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Here is an entry in the category of why my husband is better than your husband. Since the minute he read the review of Love and Consequences, the book by a white girl (Margaret Jones) raised in South Central by a black foster mother, "Big Mom," David has insisted it must be made up. I meanwhile insisted that he was just being cynical, world-weary, crass. I have lately been spending lots of time in poor, run-down apartment complexes and was affected by the idea of a gang-banger who could live to write about it. So much so that a couple of days ago I bought the book. You know where this is headed. I was literally just settling in tonight to crack open the book when I hear David running triumphantly up the stairs. Indeed, he was right. The New York Times reports that the entire thing is made up. Every bit of it. Apparently her sister called the publisher when she read about the book and saw a photo of the author, whose real name is Margaret Seltzer. The chick grew up in the San Fernando Valley, with her own family. She went to a private Episcopal school. In the Times story, she still seems, queerly, to defend herself, insisting she was giving a voice to the voiceless. The voiceless? Has she not seen American Gangster, or listened to any rap music? "Maybe, it was an ego thing," she tells the Times. Yeah, maybe.
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Yes, Charlotte Allen really has outdone herself with this one, but then we’re all writing about it and forwarding it and reading it, so the Post really sort of won by losing again, didn’t it? In case anyone at the Post (and yes, the Post owns Slate) cares about anything beyond the click-throughs, the Allen piece does illuminate all of the Five Universal Commandments of Writing About Women:
1. It’s not sexism if it's women trashing women.
2. Writing by women about women need not be held to the same critical or analytical standards as writing by men because—I suppose—we really are as stupid as Allen suggests.
3. No need for originality in pieces by women about women. Oprah, Celine, and Grey’s Anatomy never get old. Good times.
4. When all else fails, say the piece was meant to be funny. Then you can say that anyone who didn’t like it has no sense of humor.
5. Laugh all the way to the bank.
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Like Liza, I am not a huge fan of the b-word; how about we send Cindy to that boy's house? Tina Fey's "Bitch is the New Black" joke about how it takes women mean as nuns to get things done is funny—as was Hillary, in her good-natured appearance on this week's SNL. I know from ass-kicking nuns, though, and some of them were (and are, of course) happy, funny people, while others were too mad to function and so did things like spend an hour yelling at a seventh-grader for having a hickey on her neck, or berating that nice Mrs. Tennis until she put her head down on the desk and cried. Not that this wasn't understandable, in a way: These unsalaried women carried the church, did all of its scutwork, and waited on and deferred to Father, right or wrong, without receiving so much as a pension in return, and very few thank-you notes. But, no joke, the result was not always competence in the classroom.
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Today, Washington Post science writer Shankar Vedantam has a piece titled "Intimate Rivalries" about how married couples and close friends negotiate their jealousy when they are both in the same field. He says researchers have found that "unhappy couples and friends unconsciously fall into the trap of competing in the same domain," while happier couples find different aspects of work at which to excel. I have long agreed with Emily B.'s musing on whether Bill hasn't subconsciously wanted Hillary to fail. It would be hard for even the most well-adjusted half of any couple to see their spouse take over the same job—a job that represented the pinnacle of achievement—and face the possibility of being bested. (Let's stipulate that Bill is not the most well-adjusted spouse.) He has long worried about his legacy—the late'90s were too peaceful to present the chance for greatness that more challenging times provide. Don't you think Bill has fretted that Hillary, having the discipline and toughness that he lacks, might show him up as a war-time president, while he fiddles on the sidelines with his foundation? Don't you think he's secretly the biggest Obama supporter of all?
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Thank you to Feministing for pointing out that after getting hundreds of reader comments, the Post tried to mute the Allen controversy by quietly changing the headline from "Women Aren't Very Bright" to "Why Do Women Act So Dumb?" Now that's forthright.
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I always like to hear an old voice from the Independent Women's Forum if just for nostalgia's sake. And Charlotte has always been one of my favorites. So Charlotte, here's my reponse. There is already such an office novel. It's called Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. In it, the MEN are pathetic, conniving, sad, desperate office-cooler junkies. It's set in an advertising firm, and their current project is an attempt to make breast cancer funny. Nearly an entire chapter is devoted to their obsessing over who stole someone's office chair. It's a great novel and very convincing. And then of course there's the original office buffoon, David Brent (the Ricky Gervais character) in The Office. A much grander idiot than any woman could ever be.
As for the cultural complaints—the I can't believe that Celine Deon sells tickets or that Oprah Winfrey exists. I can only say I feel the same way about Seal, and Barry Manilow, and also the Capital Gang.
And the charge that Hillary has stocked her staff with idiot female loyalists. That one is easy. We've just lived through the male version of that phenomenon. No great brains in that operation.
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Just to revisit for a second the thread about profanity: Emily's Tina Fey homage and Cindy Loose's parking lot dispatch both arrived, for me, at an opportune moment. Last week, my sweet and cheerful 12-year-old came home to report that a boy on her middle-school bus had called her a bitch—or, as she put it, "the b-word." As is often the case, I marveled at how my sixth grader is encountering so many things so much sooner in life than I did—algebra, fluid dynamics, and now, gratuitous bursts of misogynistic profanity. One minute you are sitting in your seat thinking about homework, or groceries, and the next minute you are being angrily reminded of your gender. As a parent, it was hard to know what my role should be: I know she's going to hear bad words on the bus (she hears them when I am looking for a parking space), but does she have to put up with that particular word, directed at her particularly? How does it affect your sense of self, at 12, to be called a bitch by a boy? Did this signal the start of the loss of self-esteem that some feminist theory maintains sets in at her age? Or was that the prior generation of girls that happened to? And what should I do about any of this, aside from assuring her that she doesn't have to put up with a comment like that, ever? In this case, that was enough: She knew it anyway, and in fine Loosian fashion had already told the boy (who is well-known for colorful commentary) to cork it and resolved to avoid him on the bus. A friend sitting near her later told a school counselor. It may have bothered me more than it bothered her: While I loved Tina Fey's riff, the b-word, directed at my daughter, still had a real power and potency. And it did bother her enough to tell me about it.
I was also struck by the comment the Hillary supporter made to Cindy in the parking lot. To me, one of the underexamined questions of the campaign is how much and in what way a female president would or would not change—well, everything. Attitudes, language, middle-school bus conversations, judicial appointments, workplace policy, parking lot tirades: What would change, exactly, and what wouldn't? Would there be less sexist invective in the world, or more? More angry outbursts, or fewer? What would the trickle-down effect be, or not be? One senses that the female primary voters of Texas and Ohio may be asking themselves that right now: stick with the woman candidate, or decide that gender is not a deal-breaker? In an effort to win the continued allegiance of women, Hillary broached the topic in last week's debate, saying, "I am thrilled to be running, to be the first woman president, which I think would be a sea change in our country and around the world, and would give enormous [APPLAUSE] ... you know, enormous hope and, you know, a real challenge to the way things have been done, and who gets to do them, and what the rules are." She says this kind of thing elsewhere, of course, rightly stressing the historic nature of her candidacy, but may feel constrained from elaborating because she feels an even more pressing need to shore up her credentials as commander in chief, and it's hard, frankly, to do both, implying that some things will be different with a woman at the helm, while others, like America's military readiness, won't. At any rate, I wished she had spelled out what "things" and what "rules" she had in mind. Perhaps she does in stump speeches. A friend of mine argues that the reason Margaret Thatcher was accepted lo these many years ago is because the British, with their history of queens, have a national imagination that accepts the image of a powerful female leader. Would the election of a woman U.S. president mean that our national imagination had enlarged? Would it mean the work of equality was done—or just getting started? Another friend has a 9-year-old boy who is an Obama supporter: He likes to circle newspaper photos of Hillary supporters, marshaling evidence that they are mostly "bitter old women." Apparently it's a laughable notion, to a 9-year-old boy, that a woman might be bitter. His view might change once he starts riding the middle-school bus.
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At the risk of dignifying the inane with more indignation than it's worth, did the Washington Post really run, as one of its main weekend Outlook pieces, an essay whose sole point is to argue that women are dumb? The writer, Charlotte Allen, describes a friend's plot for a novel called Office of Women, "in which nothing ever gets done and everyone spends the day talking about Botox." She ends by urging women just to relax and "not mind the fact that way down deep, we are ... kind of dim." In between those brilliant bookends isn't any sort of serious discussion of the research on sex differences, just unfunny stereotypes by the shovelful. I'm not surprised that Allen would write this kind of drivel. But I'd like to be surprised that the Post (which owns Slate) would prominently publish it. Can anyone seriously imagine Outlook headlining the stupidity of Latinos or evangelical Christians or chimpanzees, for that matter, in this callow, unsupported way? Will there ever be a time in which feminism-bashing women won't enjoy lower publication standards ? I'm all for provocative—bring it on. But this essay does that word a disservice.
UPDATE: John Pomfret, the editor of Outlook, says Allen's essay was a joke. Right, that sorry editor excuse. The only problem is that the essay is so not funny.
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That Tina Fey riff is great—Hillary as ass-kicking nun. Hillary fares much better in that one than she does in the latest show running at Second City, the famous Chicago comedy theater, original home of Tina Fey (and Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray and Jim Belushi). That one is also equal-opportunity skewering, where the show makes fun of Obama and Hillary. But she of course comes off much worse. In their famous skit, Hillary (posing as Sillary Tinton) tries to hire an assassin to kill Obama, but she can't find one because they're all in love with him. The real Obama went to see the show with his wife and laughed his head off. Hillary hasn't gone yet. Here's an NPR report on the show.
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Mom who works at home: Bill will be picking up the girls today.
Non-salaried mom: Why, are you out of town?
M: No, just on deadline.
N: Well that's awfully nice of him. I hate for him to have to do that.
M: It's not nice; he's their dad.
N: But, you can't come?
Is this conversation ever going to change?