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Well, what confused me is that Tien does not describe her marriage as a bad marriage, or her predicament as particular. "Don't misunderstand. I would not, could not disparage my marriage," she writes, after spending 500 words describing her husband as a drivelling idiot. And then: "Nor is Will the Very Bad Man that I've made him out to be. Rather, like every other male I know, he is a Moderately Bad Man." And then she has a scene in which she and her friends are standing around and one of them announces she is getting divorced, and none of them expresses shock or pity. Instead, their faces show "could it be?—yearning?" Now the fact is, in our class and generation of women, and presumably Tien's, far fewer marriages actually do end in divorce. (Ten percent is the lowest statistic I've seen.) So maybe this is all about fantasy, and thus harmless. The flip side of this argument is Roiphe's—that in our child-centric culture when a woman with a child does actually get divorced, she suffers a fair amount of scorn and stigma. So the surprise for me was that even in couples with decent marriages—or who seem to have decent marriages—women spend a lot of time hating their husbands and fantasizing about divorce but not actually pursuing one.
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Forgive me for wondering whether the whole “women-who-crave-divorce-in-print” boomlet we’re contemplating here is yet another manifestation of the “mommy wars” phenomenon. That is the media-created dustup wherein approximately 18 women (all of them upper-middle-class residents of Manhattan) purport to speak for all American women, in describing a nonexistent raging conflict between stay-at-home and working mothers. It turns out they speak for precisely nine women at each end of the bell curve—the nine women who stay at home and hate working moms, and the nine women who work and hate stay-at-home moms.
But the huge bulge on the bell curve that is the mass of part-time, flex-time, volunteer, work-from-home, struggling-along, working-it-out, too-busy-to-care moms nevertheless watch in awe as the caricatures play out in fiction and in the media. We can’t get enough of those mommy-wars stories!
Even casting this current discussion as a choice between “I contemplate divorce every day" and “my husband and I never fight" highlights the problem: Why do we want to cast our marriages in such cartoonish extremes? I find myself wondering whether women need to take this sort of outrageously simple position (“I hate my kids” “I loathe my husband”) in order to get published, or if we like to read about complicated subjects rendered in cartoonish ways?
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Well, I suppose that through a certain feminist lens everything looks like progress (From Anna Karenina to Ellen Tien). There was a time when any literary heroine who attempted some escape from the confines of a dull, loveless marriage wound up dead or alone or trapped in a dull, loveless marriage anyway. Then came the silent sufferers of the John Cheever era. And now we have our raging house bitches, freed by the pen. And I suppose there's a certain justice in that. Men don't do it because it still seems petty or pathetic or somehow beneath them to trash their wives in print (i.e., Philip Weiss' condescension). With women, the act still carries an outrageous glamour. (Katie Roiphe wrote a recent essay in New York about how happy she was about her divorce. Claire Bloom's memoir about her marriage to Philip Roth, among others, is a classic, and Roth only sought revenge obliquely, through a fictional Eve.) But I guess I don't see the liberation or happiness at the end of this road. Freedom from housework, freedom from the sole responsibilities of child-rearing, freedom from semi-arranged marriages. I'm with you. But freedom from intimacy? Freedom from love? And then what?
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Ann and Meghan, when I tried to come up with male journalists and essayists who run down their wives last night, Norman Mailer kept popping into my head. Wrong era (and maybe wrong kind of misogyny). The men's companion volume to The Bitch in the House, as I recall, was mild and mewling by comparison. Do women bitch more because they're bitchier or because they have more to bitch about? I like Ann's image of Iron Women wives clubbing their plankton husbands, but I wonder if those are mostly literary poses. Another thought: Writers like Ellen Tien are practicing self-deprecation run amok and misdirected to include not only themselves but the men near and dear to them. When I wrote recently about parents who dissect their family lives in print, the writers I interviewed unfailingly told me that they themselves, and their failings, were the real subject. The Bitch writers seem to depart from this model all too readily. Maybe that's because they extend their unflinching self-analysis to their husbands and marriages. Their men's pores and warts are as coldly exposed as their own, but maybe somehow that seems OK, because the whole thing originates in self-critique, even if it ends up somewhere else entirely.
Hanna, I don't know about you, but I feel like among the married women I know, contemplating divorce is a huge fault line. For some women, it's like prodding a sore tooth—both irritating and somehow comforting. And for other women, it's just not part of their universe—not today or yesterday or 10 years from now. Tien implies there's no real understanding among women across this divide, because she can imagine only one side of it. Is that right? I hope not, but I'm not sure.
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I want to take advantage of what Maureen Dowd dubs the celebrity divorce moment (Christie Brinkley, Madonna) to talk about how this great American pastime figures for the rest of us. When David and I did the Slate V feature in which we spent a day no more than 15 feet apart, I got one overwhelming response from women: How could you do that? I could never do that! That would be torture! For a while I wondered whether people were exaggerating their horror. After all, how hard could it be to spend a mere 24 hours tethered to the man you married? Annoying, maybe, but torture? And then I came across a story in O called "Divorce Dreams." New York Times reporter Ellen Tien begins the story with a portrait of her bumbling fool of a husband, who lies, always says exactly the wrong thing, scratches his armpit at a parent-teacher conference and then "absently smells his fingers." These anecdotes are not recounted in Lucy-and-Ricky good cheer. The story's first sentence is: "I contemplate divorce every day." Three paragraphs in, I was shocked that someone would write this way under her own byline about her living husband, and not her ex. But apparently I am an idiot. The premise is that women of certain class, flush with financial independence, yoga-toned arms and infinite choices, all yearn for divorce every day. The other ones, who say things like, "My husband and I never fight," or "My husband is my best friend" are either willfully deluded or liars. "Beneath the thumpingly ordinary nature of of our marriage—Everymarriage—runs the silent chyron of divorce." So, help me out here, ladies. Is this true? Am I living in a fantasy land? Or is Ellen Tien as bitchy as she seems?
Read the rest of the XX Factor conversation about divorce and the way men and women treat one another in print.
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