Tuesday, May 20, 2008 - Posts
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That's funny, Meghan—when you just posted asking if any of us had seen Philip Weiss' cover piece for this week's New York, I was debating whether it was worth gathering my own thoughts about it. Poor Weiss is already being eaten alive, entertainingly, in the comments section, and really, his piece is such a feverish blend of anecdotal evidence, confessional sexual fantasy, and ev-psych chestnuts (there are enough "hard-wiring" arguments in there to power a mainframe) that it kind of critiques itself. But if nothing else, you have to marvel at the guy's self-immolating candor, his willingness to expose his fantasy life to public scrutiny in his quest for what the old Kris Kristofferson song called "some strange." I'm all for dismantling our culture's understanding of marriage as a state-sanctioned commitment to lifetime heterosexual monogamy. But what about prioritizing the "heterosexual" part—and granting all Americans the civil rights that come with marriage—before we start rejiggering the "monogamy" part so straight guys can collect all the women they want?
As you point out, what Weiss tries to frame as a radical rethinking of marriage amounts to a code of conduct so familiar as to be reactionary. Hey, what if we lived in a world where, because of their struggles with monogamy, men were subject to a less restrictive set of sexual expectations than women? And what if, instead of working as, say, waitresses, young women could fashion alternate careers for themselves as professional "mistresses"? What if sloppy think-piece writers could conflate the practices of "empowered" courtesan-bloggers like Debauchette or the polyamorous authors of The Ethical Slut with the sequestration and abuse of 14-year-old girls by the FLDS cult? Oh, wait, we're living in that world already.
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Has anyone sat down yet with New York's cover story, a long essay entitled "The Affairs of Men: The Trouble with Sex and Marriage," pegged to the Eliot Spitzer scandal? Inside, however, is not an outré confession but a fiftysomething baby boomer's long-winded attempt to rationalize his desire to screw a variety of women despite being married. Though it presents itself as provocative and edgy, the piece is inflected with the naïve, wishful rhetoric of 1970s thinking about sex.
Philip Weiss, the author, explains that men "hunger for sexual variety" and determines that this hunger is "a basic and natural and more or less irresistible impulse." He comments on Ashley Dupre's "luscious body." He reports that men are using more porn than ever and quotes Mark Penn wondering what will happen when women "realize it." He notes that sexless marriages among power couples are endemic. He harps on his own desire for "some strange." Yet when his exasperated wife proposes an open marriage in response to all his bellyaching, he flinches at the thought that she might avail herself of the new rules, too: "No thanks." Throughout, he presents a view of men as virile, prowling predators and of women as gentle, jealous keepers of social calendars who simply don't feel monogamy to be as much of a challenge as men do. (His wife tells him that the women she knows aren't that interested in sex.) And thus he frets over a "never-ending battle of the sexes," which might be boiled down to: "Men Like To Spread Seed, Women Get Jealous." My god, the man has put his finger on it! And only how many decades after Charles Darwin did it better?
The piece has myriad problems. But the main problem is that it offers nothing new. Weiss is deeply enamored of what he takes to be his own willingness to challenge cultural mores about sex, yet the piece could have as easily been written in 1978 as today. Weiss' cultural references are antiquated—Yoko and John, Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife—and so are his attitudes. (Prime example: He fantasizes about persuading waitresses in New York that it would be "cool" to have an affair.) There's certainly plenty still to be said about the complexities of monogamy in married life, but at this point the starting point for the conversation should be a lot more advanced than Weiss'. It certainly would have to include the fact that women may well find monogamy to be almost as difficult as men do. One 2007 study found that among married couples with children, some 37 percent of women and 40 percent of men cheated. That's not a huge discrepancy. I pressed to the end hoping for some, any, fresh insight (For example: Has feminism changed women's relationship to sex and marriage? Do couples raised in the post-feminist age deal with their sexual appetites with more clarity than boomer couples do?)—but I kept finding only the same "truth" you find in Philip Roth novels of late: a rather fuzzy picture of the darkness of sexual desire.
To put it plainly, it's tiresome to read men dilate at length on their own hemmed-in libidos while refusing to seriously examine three things: 1) the possibility that unfettered sexual freedom might not actually solve all their emotional problems or satisfy their fantasies, 2) the possibility that their wives might feel the same complicated desire for sexual novelty, and 3) that one consequence of sexual freedom is jealousy. Weiss coyly refers to his desire to have a threesome with a blogger named Debauchette and waxes enthusiastic about breaking down sexual taboos and setting up free-loving polyamorous compounds. (Been there, done that, circa 1971, no?) He goes on and on about sexual variety but doesn't characterize just what it is about variety that's appealing to him and his anonymous peers: the possibility of a brutal, depersonalized sexual encounter? The sheer bounty of potential partners? Novelty itself? All of the above? I'd love to read some, well, probing writing about this.
Basically, the piece lost me as soon as it became clear that Weiss wanted to have zipless fucks while his wife was home planning his social calendar. (Talk about presenting yourself in an anti-erotic light.) It lost me again when I reached the end and found that he never paused to complicate his assumption that having sex with more women would make him happier—and be as mysterious and thrilling as his fantasies. Sex is rarely frictionless. Let's assume that—and then ask what it might be like to be more honest about it.
Read more XX Factor reaction to Philip Weiss' New York magazine article.
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Well, I’ll bite Hanna.
Of course Hillary Clinton is a victim of sexism. She’s also a victim of classism, regionalism, her own cross-eyed optimism, of massive political miscalculation, and of her association with epic philanderer Bill Clinton. The fact that she and some of her supporters may be willing to single out just one of those “isms” and blame it for all her woes is testament to how much identity politics can flatten a country of otherwise intelligent thinking people into a bunch of compulsive one-notes. Sure sexism is partly to blame for Clinton’s failure. But for her to claim that it’s solely to blame or even mostly to blame—oh, and that the media’s failure to harp exclusively on that sexism in this campaign constitutes yet more sexism—is evidence of how far the women’s movement still needs to move in this country.
You wanna play with the big boys? Embrace complex causation! Sexism sucks. But the surest way for feminists to be reduced to mere women is with the claim that absolutely everything bad that happens to them happens because they are mere women.
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Interesting report, released today by the American Association of University Women, which says that the idea of a boys' crisis in education is so much bull. Being one of those women who struggled in school with math (because it did not interest me, or because I was given the idea that, as a girl, I would not be good at it?), I always read these statistic-laced reports with a Twain-esque hairy eyeball. Still, I find compelling the conclusion that the "largest disparities in educational achievement are not between boys and girls, but between those of different races, ethnicities and income levels." Likewise, I applaud the attempt by the AAUW to debunk the histrionic contention that academic gains made by girls in our schools have come at the expense of boys. But what to make of my visit yesterday to the Boston Day and Evening Academy, an amazing alternative high school in the city for kids who are overage for grade level and at high risk for dropping out. The school's enrollment is 55 percent girls, 45 percent boys—also 65 percent black and 27 percent Latino—despite the fact that boys drop out at much higher rates than girls. The gender discrepancy occurs across racial groups, but the gap between male and female dropout rates is higher for black students than for either whites or Latinos. (Not so for Asians, whose overall dropout rates are low). Boys in general may not be in crisis, but from my vantage point, black boys are. Girls didn't cause it. And, lord knows, girls still have their own battles to wage. But the more public schools I see, the heavier grows the plate of worry I carry around for my son. My daughter's plate pretty much stays the same.
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We have reached the moment of the endless military metaphor—the image of one lone warrior steeling herself against the tsunami of enemy forces—which, as any Hillary watcher knows, marks the beginning of the end. Yesterday, in the front-page New York Times story about Hillary and the gender wars, Jodi Kantor let on that Hillary had declined to be interviewed earlier about gender dynamics in the race because it would be "impossible for her to address in a frank way." This implied some deeper, darker truth she would share with the American public when the time was right. Yesterday, in Maysville, Ky., she broke her silence. Instead of letting Ferraro speak for her, Hillary said it herself: "It's been deeply offensive to millions of women"—"It" being the "sexist" pundits, the lewd t-shirts, the "Iron my shirt" moron (who turned out to be the best thing that's happened to Hillary). The sexism is "more respectable," "more accepted," than, say, other unmentioned "isms," she went on, and then on again: The press shrugs at the "incredible vitriol" engendered by the "misogynists."
Ah, bitter, contented Hillary. We have finally come back around to where we started. After the weeping Hillary, the gun-toting Hillary, the race baiting Hillary, now we finally have a Hillary we recognize. Back in the Clinton years, Joe Klein used to write how Hillary was all purposeful and aglow when her husband was discovered to be cheating, because it restored her to the central, aggrieved position where she was most herself. This suggests that for the next 24 hours, or perhaps two weeks, we will get the very best of Hillary: alive, comfortable, warm and toasty and angry all at the same time. She will be our Dolly Parton, our Oprah, our Artemis, our Thelma and Louise: the "avenging angel," as Kantor put it, for millions of American women who have been wronged in some way. We, the women of the press, will be held to feel guilty, responsible, nostalgic, elitist. We will somehow have to explain ourselves. Anyone want to go first?
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