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Daphne Merkin and Christopher Caldwell

the breakfast table
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from: Christopher Caldwell

Sex and the City

Posted Tuesday, July 13, 1999, at 4:09 PM ET

Dear Daphne,

I think you have Washington down to a T. The "masculinity" you describe is just a function of gender ratios, which are in turn a function of dominant industries.

New York has PR agencies, design companies, publishing houses--magnets for smart, twentysomething women. With twice as many eligible single women as men, women have to compete like hell for the attentions of men. Which makes them more feminine and the men less masculine. Your archetypal New York mating situation is a downtown party at 3:30 in the morning with seven girls and one guy circling a coffee table covered with spilt drinks. The girls are wearing $10,000 of "casual" clothes between them. Add on the guy's wardrobe and you get up to $10,003.95.

In Washington, it's different. Who wants to do the revenue-scoring on a military appropriations bill? Boys! B+-student, captain-of-the-chess-club boys. Visual evidence is that the boy/girl ratio is about 3/1. Your archetypal Washington mating situation is a Senate office where eight male aides are joined by female new hire, who brings out all their panicky male reflexes: swagger, braggadocio, sotto voce dirty-joke-telling, and expensive suits. That's why Washington tends to produce (and attract) these cocky, peppy, snappy terrier-like males along Regan lines.

Maybe you're right that Don Regan was an anti-Semitic misogynist. But without claiming to tout comprendre, I'd be inclined to beaucoup pardonner. I've often thought a good contrast with Regan was Tip O'Neill. The two grew up a stone's throw from one another in the same narrow North Cambridge Irish community. (A real community, not a "community," like "the social-services community.") And like all Bostonians of all ethnic groups, they came to see the lives of those outside the community as what Ed Koch, referring to upstate New York, called "a complete joke."

The difference--I'm speculating--is that O'Neill, at some level, knew he was thinking tribally, and was ultimately content to see his tribe's claims settled in a wider arena. Regan, if you're right, took his tribal feelings for universal ones. "What wider arena?" would have been his response. It's this schism that turned busing in 1970s Boston into such a violent catastrophe. That and that fact that O'Neill's side got to make its point with armored personnel carriers and helicopter gunships.

Before we leave group antipathies, that weird co-existence you describe--between violence and moral nuance--called to mind another Financial Times article from this morning. Its thesis was its headline: "Bulgaria Proves Rare Model of Ethnic Tolerance in Balkans." Bulgaria, the article explained, has not expelled its Turks in recent years, as it did under the Communist tyrant Todor Zhivkov in the 1980s. And good for them, but presenting Bulgaria as some kind of diversity haven strikes me as malarkey. On May 30, at the height of the Kosovo bombing, the Bulgarian state news service complained that some of the targets NATO was hitting inside Serbia--specifically, the cities of Pirot and Dimitrovgrad--had an unacceptably high number of residents who were racially Bulgarian. Their viewpoint comes down to being happy to join in a fight for human rights, as long as it's conducted along their own racist principles.

I would love to talk about women's soccer tomorrow.

Best,
Chris

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Christopher Caldwell

Sex and the City

Posted Tuesday, July 13, 1999, at 4:09 PM ET
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Daphne Merkin is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes "Reckonings," a column on personal and cultural life. She is the author of Dreaming of Hitler, a collection of essays (click hereto buy the book). Christopher Caldwell is a senior writer at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Press.
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