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While we're in Jezebel land, who can resist a little rubbernecking? Tracie and Moe of the site recently made a spectacle of themselves onstage in Manhattan at the Thinking and Drinking series put together by Lizz Winstead of The Daily Show, all captured on video, alas for them. Winstead is furious (clips there and everywhere), and the whole thing already has been raked over the blogosphere coals.(Best and raunchiest post title: Jezebels Gone Wild: In Which Feminism Finally Bends Over and Eats Itself From the Ass Up.) On Jezebel itself, damage control includes calling the whole thing a "fucking shame." But on her own blog, Tracie prefers blurry denial:
Anyway, I thought this thing was supposed to be a comedy show, but to be honest, I didn't really do my research on how the interview was really gonna go. I tried to make some jokes, but they fell super flat. ("I don't get raped because I live in Williamsburg, and all the guys there are pussies.") It all seemed really horrible at the time, but now, looking back, I sort of have to laugh. I mean, to our friends, it was just Moe and Tracie being Moe and Tracie—drunk, irreverent, drunk.
Wow, yes, a shame. And another lesson, if we needed one, in the perils of overexposure, oversharing, over-the-top Internet/video self-indulgence. But isn't that the whole story, really, as opposed to a broader of indictment of feminism and a prediction of its ever-impending doom, as some of the commentary seems to have it? What I wish for these women are the days when a bad small stage appearance or college newspaper column was quickly mothballed, never to be viewed again. Maybe the Web is creating a scary new boundary-free generation, and for sure talking smack about sex has gone way beyond what I remember from my decade—ago 20s (see Emily Gould). But maybe also it's just gotten way too easy to rubberneck, and so youthful errors become train wrecks. Thoughts?
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The Jezebel team posted a conversation recently about the new HBO documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. I haven't seen the doc, but I know the bare bones of the Polanski story—the director sodomized a 13-year-old girl, was charged with statutory rape, and then fled the country. While the Jezebels don't exactly excuse Polanski's behavior, they have a fairly glib conversation about the whole affair. They posit that age-of-consent laws are "a gray area"; they seem to agree that the victim's mom should have taken some of the heat for leaving her nubile daughter alone with an older man of questionable morals; and they wonder if what Polanski did is worse than the fact that Hollywood doesn't care about what he did.
Unsurprisingly, lots of Jezebel readers have found the conversation offensive. "I think being the actual pervert instead of exploiting the pervert for his talent is worse," writes one commenter. "[S]he was a 13 [year] old child it's wrong and illegal," writes another.
Part of me agrees with the commenter outrage, but I think the Jezebels have something here. This particular case is likely just plain wrong and out of the gray area (I just don't know enough about it), but in general I find myself saying, "Yeah, but ..." when it comes to the age of consent. Thirteen is young. No doubt about it. But 18 strikes me as a little old if we're talking about the youngest age at which someone can say yes and mean yes. Isn't it just a little condescending?
Full disclosure (or is it oversharing?): I entered into a relationship with an older man when I was 18. I knew what I was doing, and frankly, I would have known what I was doing at 17 or at 16. But since this wasn't a Romeo-and-Juliet situation (i.e., we weren't just a couple of years apart in age), it would've been criminal to get together any earlier. To which I say, get off my back, government!
These laws are very culture- and century-specific. What we call May-December now would have been called June-September not too long ago. Not everyone's sexual desires fit neatly into the particular mores of the time they live in.
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Your Friday firestorm watch: After NPR (NPR!) published an audio essay titled "Sex Without Condoms Is The New Engagement Ring" (which prompted a heated debate) Moe Tkacik of Jezebel responded with a wistful ode to the joys of barebacking. "[H]ere is the irrefutable," she writes: "it feels awesome." The biggest downside, as Moe sees it, is the increased likelihood that you'll have to have some very awkward conversations with your future partners.
The post has generated a lot of comments, both on and off Jezebel, ranging from people who agree with Moe to those who find her sentiment to be glib at best, flagrantly irresponsible at worst. Moe—who’s about to leave Jezebel for Gawker—seemed to take all the hubbub as one big don’t-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out, and a few hours later posted a bitter, rambling non-apology.
Ignoring her ill-advised detour into STD statistics (the apparent point being: Lighten up, ladies. Chances are you’re white, which means you probably don’t have AIDS!), she touches on some issues that we’ve been mulling over here on "XX Factor," particularly with regards to Jezebel—namely, what’s the line between honesty and indulgent oversharing? Can you still be a feminist if you sometimes have very un-PC desires and opinions? Should young female public figures try to comport themselves with more decorum and propriety, or is that a condescending point of view?
In this case, at least, I’m more offended as an editor than as a feminist—Moe’s second post, in particular, flirts with incomprehensibility. As far as the charges of irresponsibility go, I’m tempted to say: Meh. Frankly, if you’re going to take sex-ed advice from a Web site whose best writer goes by the moniker “Slut Machine,” well, you have bigger problems to deal with. I’m mostly disappointed that the NPR story’s initial thesis—that deciding to go mano-a-mano with your partner can be considered a serious expression of commitment, especially when skyrocketing divorce rates mean that a marriage certificate isn’t the signifier it once was—got lost in the shuffle. That idea has a kernel of weird, gross, uncomfortable truth about it. I'm a big fan of Jezebel’s dedication to airing “Id-level truths,” as Moe put it in her second post. Sometimes I just wish they let their ego do a bit of cleaning—not for decorum’s sake, but for clarity’s.
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Nina, maybe you're right that more women might pick up a pen during this recession (though I'd imagine the free time offered by unemployment is more likely to be the impetus than money, as Bonnie notes). What struck me, though, about that Laura Miller Salon essay "Why can't a woman write the Great American Novel?" is encapsulated in this bit:
[M]any critics and editors, especially male ones, make a fetish of "ambition," by which they mean the contemporary equivalent of novels about men in boats ("Moby-Dick," "Huckleberry Finn") rather than women in houses ("House of Mirth"), and that as a result big novels by male writers get treated as major events while slender but equally accomplished books by women tend to make a smaller splash.
Meghan wrote about this phenomenon a couple of years ago, when the New York Times polled critics to find out what they thought the most important books of the last 25 years were, and big novels by men dominated the results. America's big, and any novel that represents it has to be big, or so that line of thinking goes. Even Norman Mailer, the most macho of all the 20th-century literary macho men, seemed cowed by how big a "Great American Novel" would have to be, saying once that "The Great American Novel is no longer writable. We can't do what John Dos Passos did. His trilogy on America came as close to the Great American Novel as anyone. You can't cover all of America now. It's too detailed." (If you'll allow me a moment of blatant gender stereotyping, that sort of literal-mindedness—I must capture every single detail!—seems pretty classically male.)
The term "Great American Novel" first appeared in 1868 in an essay in The Nation when, America was trying to define itself, culturally and otherwise, against still-dominant Europe. The original coinage definitely didn't exclude women—George Sand was one of the European authors namechecked, and Harriet Beecher Stowe was cited as the closest thing we'd had to date. It also called for the Great American Novel to be "the picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence." On the face of it, that's a pretty humble definition, and one that wouldn't seem to exclude those "domestic" novels we think of as typically female literature. So when did we decide that we couldn't beat Europe by merely painting the ordinary? (This all might just be the simple fact that women usually don't go in much for pissing contests, literary or otherwise.) Or was American life so gender-fragmented in the 20th century that it became hard to have a shared "ordinary"? Jezebel and Esquire seem to think so—their wildly different lists of the books every man and every woman ought to read certainly suggest that. I've read far more on Jezebel's list. So, XXers, should I be mad at myself because my reading habits have tended toward the stereotypically female, or should I be mad that more books on Jezebel's list haven't gotten wide-ranging critical acclaim?
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Disney's newest animated film won't be released for another nine months, but The Princess and the Frog—Disney's first to feature an African-American princess—is already being scrutinized. First it got knocked because the heroine was a black chambermaid working for a rich white woman, then because one of the animal sidekicks was a toothless, seemingly redneck Cajun firefly. Plus there were plenty of people who were peeved that it took Disney so long to feature an African-American princess in the first place. (Dodai at Jezebel has been tracking the fracas; scroll down to see more links.)
Now, according to the U.K.'s Daily Mail, bloggers are up in arms because Princess Tiana— reimagined as a young woman living in Jazz Age New Orleans—falls in love with a guy who isn't black. Prince Naveen (an Indian name, I'll note) is heir to the throne of "Maldonia," and is voiced by a Brazilian actor. I'm not quite sure he's white, let alone "the whitest frat boy dickhead you can find," as one commenter put it, but he's definitely much lighter-skinned than Tiana. I think he looks sort of Mediterranean, myself.
I'm not surprised that people are pre-emptively monitoring this film's sensitivity levels, but I honestly can't tell if this tweaks my sensors. On one hand, it sucks that little African-American boys won't get to see a black prince, and I don't like the equation of lighter skin with desirability, either. But on the other hand, I'm all for seeing more mixed-race couples in the popular media—how annoying is it that, in most movies and TV shows, minorities are always getting paired with partners of the same race? I've been watching old episodes of Firefly lately, and the Gina Torres/Alan Tudyk pairing still seems really fresh to me. I'm going to try to reserve judgment till I actually see the film, but what do you ladies think?
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Has anyone seen this strangely unsettling Lime-A-Way commercial? I caught it last night during a disappointing episode of Saturday Night Live. (Much could be written about that cougars sketch; luckily, Jezebel already did.)
A young mother is walking through the supermarket with her arm in a sling. She tells the first person who expresses concern that she fell while rollerblading; the second that she had a mountain biking accident; the third that she hurt herself while hang gliding. Then she runs into another woman with a broken arm who gives her a knowing look and says, "Hard water stains, huh?" To which the first mother ruefully shrugs and smiles.
Now, first of all, this commercial suddenly makes me very self-conscious about the state of my own shower fixtures. But does anyone else see an awkward similarity between this perky hausfrau and a battered wife, lying about the source of her injuries? I can't imagine why Lime-A-Way would want potential customers to make that mental connection (unless they're truly sick, patriarchal little puppies), but the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced this ad goes in the Woefully Misguided category.
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I missed out on the Grammys live, so when I read Marjorie's post on M.I.A.'s polka dot outfit, I figured it would be a fashion disaster of Lil' Kim proportions. But looking at the photos of the Sri Lankan star, it seems that her frock was more Bjork than Beyonce, which is to say: whimsical and slightly ridiculous, but certainly not worth any gaspy pearl clutching. Her fashion has always been silly, and this over-the-top outfit is no exception.
M.I.A.'s pregnancy peekaboo actually seems to be very similar in spirit to the "gross-out girls" Meghan blogged about last week. Just as my old colleagues at Jezebel and writers like Miranda Purves are debunking notions of feminine delicateness, M.I.A. is showing the world that a woman who's just shy of the delivery table can rock out on stage in a peekaboo getup. Like everything else, though, it's all about execution. I can say for the Jezebels that when they write their most graphic pieces, the aim is not just to potentially inform, but also to make the reader laugh. Which is why Wetlands is such a failure. I read it last month, and when it wasn't actively turning my stomach from its exponentially disgusting descriptions, it was turning my stomach with its aggressively artless prose.
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I don't know why I'm on the sex-and-body beat this week, but ... Has anyone else read Rebecca Traister’s smart Salon piece about the rise of the girl gross-out essay? Traister argues that we’re seeing a spike in women writing about squishy, gooey bodily functions:
Laughing about all the nasty shit -- or crying about it, kibitzing about it, whining about it, bragging about it, confessing it, writing about it, and most important, exposing it -- it's all the rage. Jezebel, the popular women's offshoot of the Gawker empire, has been the leader of the oversharing crusade, with vibrant, aromatic and really graphic posts about everything from lodged tampons to yeast infection remedies to bloody period sex to female ejaculation.
Trend stories usually seem fake to me, but I think Traister’s right about this one—though we’ve seen waves of similar self-revelation in the past. (Do you all agree? Disagree?) As for me, I confess I’m both repelled by and attracted to all these bloody confessions—at times amused and impressed by the frankness of these women, at other half-put off by it. Perhaps that’s because I come from conflicted Catholic stock. But I think it’s also that the phenomenon Traister is describing is more multi- than single-faceted, in ways I wish she'd teased out more.
Which is to say: I have different reactions to different parts of Traister’s piece. Miranda Purves’ graphic description of her pregnancy in Elle seems to have a purpose that goes very beyond exhibitionism. You have to be graphic to write that piece in the first person, because the piece has to enact Purves’ own shock at what happened to her body and to convey her sense of feeling gypped that few people had spoken explicitly about this to her beforehand. She's onto something. In an age of disclosure, it’s (paradoxically) shocking how many women are surprised by what can happen to their bodies during delivery. (I remember reading a brutally honest description of birth in, of all places, Sylvia Plath’s diaries when I was 24, and thinking: Why on earth has no one ever told me this stuff? )
But I’m not sure I feel the same way about Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands, where, I’d say from my brief perusal of it to date, the reader finds a lot of youthful narcissistic exhibitionism on display. So far I don’t get the value of that exhibitionism; the writing seems bland, and the “rawness” is designed to shock—a stance I find increasingly tedious in our bare-our-souls-and-bodies culture.
Which brings me to a question for all of you: Is being relentlessly in-your-face the only way to write about the secret reality of the female body? Is this mode of brazen oversharing a kind of feminist reclaiming? Or is it mostly a canny method of self-packaging? Of course, as Traister herself notes, those two questions may not necessarily have mutually exclusive answers. The either/or approach is used far too much when it comes to women who write (or speak) provocatively about themselves.
So I’d like to ask the inverse question: Can you write effectively—that is, shockingly—about the actual reality of inhabiting female body while also being, well, more modest, or neutral, in affect? I’m trying to think of examples. … Sontag’s journals actually come to mind. She writes at times about female genitalia with a coolness in tone about that's eerie yet revelatory. What else?
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The trailer for Matthew McConaughey's forthcoming Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (think Scrooge for an unrepentant womanizer) has arrived on the Internet and, inevitably, it looks mediocre (Jezebel slagged on it over the weekend). How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days notwithstanding, McConaughey has never appeared in a decent rom-com, and, obviously, not for lack of trying. He's the genre's current go-to guy and demonstrates how far these once mighty films have fallen. A job previously done by Cary Grant is now being done by a dude whose all time best line reading involves the phrase "I get older, [high school girls] stay the same age." No fair. Can I at least get a Hugh Grant or a Ryan Reynolds over here?
The underlying problem with the McConaughey persona is that he's just not a catch, unless it's your life dream to stay buff by playing bongos and running on the beach all day. He brings his laid back, surfer vibe to all his roles, meaning his characters have a nice mellow charm, a lazy sex appeal and no ambition or native intelligence whatsoever. He is so obviously not a guy worth fighting with, let alone over, for an hour and a half—splitting a pot brownie and having a skinny dip sounds much more his speed.
Yet, on a strictly human level, I can't help but admire him: I think maybe he knows the secret to true contentment. Unlike most actors, who spend their extremely fortunate lives constantly striving, seemingly as burdened with the stress of professional success as the rest of us non-Adonis, non-millionaires, McConaughey appears to be legitimately satisfied with his extraordinary luck and to have fully embraced his professional mediocrity (only his frequent co-star Kate Hudson seems as willful or happy a hack). He's the guy who wrapped a Steven Spielberg movie (Amistad) and decided that caliber of film just wasn't for him, his spot in the canon be damned. I don't dig his movies, but maybe he wants to hang out and teach me to be Zen sometime?
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My old compatriots at Jezebel mocked the tone-deaf women behind the blog Dating a Banker Anonymous earlier today.This gaggle of entitled broads (known as DABAs) was featured in a New York Times article. In a nutshell, these women have seen their relationships become difficult because their banker-lovers have fallen on hard times and are no longer the carefree captains of industry they were in the halcyon days of 2006.
Anyway! Their hubris is easy to make fun of, but what struck me was the final two paragraphs in the Times article:
Despite the seemingly endless stream of disparaging remarks and shaking heads, some of the appeal of dating a banker remains.
"It's not even about a $200 dinner," Petrus said. "It's that he's an alpha male, he's aggressive, he's a go-getter, he doesn't take no for an answer, he's confident, people respect him and that creates the whole mystique of who he is."
Maybe I'm reading between the lines too much, but it sort of sounds like these women like bankers not because of the money, but because they're jerks. This suspicion was confirmed by one of today's entries on the DABA site titled, "Ain't Messin' With No Broke Banker."
"Overnight, he went from unavailable to downright clingy. He wants to have dinner every night. By dinner I mean staying in and cooking as Megu is no longer in the budget," laments a sad, sad DABA. "Thanks to the recession, I now have a completely devoted BF, which is exactly what I wanted. So I should be happy, right? Wrong. I’m bored and can’t stop thinking about my perpetually unattainable Euro ex-boyfriend who is recession proof courtesy of an offshore trust account." Is it possible that even if Donald Trump were broke, he'd still be a model magnet as long as he remained emotionally adolescent?
Even though they may date wealthy louts, don't cry for the DABA girls: Word on the street is they've locked down a book deal for their tales of fiscal woe.
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The more a reality-TV show makes my jaw drop and leads me to ask, "What must his/her parents be thinking right now?" the more I relish it. But today, I've got a wicked guilty-pleasure hangover. On last night's episode of The Real Housewives of Orange County, a cast member, Tamra, who was hosting a party, set out to get her younger blond rival, Gretchen, drunk—"naked wasted," as Tamra put it. Usually, I relish drunken reality-TV shenanigans, but last night, I wanted to change the channel when I saw the way Tamra's twentysomething son pawed at the blitzed Gretchen, whose much-older fiance was hospitalized and dying of cancer at the time of filming. I couldn't bring myself to turn it off, alas. (Watch some of the lowlights here, thanks to Jezebel.)
Usually, the reality-TV stars I laugh at are my age or younger—part of the "everyone is famous," social-networking, watched-Survivor-during-my-formative-years generation. The Real Housewives of Orange County may be neither real nor housewives, but they are all older than 30; all but one are over the age of 40. They should know better than to a) maliciously get someone drunk; b) continue to encourage her to take shots when it's readily apparent that she's drunk; and c) commit the crimes of (a) and (b) in front of cameras—while giggling behind their hands about it. Mean-girl behavior in fully grown women is stomach-turning. Real Housewives used to be fun fare to watch while unwinding after work. Now, I find myself wondering how much farther up the generation chain the look-how-badly-I-behave genre can climb. A reality show about catty nursing-home residents squaring off in their separate cliques, perhaps?
I wish I could promise I won't watch anymore, but I can't: The episode ended on a cliff-hanger, and I'm dying to know what will happen.
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If there is a cultural phenomenon about which I can really do without the expertise contained within the average weekly magazine feature on the subject, it is the one about women who live in New York and drink more than they ought. Still, I am a female contributor to a female-centric blog, and women have savored women-getting-wasted stories at least since Anne of Green Gables got Diana sloshed on that raspberry cordial, so I dutifully began to read it this afternoon for possible posting purposes and indeed found myself snickering in recognition over this passage:
FEMINIST ONE: You would be proud of me. I drank alone last night!
FEMINIST TWO: I am proud! I should have called you. I was too drunk.
FEMINIST ONE: I opened a bottle of wine—a good bottle that I had been saving—poured some into a juice glass, and watched The Age of Love. My dad called, and he was like, “You know that drinking doesn’t solve things long-term?” And I was like, um, that’s a lie.
FEMINIST TWO: Hahahaha!
FEMINIST ONE: I know. I was so serious too.
FEMINIST TWO: Yeah, it solves things long-term, as long as you commit to drinking.
FEMINIST ONE: I told him booze was no different from Klonopin and it’s cheaper!
That's so funny! I thought upon reading the first few lines. I have had IMs exaclty like…
Oh ha, indeed, the IM had originally appeared in a July 2007 post on Jezebel, a women's site I co-founded which the New York story dubs "very pro-alcohol." (I am "Feminist Two," and for the record I have never tried Klonopin.) But more importantly I really don't think of myself, or anyone else on the site, as "pro-alcohol." Pro-pleasure, sure, pro-"honesty" or "candid examination of the human condition as experienced by women at this particular cultural moment," maybe. And insofar as our treatment of women and alcohol ab/use during my tenure was concerned, I think the site was probably best described "very pro-jokes," as one might glean from, say, my posts chronicling my adventures with alcohol-cessation drugs.
But no: the author illustrates me and certain of my former colleagues as "misguided" budding alcoholics drinking to reach some warped form of boozer parity with the men in our life men by a rationale "akin to the type of reasoning that paints Girls Gone Wild participants as sexually liberated."
I think this is unfair. Women make mistakes. Women do embarrassing stuff. Women regret that stuff sometimes. Women cope with it by joking about it, growing out of it, getting pregnant, getting help, or in lieu of all that, drinking more. That is the problem with alcohol: it can be a vicious cycle -- the way you drink too much, stay out too late, get too little sleep, wear yourself out the next day working late, blow off steam getting drunk all over again. But that's how it is for guys too. Sure, our bodies are different, and while drinking certainly has an added appeal to anyone who is experiencing menstrual cramps, what woman with a drinking problem would lay the blame on all the societal pressure to match the ounce-per-ounce consumption of our male drinking buddies? (Because that woman probably has bigger problems than her drinking problem, just saying.) Because I personally drink a lot -- less than I used to, more than I'd like -- and I can't even approach what my male companions can regularly put down, and I'm not trying to pretend that is good news. In other words, yes, New York, we have a drinking problem, but just like so many other problems it seems to be affecting all of us.
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Noreen, I haven't read the Vanity Fair profile of my girl crush Tina Fey yet—maybe it makes me a new-media traitor, but I like my Vanity Fair, New Yorker, and other long-form journalism best when I can read it on paper instead of my computer screen. With that caveat, I do think that Tina Fey herself is acutely aware of and conflicted about her babification. 30 Rock regularly addresses how women try to look right for their jobs, whether it's in politics or TV. In one episode, Alec Baldwin's character tells his congresswoman girlfriend, who confessed that reconstructive surgery after a bizarre accident left her "much better-looking," that he "thought she made love like an ugly girl. So present, so grateful." One story line in Season 2 addresses how a lead actress' weight gain will affect her career, with Baldwin's corporate exec character advising, "She needs to lose 30 pounds or gain 60. Nothing else has a place in television." (He gets all the best "so-wrong-but-so-funny" lines ... I hope you'll add me to your quote-swapping list, Noreen!)
Even more fascinating in 30 Rock is how Fey portrays herself. Her character, Liz Lemon, is mocked by her superiors and subordinates for her clothes (her shoes are called "bi-curious," her favorite necklace is a broken rape whistle, her date-night dress makes her friend think she's headed to a funeral), her poor social skills, and her body. ("Are you finally going on a diet?" someone asks her in one episode.) It seems that Fey might have become a hottie, but she still writes like she's the awkward girl in the ugly dress. I'm not sure I entirely agree with Jezebel's Jessica, who has argued that "Tina Fey's self-deprecation is good for women," but I do like to see the two sides of Fey battling on-screen—her relatively new good looks and the lingering sharp wit and bitterness cultivated not necessarily by being ugly, which I don't think she was, but by being a bit different, a big awkward, a bit uncomfortable.
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Not surprisingly, I had a different take on Elaine Lafferty's column in the Daily Beast. That's not to argue with Sarah or Emily or Ann, it's just that I was looking for something different. But before I get to that, what strikes me as interesting is the treatment that Lafferty is getting from some on the left. Didn't many on the left just hold up Christopher Buckley as a hero for his speaking "truth to power" in HIS Daily Beast column where he came out for Obama? And wasn't everyone horrified by the name-calling he got on the right? I was. So how is it different when Jezebel tells Lafferty to go perform an anatomically impossible task? Neither of our two major parties is perfect, and when prominent figures use their influence to criticize their parties and say "Hey, you're not listening to me," it should serve as a wake-up call. It should prompt debate and soul-searching that would make the party stronger.
But, as for my take own on Lafferty: I was amused that she was mock-horrified to be agreeing with Fred Barnes because I had just read Barnes' own Palin-is-smart column in the Weekly Standard. I've been torn up about Palin. My initial reaction was one of extreme enthusiasm, which quickly became tempered by a serious case of longing for Mitt Romney as veep when she bombed her big media interviews, which in turn became relief when she did so well in the debate with Joe Biden. Also, my concerns over her lack of experience did battle with my excitement that there was a strong, dynamic conservative woman putting herself out there and going for the brass ring. It worried me when conservative intellectuals started breaking ranks, but I couldn't help remember seeing all the women at a Palin rally I covered and how excited they were. And, no, they weren't all the bible-beating, evangelical, social conservatives that she's supposed to get so worked up. There was a young, kinda hippie-ish couple with three little girls in pink Palin T-shirts, middle-aged women with teenage daughters, women in business suits, and moms in track suits.
So when I see positive reaction from people who would not normally be inclined to like her, I'm grateful. And frankly, if Sarah Palin is as smart as the people who get to know her say, it's something we should all be happy about. Unless women want to have yet another skirmish over who gets to call themselves a feminist and fight over whether abortion is a litmus test, it's a positive that there are smart, powerful women on both sides of our great ideological divide, fighting for what they believe in and setting examples for the women in their parties.
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I'm glad Ann brought up this piece by Elaine Lafferty. Her go-go enthusiasm for Palin is deeply peculiar and, I think, speaks to some deep tensions present in the women's movement—old guard vs. new, third wave vs. second wave—and some of the concerns feminists of all kinds had when it became clear Hillary Clinton's campaign wasn't heading to nomination night in Denver.
What bothers me about Lafferty's cheerleading is not simply that it's condescending—and that line Ann pulls out is particularly awful "... a mind that is thoughtful, curious, with a discernable pattern of associative thinking and insight"; what job doesn't require thoughtful curiosity?—but that it's also completely disingenuous. Lafferty is a consultant to the McCain-Palin ticket. She says it right up front, but somehow it's easy to forget as you make your way through the story. She came over to the campaign right after the Palin pick—a moment when the country barely knew the name of the governor of Alaska, let alone whether she was a "quick study" or a bumbling idiot. There is something disconcerting to me about seeing her sitting there, behind Palin, on stage as the candidate assumes a quasi-feminist stance and steals Hillary Clinton's lines about glass ceilings
And now Lafferty simultaneously mocks the so-called "inside the beltway feminist" establishment that shuns Palin for her Christian-political positioning but then uses her own insider feminist credentials (former Ms. editor) as a shield against any criticism that she's remotely swallowed the Kool-Aid on this one. It's not a critique, it's a turn-conventional-wisdom-on-its-ear essay designed to rile people up. Why else be so casually dismissive of the rape kit story and the book banning rumors? (Of the latter, Noam Scheiber's excellent piece on Palin explains her efforts quite clearly.) Does Lafferty really have such live-and-let-live relationship to Palin's positions on choice, feminism itself (Palin has recently rejected the label), and McCain's inability to support the Ledbetter Fairpay Act? I don't buy it.
Over at Jezebel there's an angry but cogent takedown of Ms. Lafferty and her strange tenure at Ms. If you click through the links to the New York Observer stories on Lafferty chafing against Eleanor Smeal and Gloria Steinem in her final days at Ms., it opens up a few other questions. Namely: While I think its essential to the future of feminism expands the definition of feminist beyond the white middle-class women who served as figureheads in the 1970s, upon reflection, why does this feel like Lafferty's means of getting in a few punches at her old colleagues?
Addendum: Emily's take below really cuts to the point. There are plenty of good feminist reasons beyond abortion to reject the McCain ticket. Lafferty has resorted to old bromides that just don't ring true.
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There's some debate going on in the female blogosphere over a group of young women in Brooklyn who created a provocative pro-Obama poster that states: "Girls say yes to boys who say Obama." The poster is a send-up of an anti-draft poster from the late '60s featuring Joan Baez and her sisters that read: "Girls say yes to boys who say no." While BUST gives the poster the nod, deeming it "cheeky" and "fun," Broadsheet declares it "boring, overdone sexual politics" and "kind of gross," with Rebecca Traister asserting: "[it] makes me want to drown myself." Meanwhile Jezebel's Jessica Grose shrugs her shoulders: "Personally, I think it's a little self-consciously cutesy, certainly derivative and ironically playing into outdated sexual mores, but ultimately harmless."
Perhaps Dahlia's nod to "generational division" is part of what's at work here. For the most part, the postfeminist generation has less of a problem uniting the political and the sexual, but some women seem to feel any overlapping of the two is deeply problematic. For my part, I thought the poster was amusing. At this point, I'm for anything that will put Obama in office.
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Emily wonders whether what would once be seen as merely
"youthful error" is far more perilous to a girl’s reputation in the
Internet age than it was a decade ago when Emily was in her 20s.
Lizz Winstead’s video interview with Jezebel's two
founders, Tracy and Moe, showcasing the edgy young bloggers' drunk
appearance on Winstead's oxymoronically named stage program "Thinking
and Drinking,” turned into a full-out public trainwreck after Winstead
ungenerously uploaded the conversation over at HuffPost.
The raw nature of the self-exposure displayed by
the two inebriated women reminded me of a young exhibitionist woman in
Emily’s age cohort, Elizabeth Wurtzel, the talented but personally
undisciplined author of three memoirs. Wurtzel’s 1994 Prozac Nation, subtitled “Young and Depressed in America,” was a self-indulgent best-seller published when she was 26. She went on to write two more confessional books, Bitch in
1998 (which featured the naked author on the cover), and, perhaps
predictably, by 2002, a sad chronicle of Wurtzel’s struggles with addiction.
Fortunately for Wurtzel, now 40, F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong. There are second acts in American life. Wurtzel,
who complained to a Canadian reporter that the outpouring of grief
following 9/11 was misplaced (“I just felt, like, everyone was
overreacting”), was favorably profiled in the New York Times last year. She had re-invented herself and was attending Yale Law School. In March, in a Los Angeles Times editorial, Wurtzel counseled college coeds that spending “spring break in a shower with your roommate in Daytona Beach” for the cameras of Girls Gone Wild
is a bad idea. So, Emily, though your concern for Tracy and Moe is
well-founded, we can be optimistic they will withstand public
approbation and recover nicely. Apparently even overexposed divas
eventually grow up.
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Anybody else read the NYT Magazine piece on Harvard's intentional virgins? It was in many ways right off-the-rack: Not all young people who are virgins on purpose are dum-dum religious nuts. Some of them—brace yourselves—have even infiltrated Harvard. And have complicated philosophical reasons for this lifestyle choice. Too complicated, in fact, even to take a stab at explaining. But don't sweat it, because underneath—who would have guessed?—they're religious nuts, too! With hilarious hang-ups, as you'll note when I torture Harvard's Head Virgin with completely disrespectful questions about just how far she'll go. So ciao for now and see you next time, when I pull the wings off butterflies. ...
OK, so it infuriated me, but it did sound one hopeful note. When the head virgin (who doesn't even order dessert after lunch, poor sensually starved child) debated a campus sex blogger (who voraciously gobbles every crumb of her ginger cake with cream-cheese frosting and raspberry compote, get it?) the two women showed mutual respect. They declined to supply the crowd with a catfight and refused to live up to their billing: Harvard's Jezebel Takes On Campus Virgin Mary. "The women themselves saw their encounter as a meeting of two feminist positions,'' the story says, and good for them. Afterwards, they probably headed out for a glass of water and a chocolate martini. Oh, and according to their chronicler, the men of Harvard indicated that after some serious reflection, they would indeed rather marry Mary Ann than Ginger—though I'm not sure either of them would say yes.
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Hey Melinda, when you get off your fainting couch, John Kerry did NOT give that speech—not in the memorable, reimagining-family-values way that Judith is imagining. And yes you're right, Rachael, these issues are divisive, and I guess I have to reluctantly agree that it wouldn't be in the Democrats' interest if Hillary or Obama decided to have a Big Gender Moment. Which is why, as Dahlia and Melinda started out by acknowledging, we're not having it. But I applaud Judith's list, especially in its attention to economics and employment, which never quite seem to get their due and catch on fire, and so leave two-working parent families scrambling to keep it all together. I'd like to think that someday the country will be ready for and will find the candidate who will make universal preschool seem as important as saving Bear Stearns.
On a lighter note, earlier this week I watched Fifty Nude Women by Margot Roth of New Yorker Talk of the Town fame and marveled at its winsome playfulness. The women in this 12-minute film seem entirely at ease in their bodies, of all varieties. I'm with Jezebel in that the video made me think about weight but in a much less tedious way that usual. The curves and rolls and wrinkles and scars and stretch marks signaled vulnerability and also a record of lives fully lived.
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Torie,
You and Jezebel are right that Heather Mac Donald goes off the rails with her rant against drunk college girls. Which is too bad, because before that, she was making an important point. At first I wondered, why is she rehashing this now? Because I thought so many others, including Christina Hoff Sommers in her excellent Who Stole Feminism more than 15 years ago, had cast significant skepticism on the 1-in-4 trope. But, despite all the back and forth on the study by Mary Koss back in the 1980s that gave us this statistic, and despite all the healthy debate about what the real numbers are (anywhere from 2 percent on up), this number that should be controversial is still bandied about as accepted fact. (Even the CDC uses it. And my alma mater, too.)
No doubt that the activists and counselors who cite it are well-meaning and want women to be aware of what can happen to them. But it still peeves me to no end. This inflated statistic is actually harmful, because it trivializes the women—whatever percentage that may be—who actually are raped. If one in four of us is brutalized and we're all walking around just fine, then, hey, it must not be a big deal, right? It happens to everyone, so just get over it already, why don't you?
There will probably always be gray areas in defining rape. And such crimes will probably always be under-reported—it's unfortunate but true. But there have to be ways to address those problems that involve neither trumpeting a flawed statistic or attacking young women for being irresponsible.