Monday, January 14, 2008 - Posts
-
sponsorship
Were you just being provocative, Emily? Describing a best-case abortion as nothing more than "a few not ideal hours'' makes it sound like an afternoon at the DMV without a good book. And aren't you being just as categorical as you say Caitlin Flanagan is when you argue that giving a child up for adoption is definitely trickier than having an abortion? (Except when it's not?) Whether you think abortion is morally neutral, intrinsically evil, or the gray area that hijacked our whole political debate, though, here's what I wish we could agree on: There is no other-than-partisan purpose in lobbies on both sides of this issue raising huge sums that only stoke the argument, like some hideous perpetual flame. And despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, it's the fight itself that keeps us from focusing on the widely agreed-upon need for birth control, birth control, for heaven's sake birth control.
That Erica Jong post on girl-written puff pieces that Dahlia mentioned made me laugh, though; first, why shouldn't we have enough confidence to cop to an interest in not only Iraq and the Darfur and the dollar, but also shoes and Carla Bruni and poor, poor Katie Holmes? (Today's shiniest news bauble: The man Princess Diana considered the love of her life has, as the Daily Mail put it, "run to fat.'' In his first-ever, "world exclusive'' interview Pakistani doctor Hasnat Khan, reveals ... lots less than the photo of him does. "I found her a very normal person. ... I think she did great work for the country. ... I always wanted to follow in the footsteps of my maternal grandfather, who was a doctor.'') If women really were the lead dogs on the newshound puff patrol, however, we'd completely dominate daily journalism at this point, because we are all style reporters now. There's no mystery about why that might be; as news outfits cut staff to boost stock—and are expected to magically do More with Less—it's way cheaper to provide commentary than reporting. And though women are still overrepresented on the boo-hoo brigades sent out to gather quotes from grieving families, I think I mostly differ with Jong on what the meaning of "puff'' is.
She complains that we delve into such "idiotic'' and trivial matters as a political candidate's marriage—but then also charges that we "never discuss psychological depth because hey, who cares if the president's a bomb-happy dry-drunk trying to play out an Oedipal war with his father?'' I write a lot about political marriages, so I guess her puff pastry is my meat and potatoes. But isn't looking at a candidate's closest relationships how we find out about bomb-happy dry drunks trying to play out Oedipal wars? Not a whole lot of that sort of thing comes of just-the-facts coverage of position papers. Doubtless we can do a better job of covering the issues, even in our current pared-down state. As can any readers who feel deprived of substance.
-
sponsorship
Back to Hillaryland (because who can stay out for long?): Who is she kidding when she said to Tim Russert yesterday, about herself and Obama, "I don't think either of one of us want to inject race and gender in this campaign"? I'm pretty much in favor of giving Clinton the benefit of the doubt on her recent statement about the comparative roles of MLK and LBJ, as Josh Marshall does in this post. I'd like to think she was being boneheaded rather than deliberately challenging King's legacy (which would constitute temporary political insanity). And I think it's over the top to say that pointing out that the Republicans will use Obama's drug use against him is akin to painting him as a "stereotypical black drug dealer." Obama is about as far removed from that stereotype as you can get. And a realistic assessment of his weak points in the general election is just as important as assessing his strengths. But I worry that Clinton and her people are tiptoeing up to the line of injecting race into the campaign--I hope at their peril. And they have certainly crossed it in injecting gender. They did that a long time ago, when they started preparing "handmade signs that read, 'I can be president' to hand to young girls, as John Dickerson reported.
I know that part of politics is calling the sky green when it's blue. But this disingenuity plays right into the case against Clinton that Christopher Hitchens sketches here, and this fact check today belying the Clintons' claims that Sen. Chuck Hagel drafted the 2002 Iraq war resolution that Hillary voted for, and that Hagel "said it was not a vote for war,” as she said in another problematic Meet the Press moment. Also, as my dad points out to me, Hillary was aggressive and confrontational with Russert, at exactly the moment when she's supposed to be warmer and more likeable. Is that the first female candidate conundrum that she's stuck with, or a playing out of her particular weaknesses? Both, I suppose, but today it feels like more the latter.
-
sponsorship
Emily: You nailed the problem with Flanagan's piece—the overarching, equalizing is that so officiously announces to women how "they" experience the world. Everyone's a Platonist when it comes to teenage girls and sex. One thing that was great about Juno was that it tried to take that is and smash it into pieces so that girls might know for a second what it might feel like not to have fretting, anxious adults telling them how painful their sexual experiences really are. Juno tried, instead, to tell the story of a young girl who goes through a complicated, painful experience and finds it to be—upsetting, absolutely, but not life-ending or even life-defining. I don't think that's a fairy tale at all. Juno makes a point that so often gets lost when we in the media put on our gender lens: Women, young women, react to similar experiences in a plurality of ways.
By the way: Wouldn't it be nice if pundits could retire that old saw, "Biology is destiny?" At best, it's a half-truth, applicable at certain moments (even stretches) of a woman's life. But time and again it's hauled at as the only truth.
-
sponsorship
Dahlia, agreed entirely. And now on to a subject that lies somewhere between the CIA and nail polish: Caitlin Flanagan's complaints about the movie Juno in the NYT over the weekend. (Did anyone else notice that the Times' Sunday op-ed pages were practially all XX Factor fodder?) Flanagan says that Juno is a "fairy tale" because, "As any woman who has ever chosen (or been forced) to kick it old school can tell you, surrendering a baby whom you will never know comes with a steep and lifelong cost. Nor is an abortion psychologically or physically simple. It is an invasive and frightening procedure."
It's not the sentiment that bugs me, exactly. Yes, adoption and abortion can be fraught. It's the categorical nature of the statement: Adoption is a lifelong burden; abortion is complicated and scary. Flanagan's argument, here and elsewhere, also boils down to this: Sex is bad for teenage girls. That's sometimes true, sure, but sometimes not—as Juliet has pointed out to us. Sometimes, teenage sex is caring and loving and, well, great. And sometimes an abortion is a few not ideal hours that give you the rest of your life back—nothing more. Check out this new book by abortion doctor Susan Wicklund and the stories she tells about her patients. Adoption is trickier, I grant Flanagan, if for no other reason than it means going through with a pregnancy. But wouldn't the world be a better place if girls could experience it the way Juno did? I'm glad the movie made me imagine a girl who has a baby, hands it over to another woman who desperately wants to raise it, and then goes back to playing guitar with her boyfriend on his front steps. It's a fairy tale with a purpose. I did have one quibble with the movie, though: I wished that Juno's parents brought up birth control in the scene in which they gently chide their daughter for getting pregnant. It was such a no-brainer, and the mother in me rued the missed opportunity.
-
sponsorship
Erica Jong posted yesterday on the embarrassing lack of substance in our political coverage. I don’t disagree on the merits. The media (ourselves included) have now devoted exponentially more energy to Hillary’s non-tears in Portsmouth, than they have to the sixth anniversary of Guantanamo, which occurred almost unnoticed last Friday. But she also falls prey to a piece of Steinem-ism that shouldn’t go unobserved. Jong claims that “women writers are only drafted for the most trivial subjects. We comment on style not substance, beards not policy, clothes and shoes and chick lit and cooking. The men get the big topics like war, though women have the most to lose. ... ” The implication must be that women writers are disproportionately responsible for producing the poufiness that is the mainstream media.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. For one thing, women—including many on this blog—write about the “big” topics, now more than ever. For another, as Jong herself admits in this post, women who choose to write about style over substance (as she has done “because that's all the news that's fit to print and I like shooting my mouth off on the Op-Ed page as much as anyone”) cannot then turn around and complain they’re being marginalized.
Some women choose to write about shoes and chick lit and cooking. Good for them. Other women choose to write about CIA black sites and national security. Excellent. But I am sick to my teeth of the complaint that women are only tapped to write fluff. Here, by way of a valentine to Meghan: An interview with Harold Bloom (hat tip Scott Horton) offering the same critique of the media as Jong: “Democracy, whether in Sweden or the United States, depends on the voter’s capacity to think. If you have read the best of what has been thought and said, then your cognition and understanding is on a much higher level than if you have read Harry Potter or Stephen King. So what this decline into half-literature and mediocre media really means is de facto a self-destruction of democracy.” Bloom’s interviewer, by the way, is a woman.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?