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I don't know how this escaped my notice, unless maybe it's because I never read anything newspaper ombudsmen (or ombudswomen) have to say, and not only because they are so boring. (With the business model failing, the industry in apparent freefall, staffs shrinking so fast the survivors have to scurry just to keep up on government disinformation, and left and right uniting against the lazy, dull-witted, and otherwise very bad people without whom we would know nothing—nothing!—that is going on in the world, aren't in-house scolds superfluous?) Anyway, as the rest of you doubtless saw, the public editor at the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, called out Maureen Dowd for her supposedly sexist Hillary coverage. Maybe I wouldn't feel this way if I hadn't agreed with every last nasty word of it, but since when does the public editor tell columnists what to think? "Dowd's columns about Clinton's campaign were so loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband that they could easily have been listed in that Times article on sexism,'' he wrote. OK, I never read Clark Hoyt, but he never reads Maureen Dowd? (And since she is a woman, does that make Hoyt's opinion of her opinion sexist, too?)
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The Sunday New York Times chronicled the trials and tribulations of women who run businesses and employ their husbands. The piece profiled women who sell backpacks and run temp-services agencies, women who run companies that deliver meals or set up trade-show displays. But somehow they missed my favorite female CEO, Patty Brisben, who runs a sex-toy company in a suburb of Cincinnati.
Brisben's story is your classic Horatio Alger tale. As this Cincinnati Magazine article explains, she married at 17, and her first husband left her because "he wanted to spend his life with someone who was going to be successful." Some years later, having remarried, she started selling sex toys at in-home parties to make some extra cash. Fast forward to the present: Her company, Pure Romance, did $60 million in sales in 2006. Brisben's son is the president, which frees her up to run her foundation focused on women's health, and to do things like sponsor Sex Week at Yale University. The most delicious part, though, is that Brisben allows her first husband—he who thought she wouldn't be successful enough for his liking—to help the company out as an occasional consultant. (Her other ex-husband works for her, too.)
I've never met Brisben, but—confession time—I have been to a Pure Romance party. The sales reps don't speak in clinical terms, but neither do they act like they've just stepped off the set of a porn shoot. The parties are tasteful and discreet, and sex is treated like a normal, important part of a healthy relationship. When Brisben's son sought to buy radio advertising during drive time over the objection of some stations, he explained: "Look, the moms in the minivans are the ones who need the sex toys. They're looking to spice up their relationships."
I love that Brisben has made sex toys safe for the soccer-mom set and that she is down-to-earth and magnanimous enough to make it a family business. But most of all I love it that she's succeeded in the same town that resisted Larry Flynt and Hustler for so long.
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In his "Human Nature" blog, Slate's Will Saletan rejoices over the recession's toll on the cosmetic surgery business and expresses horror at the idea that some suckers (social parasites?) still refinance their homes to get cosmetic surgery during economic downturns. Then these vain people justify their ill-gotten boobs and rhinoplasties on the grounds that their plastic surgery was "an investment." Saletan cries foul: "When you can't pay the mortgage, we're supposed to bail you out? And your surgeon calls what you did an 'investment'?"
But isn't that a perfectly reasonable perspective? Sad but apparently true: We live in a society that rewards beauty and punishes ugliness, often using the medium of cold, hard cash. A 2005 Federal Reserve study, for instance, found that attractive people—in all occupations—earned 5 percent more per hour than the physically average, while the ugly earn 9 percent less an hour than everyone else. So say you find yourself, through sheer genetic bad luck, stuck in the low-earning "ugly" category—why shouldn't you decide that putting down $5,000 for a nose job or $2,500 for a "chin augmentation" is a smart long-term investment? If you can go from "ugly" to "average," you've potentially got a lifetime 9 percent income boost right there! Even if you're utterly devoid of vanity, some wisely chosen plastic surgery might be a sound economic decision.
I'll go further: Research suggests that the benefits of physical attractiveness start at birth. Nurses in maternity wards spend more time with the cute babies. And even parents, God help us all, apparently take better care of cute kids than of ugly ones—in a 2005 Canadian study, researchers found that parents with unattractive children often didn't even bother to buckle the little tykes' seat belts. Clearly, parents, if you want your ugly kid to get a fair shake in life, you need to get him or her to a cosmetic surgeon, pronto. And this, comrades, should be our new rallying cry: high-quality, government-subsidized day care; universal preschool; and free pediatric cosmetic surgery on demand!
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I'm encouraged by the announcement from the Department of Defense yesterday about the nomination of Army Lt. Gen. Ann E. Dunwoody to the position of four-star general. If the Senate confirms her nomination, Dunwoody will be the first woman to attain a status that historically has been achieved through combat jobs, which women are not allowed to hold. What's especially promising about her nomination is the fact that the government lifted its own barrier to recognize her achievements and capabilities by allowing her to circumvent the combat route.
Still, there is plenty of progress left to be made. Only five women have attained the next status beneath Dunwoody's, that of lieutenant general, as CNN reported. Dunwoody's success shows potential, but having one woman at the top does not change the fact that so many others ranking below her have yet to rise up.
I wonder how long it will take for other women in the military to move up the ranks as Dunwoody has over the last 33 years. Her nomination was announced the same day The New York Times reported that women in the military are more likely to suffer under the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy, which requires gay members of the military not to reveal their sexual identity. According to the Times article, the percentage of women discharged from the Army last year under that policy increased from 35 percent to 46 percent, although females only make up 14 percent of the Army as a whole. How can women battle gender stereotypes to attain the top positions if many of them are being kicked out due to other types of discrimination?
In an ideal world, Dunwoody's nomination will shatter that glass ceiling for all of her talented female comrades to follow in her wake; in reality, it may take a while for women to be treated equally alongside their male counterparts in the military. Let's hope for the former. And if we reach that goal, perhaps the United States will be ready to reconsider the prospect of a female commander in chief by the 2012 presidential election.
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Kara, go forth and absorb Picasso and Bernini (and then enlighten the rest of us). For my part, I'm sorry I didn't take art history in college. Or music history. In fact I think I'm a cretin. But I also regret, just as much, that I took zero math and as little science as I could get away with. I thought I was following my passions, too, and maybe I was, but now I think of the puzzle-solving part of math, which I like, and wonder if I dropped it for the wrong ie gendered reasons.
Melinda, I should have known that if I wrote about reading a novel in the evening I would offer myself up as How Does She Do It poster-woman. From now on I will write only after watching The View and Flight of the Conchords reruns. I think mother-guilt dates from whenever mothers, whether stay-at-home or working, decided that it was no longer OK to tell their kids to run outside to play and not give them another thought until bedtime (or maybe on a good night, dinner). I would hark back fondly to that time except that it was the 1950s.
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While I can't answer Melinda's question of whether the bar for mothers-who-do-it-all was always set so high, as a young twentysomething just starting out in my career, I can see that bar vaulting upward among the women of my own generation. With few glass ceilings remaining, the limits to our professional ambitions seem next to nonexistent. But along with our heightened career expectations comes the decision to try to balance both work and family life. For all the inspirational value of Hillary Clinton's historic campaign, even she got choked up trying to explain how she did it all.
About a year and a half ago, I heard Linda Hirshman speak about her book, Get to Work ... And Get a Life, Before It's Too Late, at the women's college I attended. I remember vividly her assertion that women in college should not waste their time studying subjects such as art history. Now, I was an art history major at a liberal arts college, and among the audience were a number of art majors who had emerged from the print-making and painting studios down the hall to hear Hirshman speak. Needless to say, none of us were thrilled with her advice. We were all passionate about the subjects and challenged and fulfilled by our work. Why should we have felt guilty for pursuing our interests?
With the opportunity in recent years to disprove the stereotypes about women's aptitude (or lack thereof) in math and the hard sciences, I often felt in college that I was letting down women everywhere by taking art and literature courses instead of math and physics. Studying at a women's college, I didn't have to contend with gendered expectations about the classes I should take; test tubes and equations just didn't excite me. Still, Hirshman and others like her made me feel that there were fields into which I should venture simply because they remained unconquered by women. It's taken me some time to realize that this can't be right. Can it? Just because a woman can be an astrophysicist, doesn't mean she ought to be one, and just because female art historians are not venturing into male-only territory doesn't mean they should feel guilty about studying Picasso's cubist paintings or Bernini's sublime sculptures.
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Dana, I love that you were moved by that picture of Del and Phyllis. They're revered as foremothers of the LGBT movement. In 1955, at a time when people were arrested and lost their jobs (and lives) for being gay, when police would rape women arrested for being lesbian (honest, I'm not making this up), this couple launched the Daughters of Bilitis, the first American lesbian activist organization, and founded The Ladder, a samizdat publication that was passed from hand to hand. They risked their lives back then by using their real names.
That's the reason that Kate Kendall, who runs the National Center for Lesbian Rights, nominated this couple to be the first same-sex spouses in California—and everyone agreed. Phyllis and Del deserve the aliyah, the honor of being called to the Torah in front of the entire congregation. They've helped transform the country during the past 50 years—from what was probably the worst period in American history for lesbians and gay men, to what may now be the best.
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I think I like weddings only when they’re an act of civil disobedience. When my straight friends announce their engagements, there’s always a faint sense of dread at the impending rites of veil-lifting and glass-stomping and Pablo-Neruda-poem-reciting (coupled, of course, with a sincere wish for their lifelong happiness—but I’d wish them that whether they got married or not). But those images of the San Francisco lesbian couple, 84 and 87 years old, who were wed Monday at 5:01 p.m. after 50 years together (and after a California Supreme Court decision invalidated their marriage performed in 2004) had me tearing up like a fond aunt at a rehearsal dinner. It doesn’t get any more romantic than that: Overturn our union, will you? Great, we’ll just line up and get married again the first minute—literally—that state law allows. I love imagining the two of them, frail and bent, walking out of City Hall to a mixed crowd of supporters (both women are well-known S.F. gay rights activists) and jeering protesters with placards reading “Homo Sex Is Sin.”
I honestly think that in a matter of years, this kind of image will look to us like the 1963 photographs of George Wallace blocking the schoolhouse door as two black students attempted to enroll at the University of Alabama. Good Lord, we’ll say, can you believe it was just a generation ago that people were debating the pros and cons of institutionalized bigotry and publicly protesting the right of two octogenarian women to love each other? I just hope that shift will take a lot less than 45 years and that, when Obama gets asked about gay marriage in the fall (and you know that wedge is being sharpened by the McCain campaign as we speak), he won’t fall back on that cowardly (and tautological) dodge about how “marriage is between a man and a woman.” No duh—and it’s high time we did something about it.
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So over at Ars Technica there's a link to a really interesting study that came out the other week in Science. It suggests that the much-discussed "math gap" between boys and girls in American may stem more from social factors than from biology. The study looked at more than 275,000 students in 40 countries who took a particular exam. As the Ars Technica summary puts it:
Girls scored about 2 percent lower than boys on math on average, but nearly 7 percent higher on reading, consistent with previous test results.
The researchers, noted, however, that the math gap wasn't consistent between countries. For example, it was nearly twice as large as the average in Turkey, while Icelandic girls outscored males by roughly 2 percent. The general pattern of these differences suggested to the authors that the performance differences correlated with the status of women. The authors of the study built a composite score that reflected the gender equality of the countries based on the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, data extracted from the World Values Surveys, measures of female political participation, and measures of the economic significance of females. countries such as Norway and Sweden score very high on gender equality measures; in these nations, the gender gap on math performance is extremely small.
So what do you make of that, Lawrence Summers? Now, to be fair, the study may not have tested for variance—I haven't read through it fully—which would mean that the gap between boys and girls in performance may still be larger at the ends of the bell curve. But the findings still are remarkable.
If you click on the study, too, you'll note an irony: It suggests that while the math gap correlates to gaps in social equality, boys' lagging reading skills don't. Of course, as the summarizer at Ars Technica puts it, that doesn't mean some other social factor isn't at work. I'm sure one is—or even many.
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Emily, if you are still awake and reading novels after tucking in the tender shoots, then you are so far ahead of the game that I see a best-seller along the lines of How To Be an Awesome Mummy and Still Read Great Literature in your future, and I'll pre-order my copy right now. Here's what puzzles me, though, and I'd really love to hear back on this: When did guilt become de rigueur? No kidding, I almost feel guilty that I don't feel guilty; though I definitely make my share of mistakes, I feel pretty good about myself as a mom, and I don't hear a lot of women willing to admit that about themselves. Was the bar always so high?
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I'm sure Marjorie is right that we don't know the half of the Walkers' feud—how can we, since we're only hearing Rebecca's side? And I agree with Marjorie and Maureen that feminism should entail a little effort to think from the perspective of a woman who makes a choice that's not your own.
I also think, as others have pointed out, that Rebecca Walker's critique makes us uncomfortable (or at least makes me uncomfortable) because it entwines being an ardent feminist with being a bad mother, at least in one daughter's eyes. I can't stop myself from rushing to state the obvious: Lots of feminists are great mothers! Devoted! But I also have admitted to myself since I started work after my first son was born that there's a cost as well as a benefit from having a job that takes me away from my kids for a good chunk of the day. Tonight (after they went to bed) I picked up Meg Wolitzer's new novel The Ten-Year Nap, and the passage below jumped out at me. Amy, the 40-ish napper of the title, is talking to her second-wave feminist-novelist mother Antonia, who is forever disappointed that her daughter hasn't worked (as a lawyer) since her 10-year-old son was born.
"Oh come on, you're very smart," said her mother, "and very capable. You've always been that way."
"And I expected things of myself," Amy said. "But not everyone is that driven. And not everyone is really talented. And also," she said, "sometimes it's too difficult to make it happen."
Amy recalled herself and her sisters standing outside their mother's door, banging with their fists, telling themselves they were undermothered, when in fact for so long they had been so well and fully mothered by their intellient and creative and adoring mother that surely her mothering would have a long half-life.
But all they knew, then, was that Antonia had said. "This is my time," and that she'd gently closed her door. The girls played Jane Eyre once in a while over the years: they imagined themselves orphaned by their wonderful mother and even, somehow, by feminism itself.
This, I confess, makes me want to cry. Am I falling down the guilty-mother rabbit hole?
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There I was, all set to jump up in defense of those Pharmacists for Life whom Will and the Washington Post wrote about. Given how poorly they're likely to fare in the marketplace, their position struck me as both principled and doomed; how could I resist? I don't happen to agree with them, because limiting access to birth control seems so likely to lead to more abortions. But they have the right to sell only what they feel OK about selling, don't they? What's more American than that? Then, alas, I glanced at their Web site, which refers to an "abortoholic babe from NARAL'' and calls Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, "the Dictator of the Midwest, Guv 'Slobodan' Blagojevich ... the totalitarian abortoholic Serb reigning in Springfield, but who much rather prefers the shores of Lake Michigan to the boorish 'fundies' downstate as the kook left-wing radicals refer to anyone with Christian beliefs. Now, there's tolerance!'' Where? You guys are on your own. (And really, isn't that how you want it?)
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The Walkers' feud is way too complex and layered for us to assume we really understand what is going on between them. Clearly there's family dysfunction, old resentments, past disappointments—all the stuff that most families deal with on some level or another. I also wonder if Rebecca has some unresolved identity issues that she may also be blaming on her mother and on feminism. After all, as E.J. noted, this is a woman who for many years lived as a lesbian. She is also a biracial woman who grew up being shuttled between the two very different worlds of her divorced parents, an unconventional black mother and a conventional white father. Being raised by, and in the shadow of, a famous parent also can't be easy.
What any of this has to do with the feminist movement, I don't know. Isn't feminism all about women having choices, the freedom to live our lives as we choose without having to stay within some circumscribed set of societal parameters? Can't both of the Walkers' lifestyle choices be considered just that, choices? Rebecca chose to live as a lesbian without a biological child, and now she chooses to be married to a man with whom she has a biological child, fine. I doubt very much that she checked with the Misguided Angry Feminists Council before she made either of these decisions. The feminist movement never made me want to swear off motherhood, burn my bra, hate men, or denounce women who made choices different from mine or choices with which I disagree. The last time I checked the feminist movement has never tried to control my womb, so why is it the feminist movement's fault that Rebecca allowed her mother to solely shape her image of motherhood, and for that matter womanhood and self? I love my mother but I am not my mother, my worldview and life experiences are very different from hers. Did she make some mistakes in how she raised me? You bet. Does she also get credit for the better parts of me? Absolutely. Our mothers may define us as little girls but we define ourselves as women. My mother could never make me want or not want children, and if I were to solely blame her for either of those choices, it would be intellectually dishonest. I would never give one person so much power over me but if I had, I would also give myself some of the blame for allowing it to happen. I'll leave it to others to decide if Alice Walker deserves all of her daughter's criticisms, but I think if Alice had just supported and respected Rebecca's choices they probably wouldn't be where they are now. Women supporting and respecting one another's choices has everything to do with feminism.
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Today at 5:01 p.m. PT, same-sex couples will begin to marry. I send them love and congratulations. And I send my profound hope that every single newlywed couple—the ones who have been together for 30 years ago or for 3 months ago—may be happy together for ever and ever. Mazel tov!! For the rest of us: Did anyone see Pam Belluck's New York Times article on Sunday about lesbian and gay Massachusetts married couples? Except for the fact that it was primarily illustrated with photos of male couples (not her fault), the story was almost embarrassingly on target. She was entirely accurate about the ordinariness of lesbian and gay couples' attitudes toward marriage, now that the initial rush and excitement is over: As she notes, the numbers marrying have fallen off precipitously, the pent-up demand having been spent. Now we're marrying in more ordinary proportions.
But I got a call from a reporter today who was surprised by our ordinariness, asking: Isn't there something unique about how gay and lesbian folks respond to marriage? Well, no. Remember that we were born and raised in every ZIP code in the country, in every possible subculture, from the Bronx to Bellingham, Wash. We tend to relate to marriage the way our social peers or siblings do. The Cambridge politico gals—the ones who wash out and reuse their Ziploc bags—are going to have a different take on marriage than the Dallas debutante couples who get their hair freshly dyed every four weeks, whose take take will be just as different from that of the D.C. black-church-choir male couple. We are no more unified about our attitudes toward marriage than the rest of you.
But what Belluck did nail, embarrassingly so, was the different attitudes that men and women bring to marriage—amplified when both halves of the pair are the same sex. Whether it's nature, nurture, or culture, men and women do have some different predilections. A couple of weeks ago, when y'all were having that monogamy discussion, I bit my tongue about this. But Belluck has now outed us, so I'll chime in.
1. More women date with an eye toward serious partnerships. You know the joke, right? Q: What does a lesbian bring on her second date? A: A U-Haul. Everywhere that same-sex partnerships have been recognized, female couples sign up at twice the rate of male couples. That's two female marriages for every male marriage. That doesn't mean every woman is marriage-minded—generalizations can never fit everyone in a given group—but women do seem to be, quite literally, twice as interested in marriage as men.
2. Men marry without seeing it as necessarily monogamous. Here's the other half of that joke: Q: What does a gay man bring on a second date? A: What second date? Many gay male couples—not all, as my gay male friends have insisted to me!—leave room for the occasional meaningless sexual encounter. God bless 'em. I hope they are all wearing condoms.
3. Women are serially monogamous. If anybody cheats, it's over—but only sexually, not necessarily emotionally. I used to joke that the waiting period for female-female marriage licenses ought to be two years: If they're still together by then, they should be safe until about year seven. Here's the embarrassing part: Belluck finds a few lesbian couples who've broken up and yet who remain each others' families. (She even airs the dirty laundry of women who leave their gals and start dating men instead—many butch women I know have had to return their toasters when their gals went straight!—but she leaves out the problem of the "straight" married lady next door who starts hitting on you.) One such couple in her story is buying a duplex so that they can still raise their son together. Oy, lesbians and their exes! By the time you get to middle age, you are never dating just one woman; you are dating her entire family of exes and exes' exes. Those are going to be your in-laws, so you might as well make a good impression on them early. They have the key to her house. They walk her dog when she's away. If you have kids, they will babysit for you when you need a night alone together. Learn to love them.
5. Same-sex couples are less likely to go nuclear when they argue. OK, this is from a Science Times article earlier in the week, not the Belluck article, but this also rings true to me. If you're not blaming the entire sex for being incomprehensible, you have a little more room to laugh. My ex and I used to take each others' side in the really common arguments. It made us laugh and it helped. Until it didn't. The other point in this article also rings true: We argue just as often, and in many of the same ways. Consider what they call the "demand-withdraw" approach: One side pushes for more intimacy and the other withdraws. Two women or two men have that too. It broke up my own marriage.
Because of all the above, I'm going to guess that lesbians divorce more often—expectations are higher—and that gay male marriages last longer—they are less likely to marry in the first place, more likely to forgive straying. But I haven't seen numbers on that yet.
Once again to the Californians: Good luck, and may you persuade your neighbors that they have nothing to fear from the married women next door!
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I find it a little ironic that we're so ready to tear Rebecca Walker apart in the same forum where some of us sympathized with the plight of Ashley Dupree. No matter how gross the lot of prostitution, Dupree chose that (although we didn't know until later that she didn't need to. Still, there are other ways to pay the bills). No one chooses their parents, nor the messages those parents send about whether they were happy to have you (or, in this case, allegedly weren't. I'd say it takes a rare someone who's the pillar of self-confidence—and how do you get to be that with a mother who supposedly ignores you?—to survive the message from your own mother that you are, essentially, nothing but a burden.)
Yes, there are parts of the younger Walker's essay where she plays enough of a martyr that you want to go get a cross for her. ("A neighbour, not much older than me, was deputised to look after me. I never complained.") And she's a pretty preachy about motherhood. ("I am my own woman and I have discovered what really matters-a happy family.") Still, if there really is a tenet of feminism that "all women are sisters and should support one another," as Walker says her mother believes, why are we, if we believe that we indeed are feminist, so eager to rip her apart? I'm not suggesting everyone needs a group hug, but I do think it's hard to label her as completely anti-feminist because she has some critiques of the movement.
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Two things bother me about the Rebecca Walker essay (which last week stirred up a hot intergenerational discussion on a feminist listserv I'm on). First is her conflation of her mother and feminism. I'm sorry, but when did Alice Walker become the spokesperson for and avatar of the second wave? One older (in her 60s, I think) feminist writer on that listserv wrote that her version of feminism didn't posit motherhood as slavery; rather, her feminism meant trying to enlarge the world so that men and women didn't have to divide up the worlds of work and family because each would be involved in both. In that vision of feminism, men and women both would be important in children's lives--as would some social responsibility for children's futures, including early childhood education, flextime, and all the other things necessary to allow families to integrate work and childrearing (and, let me add, being human). That's the feminism that I learned and subscribe to. Walker, instead, personalizes her mother's mistakes (or her perception of those mistakes--hard to know whether memoirists are reliable narrators) as if Alice Walker's bad behavior stood for the mothering failures of the entire second wave. Um ... nope.
Second is the way Walker elides her relationship with Meshell (note: new spelling). Of course her past life is public and all over the Internet; there's no way she can pretend she has only been heterosexual. But in this Daily Mail piece, her lesbian "phase" is elided from her neotraditionalist narrative, in which she is lost until she finds full life satisfaction from mommy + daddy = baby. Oy. (Note for later blog post: Today California begins marrying same-sex couples! Hurray for the Golden State!)
My novice impression is that the younger Walker is melting down and has some institution in her future. But I don't know the woman, and who am I to psychologize without a license? Her mental state is none of my business. Her politics ... well, it isn't even a politics. It's just whining.
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Rebecca Walker may be a narcissist, but this quality alone is not what bothers me. Her mother Alice has been called the same, yet in the older Walker’s groundbreaking 1983 novel The Color Purple, she managed to forge some meaningful social commentary. The younger Rebecca has failed to muster career success beyond being a memoirist. In addition to her book Baby Love, Rebecca published a book in 2002 titled Black, White, & Jewish, in which she detailed how difficult it was to grow up the biracial girl of divorced parents, shuffled between coasts and homes.
As a child of divorce, myself, I get awfully tired of reading this stuff by people who blame a lifetime of issues on divorce. It’s a harrowing experience, sure, but does anyone else think Rebecca Walker probably had some issues outside of mom and dad splitting up?
Rebecca notes in the Daily Mail essay how difficult it was for her in 2004 when she told her mother she was pregnant. “[Alice] went very quiet. All she could say was that she was shocked. Then she asked if I could check on her garden,” Rebecca writes. Elsewhere, she whines that Alice vaguely considered her “a calamity,” just as madness was an obstacle for Virginia Woolf and poor health a problem for Zora Neale Hurston.
Instead of moping over how her mother’s feminism ruined her life, the younger Walker should be most concerned with how wholly anti-feminist she herself is. She is apparently incapable of writing outside of her own personal experiences as a woman, which has the effect of making her scope as a writer unusually narrow (as if she is stunted by her pair of X chromosomes). Best to hold off on crafting autobiographies until one has achieved something worthy of reflection. Catfights with mom and years of uncertain sexual identity do not a worthwhile memoir make.
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In the New York Times on Sunday, Susan Faludi reworks her American gender narrative for Obama-McCain, and argues that Obama is challenging the norm of candidate as avenging rescuer by refusing to go through the gladiator motions. I went back and read Meghan's piece on Faludi's book to remind myself why I find her approach a bit tired. And call me an unimaginative literalist, but the idea she's shopping now that Obama is the first woman president, because he's not out there posing in a flak jacket (note to campaign: plenty of time left), just seems silly.
But Faludi also rightly points that Obama is surrounded by strong women—mother, wife, sister, daughters—and that he seems proud of that, and of them, without indulging in any insecure flapping around. This reminded me of a great e-mail I got from reader Trena Klohe last week:
I'm Gen X feminist with a 4 year-old son and a 2 year-old daughter. I fret fairly often about how to raise them to be strong, confident, egalitarian-minded people.... So here's what gets me. Even if Barack Obama seems too much like the breezy new upstart, to some, isn't he also a shining example of the feminist son both generations hope is possible? Evidence that the revolution at a personal-is-political level is succeeding? A credit to Ann Dunham [Obama's mother] and the entire sisterhood of courageous, trailblazing women on whose shoulders we stand? In this light, isn't Obama's success just as much an affirmation of "second-wave" feminism as Hillary's would have been?
A different sort of role model for our sons, that's for sure. Though probably better not to point it out to them.
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Political consultants are always yammering about what a good idea it is to get the most damaging information out in the open ASAP, and on the candidate's own terms. Which is why I suspect Michelle Obama of cannily revealing that secret terrorist handshake in literally the very first moment it was safe to do so, on the very night her hubby acknowledged that he had closed the deal. The true genius, of course, was in the foresight and field work of spending the last 15 years getting millions of hapless suburban tweens and their hopelessly unhip parents thinking that this menacing shout out to fellow jihadists was harmless as a high-five; is there no end to this woman's perfidy? And that "baby mama" thing? Doubtless a plant, designed to deflect attention from the soon-to-be-released video of Michelle complaining about her husband's general messiness, and shouting, "Why'd he leave out the butter? Why'd he leave out the socks?'' Not to mention—oops, just did!—the shocking follow-up footage in which she asks a neighbor, "D'you see that?'' Let's just say I'll be curious to see what job that Fox "producer'' gets in the Obama administration.
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A few weeks ago, memoirist Rebecca Walker published an essay in the U.K.’s Daily Mail titled “How my mother's fanatical views tore us apart,” which has been making the American Internet rounds in recent days.
The mother in question is Alice Walker, prominent feminist and author of the beloved novel The Color Purple, whom Rebecca paints as a selfish, distant parent more enamored of her radical politics than her own child. Rebecca describes how her mother would leave her behind for days at a time to hole up in her studio, and how she once discovered a cruel poem her mother wrote comparing her to “various calamities that struck and impeded the lives of other women writers.” Alice’s actions left young Rebecca yearning for a “traditional mother” like her stepmother, Judy, “a loving, maternal homemaker with five children she doted on.” (Ouch.)
The crux of Rebecca’s beef with her mom, though, is Alice’s conviction that motherhood is a “form of slavery,” a belief that caused a major rift between the two women when Rebecca announced she was having a child in 2004. The two women have not spoken since Rebecca gave birth to her son, Tenzin, and Alice has reportedly cut her daughter out of her will.
Rebecca, full of the kind of new-mommy bliss that makes us childless singletons simultaneously wistful and a bit queasy, is angry that she almost gave up on this transformative experience because she drank her mother’s “rabid feminist” Kool-Aid. “Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness,” she writes. “It is devastating.”
As opinions pour in about this essay—Is feminism really to blame? Is Alice Walker a raging narcissist? Is Rebecca?—it’s interesting to remember another recent Walker family controversy. When her memoir Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood after a Lifetime of Ambivalence, was published last year, Rebecca lit some crazy fires by confessing that she felt differently about her biological son than she did about the teenage son she raised (and is still parenting) with her ex-lover, Me'shell Ndegéocello:
"It's not the same. I don't care how close you are to your adopted son or beloved stepdaughter, the love you have for your non-biological child isn't the same as the love you have for your own flesh and blood. It's different. ... It isn't something we're proud of, this preferencing of biological children, but if we ever want to close the gap I do think it's something we need to be honest about. ... Yes, I would do anything for my first son, within reason. But I would do anything at all for my second child, without reason, without a doubt."
Note to Rebecca Walker: Easy there—20 years from now, you might be the subject of an aggrieved essay yourself.
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And so begins the bride-off. Blech.
Articles like this one pitting Michelle Obama against Cindy McCain, remind me of how gross the position of first lady can really be. The wives of the candidates are being evaluated for such important qualities as jeans-size, glamour, personal wealth, public speaking abilities, and sense of style. Obama is in trouble for over-sharing (Barack is sock-challenged.) McCain for under-sharing (her financial info). Oh and now Michelle is being called “Obama's baby mama" by the ever-classy Fox News (although for my money that fist-bump pretty much redefined foreplay in America for a generation or two).
Maybe it’s too much to hope for anything less than the relentless meringue of these kinds of pieces, but given that we were but a breath away from a Cindy McCain versus Bill Clinton race, is it possibly time to rethink the way we talk about presidential spouses in a way that bypasses the size of their jeans?
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On Convictions, a thoughtful post from Rich Ford, in response to Kim and Melinda. Rich is the author of The Race Card (much more here). In thinking about whether Clinton supporters who say they'll back McCain are motivated by racism, he writes:
Of course there are a lot of explanations that don’t involve racism. Maybe some Democrats for McCain really buy into the experience line; maybe some voted for Clinton mainly due to gender solidarity and actually prefer many of McCain’s policy positions. Personally, I suspect most Democrats for McCain are driven not by racism but a much more widespread, simpler, and more primal motivation: spite.
I suspect a lot of the reason Obama supporters want to tar every Democrat gone over to McCain as a racist is that they suspect that some unsavory motivation underlies this strange shift in political alliances and jump to the most uncharitable conclusion: racism. Juries are apt to do this in discrimination cases, too: If the employer is acting out of favoritism, vindictiveness, or spite, they figure he’s probably a racist, too. But in fact the likelihood of another unsavory motivation, sufficient in itself to explain the decision, cuts against the inference of racism: If Clintonites could be motivated to support McCain by spite alone, then we have less of a reason to suspect them of racism.
Oh, by the way, before the hate mail from Clinton supporters pours in: I have no doubt that many Obama supporters would have succumbed to a spiteful solidarity with McCain had Obama lost to Clinton. (Oh, oh: Is that just going to get me more hate mail?) Crushing disappointment and a resultant spiteful backlash has been a real risk in this primary of potential 'historic firsts': Someone had to come in second, and some profound symbolic triumph over bigotry and oppression had to be delayed. That’s hard to take, and we can expect the McCain campaign to try to capitalize on the resentment of the losing faction. I think Obama could probably win the election without the racist vote, but he may have a hard time winning without the spiteful vote. Let's hope those liberals for McCain decide they like their faces enough not separate them from their noses.
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Yes, Kim, it is definitely the Age of Entrenchment, and I don't think I'm pretending that schoolyard taunts of any sort are unheard of, or that what happened to my friend's child is any particular reflection on Obama's campaign. But I don't want to be among the entrenched, either; sometimes I am wrong, and if I'm giving my friend the impression that I am suspicious of recovering Hillary supporters in that way, then I'm not averse to looking at that and maybe rethinking both my assumptions and the signals I'm sending. If things had gone the other way in the primary, I'd need a minute, too. And to be perfectly honest, I'd be winking at the old guy myself.
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Melinda, I'm sorry your friend's son got tagged as a racist for supporting Hillary. But please: Let's not get it twisted.
My kids' school is almost a 50-50 split between black students (African-American, Haitians, Jamaicans, etc.) and white, with a smattering of Asians and Latinos, a good cultural diversity program and all the required social studies curriculum about "teaching tolerance" (a phrase I detest, by the way). Yet we've had incidents of name-calling and teasing and grief that involve race, perceived sexual orientation, body size, academic ability, religion (my friend's Muslim daughter was asked quite casually if she was carrying a bomb in her backpack), etc., etc. Is every other school in America such a bastion of maturity and civic-mindedness and tolerance (that word again!) and acceptance and understanding and full-throttle multiculturalism that these things do not occur? Wow! To pretend that this particular incident is a problem by and/or of Obama or his supporters and not instead another symptom of a far larger and far older American (and indeed human) problem is ridiculous on its face.
The problem is not this campaign. The problem is that we, all of us, remain essentially segregated in this society, not only by race but by class and religion and political views. We live in our own little enclaves, all of us, segregated and self-righteous and increasingly entrenched. The Age of Entrenchment, I call it, when for all the millions of people like me blathering on across the Internet, no one ever really changes her or his mind about anything, or indeed even hears any statement or argument or evidence or passionate plea except that which confirms what they already believe. Any surprise our children are picking up on this nastiness?
As for flirting with McCain, I have two things to say. One of them is this essay—and forgive me for always dragging Tim Wise (a man!) into this forum, but the dude speaks with such fearless clarity it makes no sense to try to replicate.
The second is this: Please, please, please, by all means, go ahead and vote for whomever you want, and let the chips fall where they may. Just stop threatening us already. In this heat it's tiresome.
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The problem with being a judge who loves to shock is that you're a flashy barracuda in a school of plain tuna, and you risk careening off into the high seas that are the province of public officials who are just too out there for their own good. Such is my thought after reading that Judge Alex Kozinksi posted porn on a web site he thought was private, but wasn't. The material included "a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal," we learn from the LA Times. We can't judge for ourselves anymore, because the site has been wiped clean, but if Judge Kozinski says that he found the porn funny, I bet he did--and it was probably offensive, too. Herein lies the Kozinski challenge. He is a transgessor, a flouter of boundaries, a man of many appetites. When he wrote a week-long diary for Slate in 1996, he told us all about going to a lingerie and pajama party. ("The Location: Gatsby's Rendezvous by the Sea, 'the house that all of Malibu deems the scandalous haven of sleepless nights.'") When I profiled him in 2004, the art for the piece depicted him as a circus master--and he liked it enough to ask for a copy. Plenty of other examples could be inserted here, and Phil Carter (on Convictions) has plenty of company in appreciating Judge K's quirks. Lots of reporters and court watchers have urged him onward with our appreciation. And now that we know that among the many things he appreciates are women painted to look like cows, how can we go all schoolmarmish? I know, I know, judges are supposed to be beyond reproach, and this is the opposite of that. And yes being outed for semi-public porn-sharing while trying an obscenity case is pretty rich. It's the sort of plot twist Judge Kozinski would write into a screen play. Maybe that's the answer: Toss the bench and move to Hollywood.
(Cross-posted on Convictions.)
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Melinda, George Will has a plan for how to bring Hillary voters back into the Obama fold - scare ‘em! On Hardball Monday night, George Will said he suspects that "three quarters of the country at this point does not know that John McCain is pro-life" and speculated that "once the Democrats make that known, as surely they will, [women] will come scampering back to the Democratic Party in droves."
Setting aside the light condescension of the word "scampering" (it's what furry little animals do) I wonder if Will's right - if the Democrats might actually benefit from a social issues flare-up. If NOW and NARAL start tearing away at McCain over abortion, aggrieved Hillary-supporting feminists will give up their flirtation with the Maverick. On the other hand, ending the abortion détente could galvanize the Evangelical Republicans that have been sitting on the backbench.