Ted and I had just placed our orders when my cell phone started vibrating. It was my mom, and she wanted to know how to use the bottle-warmer. I told my mom what she needed to know, hung up the phone, and almost started crying.

A detailed explanation of the planning and preparation that went into my lunch date would be instructive for anyone who is currently contemplating breastfeeding (and, for that matter, for anyone who would dare to judge a woman who chooses not to breastfeed), but the thought of composing such an explanation seems exhausting to me. Suffice it to say that, if Frances was awake and taking the bottle of milk I pumped for her just as Ted and I were sitting down to the table, a glass of wine with my lunch was out of the question, and a leisurely meal with my husband was in jeopardy.

As it turned out, Frances was happy with her bottle and I didn’t need to rush home to top her up. I was able to enjoy my sandwich—tuna, medium-rare, with wasabi mayo—rather than cramming it into my face, and I got to spend some time alone with Ted. Still, an experience that was supposed to be relaxing and restorative was slightly nerve-wracking. I loved being pregnant, and I love nursing my daughter, but I also kind of miss the days when my body was my own.

Which is why this New York Times article made me kind of nuts. It’s about new guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommending that women of childbearing years consider themselves perpetually “prepregnant”—that is, they should avoid alcohol and cigarettes and take prenatal vitamins. The reasoning behind this shift from prenatal to “preconception” care is not unsound: “The problem, doctors say, is that by the first prenatal visit, a woman is usually 10 to 12 weeks pregnant. ‘If a birth defect is going to happen, it’s already happened,’ said Dr. Peter S. Bernstein, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at Montefiore Medical Center in New York who helped write new government guidelines on preconception care.” My problem is with the way these guidelines are meant to encompass even women who are not trying to get pregnant. The reasoning here is a little more shaky: Since more than half of all pregnancies in the United States are unplanned, women should, essentially, plan for an unplanned pregnancy and birth.

Continue reading over at my other blog…

Little Bo Peep Show

I love Halloween. For as long as I can remember, I have enjoyed being scared—at least a little bit—and the prospect of being someone else for a night has always been appealing. The main attribute I require in a Halloween costume has always been authenticity. This means that, when I was a 4-year-old Batgirl, I needed a costume painstakingly constructed—down to the utility belt—by my amateur seamstress mom and my fanboy Uncle Bobby, rather than a mask and plastic coveralls from Kmart. Anything, for example, with a picture of Batgirl on it would have been absolutely out of the question, as Batgirl would not wear a picture of herself. Duh.

With less iconic, more broadly conceptual costumes, my sense of authenticity was more subjective. For several years—starting when I was around 12, I think—I went as some kind of vampire. Obviously, there’s no precise template for vampire, so I would just construct an outfit that seemed like something a vampire might wear: the occasional cape, a lot of black, an—during my punk-rock teens, tattered stockings and boots with pointy toes.

As I got older, the vampire got a little sexier. Indeed, I would say that it’s no coincidence that my vampire years coincided with adolescence. Like any other fancy dress occasion—by which I primarily mean school formals—Halloween was a chance to become someone hot.

Given that Halloween is a liminal time, a celebration of topsy-turvy, and a last hurrah before the cold, dark winter sets in, going for hotness seems like a reasonable approach to the holiday. Of course, as someone who spends a lot of time around the children—I live in a university town and I am, myself, a student—I can report that the contemporary American young woman doesn’t wait for a special occasion to go for hotness: I see a lot of g-strings floating above lowrider jeans on every walk to and from Spanish class. I would argue that it’s the pornification of everyday life that has made the typical sorority girl’s Halloween costume indistinguishable from the get-ups worn by shticky strippers, or perhaps whores to whom one must pay a little bit extra for the role-playing.

I don’t have a coherent position on sexiness and feminism, and, as I’ve already stated, my position on sexiness and Halloween is pretty much, “Why not?” Thus, to the extent that I’m disturbed by costumes like “Temperature Rising Nurse” and “Sexy Nun”, it’s because I know that if I went as, say, “Evil Pixie,” I’d actually be going as “Woman Who Is About 15 Years Too Old and 30 Pounds Too Fat For Her Costume”—and “Evil Pixie” is relatively demure.

Actually, even if I were sufficiently delusional, I still couldn’t go as “Evil Pixie,” because the largest size in which this costume is available is 6-8. It is, however, available in teen sizes, which brings us to what I actually do find disturbing in the trend toward racier costumes: children dressed up to be sexy and adults dressed as sexualized children.

This ThursdayStyles article didn’t have a whole lot in the way of ground-breaking commentary, but it did offer the unsettling idea of college students dressed up as “va-voom Girl Scouts” and “girls’ costumes… designed in ways that create the semblance of a bust where there is none.” It was the latter image that sent me on a Froogle search for “bratz costume”, and, sure enough, I discovered that one can, in fact, dress one’s 8-year-old in a ersatz latex corset this Halloween.

The online shop where I found the Bratz get-up also sells something called “Lipstick Diva.” This hot little number not only induces unease, but also conceptual vertigo, as the plaid miniskirt seems to be schoolgirl, by way of Trash & Vaudeville, sold back to schoolgirls. In fact, all the girls’ costumes on this page are kind of gross. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t remember quite so many bare midriffs at Halloween when I was a kid.

I don’t really know what to say about all this, except that the peak of female sexiness—as judged from the outside, not the inside—seems to be a brief period between the ages of 12 and 19, and that, when the time comes, I think I will try to convince my own daughter that it would be good contrarian fun—rebellious, even punk—to use Halloween as an opportunity to celebrate her inner prude.

[THANKS TO GRIFFIN FOR THE NYTIMES LINK.]

Too much testosterone kills brain cells

Yes, the headline is kind of “No duh,” but it’s always nice to see common knowledge verified by scientific research. Now my husband has yet another reason to thank me for marrying him.

So Much for the 11½-Inch Lip-Syncing Stripper

This is kind of old news, but having chastised Hasbro for their plans to add “skanky ho” to the list of possible answers to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, I feel I should mention that the venerable toy company has decided against manufacturing Pussycat Dolls dolls. Props to Dads & Daughters for sponsoring the letter-writing campaign that apparently changed Hasbro’s mind.

Bitch: The Style and Substance Issue

Issue #32 of Bitch Magazine is now available at this nation’s better newsstands. In it you will find an analysis of the fashion strategies of Madonna and Dolly Parton, a very thoughtful look at the work of style writers, and my review of Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction.

Bitch has also just launched a snazzy new website, complete with blog.

To Hell with Caitlin Flanagan

Regular readers will, perhaps, recall that I have praised New Yorker and Atlantic contributor Caitlin Flanagan in the past. I don’t know if I’ll be doing that anymore. I think it might be time for us to see other people—actually, judging from some of the blurbs her new book, To Hell with All That, has collected, it appears that she’s already been stepping out on me with the likes of Susanna Hoff Sommers and P.J. O’Rourke. (What, Maureen Dowd didn’t get her advance copy? Or is the elite media only big enough for one redheaded, Irish-American essayist who enjoys ragging feminists while reaping the benefits of feminism?)

What, you may ask, has brought about this change of heart? Well, first there was the absolutely devastating profile in Elle. In this piece by Laurie Abraham, Flanagan comes off as a loopily hypocritical woman who is unaware of—or unwilling to consider—the ways in which her own considerable privilege puts her in a rather precarious position when it comes to judging the lives and choices of others. Consider this, for example:

After a while, thankfully, the conversation turns from dead rodents to hot food. We’ve gotten here because though Flanagan moons over the domestic arts in her writing, she also jauntily reports that in her married life, she has never so much as changed a sheet or been asked to sew on a button, nor could she tell you the price of a single item in her refrigerator. (She also tells me that she's not a “big doer of laundry.”) I ask her why she glorifies housewifery when she shuns its tasks. “For the ’50s housewife, the standards in a sense were a lot lower. You know she’s putting the roast into the oven or whatever,” she offers. “Modern standards of housekeeping are deplorably low—when you go into these houses, they do not eat hot food.” Her voice drops, as if she's telling a devastating secret. “They do not eat hot food!” she repeats in staccato. “Things are getting nuked. They’re eating subpar, rotten food, but then you go to a dinner party at their house and you think Paul Bocuse has been there.” She sounds genuinely disgusted.

For the next few minutes, Flanagan expounds on home-cooked meals, saying how much she missed them when she was sharing an apartment just out of college, working some “dopey job” in Washington, DC. “I felt so lonely, and so sad, and so unwelcome, and I just think it's really great when, if someone’s out all day and working, and working, and working—and some days he might be late,” she adds, the “he” being her husband, Rob, whose last name Flanagan does not like to reveal but who, as has been written elsewhere, is a Mattel executive who produced Barbie in the Nutcracker and Barbie of Swan Lake. “I always have his dinner out. It’s not fancy. But someone had a hot meal waiting for him. Someone loved him. Someone thought he was out all day dealing with business. It’s like you come through that door, Yeah, a hot meal,” she says dreamily.

Elsewhere, Flanagan is pretty clear about the fact that she’s not much for cooking. So we are left to wonder just what “I always have his dinner out” means. Does it mean that she always makes sure that the cook or housekeeper or whoever actually prepares the meal has, indeed, done her job? Or maybe the housekeeper puts the food in the oven and Flanagan does, truly, take it out? I’m not just troubled by the suspicion that Flanagan doesn’t quite practice what she preaches. I am troubled by the zeal with which she judges women who are, perhaps, less dedicated to providing hot meals for their husbands—particularly when few women can count on paid help when they’re deciding how to put food on the table.

Abraham breaks it down:

Flanagan bemoans the extravaganzas that have become children’s birthday parties but still throws lavish hoo-has for her boys; she opines that there isn’t “a nanny in the world who has not received a measure of love that a child would rather have bestowed on his mother,” then hires one herself; she pokes fun at “professional-class” women’s anticlutter fetish, then hires a personal organizer for weekly visits. I don’t begrudge Flanagan her luxuries, but she’s so oppressed by them. It’s ironic, because there is nothing that honks off Flanagan more than privileged women who play the victim—that is, privileged women who whine about balancing work and family life. “If you want to make an upper-middle-class woman squeal in indignation, tell her she can’t have something,” Flanagan writes.

“You seem to ridicule women who are struggling to balance work and family,” I tell her, kicking off one of what would be many circular exchanges with her.

“No, that’s a profoundly important issue on a personal level.”

“But you just told me the personal is political,” I say. (Explaining how feminism was once noble but had outlived its usefulness, Flanagan’s exact words were: “The feminist movement had this notion that the personal is political. I thought that was a brilliant formulation.”)

“I just think if someone's making a six-figure salary, I just don’t care about them anymore,” Flanagan concludes—which is pretty funny, considering that the six-figure gals have to be her most natural demographic—or maybe it’s the gals with six-figure husbands. They're the ones who don’t have jobs (Flanagan likes to say she doesn’t have a “real job”) but do have full-time nannies.

Then again, isn’t Flanagan really a working mother, as that term is commonly understood? When I try to get her to acknowledge her uncanny resemblance to one, you'd think I was trying to get her to admit that she's a stripper.

“Aren’t you a working mother?” I ask.

“All mothers are working mothers,” Flanagan replies.

“Working mother outside the home, I mean.”

“No, I’m never outside the home when I work,” she replies. (Geez, I fell right into that one.)

“But you do have an office in the house? You’re not typing in the kitchen, right?”

“When the boys were really little I did. I sat at the kitchen table. I sat right there and worked.” And so on.

I ask her whether she still has regular child care. “I don't want to get into the specifics of that,” she says, “because it’s so personal, but I would say there’s a lot more cleaning help at this point. I have help with the kids sometimes, babysitting.”

The rest of the article is pretty much more of the same. This really was rather devastating for me to read. It was like discovering that one of my friends gives money to the NRA, hassles women in front of abortion clinics, and voted for Bush—twice. (Note to friends: If any part of this description does, in fact, fit you, please: just don’t tell me.)

Joan Walsh’s review of To Hell with All That for Salon is less shocking, perhaps, but no more flattering. Walsh is particularly disturbed by Flanagan’s description of her struggle with cancer, and with her use of this illness to denounce feminism and extol the virtues of “traditional” marriage:

A short paragraph explaining that her husband took care of the boys and carried her to the doctor when she was sick is interrupted with what feels like a non sequitur. “If that’s a traditional marriage, I'll take it.” She explains her reasoning thusly:

“If a marriage is like a bank account, filled not only with affection but also with a commitment to the other person’s well-being as much as to one's own, I suppose my balance was high. I suppose that all the days I had made a home for my husband, and all the times I had ended my writing days early so that he could work late or come home to a hot dinner and not to a scene of domestic chaos—all of that, as much as the desire and intensity that originally brought us together, were stores in my account.”

What conclusions are we supposed to draw from this? That a woman who doesn’t devote herself to “making a home” for her husband shouldn’t expect his care and support? That self-sacrifice is a kind of emotional insurance policy? That love is an entirely quid pro quo affair? If that’s a traditional marriage, I don’t want it.

This is all quite appalling, but it’s also somewhat dubious, coming from a woman who has had domestic help consistently at least since the birth of her children. Unless Flanagan is employing some sort of feudal logic—whereby, as lady of the manor, she takes both responsibility and credit for overseeing the servants—her husband should be in emotional debt not to her, but to the nannies and babysitters and housekeepers who have done much of the actual labor involved in producing hot dinners and quelling domestic chaos. At this point, it becomes impossible to read an essay like “How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement” as anything other than a tortured, disingenuous exercise in self-analysis.

Walsh suggests that Flanagan is confused, and she admits to being confused about herself. Certainly, confusion is what fuels the so-called “Mommy Wars”—confused logic, confused emotions, confused judgment, and confused guilt. Walsh also writes that Second Wave feminism was born, at least in part, by the fact that staying at home felt bad for a lot of women, and the current conflict about the proper role of women is the result, at least in part, of the fact that leaving home feels bad for a lot of women. So, what we have is women attempting to create social policy out of their own unique experiences. What we have is a burgeoning population of essayists, each of whom is—more often than not—trying to tell other women that they should be doing what she’s doing.

A lot of women have little choice in what they are doing. A lot of women aren’t able to give up the corner office to stay at home with the kids because a.) they do not have, nor have they ever had, the corner office, and b.) if they stay at home with the kids no one will be bringing home the paycheck required to clothe, feed, and house the kids. Even if we set this aside, even if we restrict ourselves to worrying about women with Ivy League degrees and six-figure salaries, I think we have enough evidence at this point to question the value of social policy by anecdote. The percentage of the female population who are in a position to learn much of anything from Flanagan’s example is so small as to be meaningless if not for the fact that this same population has considerable media access and a will to use it.

If like-minded women want to club together to congratulate themselves on their feminine virtues and motherly righteousness, well, it’s a free country. And I can’t imagine that these women are going to stop committing their self-satisfaction to paper anytime soon. What I am sure about, though, is that I’m about done reading.

ON A RELATED NOTE Over at my other blog—the one about being babies and such—I have a few things to say about Sandra Tsing Loh’s Atlantic Monthly review of Mommy Wars.

Yes Donors and Choice Mothers

I was interviewed recently, and one of the questions I answered was asked—and I’m paraphrasing here—was “How would marriage and the workplace be different if the radical feminists of 30 or 35 years ago had been more successful?” It was hard for me to answer the question, because it was hard for me to imagine a world in which radical feminism achieved its goals. This is basically what I said in my non-responsive response, and I mentioned, as an example, Shulamith Firestone’s program for releasing women from the biological responsibilities and complications of reproduction. While it is possible to argue that women are hobbled by pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering, the willingness of many women to undergo expensive, intrusive, and dicey fertility treatments suggest that a lot of women have no desire to be liberated from the corporeal aspects of motherhood.

I thought about this again while I was reading the cover story from yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, “Wanted: A Few Good Sperm.” I was thinking about how, while women may not be willing to outsource gestation—quite the contrary—a growing number of them are creating a kind of reproduction and parenthood in which men are almost unnecessary. I was also intrigued by the way many of the women who choose to become single mothers are forging new types of community and family, communities made of other single mothers and families made of children who are the product of the same sperm donor—communities and families of which the sperm donor himself is generally not a part. This may be about as close to achieving the goals of old-school radical feminism as we are likely to get.

This is all, of course, a big social experiment, but early signs are positive. In the article, Jennifer Egan writes that “a 1992 survey of teenagers raised by single mothers found that they experienced markedly fewer adolescent problems than children of divorce.” And she mentions that “a continuing study of a group of children in England, now 2, who were conceived by single women using donor sperm concludes that so far they are healthy and well adjusted.”

On the other hand, I find some of the genetic engineering that’s going on alarming. Here’s one woman profiled in the article assessing a sperm donor: “‘Thick hair, which is also nice,’ she said, ‘because if I happen to get a son, I don’t like bald guys’”. Some of it is alarming and also naïve. Here’s the same woman on another donor: “‘…he’s six feet but he only weighs 150. Which is good. If I have a girl, she wants to be skinny, and if she can eat what she wants, that’s perfect’”. (I have a tall, skinny dad. I am neither tall nor skinny.) Of course, I can’t say that I wouldn’t be making similar analyses if I were shopping for DNA.

And here’s the big reason I found this article so interesting: I can easily imagine myself shopping for DNA.

My husband has told me many times that, if we had broken up, he would have given up on the idea of marriage. He would have bought himself a condo with a hot tub, he would have updated his personals profile to make it clear that he wasn’t looking for a serious relationship, and he would have settled into a life mild hedonism. (Sometimes—particularly when, say, our roof is leaking or when he’s contemplating the complexities of our joint tax return—Ted gets a faraway look in his eyes, and I suspect that he’s paying a little visit to perennial bachelor fantasyland.)

But I’ve never really thought much about what I would have done if we hadn’t gotten married (probably because I was always confident that Ted would be smart enough to marry me). Had we not gotten married, though, I believe I would have given up, too—on marriage, but not on motherhood.

I was never particularly marriage-minded, in any case; that is, I didn’t grow up dreaming about marriage in the abstract. There are a couple of guys I have thought about marrying, but I have also dated guys that I really couldn’t imagine being married to—including one guy that I totally, totally loved but couldn’t quite see as a husband, and certainly not as a father.

Of course, I didn’t grow up dreaming about babies, either. I didn’t know that I wanted to be a mother until I got pregnant, by accident, and discovered, by accident, that motherhood was tremendously important to me—a lesson that was, if anything, reinforced when I had a miscarriage. It’s easy to imagine that I would have given up on romance if I hadn’t married Ted, but I can’t imagine that I would have given up on motherhood. It seems that an increasing number of women feel the same way I believe I would have.

Mean Girls Triumphant

I really appreciated Naomi Wolf’s piece on popular fiction for teenaged girls in the last New York Times Book Review. I appreciated it because I have always wondered just how bad those Gossip Girl books are but I couldn’t quite bring myself to read one, and I appreciated it because Wolf offered more than a shrill jeremiad. She didn’t just freak out about all the sex and drugs and shopping in these books; she explained how, in their valorization of the rich and popular crowd, these books invert the philosophy of young adult fiction as we have known it, not to mention the philosophy of Austen and Alcott.

However, there was one line that gave me pause: “They carry no rating or recommended age range on the cover, but their intended audience—teenage girls—can’t be in doubt. They feature sleek, conventionally beautiful girls lounging, getting in or out of limos, laughing and striking poses. Any parent—including me—might put them in the Barnes & Noble basket without a second glance.”

Is she high? It’s true that the A-List and Clique books have a fairly innocuous appearance—although, I’ve got to say, all those girls look supremely bitchy—but I knew those Gossip Girls were trouble without ever reading a word. The covers are so much scarier than anything presented by grown-up chick lit. Well, I suppose there’s something at least a little bit scary about the idea that adult women think of themselves—or want to think of themselves—as cartoon characters, but I find the glossily eroticized photos that adorn the Gossip Girl jackets to be disturbing in a much more visceral way.

The photos are always cropped in such a way that the model loses all identifying—all humanizing—features. Now, given that these books are, to quote author Cecily von Ziegesar, “aspirational” (saints preserve us), it makes sense to make the girls on their covers as generic as possible; it’s easier for readers to project themselves into the glamorous world of the novels. On the other hand, it’s hard not to notice that these young women are reduced to nothing but open mouths, pubescent breasts, and lanky legs. It’s hard for me to imagine, looking at these images, that anything wholesome or redeeming or even thoughtful might lie behind them. It seems that my imagining was not too far off the mark.

“The Happiest Wives”

Ted hipped me to John Tierney’s op-ed piece, “The Happiest Wives”, the day it was published, but it’s taken me awhile to get around to reading it. Here’s the part I found most interesting:

Consider what’s happened with housework, that perpetual sore point. From the 1960’s through the 80’s, wives cut back on housework as husbands did more. In the 1990’s, though, the equalizing trend leveled off, leaving wives still doing nearly twice as much of the work at home.

That seems terribly unfair unless you look at how men and women behave when they’re living by themselves: the women do twice as much housework as the men do. Single men do less cooking and cleaning, because those jobs don't seem as important to them. They can live with unmade beds and frozen dinners.

I found this interesting because it never occurred to me before, and because it seems to me to make sense. Certainly, the division of labor in my own marriage is shaped by pre-existing behavior—mine, and my husband’s—although, the tasks aren’t so neatly distributed by gender. I was enthusiastic about cooking even when I was just cooking for myself, but I was also a total slob when I was a single gal. As a bachelor, Ted subsisted on Chunky soup and Raisin Bran, but he always had a clean bathroom. Now that we’re married, I do most of the cooking and he does most of the cleaning.

This system wasn’t the product of thoughtful, principled negotiation; it’s just kind of how things have worked out. If we kept track of the hours Ted spends Swiffering and that I spend chopping cilantro, we might discover that our household contributions are not precisely equal, but I doubt that we’re ever going to do that. Indeed, I think that the organic nature of our division of labor is part of what makes it work, and I’m pretty certain that it accounts for the flexibility we enjoy.

Ted cleans because he has a low tolerance for filth; if he lets things slide a bit, I don’t care, because I’m a pig. Similarly, if I feel like defrosting a pizza for supper, that’s just fine with Ted. If I need a pot or a knife that’s sitting in the sink, I don’t ask Ted to do the dishes; I clean it myself. When the so-called “morning” sickness made food preparation an impossibly noxious task for me, Ted didn’t pout or complain; he offered to cook.

Now, before everybody starts getting all up in my shit, I would like to make it clear that I’m not presenting my marriage as a model union that should be emulated by all, and I’m certainly not saying that Tierney’s column offers a foolproof program for social engineering. Furthermore, I am not suggesting that marriage doesn’t—or shouldn’t—change a person’s conduct. I’m just saying that the paragraphs quoted above resonated with me.

Of course, it’s also worth noting that the happy division of labor that Tierney describes—career man with stay-at-home wife—doesn’t work for everyone (some of my best friends are statistical outliers, and I’m always wary of any attempt by norms to tell them how to live), and that, even when it does work, it only works as long as the couple is married. This is something Ted mentioned when we discussed the column, and it’s something we discussed at length before I quit my job. I was happy to jettison a career in marketing, but the fact remains that, if Ted and I get divorced, I’ll be kind of screwed, professionally speaking.

In the days since it first appeared, this column has made the rounds in the blogosphere. Amanda at Pandagon rips Tierney a new one. I particularly liked her response to Tierney’s observation that, from the 60s through the 80s, women started doing less housework and men started doing more, while this trend leveled off in the 90s:

…if men were picking up more and more of their share of housework and then stopped when Tierney says, it might not be just because men have a built-in housework termination gear that makes them stop as soon as they hit 60% of whatever the female in the vicinity is doing. That this “leveling off” happened right about the same time that the anti-feminist backlash that Susan Faludi described was hitting an apex and the rise of the Limbaugh listening embittered white male might not be a mere coincidence, but a trend that also got played out at home.

There’s also a nice analysis of the study Tierney cites over at Half Changed World.

“The Shame Game: Marketing the Guilty Pleasure”

The latest issue of Bitch isn’t just the magazine’s 10th-anniversary extravaganza. It’s also the issue that contains my consideration of the phenomenon of “guilty pleasure.” In it, I take a look at chocolate, designer cosmetics, and Desperate Housewives. Here’s my thrilling conclusion:

The guilty pleasure is a troubling cultural paradigm, and one that is most often used by women and by people marketing to women. Phenomena coded as guilty pleasures suggest the possibility of transgression, but they actually reinscribe social conventions that encourage women to feel ashamed of behavior that is hardly shameful. It is, perhaps, the fake sense of empowerment offered by the guilty pleasure that is its most damaging feature. Eating chocolate cake, wearing saucy underpants, watching a nighttime soap: These are personal acts, and they suggest that the private realm is the (only) appropriate place for a woman to break the rules. When we allow ourselves to be convinced of our own disobedience, when we delight in our bad-girl selves, as we engage in truly inconsequential actions, we accept the idea that female pleasure is inherently transgressive. In fact, we are encouraged to regard wearing lipstick with a naughty name as somehow rebellious, and we are distracted from the truth that the ethos that created and reiterates the concept of guilty pleasure is anything but revolutionary.

Guilty pleasure is fleeting and, ultimately, counterproductive. A closer look at the lives of real desperate housewives—of real American women generally—might reveal that they don’t need a spa day so much as they need things like subsidized childcare, rewarding jobs—for themselves and their husbands—that don’t preclude family life, and schedules that allow for a little personal time and adult socializing. They need a society in which the pursuit of pleasure—of joyful self-expression and honest self-actualization—is nothing to feel guilty about.

To read the rest of the article, you’ll have to buy the new Bitch. This issue really is jam-packed with feminist excitement. If you subscribe now, you’ll get this issue, plus a year’s worth of smart—sometimes smart-alecky—cultural criticism while supporting an outstanding not-for-profit organization.

Blowjob Nation

I like Caitlin Flanagan. She’s a good writer, and I always find her choice of subject matter (housewifery manuals, parenting, Mary Poppins) compelling. She has a wry sense of humor, and—most importantly—she’s a skeptic. Flanagan is always just a little bit suspicious of received wisdom.

The latest issue of the The Atlantic contains the best piece I’ve read on the oral sex “epidemic” that has taken hold of our nation’s youth. Here’s my précis: With cool and convincing logic, Flanagan argues that the blowjob problem in America’s middle schools is probably not as bad as The Rainbow Party suggests. She does, however, acknowledge that girls today feel differently about fellatio than past generations of adolescent females. Flanagan makes the depressing but cogent suggestion that we have, as a society, abandoned our girls to a pornified culture and a woefully inadequate model of empowerment. She concludes by writing

I am old-fashioned enough to believe that men and boys are not as likely to be wounded, emotionally and spiritually, by early sexual experience, or by sexual experience entered into without romantic commitment, as are women and girls. I think that girls are vulnerable to great damage through the kind of sex in which they are, as individuals, as valueless and unrecognizable as chattel. Society has let its girls down in every possible way. It has refused to assert—or even to acknowledge—that female sexuality is as intricately connected to kindness and trust as it is to gratification and pleasure. It’s in the nature of who we are.

But perhaps the girls themselves understand this essential truth.

As myriad forces were combining to reshape our notions of public decency and propriety, to ridicule the concept that privacy and dignity are valuable and allied qualities of character and that exhibitionism as an end in itself might not be beneficial for a young girl, at the exact moment when girls were encouraged to think of themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy and to act on an imperative of default aggression—at this very time a significant number of young girls were beginning to form an entirely new code of sexual ethics and expectations. It was a code in which their own physical pleasure was of no consequence—was in fact so entirely beside the point that their preferred mode of sexual activity was performing unrequited oral sex. Deep Throat lingers in the popular imagination because it was one of the few porn movies to trade on an original and inspired premise: what a perfect world it would be if the clitoris were located in a woman’s throat. In a world like that a man wouldn’t have to cajole a woman to perform fellatio on him; she would be just as eager to get it on as he was. But this was a fantasy; a girl may derive a variety of consequences, intended and otherwise, from servicing boys in this manner, but her own sexual gratification is not one of them. The modern girl’s casual willingness to perform oral sex may—as some cool-headed observers of the phenomenon like to propose—be her way of maintaining a post-feminist power in her sexual dealings, by being fully in control of the sexual act and of the pleasure a boy receives from it. Or it may be her desperate attempt to do something that the culture refuses to encourage: to keep her own sexuality—the emotions and the desires, as well as the anatomical real estate itself—private, secret, unviolated. It may not be her technical virginity that she is trying to preserve; it may be her own sexual awakening—which is all she really has left to protect anymore.

We’ve made a world for our girls in which the pornography industry has become increasingly mainstream, in which Planned Parenthood’s response to the oral-sex craze has been to set up a help line, in which the forces of feminism have worked relentlessly to erode the patriarchy—which, despite its manifold evils, held that providing for the sexual safety of young girls was among its primary reasons for existence. And here are America’s girls: experienced beyond their years, lacking any clear message from the adult community about the importance of protecting their modesty, adrift in one of the most explicitly sexualized cultures in the history of the world. Here are America’s girls: on their knees.

Our Feminism, Ourselves

My husband doesn’t cook. I do. When feminists—particularly older feminists—learn these facts, they frequently give Ted shit. If I’m in earshot, I issue my standard defense: Ted doesn’t like to cook. He doesn’t know how to cook. I do know how, and I do like it. His kitchen contribution is doing the dishes. Sometimes, if I’m feeling particularly piqued, I add that, as the primary wage-earner in our family, Ted puts food on the table in the figurative sense. What I never say is, “Really, it’s none of your damn business,” although I often think it.

This, I believe, is the fundamental issue at the heart of the ongoing controversy over “choice” feminism: To what extent is the personal political? Even when I want nothing more than to be left in peace by my more doctrinaire sisters, I cannot deny the validity of this question. If I think about my own domestic arrangements, for example, I feel that Ted and I have pretty much worked things out to our own satisfaction. (Well, my own satisfaction: Ted is significantly more filth-averse than I am, so he ends up doing most of the cleaning; perhaps this state of affairs will look more equitable when we add childcare to the mix.) But am I being a bad feminist by assuming the traditionally feminine chore of cooking? Will I be setting a bad example for my child? I am not asking these questions facetiously; I really do feel that they are worthy of consideration. Is feminism fulfilled when a woman does whatever she wants to do—whether that’s become a stockbroker, an astronaut, or a housewife—or does it require that we organize our own lives in such a way that we help make such choices possible for all women? What do we owe to ourselves, and what do we owe to each other?

I ask these questions of myself a lot, and I’m asking them today because of a piece in yesterday’s New York Times. In it, Patricia Cohen discusses the ongoing debate sparked by Linda Hirshman’s American Prospect article, “Homeward Bound”. This piece is, of course, old news in the blogosphere, but the conversation it has generated is hardly over. The crux of the argument is whether or not participants in the “opt-out revolution” can call themselves feminists, or whether their decision to leave the public sphere in favor of private life is a sign of the end of feminism.

Underscoring this question is a more fundamental question about feminism itself: What, exactly, has it achieved. Cohen points out that women have made significant strides over the past 50 years, and that’s undeniable. But she also highlights the fact that feminists are still agitating over the same issues that got them exercised and mobilized half a century ago. This suggests a real lack of progress to me, and I think the anxiety that “choice” feminism generates is fear that, as long as a substantial number of women are happily opting out of the workplace, it’s harder for women who want a career—a more public life—to opt in. This is, certainly, something that I worry about while I’m staying at home.

My biggest issue with “choice” feminism, though, has nothing do with the decisions I’ve made in my own life. It is, rather, that “choice” feminism implies options that remain unrealistic for a large numbers of women. Very few single mothers can choose to stay at home with their kids—in fact, welfare reform has made that a near-impossibility. In an unfortunate little twist, many of these women forced into work are the same low-wage workers who make it possible for other, more fortunate women to pursue their careers. That is to say, feminism has hardly succeeded in changing our collective, cultural idea of women’s work. Women haven’t relinquished their domestic duties; at best, they’ve simply outsourced them.

It’s all very complicated. On the one hand, I want to be able to live my own life and to afford other women that same right. On the other hand I’m always a little shocked and disappointed when a woman of my age, education, and coolness-level takes her husband’s name. The reasons why my husband is the member of our family with a fulltime job have everything to do with geography and our differing vocations, but I still feel kind of weird about our seemingly traditional arrangement. I will soon be a stay-at-home mom, but I can’t imagine that I will ever think of myself as one. What does all this say about me, and what does it say about my commitment to feminism?

I don’t have any answers. I will offer this, for whatever it’s worth: While I was relaxing in the recliner, drinking tea and reading Cohen’s article, my husband was vacuuming cat hair off the sofa.

I Don’t Think I’ll Be Buying a Subscription

I suppose you could say that, as a woman who quit her pretty good job when she got married, I’m part of the “opt out revolution”. I do still work as a freelance writer, but I spend most of my time at home, where I cook and garden and occasionally clean something. Nevertheless, having read Rebecca Traister’s review and interview, I’m pretty sure that the new magazine Total 180! does not speak to my experience. In fact, it sounds quite terrifying.

[SALON ARTICLE VIA PANDAGON VIA FEMINIST BLOGS.]

Is Maureen Dowd Any Good?

It seems that a lot of people took issue with Maureen Dowd’s report on the war between the sexes in her new book and the excerpt from same recently published in the New York Times Magazine. This does not surprise me. What does surprise me is that so many critics seem surprised by their own displeasure.

Early in her contemplative and carefully argued critique, Katha Pollitt notes that she reads Dowd’s column and adds “We all do,” a sentiment echoed by Echidne of the Snakes when she writes, “Yes. We all read Dowd. We all read thirstily the few female political columnists we have, and we listen to what they have to say about women.” And, before she commences to rip Dowd a new one, Katie Roiphe (I’ve got to tell you, I never imagined the day when Katie Roiphe and I posted opinion pieces with the same title) pauses to lavish praise:

She is, at her best, a brilliant caricaturist of the political scene, turning each presidency into vivid farce. As a caricaturist, she has a fondness for punchy one-liners strung together, and for the one-sentence paragraph: “Survival of the fittest has been replaced by survival of the fakest”; “We had the Belle Epoque. Now we have the Botox Epoch”; and “As a species is it possible that men are ever so last century?” Her style evokes a brainier Candace Bushnell, whose oeuvre she frequently refers to, but it is given extra weightiness by her position at the Times.

“Survival of the fittest has been replaced by survival of the fakest”: That’s brilliant? Katie, you’ve got to be kidding me. It’s cheap, barely clever, and—if you give any credit at all to evolutionary psychology—just plain wrong. This kind of stuff is precisely why I can’t—physically cannot—read Dowd. Half a column inch of that preciousness, and I’m too agitated to read anything.

Kathryn Harrison—who reviewed Are Men Necessary? for the New York Times Book Review—is the only critic I’ve seen who has any problem at all with Dowd’s style:

[S]mart remarks are reductive and anti-ruminative; not only do they not encourage deeper analysis, they stymie it…. Producing one of her trademark staccato repetitions—for example, on cosmetic surgery: “We no longer have natural selection. We have unnatural selection. Survival of the fittest has been replaced by survival of the fakest. Biology used to be destiny. Now biology's a masquerade party”—Dowd effectively dismisses a subject by virtue of proclamation. Does she let loose three arrows instead of one because she can't choose the cleverest among them? Typically, her formula is to articulate a thesis, punch it up with humor and then follow with anecdotal support or examples taken from TV shows, advertisements, overheard conversations—all cultural detritus is fair game. Often she quotes from reputable sources, CNN or The Times or a professional journal like Science; more often she applies witty asides, snippy comparisons (“Arabs put their women in veils. We put ours in the stocks”) and tabloid-style alliteration (e.g., “dazzling dames” and “He mused that men are in a muddle”).

From time to time, I’ve thought that maybe I was missing something, that maybe I’d just tried Dowd on an off day—or, rather, several off days. Now, having Harrison’s corroborating opinion, I think I can just relax, secure in the belief that I was right all along.

Is Maureen Dowd Necessary?

I do not much care for Maureen Dowd. I tend to avoid her column, and, when I do skim it, it’s sort of like an 8-year-old sticking her tongue on a 9-volt battery: If it offers any pleasure at all, it’s the perverse pleasure of a reliable irritant.

I should have known better than to read her article in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. I fully expected to be exasperated, and I was not disappointed. But I was surprised by just how boring and insipid the piece was. Just a few sentences in, I found myself thinking, “She is totally going to quote Helen Fisher,” and I was totally right. Helen Fisher is the go-to girl when you want to bolster your sexually Manichean worldview with a little evolutionary psychology. She is also, in my opinion, a poor scholar and possibly a bit of an idiot—in her abysmally stupid The First Sex, she explains that women are valuable networkers and team-builders in the business world because of they’re so wonderfully chatty and delightfully social, for example (I don’t recall if she makes any specific mention of their ability to brew coffee and organize office birthday parties, but I’m sure she would have if she'd thought of it.)

And Dowd’s certainly not saying anything that hasn’t been said a thousand times before. Indeed, the entire article is utterly devoid of new or newly provocative material, unless we feel that Ms. Dowd and her lady friends are so smart and fascinating that oft-repeated truisms about the war between the sexes only become meaningful when they issue forth from their particular mouths. It’s hard to believe even Ms. Dowd’s prodigious gift for puffery could spin this crap into 352 pages.

The decision to run this piece was, I think, either a product of Ms. Dowd being too powerful for the editors of the magazine to refuse, or it was an example of the Times having its head up its ass—and I realize that these are not mutually exclusive. A point-by-point critique of the article seems ridiculous to me—in part because it would be longer than the article itself, and in part because it practically critiques itself. If you’d like to enter into an thoughtful and interesting discussion of Are Men Necessary?, the meaning of manhood, and the plight of the nice guy, you should check out these postings and their related comment threads over at Obsidian Wings.

[THANKS TO TED—A NICE GUY WITH A SMART, INDEPENDENT, AND DEEPLY SARCASTIC WIFE—FOR THE OBSIDIAN WINGS LINK.]

Truth, Consequences, and Bratz Babyz: The Summer Issue of Bitch

I think it’s fair to say that I’m not easily shocked. Nevertheless, I can honestly report that my jaw did drop when first I beheld Bratz Babyz. The dolls were featured in the toy section of a Target ad, and sexy toddlers were something I had not expected to see in a family-friendly Sunday circular. You can get the full dose of my righteous wrath in the Summer number of Bitch. Contributors besides me include Jessa Crispin, Trina Robbins, Paula Kamen, and Wendy McClure. And, being that this is the “Truth & Consequences” issue, you’ll also find articles on such topics as the modern memoir and the other woman. Buy it now!

Bitch: The Masculinity Issue

If you don’t have a subscription to Bitch, you should, firstly, go straight to the magazine’s website and get yourself one. Then you should head for the nearest Bitch distributor and pick up a copy of the Spring issue. I’m not just saying this because I happen to have two short pieces in this particular issue, but, now that I’ve mentioned it, let me tell you about them.

Among the “Bitch Reads”, you will find my review of Reading Oprah, a scholarly—but neither pretentious nor arcane—investigation of Oprah’s Book Club. If you have ever looked askance at this cultural phenomenon—perhaps because you, like me, are a literary snob—Cecelia Konchar Farr will wipe the smirk right off your face with her very reasonable praise for the Book Club. Indeed, the book is worth reading just for her pleasantly devastating takedown of Jonathan Franzen.

And, because this is the Masculinity Issue, I put together a brief taxonomy of beta males on TV for the back page. Here’s an excerpt:

The Fat Slob
No TV archetype is more venerable than The Fat Slob. When Jackie Gleason—one of TV’s earliest stars—stuffed himself into a bus-driver’s uniform on The Honeymooners, he pioneered an enduring image of the working stiff who just can’t get a break. There have been other, less noble, incarnations of The Fat Slob—Homer Simpson comes immediately to mind—but The Fat Slob generally remains a sympathetic character. And he’s come a long way since Ralph Kramden’s day: He still works hard to maintain a middle-class living, but he is now, more often than not, married to a slender hottie at least a few years his junior. Just as dumpy porn actors makes it possible for Joe Sixpack to imagine himself scoring with nubile babes, the Fat Slob presents a model of sub-alpha-but-sexually-successful masculinity to which even the below-average man might aspire. Exemplars: Fred Flintstone, Dan Connor on Roseanne, Doug Heffernan on King of Queens, Jim on According to Jim.

When you buy the latest Bitch, not only will you get the rest of this scintillating article, but you’ll also get an essay on the down-low as a pop-cultural phenomenon, a bearded-lady hall of fame, and an article entitled “Senex and Sensibility: Boys to Men in Wes Anderson’s Film Oeuvre”. Obviously, you should buy it right now.

She’s a Total Velma

It seems I struck a nerve with my recent postings on girls who wear glasses. One commentator suggested that we reclaim Velma—the cleverest member of the Scooby gang—and use her name to signify a woman whose beauty and sexiness depend, at least in part, on her awesome intelligence. Thus, we might say, “That Tina Fey is a total Velma.”

I’m all for it. I have always believed that an ample brain is an asset, regardless of one’s gender, and that glasses are just another chance to accessorize. And, while I still put in my contacts when I want to slap on the liquid eyeliner, I must admit that my idea of glamour is, perhaps, slightly out of sync with at least some conceptions of sex appeal. Back when I was single and cruising the personals ads, I discovered that all sorts of guys cited Janeane Garofalo as their ideal woman, and I ended up marrying a man who listed Daria as one of his very favorite ladies. So, Dorothy Parker’s famous dictum aside, female four-eyes should know that Velmas are hot.

Archival Interview: Lily Burana

In the February 28 issue of The New Yorker, Francine du Plessix Gray reviews a new history of burlesque—Rachel Shteir’s Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show, which sounds awesome. She also mentions Strip City: A Stripper’s Farewell Journey Across America by Lily Burana, one of the best memoirs I have ever read. I talked to Burana when the book first came out in hardcover in the fall of 2001. She was friendly, easygoing, very smart, and intensely thoughtful. She spoke in the kind of succinct, fascinating, brilliant paragraphs that barely need editing. Burana was, in short, a dream interviewee, and the interview remains one of my favorites.

Oedipus, Schoedipus

The story becomes a complex—the Lot complex—because its “primal interest imposes itself upon history, religion, art and individual psychology, and people in turn impose their history, experience, personal mind-sets and imaginative skills on the biblical text.” [Robert M.] Polhemus doesn’t invent the Lot complex any more than Freud invented the Oedipus complex. What he does—thoroughly and brilliantly—is identify what has existed for millenniums of recorded history, introducing diverse examples of the archetypal transaction between a young, sometimes very young, woman and the man who, if he isn’t actually her father, is old enough to substitute.

So welcome to Daughterland, where we don’t read much Hemingway, or grill meat outdoors, and where we’re mystified, and a little bored, by all the hysteria over Oedipus, who didn’t even know it was his mother he was sleeping with. Oh, he was unlucky, certainly, so unlucky that he happened into what’s more usually the female contretemps of being sullied by sex. But can you imagine if every woman who discovered herself the unwitting accomplice to her own defilement thrust pins into her eyes? Seeing Eye dogs would march cheek by jowl down supermarket aisles.

New York Time Book Review, you sly minx, you. How coyly naughty to have Kathryn Harrison review a new study of father-daughter eros in art and culture.

I tend to enjoy Harrison’s work—including The Kiss, but also her novels Poison and The Binding Chair—and, as you can see from the excerpt above, this is a very clever review. Lot’s Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women’s Quest for Authority is the name of the book Harrison’s describing here, and it sounds pretty good, too—erudite, original, and provocative in the best kind of way.

Different but (Probably) Equal

I’m glad I didn’t bother to write anything about the kerfuffle surrounding Lawrence Summers’ recent statements about women in the sciences, because, had I actually written something, it would have looked a lot like