Tuesday, June 16, 2009 - Posts
-
sponsorship
When I was reading Sandra Tsing Loh's article in the Atlantic that we've all been discussing, I found myself getting distracted by a lot of things, among them the ostentatious dishes of the male cook in the household she visits for dinner. I know she emphasized this for bitter effect, but it did ring true in that it sometimes strikes me that when men cook, they like to cook fancy—as opposed to women, who are what one food editor I know calls the "little brown wrens" of the cooking world... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
Dahlia, Hanna, Jess, Abby: This debate over marriage arrives as I am
in a perfect storm of marriage-related texts. In addition to Tsing
Loh’s provocative piece about why everyone should get divorced, I’m in the middle of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Gay Talese’s controversial account of the 1960s sexual revolution, and Christina Nehring’s excellent A Vindication of Love,
a polemic making the case for the importance of love—messy, violent,
volcanic, inequitable love—in women’s lives. Perhaps I, too, have read
too many books, but I don't quite agree that a) the real drag is
children, not marriage or b) that Tsing Loh is a victim of magazines
that peddle a vision of a life of “perfect romantic intimacy” and
“perfect mothering.” Taken together, all this material suggests just
how idealized the "companionate" marriage has become. So let me ask:
Could she just have decided that such a marriage is, well, not for her?
And that—gasp—she was going to be arch about what has, after all,
become the sacred cow of feminism?
Her piece is most interesting to me for the personal corrective it
offers to the view that a present-day equitable partnership between a
man and a woman is the ideal arrangement to which all of us should
aspire. In a sense, Tsing Loh is just writing about the old division
between passion and intimacy / security. She doesn’t have much new to
say (this has been a debate forever, and at some point
someone—me—inevitably reminds us all that “courtly love” was originally
adulterous love, an ameliorative balm to the tedious social
arrangements that were marriage). But I found it refreshing to hear a
woman confess so baldly that ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
I found myself gagging at the first line of Sandra Tsing Loh's article
where she says, "Sadly, and to my horror, I am divorcing." Something
about that horror part got under my skin—that she was trying to
convince us, her readers, that divorce was something that "just
happened" to her, outside of her control. And that was only the
beginning of the pity-party. Having an affair, she confesses, "was a
surprise." Her decision not rebuild her marriage: "heart-shattering."
Words to induce our pity, to absolve her responsibility to her
committment, her husband, her friends, and her children. The whole
article, to me, read as ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
Hanna, I read the Sandra Tsing Loh piece not as a condemnation of modern marriage, and not even as a parable about the impossibility of modern motherhood,
but as a cautionary tale about building your life around what Tsing Loh
describes as a life spent “taking with me ... to my bed, a glass of
merlot and a good book.” Because the only villains in this piece are
the books—the piles and piles of books that she uses to arrange her
life. From what she depicts as her “lazy, undisciplined attachment
parenting” to the nearly pornographic, Pottery Barn descriptions of her
friend’s kitchen renovation, the story leaps from one fashionable
marriage book to the next. She won’t hire a nanny because of Barbara
Ehrenreich’s dictum that she’d “never let another woman scrub her
toilets.” Her friends’ absurd husbands are either “cheating” with
subscriptions to gourmet magazines or bookmarked porn sites. Whole
conversations with her girlfriends ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
Late last Friday, in a development that hasn't gotten enough attention,
a judge appointed by George W. Bush breathed a big breath of life into
a lawsuit that seeks to hold John Yoo accountable for the abuse suffered by Jose Padilla, one of the Bush administration's most notoriously mistreated one-time enemy combatants. I've written about Padilla's suit against Yoo for Slate.
When it was filed, Padilla's lawyers were accused of abusing the legal
system by going after Yoo, a sole former Bush lawyer who is on the
faculty of Berkeley's law school. (Disclosure: Padillla's counsel
include Jonathan Freiman, who is a friend of mine, and students in a
Yale Law School clinic, where I'm a fellow.) Let's just say that last
week's ruling by Judge Jeffrey White is a major victory for Padilla and
sweet vindication for the lawyers who represent him. The judge rejected
all but one of Yoo's claims of immunity and said... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
Hanna, I too read the Sandra Tsing-Loh piece in the Atlantic, and I think she's missing part of the point. It's not modern marriage that's the problem, it's modern child rearing. Motherhood and marriage are inextricably linked in Tsing-Loh's piece, and while she never explictly says it, she chooses modern motherhood over her marriage:
Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I cannot take on yet another arduous home- and self-improvement project, that of rekindling our romance. Sobered by this failure as a mother—which is to say, my failure as a wife—I’ve since begun a journey of reading, thinking, and listening to what’s going on in other 21st-century American families.
But even though Tsing-Loh complains about the "staggering working mother's to-do list," she refuses to ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
In this month’s Atlantic, Sandra Tsing Loh
writes about her recent divorce from her husband of 20 years. Divorce
is not, for her, what it was in the Gloria Gaynor days, a path to
delirious freedom and dramatic rebirth. Instead, her marriage dissolves
the way it was lived, with haggling over domestic tedium. Tsing Loh,
who had the affair (as she confesses obliquely), guiltily offers to
keep changing the kitty litter.
What’s ultimately distressing about her essay is not the details of
the divorce (affair, alienation, what to do with the kids) but her
dismal portrait of the modern American marriage. Long-term monogamy is
obsolete and unnatural in any age, she argues, with some support from
anthropologists. But in our age, when relationships are governed by
children’s needs and defined in management speak, they are doomed.
“Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I can not take on
yet another arduous home and self improvement project, that of
rekindling our romance,” she writes.
The piece has its exaggerations and tropes—for example the scene
where her group of girlfriends, who stand in for all womankind,
suddenly break down and confess that they, too, are dying to get
divorced.
But many of the details in her very vivid and damning portrait are
bound to resonate. The most common and seemingly happy marriages are ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
Yes, Vanessa, you are right that the Iranian elections are an argument against "U.S. interference" as a tool of democratization—if, by that, you mean U.S. military intervention. However, they are an excellent argument in favor of more peaceful forms U.S. democracy promotion, by which I mean radio programs like Radio Free Europe's Radio Farda, support for human rights websites (such as the excellent iranrights.org) based outside the country and training and other kinds of support and training organized by the National Endowment for Democracy and similar groups. The point of such exercises is ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
So Iran's Guardian Council has agreed to do a partial recount of the votes, according to the New York Times
and other sites, in response to street riots and protests larger than
any in the country since 1979. If you haven't yet seen pictures of
what's taking place, you have to check out this gallery
from The Big Picture. (The image of the protestor helping the injured
riot officer is amazing.) As everyone else has already noted, too, it's
fascinating that social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs have
helped fuel protests and fervor. It's become a cliche that ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
I have a strange fascination with Eliot Spitzer. There, I said it.
It's true. I suppose that's in part due to the fact that when
Spitzergate roared its way into the headlines, I was running a project
in which I was (for reasons that now escape me) collecting e-mails from men who had paid for sex
about why they had paid for sex. Spitzer was one of those guys. I mean,
he didn't send me an e-mail (not that I'm aware of, anyway), but he was
one more john who had paid for sex, and the only difference was that A)
he had gotten caught and B) he was famous.
Since, I've followed the guy's fall from grace and heady reascent to Slate columnist. Most recently, the kids over at Vanity Fair took him out to lunch,
and John Heilpern succeeds in getting the former governor to open up
over hotdogs. These days, Spitzer works for his father, a real estate
tycoon. He's worked doggedly to rehabilitate his reputation, but ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?