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Yesterday, Eve pointed out that Dan Quayle speechwriter turned National Review blogger Lisa Schiffren took a swipe at the XX Factor bloggers -- something about the audacity of our dislike of Sarah Palin and love for Michelle Obama. (Je stands accused!) Was it a coincidence that I took a swipe at Schiffren the day previous? Methinks not. Either way, such slandering prompted some digging into Schiffren's backlog of neocrank opinion, and it seems we're in good company.
According to Schiffren, our new President is a communist.
Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in
New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against
their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my
mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I
am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific
unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my
circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and
usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come
together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such
relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young
Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League.
Oh, and don't get her started on gay marriage. From "Gay Marriage, an Oxymoron," a 1996 New York Times Op-Ed (not available online):
[O]ne may feel the same affection for one's homosexual friends and relatives as for any other, and be genuinely pleased for the happiness they derive from relationships, while opposing gay marriage for principled reasons.
"Same-sex marriage" is inherently incompatible with our culture's understanding of the institution. Marriage is essentially a lifelong compact between a man and woman committed to sexual exclusivity and the creation and nurture of offspring. For most Americans, the marital union -- as distinguished from other sexual relationships and legal and economic partnerships -- is imbued with an aspect of holiness. Though many of us are uncomfortable using religious language to discuss social and political issues, Judeo-Christian morality informs our view of family life.
So, does this mean Schiffren's not going to come to my unholy gay communist slumber party?
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Jessica, I think you're right that the fascination with the Duggars and their cohort is more than simple freak show, can't-look-away compulsion. People are always oddly obsessed with/judgmental of big families, even if they're not extreme cases. I'm one of six kids. Often when I mention that fact, people seem to think that means they can freely inquire about my parents' finances, their views on birth control, and whether any of us are deeply screwed up or were ignored. They even want to know stuff like the number of gallons of milk we drank a week (eight, for those of you keeping track at home, all lined up in our restaurant-style refrigerator) and conjure images of KrazyKop station wagons and hellish family vacations, or ask if my life was like Cheaper By The Dozen. We're a far cry from the Duggars or this crazy octuplet story, but I think even slightly outsize familes provide sort of a larger-than-life yardstick against which people get to judge their own life choices. If someone else manages to have a greater-than-normal-number of kids who don't end up deeply screwed up, I think in a weird way that makes some people feel like maybe they're not giving everything they could as parents (even though that's nutty logic). Or watching the Duggars makes people feel a lot better about the life they're giving their kids. It's sort of a bombastic example that throws your own family into relief, and since we're all endlessly fascinated with ourselves and our own families, bam, ratings gold.
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Jessica, you're right—TLC must be salivating at the thought of signing a reality TV show deal with the mother of the octuplets. (Incidentally, the word octuplets appears in neither my Word spell checker nor in the dictionary Slate uses, though the dictionary does include octuple as an adjective, noun, and verb.) I'd imagine that the mother herself isn't Quiverfull: Couples who follow the principles of the Quiverfull movement vow to accept as many children as God gives them, whether that's 20 kids or four or none, and they reject both contraception and fertility treatments as attempts to interfere with the lord's plan. Perhaps she's a Quiverfull groupie?
I wish I could put a finger on why I and so many others find this story fascinating. Maybe it's because this is one of those places where the right and the left ends of the social spectrum are in agreement. Conservative bloggers have called the mother irresponsible and speculated about what assistant programs she and her children could be enrolled in or eligible for. Liberal bloggers worry about everything from whether the kids will get enough attention to what the family's carbon footprint will be. I don't think I've seen anyone celebrating the "miracle" of this birth—the responses I've encountered have expressed only horror.
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Well, Jessica, maybe people are riveted to these shows the way they are riveted to every reality show: At least I'm not as crazy as they are! Or, in the case of the mean nanny shows, at least my house isn't as bad as that!
And Bonnie, forget what the woman herself was thinking: What was the doctor thinking? It should be medical malpractice to implant eight embryos, given the extreme probability of premature births leading to crippling disabilities—especially if the woman says in advance that she would not be inclined to reduce the number if they all implanted.
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What was she thinking, Bonnie? Maybe she was thinking that she'd get a reality TV show. While there's always been some interest in massively fertile women, it seems that in the past few years, more and more of these moms-of-multiples have been getting media attention. First there's Kate Gosselin, who has a set of sextuplets and a set of twins, as well as her own TLC show, Jon & Kate Plus 8. Then there's her network-mate Michelle Duggar (pictured at left), who has given birth to 18 children and even allowed TLC to film her giving birth to number 18.
I've seen a few episodes of both Jon & Kate and the Duggars' show, and they're outrageously banal. Entire episodes are constructed around a single task: Jon makes dinner! Jinger Duggar gets her driver's license! (Side note: All 18 of the Dugger children have names that begin with J). And it makes me wonder why these families are getting more than their 15 minutes of fame. Is it merely the freak show aspect of having so many babies? Or is it something else, something that reinforces the idea that fertility is a woman's greatest virtue? Considering the fact that the Duggars are part of an evangelical movement called Quiverfull, which eschews birth control and promotes the idea that a woman's primary function is to be a mother, I'd say it's the latter.
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At first, the media and medical establishment tsk-tsking over irresponsible fertility treatments seemed a bit, er, premature in the coverage of the California woman who delivered eight babies totaling over 16 pounds at Kaiser Permanente Bellflower, this week. None of the relatives had spoken to the press (despite the many TV bookers undoubtedly camped out in their Whittier cul-de-sac since the birth of the six boys and two girls was announced Monday) and the delivery team, who have not been as camera shy, would not comment on whether the mother had had prenatal medical intervention. Yesterday, an "acquaintance" told reporters the still unidentified new mother, who lives with her mother and father while her husband is stationed in Iraq, has six more children, including a set of twins, at home. The new arrivals, who were delivered from her distended uterus in about five minutes, brought the number of family members who will occupy a three-bedroom home to at least 17. It seemed unlikely to me that the overburdened woman would turn to assisted reproductive technologies to enlarge her family, especially given how expensive and only fractionally insurance-covered fertility treatments are. I thought perhaps the 32-year-old woman was just preternaturally fertile. Her generation has been environmentally exposed to so much chemical estrogen and other fertility-inducing substances, I reasoned, and litter-sized multiple births could be a harbinger of things to come. But we learned today from the Los Angeles Times, who coaxed the grandmother, Angela Suleman, to the phone that fertilized embryos had indeed been implanted in her daughter 30 weeks ago and to her surprise all of them "took." I am normally not one to question another woman's reproductive choices, but I can't help wondering, what was she thinking?
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Let's hear it for PETA. The "vegetarians have better sex" ad, featuring hot women enjoying sensual interludes with various veggies, has become a certifiable viral video after NBC refused to air it during the Super Bowl, deeming it too risqué. (See some of the editing suggestions from NBC here-I imagine Victoria Morgan, VP of advertising standards, never imagined that during her career she'd have to ask a potential advertiser to cut the segment showing someone "screwing herself with broccoli (fuzzy)".)
The thing is, they've done this before, with a "too sexy" ad featuring Alicia Silverstone. The ad was slated to run in Houston but was pulled "at the last minute" by Comcast. I half (hell, I'll bump it up to three-quarters) suspect that they purposely make the ads overly provocative. This way, they don't have to pay the insane Super Bowl ad fees, and they still get the buzz. An ad that's "banned" for being overtly sexy is far more likely to get traction than it might if it's slightly less salacious and sandwiched between the commercial heavyweights of the Super Bowl. And talk about false advertising: As Nina writes in an "Explainer" today, going veg doesn't guarantee a better sex life.
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Last year, Broadway got Kristin Scott Thomas in The Seagull and Katie Holmes in All My Sons. In this month's lady-from-Hollywood-takes-on-an-English-class-classic, we have Mary-Louise Parker (Weeds, Boys on the Side) as Henrik Ibsen's notoriously difficult (in every way that phrase can possible be meant) Hedda Gabler. Hedda is one of the most iconic female roles in Western theater--Cate Blanchett came to New York with her own version just two years ago. Former Slate movie critic David Edelstein has a great essay in New York this week that asks, "Why, in spite of everything, is Hedda still the most popular girl in her class—and can anyone manage to get her right?"
"They all want to play Hedda, the female stars of stage and screen unjustly deprived of characters in the canon with real stature—despite the fact that she is a borderline psycho who resists our sympathy, and that Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler is an obstacle course over a minefield: creaky, exposition-laden, rife with the potential for unintentional laughs, bound by conventions of drawing-room realism. Beside Hedda, Hamlet is a walk in the park: At least he can talk to the audience, establish a rapport—help us to, you know, relate to his predicament. Chill Hedda is forever out of reach."
Edelstein is rather kinder to Parker than Ben Brantley was in the New York Times ("her Hedda brings to mind a valley girl who's given up cheerleading to be a goth because it's way cooler and it matches the place her mind's at now"). His ideal Hollywood Hedda, though, might surprise you:
"The only living English-speaking star who seems a perfect match is—laugh all you like—Angelina Jolie. I have no idea if she has the theatrical chops (movie stars who rule in close-up—like Julia Roberts—have a way of shrinking onstage), but Jolie has the size, the unyielding self-containment, the take-no-prisoners craziness, the will of a temperamental Greek goddess .... She could demonstrate, definitively, just as Ibsen did, why Hedda is the most alive anti-heroine in modern drama: It's what happens when you put a very large spirit in a very small box."
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Ladies! To the trenches! We've been slandered! Over at National Review's "The Corner," Lisa Schiffren bewails the "orchestrated deception" involved in the Obamas' (entirely traditional) hiring of a White House chef -- and dings the XX Factor in the process:
According the New York Times,
Sam Kass, who cooked for the Obamas in Chicago will now move onto the
government payroll as a White House chef. ... Who knew? I believed all that stuff about how Michelle was an
overburdened modern working mother, rushing from school dropoff to her
high-paying, demanding work at the hospital, to dress fittings, to
whatever it was she needed to do to support her husband's political
aspirations, back home to take care of her daughters. Call me naive,
but that model usually includes making dinner. ...
Didn't the women at Slate, among others, complain that there
was something offensive about Sarah Palin's apparent ability to raise 5
children, run the state of Alaska, run marathons, and cook those
mooseburgers—because it set the bar too high for ordinary women? But
they were willing to believe that Michelle could do it all, and keep it
all organic and healthy at that—because she has a law degree from
Harvard?
Yes, I left parts of Schiffren's post out, but no, it doesn't make any more sense when they're put back in. I do recommend reading the whole bizarre thing if you haven't gotten your day's dose of 17 laughs in yet.
To take Schiffren's post seriously for a moment, rather than perpetrating some kind of lie, Michelle Obama has long admitted to being a bit cooking-averse (here's one instance, from May of 2007). Schiffren's a journalist, right? Call me naive, but that model usually includes Lexis-Nexising.
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You are so right, Hanna - this snow cancellation thing always drove me batty when we lived in DC, not merely because of what it said about our region's "toughness", but because of the scorn that those last-minute school closures - usually after one snowflake - always demonstrated for working women. Scrambling together last-minute childcare, and/or bringing your child to the office is just about possible for middle-class parents, but was a nightmare for people who didn't have the sort of jobs to which they could bring children, and didn't have the money for childcare.
So annoyed by this attitude did I become that at one point I found myself shouting down the phone at a spokesman for the Montgomery County School System, who was placidly telling me that the real problem was the buses, which couldn't possibly run in a light dusting of snow. So let everyone drive, I said. The spokesman responsded, with icy triumph, "not everybody, Ms. Applebaum, has a car."
Of course, those who don't have cars can't afford child care either. I was so annoyed I wrote a column about it.
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Dayo, I agree with you on a number of things about contraception and economic prosperity for the country and for women—and disagree with Rachael's contention that contraception isn't related to jobs.
Let's be real: Most women (with the exception of lesbians like me) couldn't be 21st-century workers without contraception. Helping poor women pay for contraception keeps them in the workforce (good for the economy), keeps down maternity-related health care costs down (ditto), helps poor women not have more children than they can support (TANF costs reduced), incrementally helps expand health care coverage, and all sorts of other things that are good for the economy, for women, for children, and for the country. Yes, I salute Medicaid coverage for contraception!
What's more, I agree with Ruth Rosen's more recent analytical post explaining the right wing's philosophical objection to family planning at all. Here's a snippet from her brilliant explanation of why Margaret Sanger was repeatedly arrested for opening her pioneering birth control clinics, why she and her fellows were attacked so ferociously by the forces of Comstock, and why contraception is still being attacked today:
... the religious right's real agenda is not just to eliminate abortion, but to end the historic rupture between sex and reproduction that took place in the 20th century.... If reproduction ceased to be the goal, sexuality might become yoked to pleasure and that is quite unsettling to many Americans. That is the legacy the religious right has fought against, and it's that agenda that cut funding for family planning.
As I explained in my book What Is Marriage For?, when women won the battle over contraception, it blazed the trail for the acceptance of lesbians and gay men. Hurray contraception, both practically and philosophically! What's more, there's some disguised racism in the opposition to Medicaid-funded contraception; all "welfare" supports for poor folks get a racialized tinge in the cultural imagination (however false the imaginary picture).
And. Yet. I still don't get the angst over whether expanded Medicaid payments for contraception should or should not have been in the stimulus package. Can't we give Obama a chance to make this happen some other way? The man has been in office for all of nine days. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine! And in those nine days he has already done some amazing things for poor women—both symbolically resonant and immediately practical—like repeal the gag rule, appoint a female solicitor general, make Hillary Clinton (with her explicitly pro-women approach to foreign policy, dating back to the Beijing conference and beyond) our secretary of state, and support equal pay in the fabulous Ledbetter Act.
Look, Clinton went down in flames when he tried—right after he was inaugurated—to allow lesbians and gay men to serve openly in the military. The idea was right but the tactics were wrong—and the results were the disastrously restrictive Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. Can we give the Obamanauts another month or two—or call me crazy, three! —to work on Medicaid-funded contraception, which is so outrageously controversial, for the reasons Ruth explains, and more?
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Yesterday, Obama insulted our fair city by saying we can't "handle" a little bad weather. His spontaneous outburst to reporters came because his daughters' school was closed yesterday after an ice storm. With all due respect, Mr. President, this is the problem with public officials sending their kids to private schools. The real story in Washington this year was how D.C. public schools, usually spooked by a light dusting, didn't close after Tuesday's snowstorm, thanks to the tough-it-out policies of Chancellor Michelle Rhee. This is a longstanding gripe of mine, how private schools, even ones located in D.C., following the weather guidelines in Montgomery County, Md., as if they float above the actual city.
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Commenter jack_cerf posted a follow up to our Dating a Banker Anonymous discussion in the Fray, that perhaps sheds light on the modern urban tragedy of banker-boyfriend breakups:
"Last September Michael Daly of the NY Daily News did a piece on the economic indicator he called the High End Girlfriend Index ("HEGI"). Premise was that one of the conspicuous luxuries of life on Wall Street was to be able to afford the kind of woman who had ignored you in high school. Conversely, the crash led to their being -- very, very reluctantly -- let go. Daly quotes a New York lawyer as follows:
You have a Wall Street guy and he looks like one of the seven dwarfs," Hayes says. The schlub finds himself with a fabulous girlfriend such as used to brush past him as if he were a wall. He will do almost anything to keep her if his magic millions suddenly evaporate, even selling his watch and cuff links.
"The last overhead to go is a really high-end girlfriend," Hayes says. "If you're a short, ugly 40-year-old guy and you're throwing over a high-quality girlfriend, you're desperate."
The absolute economic low comes with a realization that Hayes summarizes in a sentence. "I can't afford her anymore!"
When he hears of one tumbling titan after another giving up a fabulous girlfriend, Hayes knows we are in the direst of economic times, no matter what the Dow says."
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OK, OK. Eve, you’re right. The bailout (whoops, stimulus—whoops, recovery) bill passed the House, without the family planning funds, and without any Republican support. So the big bad Democratic majority didn’t need to kowtow to Republicans after all—which means that Democrats are entirely responsible for the diminished support for women’s reproductive health. Maybe this is politically intelligent, but I don’t see how just yet.
To Rachael: I’m not particularly irked that this bill is saddling my generation with debt. Yes, this is a scary moment, about which I don’t think anyone knows enough, no matter which study which economist is brandishing. But, hyper-liberal that I am—and because in Washington, we get to call these things whatever is rhetorically expedient—I’m going to name all this cash a “strategic investment.” One that, in the case of contraception, is desperately needed in many Medicaid-qualifying households, and one that pays dividends in the long run—for individuals and, as I mentioned earlier, for Americans interested in expanding health care coverage. See Katha Pollitt for more on the topic, and on projected savings.
More importantly, providing birth control to underserved women should be solid political ground for Dems. Two thirds of the country supports birth control for teens. I don’t see why an aversion to GOP culture-warring—which didn’t stop passage of the bill—should be enough to get America’s hard-won Democratic leadership to fold like a cheap cocktail umbrella. So the Blue Dogs are howling—why no similar pressure on blue-state Republicans? Worse, this successful peer pressure allows Republicans to dismiss birth control and, say, new sod for the national Mall, in the same breath—though one is a public and personal health policy concern, and the other a matter of horticulture. (Both create jobs, but that’s beside my point.) At what point does the conciliatory tone that Obama so desperately seeks become an abdication of power? Because, let’s not forget what he told Republicans on Monday: “I won.”
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Emily, Meghan and I have been conducting a dialogue in Slate for fellow Friday Night Lights addicts. One of my entries discussed the house of Tim Riggins. It inspired this poem "in the style of Billy Collins" from Ann Scanlan, a reader in Ireland.
The Perfect Chaos of Tim Riggins' Living Room
The cardboard beer girl
stands and surveys
the perfect chaos
of Tim Riggins' living room:
yesterday's dishes and last week's laundry
empty bottles and crushed cans
the place for everything is
wherever it was dropped or tossed.
A teenage boy stumbling through
another moody day, looking for
some kind of a family life in a home
where beer is a major food group.
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Dayo, it's giving a little too much credit where credit doesn't belong to say Republicans "ruled" by hissy fit on the contraceptive provision. You could claim that it was removed thanks, obliquely, to House Minority Leader John Boehner and the other GOPers who turned it into a big story, but at bottom (no jokes, please), it was removed for Democrats' sake. The Blue Dog Democrats, that is, who could have sunk the stimulus had they voted en masse against it and who—having run on heroic promises to crusade against fiscal irresponsibility—were feeling super antsy about the whole $819 billion bonanza.
Usually, the House GOP's bellyaching about being victimized by Nancy Pelosi and left out of the "process" strikes me as so many crocodile tears. Did any more vomitous image emerge from last fall's congressional session than that of Eric Cantor, then the GOP's chief deputy whip, waving a copy of a "partisan" speech by Nancy Pelosi in front of the cameras and claiming that it had so hurt his delicate-flower Republican colleagues' feelings they'd refused to vote for the financial bailout? But I actually think the Republicans performed a type of useful minority function in this whole contraceptive thing: publicizing a conservative objection to the bill so that more conservative-minded Democrats could consider whether it might sway them, too.
But "ruled" by hissy fit? No Republican voted for the stimulus, even after the contraceptive provision was yanked. But it didn't matter, because hey hey, it still passed the House! Some rule. I know it's considered a moral defeat for Obama that tonight's stimulus vote was party-line, but frankly, I kind of liked it. The GOP might have thought it was in "the minority" last year, but this New York Times lede is what it really feels like to be in the minority: "Without a single Republican vote, President Obama won House approval on Wednesday ..."
Maybe more of these ledes will finally prompt some soul-searching.
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Dayo,
Forgive me, but didn't we just spend eight years complaining that George Bush and Congress were saddling future generations with an unfair burden of debt? (I was no fan of the GOP-led Congress, believe me.) And wasn't one of the many complaints about the Patriot Act that it was rushed through and congressfolk didn't have time to read it? But now we have a proposal that will end up costing $1 trillion with interest and a president who says there is not a "moment to spare," and yet it's the Republicans with their concerns who are trying to "rule by ... hissy fit." (Um, also, aren't the Democrats in the majority here?) [Note: The NYT reports that the package has passed the House. It apparently went through without the contraceptives, but with $335 million for STD prevention.]
Now that they are out of power, the Republicans have an opportunity—and a responsibility—to start living up to their historical reputations for fiscal conservatism. House Minority Leader John Boehner had compiled a long list of concerns about the stimulus package, of which the complaint about contraceptives was just one item. For example, the creation of 32 new government programs that will cost $136 billion. What happens when they've spent their stimulus money? Will the programs go away? And then there's the fact that this is being sold as an "infrastructure" package, yet only 25 percent of the infrastructure dollars would be spent in the first year. (So, why the rush?)
I'm not an economist. I have no idea if the stimulus is going to work. It might be the only thing standing between us and a depression, or, as Politico pointed out today, even $1 trillion on stimulus might not be enough. But what I do know, is that if we're going to go ahead with this massive and hugely expensive project (the Senate takes it up next week), I want the focus to be on creating jobs quickly and getting money pumping through the economy. Whether that is through infrastructure or corporate tax breaks, I don't care. But I don't think that $200 million for contraceptives would create as many jobs as it could if directed toward some other purpose. There are lots of generic oral contraceptives, for example, which cost less (yay for Medicaid and our tax dollars) but reduce the incentive for pharmaceutical companies to have people out there selling (profitable) brand-name alternatives. And while $5 billion might sound like a big industry, it's comparable to what we spend on Halloween. Heck, the porn industry has asked for a bailout worth $5 billion. I'd much rather see that $200 million go as tax breaks to small businesses in return for hiring new employees, or a necessary infrastructure project (maybe a couple of bridges to SOMEWHERE, for a change). It's got nothing to do with scorn for women's health.
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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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In a blatant, desperate, and misguided bid for page-views and newsstand sales, More (More? Does anyone read More? I don't know if I've ever even seen a copy in my doctor's office) asked three women writers to weigh in on Sarah Palin. Days, weeks, months later, Palin still "sells." Their responses are a heady mix of maddening, confused, and inane.
Lisa Schiffren writes: "Knowing that conservative, evangelical Christian women want their daughters to see such a role model [as Palin] tells us that feminism, in its best sense, has won its central battle." Eh? What? I can't even figure out what that means. According to Schiffren, Hillary is a bombastic careerist, but Palin is all right because she's more "Sam's Club than Yale Club." When Sam's Club becomes your selling point, I remain unsold. Ergo, Palin is the Wal-Mart of politics. If you get what you pay for, I am glad I passed on her in the vice presidents aisle.
Next up, Kellyanne Conway wonders: "Is Sarah Palin a Plus for Women?" My vote? No. Unless by "plus" you mean "minus." If that, then yes. Conway takes issue with all the "unsavory talk" that arose around Palin. (Full disclosure: I wrote about the Sarah Palin inflatable love doll, which, I assure you, was most unsavory of me.) What did the Palin experience teach the women of America? "If you dare to seek standing in any powerful institution, attacks on your husbands, hairdos, handbags, and haute couture will be just the beginning." God help us when they come for our intellects. The fallout from this "so-called sisterhoods" (that's you, feminists) "Palin impaling"? "At a minimum, we'll see a chilling effect on women venturing outside their usual realms, speaking in anything but broadcaster English, and wearing anything but a safe, neutral uniform." When we're all wearing beige, we'll know who to blame. The feminists.
Finally, we hear from Cathy Young. Young's bite-sized take on America's hate-hate relationship with Palin is that liberal women were wanting Hillary in the White House, Palin came along and messed that up, but everything worked out fine in the end because we have a new face of feminism, and that face is attached to Sarah Palin's head. "If nothing else, she has given feminism a new face, with profound appeal to women of different ages and walks of life." No regrets for those who got Palin tattoos, then.
What is going on here? Is this feminism? Neo-conservatism with a vagina? Insanity? If Palin is the new face of feminism, I'd like to request a post-feminist president, please.
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I’m a bit disappointed by President Obama’s rude expurgation of contraceptive planning from the “economic recovery package”—as we’re being asked to call the stimulus bill that’s working its way through Congress. Perhaps I’m just not down with all the euphemism on tap this week: Why not just call “Republican skepticism” here on the Hill what it is—an attempt to derail the future expansion of health coverage, couched in a puritanical queasiness with contraception. Lisa Lerer reports Minority leader John Boehner asking: “How can you spend millions of dollars on contraceptives? How does that stimulate the economy?” Well, John—hot button-ness aside—birth control is a commodity bought and sold like any other.
I agree with EJ that in many cases (I felt this way about Rick Warren) progressives should attempt to see the forest, not the offending tree. But here, it’s not just a bunch of women begging for their crazy pills! The Democratic White House’s concession of rhetorical and political ground—about whether contraception (a better than average return on public investment) and other Medicaid assistance counts as “stimulus” or not—could have outsized effects on the future of the universal health coverage debate. Over at the Washington Independent, Lindsay Beyerstein makes roughly this point. Harold Pollack and Nicholas Beaudrot at TAP make it explicit: We’re now, the latter writes, subject to “rule by Republican hissy fit.”
Who knows whether it’s the public climate that requires lifting of the odious global gag rule to be done under cover of media darkness, or the lightweight status afforded to “women’s health” in general—but birth control represents an arm of the pharmaceutical industry that nets drugmakers over $5 billion annually—perhaps even in a recession. I imagine the investors of $5 billion in any other American industry could, presumably, expect some back-scratching, be it through money kicked into the search for a better product, or strenuous lobbying to ensure access to said product is available to American women—especially those planning families, and seeking “economic recovery” from the new Congress.
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Hello Yasmine, welcome to the meeting. I appreciate Hillary and Chelsea’s close relationship, but I don’t find it that unusual among the women in my circle to have strong, impressive, female offspring. We didn’t simply raise our daughters to be participants in the world. We conspired with them to take the world over. These young post-feminists were encouraged, applauded, educated, groomed and imbued with every opportunity we could offer, especially the ones their mothers missed out on. My adult daughter outpaced me years ago. I was a TV news producer for one of those ratings-driven network magazine shows that proliferated in the 1990s, and she, not long out of NYU, told me she wanted to make documentaries. I was flattered she wanted to follow in my shoes and offered at once to help her meet my colleagues. We were on the phone, but I could hear her eyes roll as she explained she wanted to make vérité features, not the correspondent-narrated consumer and medical alert pieces I labored over. A year or two later, she and another woman director had formed a production company and I, too tired for even one more “wheels up at 7 a.m.” breaking story, left the juggling act for more tranquil journalistic pursuits. Since then, I have watched the two women indefatigably create and innovate in a medium come into its own right along with them. The women of their generation are amazons but their mothers, Hillary included, are not at all surprised.
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We welcome this guest post from Yasmine Ergas, who teaches international law at the School of International and Public Affairs of Columbia University and is the associate director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights.
Earlier this year, French minister of justice, Rachida Dati, created shock waves, not so much by giving birth out of wedlock and refusing to divulge the name of the father, but by going back to work after only five short days. Last spring, the Spanish minister of defense, Carme Chacon, proudly reviewed the troops, pregnant belly first. And on Jan. 13, Hillary Clinton appeared at her confirmation hearing with Chelsea at her side. Are these women, Hillary in particular, heralding a new way of politics by bringing female solidarity, maternity, and womanly ways of being into the traditionally male—and adamantly masculine—enclosures of government?
Sometime in the middle of her campaign, after Bill had made one too many offensive remarks, Hillary changed strategy: Bill was relegated to the background. The iconic Clinton family had never done much for her candidacy anyway. Those pictures a' trois on the campaign trail served as a perpetual reminder of unsavory domestic relations rather than as a net positive. It was smart of Hillary to let Bill go silently into his foundation's night.
In place of the threesome came Hillary and Chelsea. A grown woman with her grown daughter. Sure, it was a unit made of shared ambitions and intense grooming. But it was also a unit made of similarity and difference, of experience and apprenticeship, of a solidarity that runs both ways. Standing next to each other on a podium, working the crowds together, they seemed to acknowledge that there was a reason why it was just the two of them up there, and that reason might not have been of their own making. Surely, neither Hillary nor Chelsea had invited Gennifer Flowers, or Monica Lewinsky, or any of their ilk, into their household. Of course, mobilizing Chelsea wasn't just circumstantial, it was also clever politics. It brought some youth appeal (not much, to be honest) to counter Obama's messianic status among the young. It dispelled the idea that Bill would be the real president. Even more, having her child around feminized Hilary. It promised to transform the incipient dragon lady—the "monster" that Samantha Power had invoked—into a mother figure.
And that transformation emphasized the idea that the relationship between mother and child can stand on its own terms, that what can be passed from mother to daughter includes knowledge about how to be out there in the world, that a woman with children is not a woman alone. So it is actually Hillary and Chelsea who are iconic. They represent all those women who, in fact or in fantasy, have brought up their daughters to be participants in the world.
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Apologies for the pun, but it's hard to be clever when your heart is breaking. Domino, the home design magazine from Conde Nast—and sister publication to Lucky and Cookie—is folding. I truly love this magazine, as my 3-foot-tall stack of well-thumbed back issues can attest. (June Thomas, ever the finder of silver linings, points out that at least my collection has now shot up in value.) What I particularly loved about Domino was its friendly, service-y vibe. Yes, there was much parading of beautiful, costly things—what E.J. might call real estate porn. But there was also a lot of solid, useful design advice that even a poor studio dweller with a limited budget could learn from. Domino really spoke to the New Victorian in me, the homebody that craved the lovely, the handmade, the chicly comfortable, and I'll be sad to see it go. Now, who wants to trade a November 2006 for a September 2005? (For disclosure's sake, I should mention that Domino's editor-in-chief, Deborah Needleman, is married to Jacob Weisberg, head of the Slate Group.)
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OK, Will, I am fuzzing up your thesis about sex difference because I wonder about how grounded parts of it are, and like I said, I find exaggerations of sex difference slightly maddening. So a few thoughts in response to yours (and from here on out I am channeling Slate columnist Amanda Schaffer, who knows much more than I do about all of this).
I agree with your claim about aggression, to the extent that boys on average tend to score higher on specific measures for aggression that's physical and verbal. I'm not sure the relevance of the study you cite though; I'd offer this one instead.
About responsiveness and social editing, I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Responsiveness to anger, pain, or what? And does social editing mean changing the way you present yourself based on cues from people around you, and is the idea that women do more of it? I Googled to not much avail. I see that the second study you cite sort of relates to some idea of responsiveness (though the findings show only a partial sex difference). But the third study is about money and kid toy preferences, which doesn't seem to relate to responsiveness or social editing (am I missing something). And what's the fourth one supposed to signify? The authors say that the finding that the male chimps played more "is practice for later dominance behavior." But why--couldn't it just as easily be about females' greater industriousness or something? And in any case, aren't we far afield from whether men are more likely to be desirous and women more likely to want to be desired, itself a speculation based on preliminary research?
Feel free to ignore me--I know you have your own blog to manage!
ADDENDUM: On bloggingheads.tv, Ann Althouse and I discuss how women's sexuality may differ from men's and what this new sex research means for feminism.
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Rachael, it's lovely to agree with you ... at least partly. I too am vastly in favor of contraception being available to all, and yet agree that it shouldn't be in the stimulus package.
I've long found it amusing that Viagra, but not contraception, is regularly covered by health insurance: Why should men's sexual pleasure be underwritten but not women's? I don't know whether Medicaid covers Viagra without a waiver (according to MSNBC, 27 states' Medicaid programs do cover contraception, but they had to seek a waiver to do it.) If yes, obviously contraception should be, too. And I agree that underwriting contraception for poor folks seems like a no-brainer-except for the radicals (and yes, they do exist) who believe that all sexual activity should lead to babies.
And yet like you, Rach, I humbly disagree with my admired friend Ruth Rosen's position ... although for different reasons. I don't have any economic philosophical objections to its inclusion: After all, this stimulus package includes money for food stamps, the GAO, the census, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, unnamed projects for the Department of Homeland Security, information technology projects for the Department of State... and what's most relevant, Medicaid. If the Obamites deem a project good for the country, it's in this bill.
So why do I disagree with Ruth? Because the White House is already showing incredible savvy in making controversial changes about women's health. I was wowed by the fact that the controversial global gag was repealed on Friday at about 4:45 p.m. ... perfect timing for missing the American news cycles. Thursday's and Friday's news cycles were dominated by Gitmo closing; Monday, the news media were all over the plan to back higher fuel-emissions standards, a big symbolic move on environmental policy. Obama slipped through his move to improve women's lives by allowing women's health providers to talk freely about all options without losing U.S. funding with no controversy. (If Rick Warren's ghastly inaugural prayer was a fig leaf for this repeal of the gag rule, well, it was worth it.)
That's why I don't mind seeing this particular, um, withdrawal from the stimulus package: because I'm guessing that the Obamamites are being savvy—taking this fight out of the public eye so that they can handle it in a better way.
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Slate's William Saletan returns for a second guest post on female sexuality:
Hey, no fair with the complications, Emily! I had a nice, simple thesis
that men and women were different,
and you had to go fuzz
it up with all your nuance and stuff. But, heck, I’m a gentleman. You took
my bait; I’ll take yours.
I can’t rehash all the research on sex patterns in aggression, responsiveness,
and social editing in this space or without putting everyone to sleep. Plus,
why trust my spin? Here are abstracts and write-ups from a few recent studies,
which can be interpreted in various ways. A little nature here, a little nurture
there. Have at it.
1. Do angry men
get noticed?
(Current Biology,
2006)
Angry
male faces were detected significantly more rapidly by male than female
observers. … Our findings are consistent with the notion of a perceptual system
in both males and females that has evolved to rapidly detect aggression in
males.
In
humans, evolution has resulted in marked differentiation between males and
females, including differences in the structural and functional organization of
the brain. These differences are reflected in patterns of cognitive and
behavioural abilities. For example, females tend to perform
better than males at fine motor and perceptual discrimination tasks, whereas
males are better at route-finding tasks. Males are also physically larger
and more aggressive than females, and so more likely to pose a physical threat. Such physical differences between the sexes may in turn have
shaped the cognitive processes involved in detecting threatening behaviour in
others. Early detection of an angry facial expression, for example, might
reduce the likelihood of an injurious or potentially fatal confrontation. … Recent evidence suggests that females are better than males
at recognizing non-threatening facial expressions such as happiness or sadness.
2.
Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others
(Nature,
2006)
We engaged male and female volunteers
in an economic game, in which two confederates played fairly or unfairly, and
then measured brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging while
these same volunteers observed the confederates receiving pain. Both sexes
exhibited empathy-related activation in pain-related brain areas … towards fair
players. However, these empathy-related responses were significantly reduced in
males when observing an unfair person receiving pain. This effect was
accompanied by increased activation in reward-related areas, correlated with an
expressed desire for revenge.
3. Sex
differences in rhesus monkey toy preferences parallel those of children
(Hormones
and Behavior, 2008)
Male monkeys, like
boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female
monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences. … The
similarities to human findings demonstrate that such preferences can develop
without explicit gendered socialization. We offer the hypothesis that toy
preferences reflect hormonally influenced behavioral and cognitive biases which
are sculpted by social processes into the sex differences seen in monkeys and
humans.
(More on the study here:
The animals were offered two categories
of toys— ones with wheels such as wagons and other vehicles, and various dolls
and cuddly toys.)
4. Sex
differences in the development of termite-fishing skills in the wild
chimpanzees
(Animal Behavior,
2005)
[T]he techniques of female offspring closely
resembled those of their mothers whereas the techniques of male offspring did
not, suggesting that the process by which termite fishing is learned differs
for male and female chimpanzees.
(More on the study here:
By the first day, adult
females were getting at the mustard and a young female watched carefully and
began to pick up the skills, she said. Two young males did not fare as well—one
simply sat next to his mother and tried to steal some mustard from her, Dr.
Lonsdorf said. The behavior of both sexes may seem familiar to many parents,
she said, adding, "The sex differences we found in the chimps mimic some
of the findings from the human child development literature." She pointed
out, however, that at least in the case of chimps, each is doing something
important, since the males' play is practice for later dominance behavior.)
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When I read this morning that President Obama was going to ask House Democrats to pull family-planning funds from the stimulus package, I breathed a sigh of relief. Not because I'm opposed to birth control (quite the contrary, actually), but because I was opposed to the stimulus package being used for such a purpose. (And yes, feel free to insert your jokes about the, har har, stimulating effects of birth control at any point.) Alas, and perhaps obviously, not everyone shares my sentiments. At Talking Points Memo, Ruth Rosen chides Obama for courting Republicans and calls his request "misguided."
This doesn't have to be an issue that divides women and brings Democrats and Republicans to blows so early in the new administration. I feel like there's a liberal argument for excluding the funds from the stimulus package, and a conservative argument for providing birth control for family planning.
First, not including the funds in the stimulus package: Despite Obama's pledge that there would be no pork in the legislation, Las Vegas' mayor has been trying to get stimulus bucks for a planned "Mob Museum" for his city, and conservatives are already having fun with such proposals as an extra $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts. If family planning is so important, do we really want it to be reduced to comparisons to the Mob Museum? Can't it stand on its own merits?
As for the (fiscally) conservative argument for funding family planning, well, as much as I rarely agree with Nancy Pelosi on anything, her comments to George Stephanopolous make a point. It's cheaper to provide birth control to poor families than it is to pay for unintended and sometimes unwanted children. And I'd rather fund birth control than abortion, a million times over. If we can give these parents the means to limit their family size, they will have an easier time taking care of themselves, meaning they will be less likely to need government assistance. And the parents will have more time and resources to devote to the children they already have, helping them with school and getting them involved in extracurricular activities, with the effect of helping them to break the cycle of poverty once they become adults themselves. (To me, that's a pretty important "family value.")
But both arguments lead me to the same conclusion: Make funding for family planning its OWN legislation. Get the debate out into the open. Obama promised hope and change. Congress shouldn't let him down with business as usual.
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Will, we invite you to join the party and you show up and ask hard questions. Ok, I'll bite. You ask whether the women-as-reactive pattern extends "to other realms
of life," since "it certainly
resonates with broad sex-differential patterns of aggression,
responsiveness, and social editing." So tell us more about the research you're referencing. I'm often driven mildly crazy by the exaggeration of findings about brain-based sex difference. It's just sexier to say that women are different from men than to say they're mostly similar. (See this great series by Amanda Schaffer for a take down about sex-based differences on language and types of intelligence.) On the other hand, when the research is solid, it's of course worth grappling with. My recollection is that you're right about aggression, but remind us why, and fill us in on the other fronts you raised.
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Dahlia, Meghan, like Jessica, I'm not so alarmed by the Girl Scout Research Institute findings (so that's where the Thin Mints money goes). Hillary Clinton almost became president this year, didn't, and now she's secretary of state. Sarah Palin could have become vice president, but wasn't ready for the job, and when you're not ready for a very public job, you can find yourself humiliated (ask Dan Quayle). Caroline Kennedy (whose paper doll image I played with as a girl, and so I find myself untroubled by the appearance of Malia and Sasha dolls) almost became senator from New York, but it turns out more than a famous name was called for, and a better qualified woman, Kirsten Gillibrand was chosen. I think the parents of the girls who took the poll need to help them to see that the lessons of this political year are that there are and will be plenty of opportunities for them to be become leaders—but that not everything will go their way, and when things don't, they have to be flexible enough to seize the opportunities they can. And also that Girl Scout training provides a crucial lesson in getting ahead: Be prepared.
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I haven’t been on our blog much of late because I recently became one of the millions of Americans who lost someone to cancer: On Christmas Day, my mother died after a two-and-a-half year “battle,” as the locution goes, with colorectal cancer. As many of you know, cancer affects nearly all of us in one way or another. New 2008 figures from the American Cancer Society show that men have an approximately 1 in 2 chance of developing some form cancer over the course of their life (44.92 percent) and women have an approximately 1 in 3 chance (37.52 percent). One of my New Year’s resolutions involves urging everyone I know near the age of 50—including you, dear readers—to get a colonoscopy. Really. It’s not that bad. And colon cancer, unlike many other cancers, is detectable in its early stages, before it has spread to other organs and lymph nodes.
Early detection is notoriously difficult, so I was particularly eager to read Wired’s provocative January cover story about the flaws in our “war on cancer.” It profiles a number of scientists and doctors who believe that America should spend less money on developing treatment on late-stage patients and more on developing tests to detect cancer before it metastasizes. The idea is that we can actually make headway in identifying cancer early on—though we have done a bad job of it so far. This proposition is tantalizing, and the Canary Foundation, a newish research group devoted to “the new science of early detection,” appears to be doing good work. But the piece (by Thomas Goetz) also manifested, I thought, a slightly breathless embrace of science that still seems to be iffy. To take one small example, the test for ovarian cancer Goetz mentions—measuring levels of the protein CA-125—can also be indicative of underlying conditions that have nothing to do with cancer—including endometrial cysts. This doesn’t help someone figure out whether to have reproductive- or cancer-based surgery. Now, as Goetz points out later, researchers are working on developing an ancillary test that will work with the CA-125 tumor marker to pinpoint ovarian cancer more specifically. But I wonder if any of our other science-minded bloggers read the article, and, if so, what light you might be able to shed. Should we be making a more concerted effort to develop tests for early detection rather than new treatments? Is it really an either/or option?
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On this morning’s Washington Post op-ed page, my friend Ruth Marcus made a similar point as your mother, Jessica, on the upside of Ty’s opportunistic marketing of dolls with “beautiful names.” The marvelous and sweet effigies of the president’s daughters indeed provide long overdue racially correct toys for little girls to be proud of. Citing the troubling psychology experiments of dark-skinned children choosing white dolls described in Brown v. Board of Education, Ruth thinks the inherent social service trade-off might be worth it. The manufacturer of Beanie Babies has again created a direct connection to the imagination of a new generation. Even in this belt-tightening moment, I’m sure the dolls are selling like crazy and even lifting the economy. I’m not offended by the actual toys and can imagine which little girls in my life I would enjoy giving them to. My fear is that if the first family is mined as a commodity, there will come a time when their worth is depleted. Right now the public wants to embrace them like a cuddly toy. It’s time to get off the stage and get back to school.
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Dahlia, Jessica,
Like you, I'm not entirely surprised by the depressing Girl Scout stats. But two thoughts spring to mind: First, I wonder what a poll of girls 9-12 would show. In my anecdotal experience with pre-teens this past election (my mother ran a secondary school that I used to spend time in), the girls in the 10-year-old range were picking up the excitement of the fact that Hillary and Sarah Palin were strong female candidates, and little of the debate over it. Second, adolescent girls are hitting that moment when they do begin to doubt themselves (the Reviving Ophelia moment) and so I wonder if this age group was particularly susceptible to absorbing the glass ceiling message. Just speculation. It'd be interesting to know more.
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Dahlia, you're right that at face value, those Girl Scouts stats are disheartening. But the silver lining may be that these girls are thinking about themselves in leadership positions in the first place. As a teen, I never considered women in politics at all. I was not an especially political adolescent, but I didn't think about the glass ceiling for women running for office because I wasn't even in the room. That girls are even considering those barriers in the first place might be a small step in the right direction. At least Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton are now sharing brain space with Taylor Swift and Zac Efron.
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Courtesy of Feministing, a new study launched by the Girl Scout Research Institute shows that girls between the ages of 13 and 17 came away from this past presidential election with some very mixed feelings about females and power. On the one hand, these young women report big increases in engagement in politics, their confidence in discussing political issues, and their sense of their own power to change things in this country. But the numbers also show a huge uptick in their awareness of barriers for women. For instance, 43 percent of girls strongly believe that "girls have to work harder than boys in order to gain positions of leadership." (Just 25 percent of girls agreed with that statement only one year ago.) And the percentage of girls who believe that "both men and women have an equal chance of getting a leadership position" has declined from 35 percent to 24 percent in one short year. Zounds.
None of this surprises me. This election seems to have inspired and discouraged most of the women I know in just about equal measure. But I hadn’t stopped to think about how that would be experienced by a 15-year-old girl, who suddenly feels powerful and smart enough to change the world but deeply doubtful that she will get the chance.
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I agree with Marjorie, Bonnie and everyone else that using Malia and Sasha Obama's images for fun and profit is beyond gross. However, my mother pointed out the one upshot to this capitalist debacle: Little girls of all races might want to play with black dolls now. I am reminded of a recent This American Life show in which a former FAO Schwartz employee talked about a coveted brand of baby dolls. The store ran out of white dolls, and so white moms were relegated to buying Asian dollies. After the Asian babies went the Latino babies. The black baby dolls were left to languish under the cheap industrial lighting. With the creation of Malia and Sasha dolls, the girls' privacy may be slightly violated, but it might change the ethnic makeup of the toy box.
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Samantha,
I don't think it's fair to compare Obama allowing his girls to accompany him on the campaign trail to the Ty Co.'s shameless marketing of Sasha and Malia dolls for profit. In American politics, it's standard operating procedure, and the expectation of voters, for political candidates—especially male candidates seeking high office—to show that they are "family-oriented men," i.e., husbands and fathers who love baseball, apple pie, and Chevrolets. For some irrational reason, images of candidates standing with their wives and children grants them legitimacy in the eyes of voters, no matter if they are cheating cads like John Edwards, Bill Clinton, Gary Hart, Eliot Spitzer, David Paterson, or the legions of other skirt-chasing politicians who are too many to name here. Obama may have thrust his daughters in the public eye, as you say, but I don't think he "cashed in" on his daughters' cuteness. He didn't try to promote them in books, market them as dolls, or put their pictures on T-shirts. Granted, his cutie-pie daughters did melt some voters' hearts—how could someone with such typically precocious American children be a closet Muslim terrorist and secret black militant?—and demystified their daddy with the weird name and nontraditional background. Still, no amount of cuteness can get you the White House if you don't have the goods the run the place. Just look at Sarah Palin and her boatload of cute kids. McCain's brood isn't too shabby, either, although the cute factor diminishes after age 10. G.W. Bush's win was an anomaly, and one I'd not like to see repeated.
Obama certainly could not lock his girls in the family's basement until after the campaign. They are a legitimate and important part of his personal bio, much as Chelsea Clinton and the two Bush girls were for their dads. And sometimes, Obama aides have said, he just missed his family and wanted them with him.
The Obamas certainly do not forfeit their right to be outraged by companies exploiting their children's names. Although I argued for limiting the girls' exposure in the media, I don't think that Mom and Dad have crossed good-parenting lines. I just think it opens them up to more people feeling entitled to take liberties with their daughters' privacy. That's why I think they should be careful. I wouldn't be surprised if their displeasure with the Sasha and Malia dolls caused them to pull the girls back a bit.
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Like many others here, I read Daniel Bergner's "What Do Women Want?" with interest. While I tend to shy away from reports from the frontlines written by those who do their research talking to the scientists and not the monkeys, I was intrigued by the essay's truthtelling: "All was different with the women." (Is not one among us going to confess to being turned on by bonobo porn?) The piece reminded me of a parallel story I've seen played out on the adult movie sets that I've visited, where you can never believe your eyes, especially when it comes to women.
Over the years, porn has taken a beating at the hands of those who deem it misogynist garbage. In fact, I'd argue, pornography is obsessed primarily with female desire. That the product its industry produces is less socially acceptable than the polysyllabic studies of Bergner's "postfeminist" desire hunters in lab coats doesn't make it any less revealing of how complicated it gets for all of us when it comes to sex, and how little any of us know about our own desires.
Porn stars toil daily in the shadowy world of desire. In Porn Valley, the sex acts are real, but is the desire manufactured? As Susan Faludi so vividly illuminated in her 1996 New Yorker essay, "The Money Shot," there is no greater pressure on a porn set than the burden placed upon the male performer and his erection, or "wood," in the parlance of the business. The woodsman must prove his desire to convince the audience that this is the "real" deal, that this scene of sexual desire is no masquerade. Hence, the "money" shot. Without it, all is lost.
For porn starlets, the act is trickier. On the one hand, the female performers have it easier. Sometimes they're turned on. Sometimes they're not. They don't have to physically "deliver" on desire in the same way their male counterparts do. Yet, for the vast majority of the male viewing audience, porn "fails" without at least the pantomime of female sexual pleasure. Without it, no scopophilia. If porn is to be believed, most men are as preoccupied with female desire as we are unaware of what it is we really want.
I wonder why the term "postfeminist" is used in the context of Bergner's essay? Understanding female desire seems more like a universal quest. Either way, I suspect it may be an impossible one.
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Ah, Nina, Sam, Bonnie—real estate porn is very dangerous. I try not to look.
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Well, XXers, let it never be said that we women don't get results. On the heels of last week's hideous and inopportune MLK-day revelation—that the hands of Barack Obama's ubiquitous cardboard cutout were, gasp, white—I realized that "Barack's" left paw is also like, totally single. (FLOTUS Michelle can't be too happy about that)
For better or worse, Barack's "Look—I can talk to the Muslims!" coloring and his "rock"-solid marital status became two of the more compelling characterological arguments for his election. In speech after speech over the course of the campaign, the hypnotic glint of the real Obama's thick wedding band told me that it was all going to be OK (and that "my taxes ... will not ... go up"). And for many former racial cynics, his "golden" hue helped seal the deal. Making it all the more terrible that the cutout could have been so obviously white, and so clearly unfaithful, for so long.
So I obsessively traced the cutout back to its makers in Utah. A series of interrogations and a great deal of hold muzak later, I obtained change I could believe in: The cutout company is now advertising two black, presumably wifed Baracks, "coming soon" to its inventory. Good.
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Nina, and Dana, your discussion underlines my theory that perfect real estate is more seductive and harder to attain than a perfect partner.
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Dana, I had a similar response to Nina's post about that amazing living situation for Roselyn Leibowitz and Catherine Redmond, the two friends profiled in Sunday's New York Times. Given all the moaning and fantasizing we all did recently about how to achieve financial contentment without trading in our less than lucrative professions, I can't imagine how these two artists could pull off $3 million in renovations. Do I smell a sugar daddy lurking behind that newly installed kitchen counter?
The whole thing was especially depressing to me after going this weekend to look at apartments with my own platonic, best friend roommate. Our tiny tiny apartment has become a little too tiny tiny for us, but even a place with one extra notch of breathing room (while staying within our price range) is so horribly far from what Leibowitz and Redmond get to call home. Ninety yards of book shelves?? We'd be happy just to have our beds not be pushed up against opposite sides of the same wall.
Um, that said...anyone know of some spacious yet affordable-for-journalists-without-sugar-daddies apartment in Brooklyn? Let me know! We are wonderfully responsible tenants!
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Nina, so funny you posted on that Times Homes & Garden piece about the two older women sharing connected lofts -- I had the link all clipped and ready to send to my best friend in Texas, proposing an arrangement just like this if we ever find ourselves widowed, divorced or otherwise single. (For the moment, I'm very fond of both my roommates, one of whom, as you put it, I gave birth to myself.) But then I got to thinking about the implications of one woman paying for the entire ($3 million dollar!) loft and all the renovations, and never did send my friend the link. Whether or not the two parties are romantically involved -- and I did love the fact that these two women were just buddies -- the power imbalance there just felt too creepy.
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I've lived by myself for the past year or so. And while I love having my own space (so much so that a swinging Friday night for me sometimes involves sewing new throw pillows) I often miss the social nature of roommate life—sometimes you just want someone to sit next to you while you watch The Real World. If you assume that singleton living is just a stop on the way toward romantic cohabitation, then fine; the loneliness can be dealt with as a character-building exercise. But if you don't want to shack up with a partner—or reproduce, essentially birthing your own roommates—and you don't want to live alone, what are your options?
If you have the money—and a good architect—you can do what the two women profiled in Sunday's New York Times Home and Garden section did: design a loft that consists of two connected but separate apartments. The gorgeous space (see the slideshow here) provides the women—who are 54 and 65—both "companionship [and] a great deal of privacy." The arrangement is less than official—one woman paid for the loft and the renovations, and there's no written or legal agreement between them—but to me it's a heartening step toward recognizing the very real, very concrete role friendships can play in our adult lives. Hell, if I could have a two-fer apartment with my best friend (complete with 90 YARDS of bookshelves!) I might never move in with my boyfriend, either.
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Responding to Sam's question about whether President Obama's campaign served his daughters up as "accessories for his Family Man ensemble," pampering and showing off our delightful children are among the great rewards of parenting. Although normally, the gifts and attention we direct to our children are on a more personal scale, bringing them into the spotlight on special occasions (announcing Dad's candidacy, Malia's birthday, Dad's election victory and swearing in), or making special treats available (the Jonas Brothers!), are a natural extension of the first couple's well-deserved pride in their charming and adorable daughters. That said, too much attention can be toxic. When they make up a guest list for the next White House sleepover, the children may feel serious politicking from among their new 2nd second- and fifth-grade classmates. The Obamas now need to definitively address the tsunami of attention the 7- and 10-year-old little girls are attracting. While there is still no sashaandmalia.com domain, there are already a number of high-traffic blogs and Web sites devoted to fans of the first daughters. Michelle's statement that the controversial "Marvelous Malia" and "Sweet Sasha" dolls are "inappropriate" is not enough. Although I love the new president's policy of transparency, he and Michelle need to draw a curtain across coverage of these minor children to protect their images and names from being commoditized in the marketplace.
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It's funny, Samantha, because when I read Barbara and Jenna Bush's letter to Sasha and Malia, I scoffed at the latter part of the sentence, "Our dad, like yours, is a man of great integrity and love; a man who always put us first." Really? The president of the United States always put his children first? I have no ability to assess the parenting skills of Bush or Obama, but I think that being president necessarily entails putting the country before your children. I don't know how to answer Samantha's question of whether it's a worthwhile trade for the parents or the children, and I can only thank the people who are willing to give up so much to serve the United States, but the assertion that the president always puts his (or, someday, her) children first strikes me as impossible. I think the president gives up that ability when he takes the oath of office.
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Fellow XX Factor contributors and readers, we're not the only ones intrigued by Daniel Bergner's article in the New York Times Magazine on female sexuality. Slate's own William Saletan has written about it as his "Human Nature" blog.
Will writes:
May I join the conversation? I was struck in Bergner's article by the same idea Meghan flagged: that perhaps "there's something reactive about female sexuality." (I have another take on the idea here.)
To me, what's really provocative about this theory is that its logic doesn't seem confined to sexuality. Bergner quotes Meredith Chivers as speculating:
[O]ne possibility is that instead of it being a go-out-there-and-get-it kind of sexuality, it's more of a reactive process. If you have this dyad, and one part is pumped full of testosterone, is more interested in risk taking, is probably more aggressive, you've got a very strong motivational force. It wouldn't make sense to have another similar force. You need something complementary.
If the dyad theory is correct, why wouldn't it extend to other realms of life, with one sex initiating and the other reacting? It certainly resonates with broad sex-differential patterns of aggression, responsiveness, and social editing.
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Ann, your reading of Bergner's article seemed spot on for me, particularly the part about women not wanting to find clear-cut answers in order to keep the door open for sexual possibility. The part of "What Do Women Want?" that stood out to me most was the discussion of sexologist Lisa Diamond's research:
Diamond doesn’t claim that women are without innate sexual orientations. But she sees
significance in the fact that many of her subjects agreed with the
statement “I’m the kind of person who becomes physically attracted to
the person rather than their gender.” For her participants, for the well-known women she lists at the start of her book [Ann Heche, Julie Cypher] and for women on average, she stresses that desire often emerges so compellingly from emotional closeness that innate orientations can be overridden.
While I believed they were being honest, I never understood my bisexual female friends who would say similar things to Diamond's statement -- that they were attracted to the person, not the gender (or maybe, as Meghan mentioned, they were attracted to the person's desire, not their gender). Anyone who's attended a liberal arts college in the past 20 odd years knows at least one women who earns the not-so-kind epithet "LUG," or lesbian until graduation, and those women are not taken especially seriously.
Research like Diamond and Chivers' is valuable, not just for getting women to understand themselves, but to potentially foster more understanding of non-normative orientations. To answer your question Meghan, no, like Nina, I don't believe that women are divided between the divergent systems of sexuality, the physiological and the subjective. It seems from the research being done, we're fairly far from coming up with any definitive commentary about women's sexuality. I think we're probably not even asking the right questions yet.
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The saga continues with the Sasha and Malia dolls that Bonnie thought were inevitable and Nina thought would be more fun if they wore miniskirts and traveled in space. First a Ty spokeswoman claimed that the company avoids naming their dolls for "any particular living individual" and chalked up the release of Sweet Sasha and Marvelous Malia to serendipity ("Sasha and Malia are beautiful names" that "worked very well with the dolls we were making," she said). Now it looks like Marjorie's call for the elder Obamas to stand up for the girls' privacy has been answered; the first lady said through her press secretary that she feels "it is inappropriate to use young, private citizens for marketing purposes."
I'm all for protecting the girls' privacy as much as possible. But are they really private citizens? When Barack Obama brought his daughters on stage with him at campaign events, making them adorable little accessories for his Family Man ensemble, wasn't he making the choice to thrust them into the public eye? And when he writes open letters to them on their first day of school (which, as Emily pointed out, came off as fairly hollow and staged), doesn't he sacrifice some of the moral high ground in this debate over his daughters' privacy, some of his right to outrage when that privacy is breached?
It's tough, I'd imagine, to be the child of a celebrity. In the case of Suri Cruise or Shiloh Jolie Pitt, though, there was no choice; their parents were celebrities from a fairly young age, so any kids they had would necessarily grow up in the spotlight. With politicians, it feels a little different. Barack Obama didn't have to run for president. And no doubt when he decided to do so, one of the issues he talked through was whether it would be fair to Sasha and Malia (and for that matter, Michelle) to put them through that. Running for public office requires a pretty hefty ego—enough faith in yourself to think that your ability to make things better with a position of power override whatever damages you'll inflict on those around you, both from rampant attention from the media and splintered attention from yourself.
Do any of you moms hold it against him that he chose to go for it anyway, even though it would almost certainly make a "normal" childhood impossible for his daughters? Or is a selfless style of parenting just as damaging as one that could be labeled selfish? Being hounded by paparazzi and commodified by toy companies is bad, yes, but for all that, Sasha and Malia get to grow up with a front-row seat to the ultimate role models: a man and woman who put it all on the line because they thought they could make a difference in the world and were determined to take that as far as they could. Perhaps it's a good trade.
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Meghan, thanks for starting a discussion about this Sunday's twisty and complicated NYT Magazine story on female desire. One quick response: You wrote about Meredith Chivers' experiment in which participants were shown a variety of sexual (and semi-sexual) images:
Interestingly, though, the women recorded their sexual response differently than did the machines that measured it: they said they had been more turned on by the images of heterosexual sex—and less turned on by the images of bonobo sex—than they actually had been. Hmm. As I understand it, this discrepancy either means that women's minds and bodies are subconsciously at war, or that the women were conscious of their less "normative" desire but felt ashamed of it. In either case, it bears thinking about.
I agree that the split between bodily reactions and psychological reactions Chivers found was fascinating. (Though I wonder how cleanly those divisions can actually be made.) But the way you describe that discrepancy makes it inherently a problem—either our minds and bodies are "at war" or we're "ashamed" of getting turned on by horny bonobos. Is it possible that the women simply had complicated reactions that, in the immediate testing situation, they weren't fully prepared to untangle or report accurately? Not that I like perpetuating the idea that women are this deep, dark forest of mystic mysteries, while men, in turn, are straightforward and easy to comprehend. (Ann, I'm a fan of your Freudian reading of the article.) But I'm not sure Chivers' data necessarily paints a picture of a womanly torment.
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Meghan, not to evade your questions, but I found myself focusing on the subtexts of Daniel Bergner's article: He is particularly fascinated by the difficulty of doing scientific research on female sexuality and by the jarring multiplicity of theories and by the tenacity of the postfeminist sexologists like Meredith Chivers in the face of the morass—more fascinated, almost, than he is by their findings about female sexuality itself. From the start, the emphasis is not just on how their data don't add up in any expected way, but also on the ways their thinking about their data doesn't add up predictably or neatly, either.
I don't mean at all to suggest that Bergner (a distant acquaintance) disparages the endeavor. But his article prompted me to wonder—in the rather ungrounded, speculative spirit the field seems to encourage—whether Freud's famous question invites a sort of Freudian reading: Maybe the last thing men really want to know is what, exactly, women want. As for women, what do they want to know? Well, to apply some crude evolutionary logic, it might seem advantageous if they were eager to probe the mysteries of their own desire not in order to come up with clear-cut answers, but to keep the door open to an array of possibilities. Could be a promising recipe, at any rate, for achieving the goal that brought Chivers to the field in the first place: "I wanted everybody to have great sex."
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Ever since Margaret Atwood—a feminist novelist in the most important sense—wrote her famous story “Rape Fantasies,” people have understood that sometimes women’s sexual fantasies are anything but politically correct. Now there’s an interesting story in the New York Times Magazine that implicitly asks: Are contemporary women doomed to experience a schism between what their bodies lust for and their minds tell them they want? (Full disclosure: Dan Bergner, the author, is an old acquaintance.) The story offers up a road map of female desire as charted by postfeminist scientists, who have been exploring female desire with gusto. Guess what? What women want in bed is far more complex and, well, polymorphously perverse than some had formerly thought. In fact, no one understands any of it yet.
Yet one interesting idea emerges from the piece: the notion that female desire is based less on intimacy (the old truism) than on the perception of being desired—a notion that, it would seem, complicates feminist notions of owning your sexuality. To take just a few bits of research from the piece: As Bergner reports, scientists have long wondered why women sometimes describe feeling arousal (even orgasm) during nonconsensual sex; some scientists now theorize that it stems from an evolutionary adaptation to early human sex. (Women whose genitals remained unlubricated were more susceptible to injury, infection, and, consequently, death.) Bergner connects this to the fact that women seem to be more responsive—on a physiological level—to a breadth of visual stimuli than men are. One recent study, conducted by psychologist Meredith Chivers, found that heterosexual women responded sexually to a wider array of videos than men did; while the men in the study mostly responded to images involving women (and the gay men mostly responded to images involving men), the straight women in the study were turned on by everything from heterosexual sex to a nude woman doing calisthenics to bonobos mating.
Interestingly, though, the women recorded their sexual response differently than did the machines that measured it: They said they had been more turned on by the images of heterosexual sex—and less turned on by the images of bonobo sex—than they actually had been. Hmm. As I understand it, this discrepancy either means that women’s minds and bodies are subconsciously at war or that the women were conscious of their less “normative” desire but felt ashamed of it. In either case, it bears thinking about.
So does the complicated notion that there's something reactive about female sexuality. (After all, we've all had the experience, I'm sure, of not desiring a man who desired us.) Be that as it may, there's something worth mulling about the (mostly female) scientists' new thinking on the matter. As Bergner puts it, scientists like Chivers believe that “female sexuality [may be] divided between two truly separate, if inscrutably overlapping, systems: the physiological and the subjective.” So I’m curious: Did any of you buy any of this? What was your reaction?
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Maybe it's because I belatedly saw Milk this weekend, but my favorite part of the New York Times today is this, from a Style story celebrating Jason Wu, the 26-year-old surprise designer of Michelle Obama's much-discussed inaugural gown:
Even when [Wu] was 5, growing up in Taipei, Taiwan, his parents, who operate an import-export business, recognized his creative ambitions. His mother sometimes drove him to bridal stores so he could make sketches of the gowns in the windows.
Maybe there's a world of complexity that lies beneath these sentences. I thought of Hanna's Atlantic story on the related though different topic of boys who want to be girls (XX Factor comments here and here). But I love the seeming simplicity and the love infusing it. Way to go, Mom and Dad.
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... if I were 8, these are the dolls I would want. OK, I kind of want them now. Mattel is releasing three Star Trek Barbies as tie-ins to the upcoming J.J. Abrams' remake of the original 1960s series (which features some genius casting: John Cho as Sulu, Simon Pegg as Scotty, and, um, Tyler Perry as the president of Starfleet Academy). The Uhura doll is experiencing some serious head-to-body ratio issues, but I think even Beyoncé would approve of that hot high ponytail. And they actually gave her a phaser!
(h/t to Wired's Underwire blog)
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A guest post from Slate intern Margaret Johnson:
"After Maddow,” Michael Calderone’s post on Politico this morning, talks about a new program being developed for the MSNBC time slot following Rachel Maddow’s hugely successful 9 p.m. show, but the headline got me thinking about where we are as a culture “after Maddow.” In other words, how has Maddow changed the way lesbians are portrayed on TV?
Every night she enters homes no lesbian has before, and does so as a self-described "butch dyke," albeit with a slight coating of eye shadow and lip gloss to help the medicine go down. On the one hand the mere existence of her show indicates a continuing trend toward putting women on camera who aren’t what Maddow once called "Barbie girls," and that’s awesome. But there’s also a strong possibility that Maddow’s adoring viewers will think she is what all lesbians look like, or at least the smart, successful ones. Through no fault of Maddow’s, other than the visibility her talent and success have brought her, she is perpetuating the idea there’s no such thing as an out lesbian who looks more, well, like a girl.
Sure, the L Word has provided a counter-image, but an extreme one—you’ll never find that many smokin’ hot femme lesbians in one community (if you do, tell me where). There’s also a counterpoint in the simultaneously lovely and badass Portia de Rossi. She played a feminine lesbian acupuncturist opposite Joely Richardson on Nip/Tuck’s 2007-08 season and also appears regularly in the home movies her wife Ellen Degeneres airs on her show, which I admit to finding totally awww-inducing. Still, I wonder how long it will be after and because of Maddow before we see more out female journalists on television, especially any as feminine as Maddow chooses not to be.
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Last week Samantha and I weighed in on the case of "Natalie Dylan," the 22-year-old self-proclaimed virgin who's selling her virginity at auction. The top bid is at $3.8 million. Now, in a personal essay, Dylan explains why she's selling her hymen for millions. Referring to the auction as a "sociological experiment," Dylan asserts it was her recently acquired bachelor's degree in women's studies that made her do it. After she pops her cherry, she's going to pursue a masters degree in Marriage and Family Therapy, and her virginity auction is preparation for her "upcoming thesis project." Apparently, while pursuing women's studies, Dylan became aware that "virginity" is a tool the patriarchy uses to keep women down, a paradigm she wants to subvert by selling it to someone. Come again?
When I learned this, it became apparent to me that idealized virginity is just a tool to keep women in their place. But then I realized something else: if virginity is considered that valuable, what’s to stop me from benefiting from that? It is mine, after all. And the value of my chastity is one level on which men cannot compete with me. I decided to flip the equation, and turn my virginity into something that allows me to gain power and opportunity from men.I took the ancient notion that a woman’s virginity is priceless and used it as a vehicle for capitalism.
How ... feminist? How ... empowering? Whoever invented women's studies must be gnawing at her wrists at this very minute. "Are you rolling your eyes?" Dylan wonders. Why, yes, I am, Miss Dylan! "But I'm not saying every forward-thinking person has to agree with what I’m doing," she continues. Thank God. "You should develop your own personal belief system—that’s exactly my point!" Ah, the wisdom of the young. She concludes: "These days, more and more women my age are profiting directly from their sex appeal, but I’m not sure other women should follow my lead." That would make two of us.
Until today, this sexual spectacle's onlookers have been attempting to discern where Dylan is coming from, personally and politically, but her essay makes it more than clear that her pseudo-feminist blathering is little more than a misguided attempt to conceal her mind-boggling idiocy. Suffice to say, I won't be bidding on her.
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You're right, Jessica, that Kirsten Gillibrand—while proudly conservative—isn't totally orthodox. A smart progressive friend writes me with another example:
Despite the fact as a hard lefty I shouldn't, I kind of find her endearing. ... She voted for the Employee Free Choice Act and was a co-sponsor. Phew!
He adds:
I think that Paterson did not have a killer option and this is not a particularly bad pick. If Jerry Nadler was transformed into a 45-year-old woman from Buffalo with a "z" at the end of her name, great, but you go to war with the army you have.
I only beg the Slate art department not to get on the task of producing an image of Jerry Nadler transformed into a 45-year-old woman from Buffalo.
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Jessica, I'm glad you raised the abortion issue. As I was listening to clips from the pro-life rallies yesterday, what struck me was the time-warp factor. The abortion debate has 
shifted radically over the last five years, but you wouldn't know it from listening to those protesters. Democratic interest groups have been working hard to shift their party's language about abortion. Candidates hardly ever talk about "choice" anymore. They don't even stop at Clinton's "safe, legal, and rare." Nowadays, they take that formula one step further and use the word "reduction," as in, "we will actively pass laws that help reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies, in order to ultimately reduce the number of abortions." (See my Atlantic story here, and Amy Sullivan's great book.) Of course, it is a classic strategy of the party in opposition to create straw men. Democrats did it, too. But I can't imagine the callous-to-life argument will stick to Obama, who has mastered the kind of religious overtones that make him impervious to this charge.
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Eve, you're right that Kirsten Gillibrand has a remarkably conservative record for a New York Dem, except on one issue: reproductive rights. She co-sponsored a 2007 bill to "expand access to preventive health care services that help reduce unintended pregnancy, reduce abortions, and improve access to women's health care," and she also got a 100 percent rating from NARAL Pro-Choice New York. It's been argued by Ross Douhat and others that pro-lifers are more willing to compromise, especially now that Obama and his choice-loving compatriots are in charge, but the evidence of that is scant. In fact, it seems like the pro-life movement has been invigorated by Obama's inauguration, as tens of thousands of anti-abortion activists attended a rally in D.C. yesterday to mark the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. (According to the AP, one woman held up a sign that said “The Audacity of Hope: No More Roe.”)
Related: Wonder what the Catholic Gillibrand thinks of this ad making the rounds from CatholicVote.org, which argues that if Obama had been aborted, he wouldn't be president today.
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OK, so, at first blush, Kirsten Gillibrand—the replacement for Hillary in the Senate, announced today—looks like the ideal solution to all of New York Gov. David Paterson's problems. Like Caroline Kennedy, she's a woman. Like the big names in the replacement race, she's a talented buck-raker (as of this summer, she was crowned the "top fundraiser" among the 42 Democrats in the House class of '06). But unlike Kennedy or Cuomo, she isn't saddled with all that dynastic baggage. Perfect!
But she's also got politics. (Amid all the oohing and aahing over a lady politician's ascent, we sometimes forget that these political girl wonders have views along with their unusual anatomy.) And her politics are quite different from those of the other contenders. She's definitely the most conservative pick out of the possible replacements the Albany Times-Union handicapped. How conservative? Well, this fall she called her voting record "one of the most conservative in the state," and while I was skeptical when I first read that—including Republicans?—it's not too much of an exaggeration, especially now that the antediluvian Vito Fossella has been booted from office.
Among the mavericky votes Gillibrand has racked up: a vote in favor of giving immunity to the telecom companies that helped Bush spy on U.S. citizens; votes against both Pelosi-supported TARP bailout bills; a vote for the May 2007 war funding bill, which lacked a troop-withdrawal deadline, the liberal mania of the moment (no other New York Democrat voted in favor); and a vote for this fall's proposal to roll back the District of Columbia's prohibition on semiautomatic guns. (In general, the National Rifle Association is a huge Gillibrand fan, making the extremely rare move of endorsing her over her Republican opponent this year.)
I have no way of knowing whether Gillibrand is conservative at heart or whether she's simply fastidiously cautious about reflecting her district, which—until November—was the most Republican slice of New York represented by a Democrat. But her elevation represents another triumph for the Blue Dog-style, Rahm Emanuel-style philosophy of expanding Democratic power: make economic crusaders (TARP vote: check) with strong veins of conservatism running through their politics (gun love: check) the new faces of the Democratic Party. (The photo at the top shows Gillibrand next to Pennsylvania's Chris Carney, a top poster boy for the fashionable red-tinged brand of Democrat.)
Well. We'll see what Gillibrand sounds like when Chuck Schumer is done with her.
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Dayo, good catch on the white hands of our new POTUS. Talk about lazy marketing, geesh! Maybe we should be grateful that they weren't John McCain's hands (I wonder if his are gnarled, liver-spotted grandpa hands), or worse, Sarah Palin's glasses (so rose-colored that she actually believed the Republican hype about her qualifications for high office). Now that would be really insulting. I'm just glad that we now have the Real McCoy running the White House and not a cheap cardboard imitation.
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Bonnie, you're right about the Obamas not being able to keep their daughters' popularity in a bottle—the girls are just too cute for words—but I do think their parents can protect them by strictly limiting their media exposure and not allowing them to be mass-marketed by J. Crew, Ty Girlz, or any other company looking to profit off Malia's and Sasha's image. It's bad enough to see the president and the first family's picture on every imaginable tasteless piece of memorabilia (what's next, bathroom tissue?). I'd hate to see the girls become so overexposed that their fans turn into haters tired of seeing them everywhere. I think the parents would also do well not to release any more private-moment pictures of them with their girls, such as the ones of the girl's first day of school in D.C. As Emily B. pointed out in a post about those pictures, the Obamas' decision to make them public sent mixed messages about their daughters' zone of privacy. If the first couple consider photos of their girls doing something as mundane as going to school to be public information, why wouldn't the paparazzi try to push the envelope further the next time the girls are out and about in D.C.? (Granted the Secret Service will likely keep aggressive-minded photographers away, but still. ... ) The Obamas' decision to allow the girls to be interviewed on television last summer also surprised me, especially because it was done in the heat of the presidential campaign and because candidate Obama then said he regretted the decision.
I thought it was pretty classy when, after broadcasting a story about the girls' first day of school, one of the networks news anchors announced it would be the station's last story on the girls because they were entitled to their privacy—and their childhood. The station also said it would follow the same privacy guidelines it had adopted for Chelsea Clinton and other past presidential children. The Clintons' were absolutist about keeping Chelsea out of the media spotlight, and I think it served her well over the long-term.
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Is Sarah Palin going to write a book? Or should I say "write" a book? Purportedly, Palin has enlisted the aid of literary agent to the politicos Robert Barnett, a D.C. attorney whose client list includes Obama and the Clintons and who's scored TV deals for Brian Williams and Christiane Amanpour. Barnett's emitted a "no comment"—embarrassed, perhaps? One theory is that all Palin's anti-media griping has driven her to attempt to tell—or should I say sell—her own story in her own words—or should I say the words of her ghostwriter? The rumor reminds me of new rumors of another high-profile aspiring writer who may or may not be seeking a book deal: Britney Spears. My allergic reaction to the idea of a Palin book is as much born out of a deep dislike of—well, I was going to say her politics—but her everything may be a better way to describe it—as it is a sadness that books have become little more than one more crappy product to shill. Regardless of what Palin produces, one can be confident that it won't be worth the paper upon which her fake words are printed.
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Sweet Sammi, these two girls are already America's sweethearts, and there is not a kid over 5 years old in this country who can't tell you which one of the president's daughters he or she likes best. J. Crew and the makers of Ty Girlz dolls are not the only retailers to take advantage of that. The commercialization of Sasha’s and Malia’s adorableness started the moment their dad was elected. The manufacturers of the dresses the girls wore to Grant Park instantly exploited the connection. I'm surprised www.sashaandmalia.com is not a Web domain for some savvy marketer yet. The Obamas cannot keep their daughters’ popularity in a bottle, and I don't know what their mother will do to protect them. Now that former White House cute kid Caroline Kennedy has an opening in her schedule, maybe she can come help Michelle Obama figure that out.
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Turns out you don't need to live in the D.C. area to give your kids the joy of playing with Sasha and Malia, thanks to the latest in the mass of Obama-related merchandise: the "Sweet Sasha" and "Marvelous Malia" Bratz-like dolls manufactured by Ty (of Beanie Babies fame). As Amy Benfer wrote on Broadsheet:
This line shares the notorious Bratz dolls infatuation with the letter "z," visible lip liner and skimpy clothing of questionable taste ... Unfortunately, as a post at Packaging Girlhood points out, the dolls are part of the teen line and thus come complete with breasts, which seems a little odd in dolls named after two little girls who are now 7 and 10 years old. The poster at that site asks: "Couldn't they have just portrayed them as they are now, perhaps as two little girls with a dog and a leash?"
I agree that the plush (and womanly) depiction of the Obama girls is a bit unnerving. But equally upsetting to me are these descriptions on the site—not just for Sasha and Malia, but all the dolls. I'm old-school when it comes to kids' toys and favor ones without a prepackaged back story—the kind that require actual imagination to bring them to life. (Note: this theory has not been put into practice. I'm 24 and childless.) I find the American Girl dolls a little overbearing in their descriptions of each doll's interests and lives, but that's refreshing compared to the nonsensical blurbs on the Bratz site, which have to do entirely with clothes and appearance.
I played the "Which XX Factor writers have Ty Girlz dolls in their honor?" game, and here're the findings. They spelled your name wrong, Hanna, but you'll be happy to know that Hip Hannah, in her "pink tennies and white knee-high socks," is "the definition of cool!" The cheerleader Exciting Emily comes close to having your hair, Emily, but her eye color is a little upsetting. Apparently her "team colors (lavender and teal) really bring out the color of her eyes." Oh right. Her lavender and teal eyes. And the Sweet Sammi doll that I can only assume was named after me has a similar ocular malfunction. Clad in an orange hoodie, blue-eyed Sammi is also, apparently, benefiting from an outfit that "really brings out her eyes!"
I wonder how the Ty team would describe Molly, the bespectacled 1950s American Girl doll I grew up with. Obviously they'd do away with that pesky and fairly educational storyline about her dad being off at war. And I have a guess what they'd say about those wire-rim frames of hers.
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The NYT Style section has a short piece on the puzzling lack of shoppers who showed up for a free makeup giveaway that took place Tuesday at hundreds of department stores nationwide in fulfillment of a class action settlement on cosmetics price-fixing. The article suggests that perhaps lack of selection in the gratis goods was the reason for the poor turnout, but, darling Style section, have you glanced over at the old Business section lately? Beggars can't be choosers. I wonder if low turnout had more to do with the fact that the giveaway coincided with the inauguration, a juggernaut of an event that cast a shadow longer than anything even free Chanel Ombre Essentielle could create. It's a smartly timed news dump by the department stores who didn't want to lose too much inventory but also a testament to how huge a cultural phenomenon this inauguration was. Americans love free stuff, but apparently we love the stuff surrounding our institutions of freedom even more.
(By the way, Hanna, you'll be thrilled to note that to get to the article, you've got to click through a patriotic J. Crew ad touting their goods as "always inspiring." The Obama bump has been great for the retailer. Its Web site—with a new feature on designing for the Obama ladies, how's that for creative interpretation of off-the-rack?—has been swamped to the point of crashing since the inauguration.)
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It's fairly remarkable that Cindy McCain does not see the irony in complaining about the New York Times' biased reporting during an interview given by her own daughter. The Daily Beast posted this interview of Cindy by Meghan McCain, in which the former tries once again to present herself as a salt-of-the-earth Jane Winebox. She claims not to care about clothes beyond being "comfortable and easy to pack" and shares her gross hotel experiences, like "that one in Iowa that had the bathtub in the middle of the room was pretty bad." This multimillionaires-are-just-like-us posturing is all well and good, but I don't understand why Cindy feels she still needs to do this. From the excellent Ariel Levy New Yorker profile of McCain that came out in September, it seemed that Cindy did not at all relish her time in the public eye, and this sort of thing will only prolong her exposure. Maybe she's just doing it to promote her new nonprofit organizations, but the timing of the article is odd if that was Cindy's intent. Why did she choose this inaugural moment to exonerate herself?
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Thanks, Dahlia, I knew Cornyn was playing games with Hillary's Cabinet confirmation (first his delay over transparency, then being swayed in a “private conversation”). Now I know why: Just a little demonstration of how we play hardball up on the Hill, Mr. Obama.
Holder’s testimony that waterboarding is indeed torture opened the way for legal consequences for interrogation techniques used under the previous administration. Now Cornyn wants the attorney general nominee to walk back the cat by agreeing to not prosecute. The problem for the Texas Republican senator is he just looks like a thug. Like Secretary of State Clinton, Holder will be confirmed with or without Cornyn’s support. I imagine the torture investigations will make their way through one or two newly constituted committees in the 111th Congress, so the terribly busy new Justice Department won't need to waste resources for a while. Cornyn's weeklong delay of Holder is so bullyish, though, I'm tempted to say, let the witch hunt begin.
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Switching gears from the recent political appointments (and dropouts) for a moment to talk about Tyler Perry. Full disclosure: I've never seen a Tyler Perry movie, but his box-office dominance and cultural relevance is certainly undeniable. Which is why I found this analysis of the portrayal of women in TP's movies from the race and pop culture blog Racialicious particularly troubling:
There is little to dispute that TP’s target audience is Black women, so let’s look at the message we’ve received so far from the play [Madea Goes to Jail]. A beautiful, ambitious, driven woman is a promiscuous, shrill bitch and a danger to the home. A good woman doesn’t turn heads with her beauty, is soft-spoken, religious, and will wait—sexually and emotionally—for the right man to come along. We see this play out as well in the movie version of Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married. ... TP wants to teach women how to have successful relationships by making sure their male partners are satisfied. His morality plays, on stage and film, scold women: Be quiet, in appearance and voice. Don’t try to be more than what you are. Serious ambition is a danger to the family. Be grateful for “good enough.” Wait for the right man to notice you. Don’t bring attention to yourself. Be appropriately thankful when a man takes care of you.
The commenters who like Tyler Perry at Racialicious argue that TP's embrace of a group so rarely seen in Hollywood movies (African-American church-goers) helps them to ignore the more insidious aspects of his "morality plays." The Root touched on this issue briefly last year, and one has to wonder, especially in light of the media's "momification" of ex-lawyer Michelle Obama, if Perry's portrayal of black women does more harm than good.
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Just to connect some dots here: Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are holding up the confirmation vote on President Obama’s nominee for attorney general, Eric Holder, in large part because they have “questions for Holder about whether he would favor prosecuting Bush administration officials for their involvement in warrantless wiretapping and harsh detainee interrogation practices.” John Cornyn, R-Texas, says he wants assurances in advance that Holder won’t launch a “witch hunt.”
Anyone else bothered by the fact that America’s top prosecutor is being asked to pledge that he will avoid investigating possible criminal conduct, despite the fact that this newly released Washington Post/ABC poll (h/t Glenn Greenwald) shows the majority of Americans (50 percent to 47 percent) would favor investigating abusive interrogation? As Glenn argues, that polling data pretty much sinks a massive meat fork into the unending false claim that there is no public will to scrutinize these matters. But it's worse than that: These numbers also suggest that some Senate Republicans want advance assurances from the nation’s top lawyer that he won’t even look into a crime most Americans want to see investigated.
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I'm glad to see Caroline Kennedy out of the running as well. But what mainly strikes me about the travails of this season's Senate vacancies is a point Slate's Bruce Reed made weeks ago: They illustrate what a bad idea it is to give governors the power to fill them. The voters of New York chose David Paterson for one office, not two. Thirty-nine states fill vacancies this way, as the 17th Amendment ostensibly allows. Tom Geoghegan argued recently that the amendment should, in fact, be read otherwise, because the relevant passage starts by saying that when there is an open Senate mid-election in their state, governors "shall issue writs of elections to fill such vacancies." The amendment then goes on to allow a state legislature to "empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct," but Geoghegan's point is that this subsidiary clause has eaten the main directive. He also points out that the Supreme Court has never really weighed in: Instead of interpreting the 17th for themselves, the justices merely summarily affirmed a lower-court decision in 1969 upholding a governor's choosing of a senator. (It was Gov. Nelson Rockefeller's appointment of Robert F. Kennedy's replacement, in lieu of a special election.)
That doesn't mean the Supreme Court would tackle the question now. Courts are notoriously reluctant to poke their noses into this kind of exercise of power by another branch of government. But the 39 states with automatic handoffs to the governor could take the ball away and give it back to the voters via special election. Call it the Thank You Caroline Act.
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I agree, Noreen, that it's hard to believe her uncle's health is the reason Caroline Kennedy has withdrawn from consideration for replacing Hillary Clinton as a senator. His grave illness is the kind of thing that makes Kennedys want to make sure another Kennedy is ready to carry on the name. It seems more likely that in her brief foray into retail politics Caroline discovered that the bubble she has been able to put around herself and her family all these years was going to be permanently popped, and that it's also no fun being mocked by the press and pawed by the public. (I await news as to whether another reason for Caroline's withdrawal is that she found out Gov. Paterson wasn't going to appoint her.) Since Caroline doesn't seem to be temperamentally equipped with the coat of armor that Hillary Clinton possesses, I would be very surprised if Caroline stepped up later to actually run for the seat. I also hope that if Ted is unable to serve out the rest of his term his wife won't succeed him, as Kennedy has apparently requested. You can honor the service and sacrifice of the Kennedy family without buying into the notion that they are entitled by some hereditary right to two U.S. Senate seats.
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Noreen is having technical difficulties, so I'm posting her thoughts on Caroline Kennedy dropping out of contention for Hillary Clinton's Senate seat:
So Caroline Kennedy is withdrawing her name from consideration for the Senate, reportedly to spend more time with her ailing Uncle Teddy. Whether that’s the full story or a rather a graceful cover-up for what would have been an embarrassing PR fiasco if she hadn’t been picked, I think this could be an opportunity for her in the long run. I was among those who felt Kennedy was getting an easy, entitled pass without showing how much she wanted the seat or why. But if she picks herself up and runs for the open seat in 2010 (with real voters and everything!), she’ll get a chance to prove me wrong and maybe even grab my vote.
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Slate language columnist and sometime "XX Factor" menswear correspondent Jesse Sheidlower tipped me off to the biggest untold fashion story of Inauguration Day: Obama's outfit for the balls was all wrong! He explains the details here:
While the dress new first lady Michelle Obama wore to the inauguration balls—"a fluffy, many-layered gown by a 26-year-old designer named Jason Wu"—got a typical amount of press attention, President Obama's attire was barely mentioned. Which is probably a good thing because it was, by the standards of men's formal dress, simply incorrect.
Obama was wearing a white bow tie and a tuxedo with a notch collar. There are many things wrong with this. First, the inaugural balls were not white-tie but black-tie events, and dressing more formally than required is a faux pas. Second, if Obama wanted to wear white tie, he should have done it right. White tie, or men's formal dress (traditionally black tie is known as "informal"; there's no such thing as "semi-formal"), is not simply a tuxedo worn with a white tie. It consists of a tailcoat, not a tuxedo jacket, and it is worn with a wing-collar shirt with a front of cotton piqué. The trousers traditionally have double piping on the side seam. Black tie consists of a tuxedo jacket (which traditionally has peak, not notch, lapels with satin or grosgrain facing) worn with a black bow tie and a pleated straight-collar shirt. The trousers have a single wide piping on the side seam.
Of course, it has become popular among prominent men to scramble formalwear conventions completely. It is now very common to see wing-collar shirts with tuxedos, or—even worse—that Oscar-season atrocity: A collarless shirt paired with a dark suit and called "black tie." But it's too bad the president couldn't have started off his term in a more appropriate outfit. He's proved that he can look fantastic in proper formal dress, as he'll need to do for state dinners, and it would have been nice to see how elegant he looked in a proper tuxedo.
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When John McCain made his first comments on the Senate floor today since his electoral opponent was sworn into office, calling for a unanimous consent vote on Hillary Clinton's confirmation as secretary of state (instead of the roll-call vote fellow that Republican Sen. John Cornyn insisted on Monday), it looked like a grand gesture of post partisanship. I’m a bit skeptical change has taken hold so quickly. Despite the usual "esteemed colleague" rhetoric, the Senate is a treacherous place. McCain is supporting Mrs. Clinton, yes, but he is also having another chance to tell his sometime rival Cornyn, "f--- you," like he did when the two got into a fight during a 2007 meeting on immigration legislation. (McCain also "used a curse word associated with chickens" but I never figured out what it was.) Nor am I convinced Cornyn's agenda for holding up Sen. Clinton's confirmation vote is as pure as wanting "a little more transparency," which is all he claims he wants from Bill's foundation. Hillary will get confirmed either way. I, too, want Obama's Cabinet to get to work, but a little more disclosure about those donors would not be such a bad thing.
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As for Hanna, a single word stood out for me from Obama's inaugural address. But it wasn't curiosity. It was nonbelievers. Atheists are among the U.S.'s most distrusted minorities, and a full 53 percent of Americans would not vote for an atheist candidate for president. Here's the context of Obama's atheist mention:
For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus—and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth, and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass. ...
There's been much talk of Obama's ushering in a "post-racial" America, but will he also be welcoming a post-religion America? Doubtful, but at least it's a step in the right direction.
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I'm buying into the whole Michelle-Obama-redefines-fashion-for-first-ladies theme. She avoids the usual clichés; she projects athletic and feminine; she does designer fashion and "off the rack." The one thing I'm having trouble with is J. Crew representing "off the rack." As the fashion narrative goes, the fact that she buys clothes in, like, an actual store is supposed to inspire us regular folk in this faltering economy to do the same. But in my mind, I just can't fit J. Crew and Joe the Plumber in the same space. For one thing, those jackets (beautiful, sherbet-y, perfect) that she bought her girls cost close to $200, which is quite a lot for a kid's coat. For another, J. Crew's brand identity is aspiring high WASP—linen pants, crisp white shirts, striped shorts for the yacht. Before I gave up, I was always discouraged by how J. Crew pants stretched a foot too long on me, thus making it clear I was not one of them. Come to think of it, J. Crew is sort of the Sidwell Friends of chain brands, which may help explain things ...
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This is the word that stood out for me in Obama's list of values yesterday: "hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism." The rest have echoes in traditional and more safe political dialogue. But curiosity has a different sort of resonance. Curiosity is what led his mother on the many of what must have seemed like reckless adventures, that eventually created the motley family he has today. For a post-PC age, curiosity is a much better word than tolerance with its implications of holding your nose. Curiosity always has two shades of meaning—great interest or careful attention to detail on one side and danger on the other. From the red flag of Eve to Curious George, Western culture has often stressed the latter definition. Now Obama reclaims it as a noble character trait, which is how I've always taught it to my kids.
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Thanks to Dahlia for just forwarding around a clip of Beyoncé singing "At Last" as the first couple had their first dance at the Inaugural Ball last night. First of all: Wow. What a fantastic performance of a great song, even more beautifully delivered than when Beyoncé belted it in character as Etta James in the recent Cadillac Records. But second: Did it strike anyone else how perfectly chosen the song was for that moment, for our moment as a nation? As Beyoncé stood there, not onstage but as a member of the audience, looking the first couple in the eyes and singing directly to them, it was as if her words could have come from all of us: At last. The slow-motion nightmare of the Bush years is over. The longest campaign since Caesar divided Gaul has finally come to an end. And the centuries of racial discrimination that have been our greatest shame—well, let's not get ahead of ourselves yet, but something significant has started to shift there, too. At last.
On a less metaphorical level, "At Last" is as romantic as love songs get, and the sight of the handsome first couple alone on a stage, she in a long white gown and he in a tux, smiling at each other with embarrassed but genuine happiness, couldn't help but evoke the first dance at a wedding. Of course, it's after the wedding that things get real, and given the state of the world right now, our honeymoon with the Obamas is likely to be even shorter than most. But for that moment at least (and you could tell from her performance that Beyoncé felt this too) our lonely days were over, our hearts were wrapped in clover, and life was like a song.
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Judith Thurman, who wrote a profile of Isabel Toledo and her husband Ruben in The New Yorker two years ago, has this touching postscript on Michelle's Inauguration Day frock:
Since the whole occasion is so fraught with symbolism, I think that the choice of Isabel was particularly apt. She and Ruben are Latinos—from Cuba—who grew up in working-class families. They and the Obamas belong to the same generation. Ruben described himself to me (before Obama famously did) as a “mutt.” America gave them a chance, and they made the best of it. When Obama spoke, this morning, about the “makers” who work with their hands, and who have built America, he might have been thinking of the Toledos. They are also independent entrepreneurs who have built a small business, which has suffered its ups and downs, but they hang in. And like the Obamas, they’re an unusually devoted couple.
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Sorry, Sam. You should have come down to the Mall. It unfolded just like a movie about a civil rights march, even a Ron Howard movie. Me and some friends and our many children followed a Kenyan band from Brooklyn down to the Washington monument.They played "We Shall Overcome" over and over and over and no one really seemedto mind. We ran over many ankles with our motorcade of strollers and people smiledgraciously and told us the kids were cute. Along the way, we met people from all four quadrants of D.C. - first time that's ever happened to me. It was freezing cold and scary crowded and still, I was complaint and irony free for several hours.
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Michelle Obama really is avoiding the First Lady fashion cliches (Oscar de la Renta, Escada), isn't she? With the debut of the ivory Jason Wu column Jessica wrote about tonight, we can add Wu's name, too, to the list of semi-obscure fashion names that average American women now know. (Is there a Target diffusion line in Wu's future?) Style.com pegs Wu as a designer who "has the immaculate Park Avenue thing down cold"; Michelle has been wearing his work since last year.
Love the feathery texture and the drapey skirt. Not as sure about the bridal color and the asymmetrical strap. What do you guys think?
(Oh and Dayo, you're right that the men are stepping up their fashion game today: How'd you like Jay-Z's Urkel-ish glasses at the Neighborhood Ball? He pulls them off, no?)
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Though she chose chartreuse for the swearing in, Michelle donned a white, vaguely Wilma Flintstoneish one-shouldered Jason Wu gown at the Neighborhood Ball. She looked fantastic, Flintstone notwithstanding. The same could not be said of Beyonce, who sang Etta James' anthem "At Last" while the Presidential couple took their first twirl. B's ill-fitting satin dress was…unfortunate at best. Even though her stylist should be shot for subjecting Beyonce to breast crimes of Barrymore proportions, her voice sounded better than ever. We're currently watching Jill and Joe Biden dance to "Have I Told You Lately That I Love You." My boyfriend's fashion commentary on Jill's tastefully low cut crimson dress: "pretty foxy."
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Greetings, ladies, in the aftermath of the wildest day in Washington since 1968. The press pit of which Eve speaks did carry a whiff of writerly aloofness; but the decidedly unjaded corps of celebrities more than compensated—livening up the already thrilling festivities.
The A-listers behaved themselves when George W. Bush, Cheney and John Boehner were introduced and a gurgle of boos came up from the mall, but Maria Shriver and her guest were first to pick up the rolling chant of “O-Ba-Ma” begun by some proud soul among the two million thronged behind us.
Call outs: Denzel Washington standing and slow-clapping through the last half of Obama’s speech (no one told him to sit down); Jay-Z and P. Diddy high-fiving one another (three times, with feeling) over the head of a delighted Beyonce Knowles; Oprah furtively snapping pictures of Angela Bassett, Samuel L. Jackson and Denzel, mugging for the cameras just below the podium. And Chris Tucker jockeying for a family picture with the Rev. Jesse Jackson—and overheard complimenting the Rev. Joseph Lowery on his “mellow yellow” benediction: “I knew he was going to say something fly, I just knew it… He couldn’t contain himself.”
And, lest male fashion be deemed totally out of XX bounds, a note on hatwear (besides Aretha’s): Though John Kennedy’s 1960 inauguration supposedly killed off the man hat, several senators—and former NBA player and Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson (who attended with DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee) wore traditional fedoras today—a snazzier way, perhaps, to keep heat from escaping than your typical ski cap. And Jay-Z, as Eve notes, was jubilant—having conscripted the luxuriant pelt of some poor animal to keep his own head warm. Spread it!
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I was out on the Mall today, freezing and not minding a bit, with two great women named Betty. Here's more.
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To Eve and the others who were there: Tell me everything! Did you make, like, a million friends with fellow inauguration observers? Were there sweet-faced octogenarians telling you about how they never thought this day would come? California hippies who had driven across the country in the same beat-up VW bus they took to Woodstock, just to be there?
I had told myself it would be too chaotic and cold and crammed in D.C. to be worth making the trip down there, but from my silent office desk right now I can't help but wonder if I made a mistake. I already missed the glowing camaraderie of election night—I was working at Newsweek then, and I knew when I received the e-mail about the Nov. 4 food schedule (dinner at 7 p.m., sandwiches at 1 a.m., breakfast at 7 a.m.) that the night wasn't going to end as I had pictured. For me, there was no hugging strangers in the streets of Brooklyn, no stopping traffic with our impromptu dance party. Just fluorescent office lights, crusty early-morning sandwiches, and the faint screams from Columbus Circle wafting in the open windows.
As it turns out, that's basically what I got today, too. A small gathering of co-workers watching the screen, trying to ignore the sounds of the printer (what could possibly be worth printing during a moment of freakin' historic proportions?), each other's frantic BlackBerrying, and the TV in some office down the hall that broadcast everything about three seconds before ours did, resulting in a dizzying echo, especially during what were supposed to be dramatic silences. So please, give me something I can vicariously hold onto, that makes me feel like I am a woman of the people, not a slave to my office building.
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To all you lady reporters who were up front underneath the stage in the press seating (hey hey, Dayo!), did you ever find yourself wishing you had braved the unticketed masses out on the Mall instead?
Joseph Lowery's benediction was still breathtaking and Obama's speech still powerful, but the mood up front was less once-in-a-lifetime historic moment and more, well, office party. On the right side of the Capitol steps, where members of the House of Representatives were seated, a mustached rep in a long camel-hair coat—I think it was Jose Serrano of New York—led others standing on his riser in drunken-sounding chants like "Rahmbo! Rahmbo! Rahmbo!" [referring to badass Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel] and "Hey, Steny [that's Steny Hoyer, the House Majority Leader], we love ya!"
Meanwhile, on the Senate side of the Capitol steps, practically every failed presidential hopeful—John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, Arlen Specter, a regally smiling Chris Dodd—casually meandered as close as possible to the coveted presidential podium, acting out their commander-in-chief fantasies by gripping the white railing tightly and waving at nobody in particular.
There was one thrilling, if short, moment. At one point, maybe half an hour before the inauguration began, people began standing up on their chairs down in the press section. The reporters all turned backward to gaze out at the thronged Mall and started to pull out cameras. I stood up on my seat, too, and felt suddenly moved: Here was the supposedly cynical press corps, turning en masse to face the American people and revere the awesome sight of millions gathered in the chill to see the first black man become president.
Then I realized everybody was taking a photo of Jay-Z.
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Could Michelle Obama have better color sense? Like Dana, I am loving her apolitically chartreuse outfit. (Although there is some fussiness in the scarf's interface with the ribbon that ties the coat closed, and I don't love the white lining that peeks out when she walks. Why not a lemon-lime lining, too?) But my favorite touches are her yellowish leaf-green gloves (from J. Crew, apparently) and ocean-hued blue-green pumps. I love the intensity of the colors, and the way they artfully clash. Down with matchy-matchiness. Long live Michelle!
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Julia and Dana, though Michelle Obama looked bold and resplendent in her pale yellow chartreuse Isabel Toledo frock and matching coat, I think we can all agree that Aretha Franklin stole the sartorial show with her enormous bedazzled bow-bedecked hat. Though the signature chapeau might not work on most Washington women, the Queen of Soul really owned it. Or maybe I'm wrong, and Aretha's hat will be the D.C. accessory of the season, inspiring head coverings of Kentucky Derby proportions. Either way: Aretha for the win.
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In the absence of any "ask not what your country can do for you"-grade catchphrase from Obama's speech (though I did love that flight of rhetoric at the end comparing our nation's current moment to winter in Valley Forge), can I free-associate about Michelle's dress and coat (which, as Julia points out, come from edgy Cuban-American designer Isabel Toledo)? What was most remarkable about her outfit was how unpolitically coded it seemed. It didn't quote any former first lady (no Reagan red, no Jackie Kennedy pillbox or cinched waist, no Democratic blue or bringing-it-together purple). The color was utterly weird and daring, a chartreuse-y yellow which, while it looked great with her coloring and the forest-green gloves she had on, seemed to carry no intrinsic message besides "I look awesome in this." Newsday would have it that, since Elizabethan times, yellow has symbolized hope, but this was no sunshine-y, baby-duck, Easter-morning yellow—it had an almost unsettling greenish cast, like absinthe, which set it apart from the wholesome primary colors seen on the other women on the podium (poet Elizabeth Alexander's red suit, Hillary's blue coat). To me, that dress was a reassuring message for those (including some of us here) who've feared that Michelle will have to disappear into bland First Ladydom.
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I had a bad feeling when I saw Chief Justice John Roberts was not reading the oath but was going to show off that he had memorized it—it's like the waiter who won't write down your order, then brings you steak instead of duck. The chief justice misplaced his faithfully, and you could see Obama looking at him wondering whether he should correct the oath or repeat the mistake. Well, it doesn't matter. As CNN helpfully pointed out, even though the inaugural was running late, Obama became president at noon anyway, oath or no oath. I have the feeling that for the rest of his life Roberts will awake from a recurring nightmare in which he says, "Repeat after me: I, Saddam Hussein Obama do solemnly ..."
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Sound the trumpets. Not for Obama's inauguration. Even better. The Bachelor is featuring its first ever "single dad" this season. Or so everyone says. "Single Dad a First for The Bachelor," reads a headline in the Chicago Tribune. His bio on the show's site calls him "a handsome single dad—the first in the series' history." And in a post on Glamour's Web site called "The Bachelor: Enter the (HOT) Single Dad," Christina Coppa raves about the "single, smingle dad": "Did you catch the sunset silhouette of Jason with his little son on his shoulders? Stop. Movie moment!"
Yes, Jason Mesnick is cute (if you go for that clean-cut, cheesily symmetrical look). Yes, he's single—a status he is trying to change by the tried-and-true method of surrounding himself with a bunch of cameras, 25 ridiculously attractive women, and detailed rules about when and how he can spend time with them all. And yes, he's a dad to 3-year-old Ty. But is he really the single dad everyone's holding him up to be? To me (and the male friend who alerted me to this strangely applied label) "single dad" means a dad doing it on his own. A widower, most likely, like the bumbling Dan Aykroyd character in My Girl, or maybe someone abandoned by his wife, like the sweetly depressed couch-bound father in Pretty in Pink. But not a divorced guy splitting parenting "50-50" (although obviously less at times ... like when he's starring in reality-TV shows) with his son's mom.
It's bad enough on the macro level that a hot guy with a kid gets extra strokes for being all sensitive and adorable while a hot woman with a kid is viewed as having baggage. Even child-loving Jason seems to think so: He kicked off two of the four single moms in the first episode! But it's even more appalling on the micro level to picture Ty's mom having to sit at home and watch everyone oooh and ahhh at the commitment of this so-called single dad as Ty plays at her feet. I hope she gets herself some airtime over this, to assert the fact that yes, she is still very much in the picture and involved in raising her son. If Jason is as close to her as he says he is and their approach to Ty's upbringing so collaborative, maybe the ex-wife should get to come on the show, Slade-style, and have a say in which of these ladies gets to join the family.
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Did anyone else catch the incredibly sour looks on their faces as they walked past CNN's cameras? They do think it should be her day. But I'm with you, Eve. What an incredible day. I wish my father were alive to see an African-American being sworn in as president. He wasn't in love with Obama—and he died before the Florida primary last year, although I am quite sure he would have voted for Hillary and might even have voted for McCain in the general election, because he so admired his military service—but he would be so proud to see this today.
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Emily Bazelon is out braving the cold on this inauguration day, and she sent us this photo capturing the calm before the crowds. Photo by Rachel Gross.
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Women's Wear Daily just reported that Michelle Obama will wear Isabel Toledo to Obama's swearing-in this morning. Add Toledo to the list of "Surprisingly Avant Garde Designers Our First Lady Likes." When she took over as creative director of troubled sportswear label Anne Klein a few years ago—an appointment that proved short-lived—Slate fashion critic Josh Patner noted that her work "often had a whisper of kinky seduction grounded in fine technique. Her jersey dresses twisted like serpents around the body. Silk skirts were hitched up at the hips with tiny metal loops; slashes in jersey dresses revealed the less obvious, and therefore more erotic, zones of the clavicle or rib cage." Sounds chilly for a day like today!
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In the past couple of days, walking around the carnival that's U Street in Washington and gaping at the throngs lined up at Busboys and Poets -- which looks likely to become the Obama era's Smith Point and Cafe Milano rolled into one -- I've speculated with a few people about how different a John McCain inaugural would have been.
But you have to wonder what a Hillary inaugural would have looked like, too. A little more than a year ago, that's what we looked bound to have, right? The answer, I'd imagine, is a similar type of thing, with fewer kitsch tables set up outside Ben's Chili Bowl, and a little more Rob Reiner and less Tom Hanks. I suspect a good part of this excitement would have appended itself to any admirable Democrat about to sweep George W. Bush out of office.
Some of Hillary's ardent supporters here still feel wistful about what could have been. In the Washington Hilton on Sunday, I ran into Rep. Maxine Waters, the irrepressible Hillary-booster from L.A., waiting for her huge coat after an EMILY's List lunch. Hillary had just spoken to the EMILY's List women, briefly reminiscing about the "18 million cracks" she made in the glass ceiling and going on to explain how a Secretary of State might be able to improve the lot of women around the world. I asked what Waters thought of Hillary's speech, and Waters gave me a sad smile. "I'm glad she landed on her feet," she shrugged. "So I'm happy for her. But I'm sad for her, too." The city's sense of feeling sad for Hillary was amplified yesterday, of course, when it was reported that Jill Biden had blithely told Oprah that her hubby Joe had been given a choice between the vice-presidential post or Hillary's Secretary of State gig. Politico's Ben Smith wrote that the anecdote "has to make Hillary just slightly insecure about the power of her own job relative to his."
Boo hoo. It's inauguration day. Can we, today, finally put a moratorium on feeling sorry for Hillary Clinton? For ages now, pity has been the dominant emotion associated with Hillary: Pity that her husband embarrassed her, pity that the media mis-covered her, pity that she didn't get the nomination for prez, pity that Obama supposedly never vetted her for veep, pity about her insecurity vis-a-vis Biden, etc. The pity actually diminishes Hillary, because it makes her look fragile, like she can't handle the slightest public diss of the kind that happens to all politicians, eventually. Geez, who even cares if Biden was offered the choice? Maybe Hillary was offered a different choice. I don't feel remotely sorry for her today. She landed in a fascinating, influential role she only would have gotten if Team Obama respected her, and I can't wait to see how she transforms it.
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While you in D.C. worry about what the temporary influx of celebrities into your city, the rest of us can only look on with envy. Stuck in Dallas, I might as well be in Siberia as far as the inauguration is concerned. Actually, it's the bizarro inauguration here. While the rest of the world will be getting rid of George W. Bush as of tomorrow, he is coming to Dallas to stay. Permanently. His new home is just a few miles from my apartment, SMU (where the Bush Library will also reside), and the President George Bush Turnpike. Here, there's no escaping the guy. (Can't we vote him off the island?) It was thus heartening this weekend to happen into a Bed, Bath, and Beyond and discover an unexpectedly huge display, right as you walked in, of Obama inaugural memorabilia. For a second, I thought I'd fallen into a worm hole and popped up, along with Hanna and Beyoncé, at Tyson's Corner. One expects to find such displays on the mall in D.C., but at a strip mall in historically right-wing Dallas? The only thing I could liken it to was the nationwide outpouring of kitsch that greeted Lady Di and Charles' wedding. (I was in England that summer and still have a campy Charles and Diana ashtray from that trip.) Indeed, such trinkets may inadvertently turn out to be the first installment of Obama's stimulus package. As Tina Brown noted in The Diana Chronicles: "In the 184 days between the February engagement and the July wedding, $800 million of royal wedding souvenirs overflowed in the red, white and blue windows of British stores." Obama, of course, is a democratically elected royal and hasn't had as much time to work with. But in my current mood of patriotic fervor, it was admittedly all I could do to resist the symbolism of buying—in Dallas, no less—a plate with Obama's image and the words "Change Has Come!"
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Speaking of Obama's hands, I picked up this tidbit from a friend who was getting a manicure at a Northwest Washington nail salon a couple of days ago. As my friend was getting her final coat, her manicurist leaned in and pointed to another manicurist in the salon and said that woman—who does the nails of one of Michelle's assistants—had been driven to Blair House to do Michelle's nails for the inaugural. Michelle was so pleased with the result that the woman got a call shortly afterward: Come back to Blair House and do Obama's nails. The manicurist reported that the president-elect was very nice and that as she was buffing his nails, he looked at them and said, "Not too shiny, please." As we put our nation in his hands, it's reassuring that he knows where to draw the line, metrosexually speaking.
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Welcome to Dayo, who is a contributor to the Root, and the New Republic, and an all around great young journalist. If there is a prize for best "off-color" detail spotted by a reporter, you win it. His hands are white! And holding old-white-man glasses! This leads me to wonder: Who is the original cardboard cutout? William Rehnquist? William Jennings Bryan? Teddy Roosevelt?
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Hanna, I agree with you that the prospect of a celebrified D.C. is deeply distressing. One of the things I've always loved most about Washington is its distinct lack of cool: only place I've ever lived where one can walk the corridors of a large office building—or the aisles of a newsroom—and find not a single woman wearing makeup. Also the only place I've ever lived where dinner parties start at 7 and end at 9, sharp. Such a relief, really, if one is trying to get other things done.
I have a hunch, though, that this won't last. Sooner or later, Obama and his entourage are going to get very, very busy: They, too, will have to wake up early in the morning to get the legislation passed, and there won't be any more late-night parties or mink coats on the Metro. Also, I watched that celebrity concert (on TV, alas) and thought it looked distinctly less than fun: cold, crowded, and something flat and forced about the whole thing. It's nice that Beyoncé sang "America the Beautiful"—when was the last time you can remember the pop-music aristocracy sounding misty-eyed and patriotic?—but I suspect there might have been more dancing in the aisles if she had sung "Naughty Girl." Won't be long before she heads back to L.A. or NYC, I predict, along with the rest of them.
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Hanna, I rather disagree with your minor inferiority complex regarding the District. Yes, our malls leave much to be desired (except for this one). But my own 'hood, U Street, is suddenly hip—the New York Times profiled trendy restaurant Marvin just days before this cool wheatpasted image of an Obama/Lincoln hybrid (on which more later) hit its outer wall. Street cred, indeed!
Among the other madnesses of Washington this weekend: the spectacle of literally thousands of life-sized cardboard cutout Barack Obamas, which grace every venue, from house parties to liquor stores. I appreciate the universal fixation on being photographed with “Barack”—as well as the undesirability of dropping the cash and braving the lines at Madame Tussaud’s for a taste of the three-dimensional thing—but I am taking issue with the ubiquity of what’s in fact a flagrant misrepresentation of our president-elect.
Take a good look at the image making the rounds of the district and, for $32.99, no doubt the nation.
Note that Obama’s hands are not the color of his head. As in, they are white. Note also that the white hands are holding glasses that Barack Obama does not wear. The crowning insult? The glasses bear a striking resemblance to those worn by Obama mentor and Health and Human Services Secretary-designate Tom Daschle. Which are not at all stylish and Obama would never wear even if he did wear glasses.
I will not parse the ironies of Obama’s head being grafted onto the body of a white man. Not on MLK Day, at least. But what do you gals think?
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The one thing you can always count on Washington for is a certain stubborn blindness to cool. There are plenty of bars and restaurants, but they never quite add up to a "scene." Trends arrive at least two or three years late—witness the recent excitement over cupcakes and tangy yogurt. In New York, young fashion designers come and go. But in D.C., Ann Taylor will always occupy a special place on Connecticut Avenue.
That was true until Friday. Now, witness some scenes from the new pimped-up city that is Washington in the Obama years
- Tom Hanks standing outside the virtual rope line at Maureen Dowd's party, unable to get in.
- Larry David and Ron Howard yukking it up inside.
- A variety show on the mall, which, let's be frank, felt a lot more like the Oscars than anything having to do with politics.
- Several motorcades NOT carrying George Bush or Dick Cheney. (We know this because the cars were white and studded with lights.)
- Several lost denizens of Park Slope wandering the city with big, long dry cleaning bags.
- Caught in the Metro doors last night: one white mink, one sparkly mermaid tail of a ball gown, one rhinestone glove.
- Overheard on the Metro: "I just had to run inside and get some pasties."
- Overheard in the office: "Oprah called."
Like many transplanted New Yorkers, I have always complained about D.C.'s dowdiness. Now, I realize there are things I will miss. A city like this is relatively good for women since it prizes intelligence and hard work above all. Unlike in N.Y. or L.A., my friends here do not spend their late 30s contemplating Botox and lifts. How long will that last if Beyoncé keeps visiting?
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Last night's party gossip deepened the "I live in L.A. now" feeling. Someone had spotted Jay-Z and Beyoncé shopping at the Pentagon City Mall. Someone else saw Stevie Wonder at Mazza Gallery.
On second thought, though, L.A. is not the correct analogy. Those are two generic malls. They are the kinds of places I go when I need a new pair of running shoes or maybe some luggage. I mean, I realize that D.C. has no equivalent of Fifth Avenue, or Melrose. But the fact that somebody told Jay-Z to go to a suburban mall for reliable bling makes me feel like I live in Peoria.
Clearly, this celebrity influx is making me anxious. A few people last night thought it might be temporary, but somehow I don't think so. I think they will be visiting a lot more often now that we have the Ur-Celebrity in the White House. Note to Washington: The Power and the Glitter are closer than ever. Must work out new dynamic with Hollywood.
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This is where I draw the line. Yesterday I opened my daughter's Friday folder, usually filled with school news, permission slips, that sort of thing. This time there was an announcement that Shakira—the hottie Colombian pop star—is singing in school on Monday. My daughter does not go to Sidwell Friends or GDS or one of the private schools Sasha and Malia were looking at. She goes to our local public school. But these days in Washington, you never know where you might bump into a star. Hey, maybe we'll get lucky and Britney Spears will do an inauguration concert at the Cleveland Park public library.
There is a convention between Washington and Hollywood, worked out over many years. They come here to be boring, and we pretend they're not famous. Angelina Jolie gives a presentation to some subcommittee about AIDS relief. The congressmen nod soberly, like it's just another Tuesday, and then afterward snap a photo "for the grandkids." Now that dynamic is out of whack, and everyone's fawning all over everyone.
First it was just Bono and Bruce Springsteen coming to sing at the mall. Fine, they always do this kind of thing. But Mary J. Blige? Beyoncé? What could they possibly want with the Lincoln Memorial? The Huffington party list so far includes: Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, Jon Bon Jovi, Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Marisa Tomei, Demi Moore, and Ashton Kutcher. Denzel Washington? Where am I living? Is this a movie about Washington or the real thing?
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I'm just a little late to this conversation—and regret not getting into the thick of it before the fantastic, boisterous, and honest Melinda signed off—but Samantha, you asked, "Why this [Natalie Dylan selling her virginity] is so far from empowering?"
Hmm, well, let me try out a few reasons. One, it perpetuates the idea that the motivations behind sex are fundamentally different for men and women; that is, men have some primal, rationality-busting want for it ($3.7 million?), while for women, it's something to be bartered, rather than something to be sought or enjoyed to the same degree men enjoy it. Would a man be able to sell his virginity for that price, or even try to?
Two, this kind of stunt can really feel all-around degrading. It's not even the sex. Natalie Dylan reminded Melinda of Aliza Shvarts, the Yale art student who said she was self-inducing miscarriages, but it reminded me more of somebody like Damien Hirst, the artist who punks the modern art scene by taking its decadence to the extreme and proving he can foist animal parts preserved in formaldehyde for $8 million on gullible art-world status-seekers. The prices that Hirst and, say, Jeff Koons fetch humiliate those art buyers who take the art seriously and pay bajillions for such pieces, and Natalie Dylan humiliates the guy who values a high-profile deflowering session at $3.7 million. It's kind of funny to watch, but I'm not sure who's empowered by such an expose.
And I liked Audacia Ray's idea that "the notion of empowerment that gets kicked around is solely about the sex act, not about the money." Yeah—what kind of power, exactly, is it that a woman like Natalie derives from putting her virginity on sale? It's the power of cash, or, to be more precise, cash-savviness: the pleasure of knowing you're doing something society frowns upon and raking in the bucks while your prudish peers stand by. Is this feminine empowerment? Do we consider somebody who intrepidly sells her kidney on the black market "empowered"? Maybe you would, but I think I'd call that person "resourceful," at best.
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Good morning, ladies—I'm inaugurating my inaugural week of XX conversation by chasing tourists off my stoop with a shotgun. Actually, I'm conserving my energies for the whirlwind that's about to hit Washington (with enough repetition, inaugural starts to sound dirty) and working on a piece about Barack Obama's soon-to-be-confirmed ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice. I showed up for both Rice's nomination announcement in Chicago in December and her confirmation hearing last week. At both events, she was on message about diplomacy and Iran and blah blah blah. More importantly, her adorable nuclear family—two children, a hubby, and both parents—was also present, fairly leaning out of their seats with anticipation. And on both occasions she interrupted the pressing business of telegraphing U.S. foreign policy to acknowledge her kids and husband. At the Chicago presser (during which Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, Jim Jones, Janet Napolitano, and Robert Gates were also named to their posts), she was the only one to do so.
So what gives? Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Thursday, John Kerry (he of the Chelsea Clinton “intern” comment) invited Rice to introduce her family—and she ran with it, gushing through her (invisible) nerves. Further, she opened her prepared statement with a reference to her daughter: “Like so many Americans, I first heard of the United Nations as a child about the age of my daughter, Maris,” she said. (I later saw Maris plopped on the rug outside the hearing room with a nanny and pops Ian Cameron.) Perhaps it was pre-emptive guilt about the grueling job Mommy signed up for; perhaps Rice, known as a brash negotiator, had simply wandered off the tough-girl reservation—Napolitano (single), and Clinton (one child) did not make similar statements at similar junctures. And Rice is younger, with younger kids, than the rest of Obama’s cabinet. But as she prepares to enter the sensitive ecosystem that is the U.N., I wonder what, if anything, such enthusiastic maternity portends. And, aside from Eric "please pick me, I'm human" Holder and Joe "Girl-girls are tougher than girl-boys” Biden—have any of the top male appointees volunteered similar introductions?
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This entire Obama-as-Superman debate is such an embarrassment. As if feminism didn't have a lousy enough reputation already. Amy Siskind sure isn't helping the cause, whining about Ms. putting Obama on the cover of its special inaugural issue in a T-shirt that reads: "THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE." Rather than, God forbid, be inspired or, heaven forbid, amused, Siskind snips: "The problem with the cover is it's a man standing in a Superman pose. And, thank you, but the women of this country can stand up for themselves." This is what gets feminist knickers in a twist these days? The cover of Ms.? Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Feminism lies like a beached octopus, tentacles thrashing in all directions, looking for anything upon which it may find purchase, desperately seeking to be relevant again. Naomi Wolf hits the nail on the head: "I can't get over the silliness of this objection." Maybe what feminism really needs is a sense of humor.
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If Bill "the First Black President" Clinton was the segue to our first actual black president, maybe Barack "This Is What Feminism Looks Like" Obama will make way for our first female one? That'd be super!
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I was enjoying lunch at my warm desk when I noticed the following subject line pop up in my gmail from Bliss Spa: "Say 'farewell' to bush with waxing discounts!" I don't know what bugged me more, the flagrant abuse of quotation marks (am I supposed to be talking to my pubic hair now?) or the completely debased beauty marketers who are trying to capitalize on the end of a disastrous presidency. My snap judgment upon seeing the ad was "ew" but then it was followed by a distinctly Pollyannaish annoyance that Bliss is being really flippant in the dumbest way possible about a truly historic inauguration. Maybe it just irked me so much because I saw the ad while eating.
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Apparently, the model of shoe that journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi hurled at Bush's head during a new conference in Baghdad last December has been rechristened the "Bye Bye Bush." The Istanbul-based manufacturer who claims to have made the shoes reports that he's been inundated with more than a quarter-million orders requesting the oxford formerly known as Model 271. But who manufactured the actual shoes tossed at Bush may remain a mystery. The catapulted pair were exploded by investigators, and Zaidi is MIA. Today, his lawyer disclosed that he's seen Zaidi's post-arrest medical records, which reveal "bruising that covered the reporter’s face and body, but was especially severe on his legs and arms; a missing tooth; a gash on the bridge of his nose; and what appeared to be a burn mark on his ear." Currently in custody, Zaidi hasn't been seen or heard from since Dec. 21. If convicted of criminal aggression against a visiting head of state, the journalist faces up to seven years in prison. His family fears he will be killed there.
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So does that gal attempting to auction off her virginity to the highest bidder remind anyone else of the young woman at Yale who was supposedly documenting her multiple self-induced miscarriages as a senior art project a while back? Not that I have any trouble believing that lots of people would cash that check. Yet something about the whole enterprise seems fishy to me. And I dunno about those "housewives'' either; are they for real or just hideously conforming to expectations? (I wouldn't know, of course. Not because my tastes are so refined but on the contrary because I have to either limit my intake of trash TV or else become one of those people whose life revolves around it. Which I realized years ago when while crossing the street on the Upper East Side, I ran into actress Ruth Warrick, who for years played Phoebe Wallingford on All My Children, and absent-mindedly greeted her—"Hey, Phoebs''—like I thought I was in Pine Valley. Halooo, she called back.) So there it was, my last digression on this blog—but only, of course, because it's also my last post. Honestly, if I have ever had more fun in print than here on XX Factor, it was so long ago that I don't remember. So I'm going to be your biggest fan over at AOL News, where as of next week I'll be writing a column and helping to launch their forthcoming political Web site, PoliticsDaily.com. (My first story—on Hillary's confirmation hearing, as if you had to ask—went up yesterday, and oh, those commenters are way scarier than you guys. My favorite outraged observation: "Hey, this is nothing but your opinion!" Tuh-rue.) So knock 'em dead with Double X, as I'm sure you will, and thanks so much for the great conversations, XX!
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Torie, I agree that last night's Housewives trainwreck was difficult to watch.However, I object to your characterization of Gretchen as so very helpless. Yes, she's going through a rough time with her fiance in the hospital, but you're not allowing her any agency in this situation. While Tamra et al. were certainly encouraging Gretchen's drunkenness, as you point out, Gretchen is a grown-ass woman. She's ultimately responsible for her own intake, and while Tamra's behavior was completely deplorable, Gretchen doesn't need our hand-wringing because she was three sheets to the wind on camera.
I am sympathetic to Gretchen's current situation, as it's crap to see a loved one sick. However, she could have dropped out of the filming at any time, and yet has chosen not to. But yeah—it's definitely trash TV, and I'm probably losing multiple brain cells every time I tune in to watch their orange-hued antics. While Bravo's editors are masters at getting their viewers to empathize with these frivolous ladies, we need to remember that they're not being shoved in our faces against their will. Gretchen, Tamra, and the entire bleached-blond crew is getting well-compensated for their televised trials.
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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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Why is Barack Obama writing an open letter to his daughters? I guess when you become president, you talk to your kids via Parade magazine. Parts of Obama's letter to Malia and Sasha, 10 and 7, are the usual empty-ish rhetoric ("I want all our children to go to schools worthy of their potential"). In the part that's more real, he charges them with "righting the wrongs that you see and working to give others the chances you've had." Lovely, yes. But also a sentiment he could get across at a family dinner or bedtime. By doing it in public, doesn't he put a huge burden on them, adding to the one they're already shouldering? And isn't he using them, too? This combined with the release of those photos from the girls' first day of school at Sidwell Friends makes me wonder.
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Regarding the news that Natalie Dylan, a 22-year-old women's studies major, is selling her virginity to the highest bidder (currently, the top bid is at $3.7 million), Samantha wondered how selling one's virginity is, as Dylan claims, "empowering." For the expert opinion on the tricky relationship between sex, money, and empowerment, I asked Audacia Ray, a former sex worker and author of Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing in on Internet Sexploration, to weigh in with her thoughts on the matter.
I'm a former sex worker (the put-myself-through-graduate-school kind) and a vocal advocate for sex worker's rights and the ability of women to make their own choices about their bodies and sexual expression both inside and outside of the sex industry. That said, I find the trope of "empowerment" a bit tiresome and oversimplified. The spectrum of conversations about female sexuality (commercial or otherwise) doesn't seem to actually be much of a spectrum: women can either be empowered or degraded about their sexuality. When I get asked about whether or not I felt empowered by my work in the sex industry, I always feel compelled to say yes, but I say it without much conviction. If I don't affirm that I'm empowered, that means I've been a victim—or that I'm about to hit the inquirer with a heady dose of semantics.
Jobs in the sex industry are often seen in a roughly hierarchical way by both people inside and outside the business, depending on the degree of nudity and sexual interaction and the amount of money one gets paid for the work. Stripping and modeling (sometimes even including porn) work seem to be increasingly acceptable, perhaps because they give the impression of flirting with naughtiness while the woman doing it is a good girl in bad circumstances. The stigma and the social price of crossing the line into sex for money is a bit different—and also viewed differently by law enforcement. The hierarchy tends to be enforced by "Never would I ever..." statements that sometimes enforce norms that aren't even all that logical but are driven by emotional reactions.
I'm all for people making money off of their assets and a bit of cunning marketing. If a girl can get $3.7 million for her virginity, why the hell not? But let's also step back a minute and separate sex and money. When the sex industry gets discussed, it's usually the sex part that is emphasized. The notion of empowerment that gets kicked around is solely about the sex act, not about the money. Maybe this is part of a cultural seduction that people want to buy into: the idea of the prostitute who is compelled to do her work because she's brimming over with sexual desire and the money is a nice side benefit. But the reality is that most sex workers, like other members of the work force, do their jobs because they get paid. So if you want to talk empowerment, maybe it's time to talk about money, too. Do Wall Street workers feel empowered? Well, maybe not in this economy.
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Dahlia, I loved your piece imploring Elena Kagan to abandon the solicitor general's "silly" uniform, the morning coat. But our sartorially sophisticated language columnist, Jesse Sheidlower, e-mailed me to clarify that we shouldn't call it a "frock coat," as you did at one point in the piece. He writes: "A frock coat is not the same as a morning coat. They are both longish, but a frock coat is the same length all around, while a morning coat tapers evenly from the front to the rear tails. (A tailcoat, such as is worn with white tie, also has long rear tails, but the upper part cuts straight back to the long
tails.) A frock coat does not have tails." This explains so much that I never understood about arcane elements of formal menswear that I thought I'd share it with you all. Here's hoping we don't see too many of these at inauguration events next week!
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Ugh. I'm not sure what to make of Natalie Dylan, the 22-year-old who popped her media cherry in the fall when she put her virginity on the market and is now back on the scene with her staggering price tag in hand: $3.7 million is the highest bid so far to be the lucky guy to bang her for the first time. (Don't believe her that the hymen's intact? Well, the lie detector backs her up, and she says she's willing to undergo medical tests for doubters).
The libertarians, of course, say this is the free market at its best: "I frankly don't care whether or not the young lady auctions off her virginity, and if someone is foolish enough to pay her more than three million dollars for the somewhat dubious honor of deflowering her, that's between the two parties in the contract as far as I'm concerned," writes Jazz Shaw on the Moderate Voice. That's basically what they said on Jossip, too, and Boston Herald editor Jules Crittenden seems to think "Natalie" (she's going by a pseudonym to protect her safety but apparently has no problem with having pictures like this or this floating around) is on the right track: "If demand is that high, it sounds like a lot of working girls could save themselves a lot of trouble, go for the big bucks in a one-off and retire," he wrote on his blog.
That free market argument makes sense to me. Her body, her choice to sell it for millions. What bothers me is that she's a women's studies major claiming this is "empowering." To whom, exactly? I guess the idea is that she's sending a message to other students who need help financing their education (her goal, hilariously, is a masters in Marriage and Family Therapy). The message: You, too, can pay for your education by having sex with strangers.
But does that actually qualify as empowerment? When Izzie on Grey's Anatomy stripped off her scrubs and shoved her boobs in Alex's face to make the point that she wasn't ashamed of having put herself through med school by posing for underwear ads, I was screaming and grabbing my own boobs right along with her. The logical side of me has a hard time explaining why this is any different, other than that it's illegal (Emily, Dahlia, it is illegal, right?) and less regulated: She's not in a studio posing for pictures; she's in a bed somewhere, being penetrated by a stranger. But even imaging it going totally right—the guy is clean, he uses a condom, he doesn't hurt her—it still feels off to me. Can any of you articulate what I so clearly can't: why this is so far from empowering, and why prostitution is not the same as modeling? Or is the libertarian argument as sound as it seems at first glance?
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Prince Harry, the spare to Charles' heir who thinks a swastika armband is a great costume-party accessory, is a precious gift to the British press. Nothing sells papers (and provides columnists with fun fodder) like a racist-epithet-spewing royal. So, when a video surfaced in which Prince Harry was caught calling a fellow army officer cadet a "Paki" and telling a soldier who had swathed his helmet in camouflage netting that he looked "like a raghead," the papers ordered extra ink. Most opinion writers gave him well-deserved guff for his racist remarks, and the prince made the now-familiar nonapology, saying he "is extremely sorry for any offense his words might cause." In Tuesday's New York Times, John F. Burns summarizes the story nicely.
Except that, as in most of the English papers, Burns neglects to mention another slur that the prince didn't even acknowledge or apologize for. The video also caught him asking a member of his squad some questions after an exercise: ""[I want to hear about] your ups and downs in the exercise. Highs and lows. ... Good points, bad points. How do you feel? Gay? Queer on the side?"
Now, that isn't as openly offensive as the P and the R words, but Harry's casual homophobia certainly doesn't express solidarity with the gay and lesbian soldiers serving in the British military.
Harry is a vile, one-man ad for republicanism, but the press doesn't seem to be all that sensitive, either.
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Emily, a quick response to yours on Elena Kagan: Just as you and I were wondering whether Dean Kagan would suffer for her relative lack of oral-advocacy experience, I received e-mail from a well-respected Supreme Court oral advocate, Roy Englert, whose institutional memory is far longer than mine. Roy reminded me that until Seth Waxman became solicitor general in 1997, “it was very unusual for the SG to come from private practice, and very unusual for the SG to be someone who had done Supreme Court arguments before becoming SG.”
Roy also pointed out that until very recently “the SG was either a respected academic or a federal judge who resigned to take the position.” Drew Days was a professor at Yale before becoming SG; Ken Starr was a D.C. Circuit judge who resigned to become SG; Charles Fried was a professor at Harvard before becoming SG; Rex Lee was a professor and dean at Brigham Young University before becoming SG. And so on through Robert Bork, Erwin Griswold, and Archibald Cox. By that metric, Kagan is not so much an outlier as far as her résumé is concerned, but rather a return to a tradition of primarily academic, as opposed to oral advocacy, credentials.
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I'm admittedly coming very late to the lengthy, sugar-daddy exchange, but maybe for that reason, after reading all the posts at once, I think it's worth acknowledging what a privileged, upper-middle-class discussion this is. After all, these days, most people scarcely dare dream of keeping their lousy, $7-an-hour job, much less of self-actualization. The desire for nannies, private schools (and for the record, my daughter, to date, has benefited from both, so I’m not casting stones)—such accoutrements are beyond the reach of 90 percent, maybe even 95 percent, of all Americans. And I wonder if this normalization of luxury desires, which Paul Krugman has lamented as one aspect of the new (now surely passed) "Gilded Age," isn’t part of what’s gone wrong in our country over the last 30 to 40 years.
When I was growing up in Dallas, even the wealthiest families in town often drove average, American-made cars. Yes, teenagers were as fashion-conscious as today, but keeping up with the Joneses didn't cost an arm or an iPod. (I still remember when you could buy clothes on layaway at Casual Corner.) Even affluent families often saved up for years for major home purchases, such as a new sofa or dining-room table. By contrast, as the real-estate bubble expanded, shelter magazines exhorted us to change our entire look—from, say, shabby chic to ultra-cool modern—every few years, at a cost of thousands of dollars. Furniture from Ikea is almost disposable. As a kid, I don’t recall a single family (including my own) that replaced its kitchen or bathroom counters. And there were plenty of fine home cooks who somehow managed without a Viking stove or All-Clad cookware.
Yet, in recent years, many average, middle-class families often seemed to want it all—and by “all” I don’t mean work-life balance—but the German (or at least Swedish) car, the multi-thousand-square-foot home, the remodeled kitchen or bath, the beautiful Eames furnishings, the designer shoes and handbags, every foodie kitchen appliance (whether anyone in the home actually cooked or not), in addition to the scheduled kids, the nanny and "best" schools. Even for those on a budget, high design has trickled down to the masses and can now be purchased at Target. Some of that, no doubt, is all for the good: I have no problem with everyone getting to enjoy a Michael Graves teapot.
But in my own life, I yearn to be satisfied with less and struggle with how to hold on to what really matters (which typically costs surprisingly little) in the distracting, expensive clutter of American life. Recently, I was reading the Little House books to my daughter, who is now 5, and kept having this pang for a one-room log cabin with a dirt floor swept clean by a straw broom, no more clothes or furnishings than one could carry in a covered wagon and instead of the usual Christmas bonanza of plastic toys, a tin cup, a piece of candy, and a shiny new penny. That’s a fantasy, too, of course—and equally out of reach. But nowadays when I dream, that’s what I often think of, not Sugar Pa.
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I'm firmly in the "Tina Fey can do no wrong" camp, and while her acceptance speech was one of the only bright spots in an otherwise snoozy and self-congratulatory Golden Globes, it always strikes me how uncomfortable she is when embracing accolades. When she accepted her Emmy last year, Fey said, "I thank my parents for somehow raising me to have confidence that is disproportionate with my looks and abilities." Then last night upon receiving her second Golden Globe for best actress, she said, "If you ever start to feel too good about yourself they have this thing called the Internet and you can find a lot of people there who don’t like you.”
I'm well aware that self-deprecation is pivotal to Tina Fey's humor, and that's what makes her so relatable to so many women. Though I may be making too much of this, I wonder if a man in her position would always publicly downplay his own talent. Last night, Tina allowed Tracy Morgan to make a speech when 30 Rock won for best comedy for the second year in a row. Again, that was one of the funniest and best parts of an otherwise mind-numbing three hours, but if "Lorney Mikes" had been the executive producer, writer, and director of the show, would he have let Tracy make that speech? Is it more just Tina Fey's personality to shy away from the overwhelming press attention she's been receiving in the past few months? Is she savvy enough to know that America may be experiencing Tina Feytigue and so she's backing off so we don't get sick of her? Or does it have to do with her gender?
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That Atlantic piece on the imminent demise of the New York Times as sheets you can cram into your oversized purse is really haunting me: How would Sundays ever be the same? While our kids are receiving religious instruction they can't remember the gist of 10 minutes later, would we have to lug our laptops to the corner coffee shop in order to carry on interrupting each other's reading by calling out snippets of stuff from the Times that the other is not quite as interested in? (Him: They want to drive Israel into the sea! Me: Natasha Richardson is all wrong for Desiree Armfeldt. Him: They want to wipe them off the map! Me: Oh yay, Dahlia has an op-ed. Him: They have a right to defend themselves! Me: And look at this ad for a speakers' series comprised entirely of people you would pay big bucks not to have to listen to.) Government cannot bail out its watchdog, I know, but I wish advertisers would.
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I love your post, Ellen, and your point (and June's) that as Frank Loesser put it, "You can't go to jail for what you're thinkin'—or for the woo look in your eye. ...'' As I've said before, (almost all) of my old (pretend) flames are either making Cialis commercials now, or else have become even more definitively unavailable. Yet my still more retro variation on the sugar daddy fantasy—its uptight, uptown cousin, the Donna Reed scenario (April Wheeler, only happy)—endures. Along with the knowledge that in real life, this would never be me. (In both the kept woman and domestic goddess narratives, you'll notice, there's a troubling amount of work involved.) If you like to pretend once in a while, though—in the kitchen, I mean—I just got a cookbook that can totally help you fake it: Big Night In, by my friend Domenica Marchetti, the best cook I know. Her recipes are not easy peasy—in fact, she's proud that some food writer pronounced them a big fat pain, and worth it. But my issue with a lot of cookbooks is that they assume knowledge ("three eggs worth of pasta'') and skills (dice until invisible) that I don't have. Whereas this is black-diamond cooking explained on the bunny slope, with gorgeous photos and the kind of storytelling I need to get warmed up and going on the creamy carrot soup or veal and mushroom stew in a puff pastry crust. I actually made these two, and felt like Bree Van de Kamp for a night; next time, I want to play her well-fed husband.
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A guest post from Slate staffer Nathan Heller:
Nina's excellent post inspired me to volley back from the male side of the Slate court. I'm also twentysomething, also living off an unlavish editorial paycheck, and parts of this discussion leave me quaking in my holey boots. If the brilliant and accomplished women of my peer group secretly hope to snag men who are filthy rich—or who happen to be filthy rich (and the distinction there seems so thin you could make shadow puppets behind it)—then I might as well tonsure my head and hone my bocce skills now. Noreen's brilliantly described vertiginous landscape is eerily close to mine.
Which is why I suspect that Nina, June, and others are right: This is definitely a complexly gendered issue, but it's a vocational issue, too. What sort of writer—or filmmaker or songwriter—wouldn't go weak-kneed at the prospect of a benefactor? I've certainly shared June's Pookie fantasy. (In fact, sugar daddies themselves are hardly relegated to one gender: The dowager-with-stud trope has been immortalized from Laura to Alfie to just about everything in which the phrase pool boy has ever been uttered.) Many of us tell ourselves that a chance to do good, meaningful work is worth some sacrifice. From there, it's easy for both men and women to fall into the trap of thinking that a less-than-scintillating partnership is worth the opportunities it affords. Hence the tendency that alarmed Hanna: the place where self-possessed ambition and domestic prostitution cross.
Of course, the idea that one's work would sparkle under the influence of a clear schedule and a seaside cottage—equally the fantasy of men in the profession, I'd offer—is probably a canard. As Jessica suggests, people with a windfall of time and money tend to end up mushy as an apple in a steam bath, even if they started with sharp minds and orderly ambitions. There is a chance to catch up (at last!) on your reading or home improvement. There is the endless rewriting of sentences. There is the all-devouring black hole of the Brookstone catalog. Meanwhile: Salman Rushdie wrote Midnight's Children while working full-time at an ad agency, Joan Didion did her best work in a partnership of two young freelancers with a small kid, and J.K. Rowling—well, everyone knows about J.K. Rowling. I'm baldly naive, but I'd like to think that learning how to do good creative work among these pressures—the process of making it work—helped those writers hit their strides on more than the electric bill.
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I keep meaning to try to enter the Sugar Daddy/Cinderella Complex discussion, and then somebody keeps posting and saying what I was going to say, only better, so at the risk of being repetitive, I agree with (most recently) Nina. The way I read it, Abby Ellin's quote and subsequent confessions of similar fantasies are more an expression of the ancient writer's wish—for a financial bailout—than a scary new anti-feminist expression of wanting and expecting a man to support you. (I mean, having freelance writers contribute a bunch of the essays in a book on women and money is bound to skew the sample in favor of acute need, and hardly seems representative.)
And it is an ancient writer's wish: Worthwhile writing is notoriously nonremunerative, as evidenced (in the unlikely event any of us need evidence) by the fact that Edmund Wilson wrote one bit of his prose on the back of an eviction notice. And I do think that historically, male writers have been perfectly willing to accept venture capital from wives and girlfriends, not to mention parents, patrons, friends, ski resorts (Hemingway was lured to Ketchum, Idaho, because the Sun Valley Lodge offered him a room of his own there, hoping his outdoorsman persona would lure summer tourists) and anybody else willing to bankroll their genius. Virginia Woolf notwithstanding, I think it's fair to say that historically, the sort of person who believes in a writer's potential unconditionally, and is willing to work to support it, often tends to be somebody like ... a wife. The late Studs Terkel relied on his wife's income when he was getting started in broadcasting: "I borrowed 20 bucks from her for our first date," he happily recalled, "I never paid her back." More recently, in Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece about late bloomers, he discusses writer Ben Fountain, who quit practicing law to write fiction, and for many years was supported by his attorney wife, Sharon, to whom he is appealingly grateful. (I think one experience modern male writers may be enjoying is that the wives who support them now have more lucrative jobs than they once could have.) My own favorite, albeit fictional, example is the playwright-actor played by the playwright-actor Wallace Shawn in My Dinner With Andre. Back when he was a rich kid living on the Upper East Side, the Wally character marvels, "all I thought about was art and music," and in this he was strikingly like Ellin and her cohort, or really any writer who grew up in upper-middle-class comfort. But now that he's a middle-aged writer and knows how hard it is to keep the lifestyle to which he'd become accustomed, "all I think about is money." In the movie, Wally's girlfriend has taken a waitressing job to support the household. "After all, somebody had to bring in a little money." (These quotes are based on a transcript I found on the Internet and hopefully are reliable—they exactly tally with my 20-year-old memory of the movie.)
Back when I was on book leave and had run through my advance, all I could think about was Wally's insight.
Really, there's nothing new, for a writer, in feeling desperate about money and wishing somebody would go out and earn some for you. There's nothing new about wanting and needing a patron. The dream of being supported, literally, may be a fantasy, sometimes, but sometimes it is a real need and results in, for example, a major piece of work. I don't worry that Abby Ellin's secret fantasy is representative of her generation; I do think it's representative of her profession. But it's interesting how hard it can be to determine whether the idea of a woman wanting a man to support her, in today's world, represents a retrograde arrangement or a bold new paradigm, and how much anxiety we feel about making that determination.
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I don't know that I've ever had the sugar-daddy fantasy, but I suppose I had expectations, because after I got married I remember having the revelation that my husband was never going to care about money or know anything about managing money, so I was going to have to learn all that stuff.
But, I guess my question is, what's so wrong with having a fantasy?
I may not have had the sugar-daddy fantasy, but I have certainly had the winning-the-lottery fantasy-many times. And I think they are comparable in a lot of ways-they are really about hoping that you will be taken care of and let off the hook, at least for a short while. Fantasizing about these things is a little vacation from the stresses of life.
Now I know there is a difference, too. You can't really do anything to make the winning-the-lottery fantasy come true-at most you'll lose a couple of bucks-while you can decide that you really do want to marry a rich guy and do whatever it takes to make it happen and might end up losing your identity. Maybe.
And, believe me, some days I kick myself because frankly, it never ever in a million years occurred to me to marry for money or even to look for a guy with money or even to think about money. In fact, I was turned off by business-types. In high school, a friend of my sister's had an incredibly thorough checklist for what she wanted in a husband, down to a specific height range. No, me, I had a different kind of fantasy. I was always attracted to artists: actors, musicians, filmmakers, writers.
More than being poor, I was terrified of being ordinary, normal, middle-class, like everyone else. Yes, you can call me April Wheeler. This is no doubt why I fell in love with the book Revolutionary Road when I first read it in grad school many years ago (aside from the brilliant writing by the extremely under-appreciated Richard Yates). Yes, I was terrified of being Frank and April Wheeler. (Now that I'm older, and I've revisited the Wheelers in the book and the movie, my opinion of them has changed quite a bit.)
I remember saying to my punk high school boyfriend (yes, I am Gen X, not Y-as is Abby Ellin, whom I went to graduate school with) that I was worried that someday I'd end up living in the suburbs married to a fat doctor. Would that I was married to a fat doctor now! Preferably one in private practice!
But no, all I wanted in life was to marry my high school boyfriend, move to New York, and live la vie boheme.
That didn't happen. Because there is a difference between our fantasy lives and our real lives.
But I digress. My point, ladies, is that fantasies are thoughts, and thoughts are free and should have free range. They are a way of trying things on for size, of working things out. I've fantasized about having sex with people I'd never really have sex with, killing people who have slighted me when of course I would never really kill anyone (I hope), relatives dying (God forbid) and leaving me a lot of money, but that doesn't mean I go out and hire a hit man. These are fantasies, not life plans. And there is a big difference.
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Juliet, I also think we're talking about at least two different kinds of fantasies in this sugar-daddy conversation. On one hand, there's the writer's desire for a magical windfall that allows her to pursue her pure-hearted literary dreams unfettered by dirty money business. (And on that point, Virginia Woolf has us all beat by a few decades with her sugar-auntie scenario in A Room of One's Own.) I'm not convinced that that fantasy is particularly gendered, or even generational, though I'm sure it has a lot to do with one's class upbringing.
The other fantasy is about wanting someone to swoop in and take responsibility for all the big, scary, money-related issues that loom in grown-up land: mortgages, tuition payments, health insurance, 401(k)s. And that, to me, has more to do with Americans' seeming inability/unwillingness to face their own economic realities and make responsible financial choices than a failing in American women, specifically. (My mother, a financial consultant who is always trying to convince me that America's days as a superpower are numbered, likes to point out that people in Asia put something ridiculous like 25 percent of their paychecks into savings. The mind boggles.)
On both points, I direct you all to Meghan Daum's excellent essay, "My Misspent Youth," which I think is an excellent cautionary tale for young, creative urbanites, female or otherwise. Daum was a very successful New York-based freelancer who realized, at some point, that she was way over her head in debt and decided to move to Lincoln, Neb., and she's particularly good at illuminating the kind of double-speak and self-justifications creative types make in the face of impending financial doom (and this was written almost 10 years ago).
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Oh, Bonnie, thanks for that inspiring and wise post. With a job I love, a child that is a serious contender for the title of world's greatest kid (I know every parent thinks that, but hey, one of us has to be right, right?), not to mention a partner so devoted, hardworking, and cute that I recently compared him to Wall-E, I know I have precious little to bitch about. (Not that that's ever stopped me before.) The story of your years as a single-mom private investigator in D.C. is riveting (have you pitched this to Showtime yet?), and that vision of happily-ever-after—you and your honey pursuing your writing on separate floors, with occasional YMCA breaks—is something to aspire to. (Oh, and thanks for calling me "thirtysomething." Heh.)
And Samantha, because you solicited our thoughts on what to say to a daughter daydreaming about a financial Prince Charming: Though I'm sure it is likely happen at some point, I would be horrified. This is why I plan to keep her away as long as possible from Cinderella, Snow White, The Little Mermaid—pretty much any Disney movie or other heterosexual rescue fantasy. Can't she have a few years of imagining her life in some way unbound by those narratives?
My grandmother used to sing my siblings and me a song, "Que Sera Sera" (it's the song sung by Doris Day to her son at the creepy climax of The Man Who Knew Too Much.) The lyrics of the first verse go like this: "When I was just a little girl/ I asked my mother, what will I be?/ Will I be pretty, will I be rich?/ Here's what she said to me ..." Now, since I'm put off by the the values espoused in those lines, I sing it to my daughter like this: "Will I be happy/Will I be strong?" I know my doctored version won't keep the princess fantasies at bay forever, but whatever will be will be.
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Not to be overly clichéd here but, Dahlia, Hanna, Emily, and Dana, you are right now having the best and most exciting moments in your crowded, demanding, and conflict-filled lives and are incidentally superb role models for Jessica, Samantha (welcome to both!) and Noreen's Gen Y cohort. You awe-inspiring thirtysomething mommies can enjoy who you became for the next couple decades while only having to work like dogs to keep the inconsistencies and chaos (brunch and a birthday party?) at a tolerable level. When I was in the throes of work-life balancing, long before Queen made it a lyric, I used to whisper to myself during especially hectic periods, "These are the days of our lives." Not much time to appreciate them, but deeply exhaustingly satisfying. (Speaking of role models, Dana, Pearl sees that her mommy loves her work. One day your little boss lady will thrive in her own professional glory.)
As the most chronologically advanced of the women in this discussion (though the least experienced writer), my career and education opportunities were measured by an entirely different rubric than either of you post-feminist generations of women. In the late '70s, I was a high-school educated, comparatively underprivileged, unwed mother raising a first-grader in Washington, D.C.'s pre-gentrified Adams Morgan neighborhood. I was not expecting Prince Charming to rescue us. I cobbled together day care, latchkeys and a series of live-in babysitters for my little girl while I used my investigative talents to earn our keep. I earnestly tried freelance writing but the reality of 10 cents a word, even counting in 1978 dimes, was unworkable.
As it was, my long hours on client matters spilled over to homework hastily completed in the McDonald's booth after bedtime. When my daughter was 12, I married a guy who wrote books for a living. He poured the proceeds from five novels into shoring up our collapsing kitchen. He adopted my daughter, and we adopted him. Since he and I were in our mid-30s and each owned a mortgaged D.C. row house, we wondered if we needed a prenup. This was it: We each declared soberly, "Everything I have is yours."
Who supports whom in a marriage is always a matter of perspective. Either way, we pooled our resources. Two incomes are better than one. My steady investigative work and his sometimes lucrative flights of imagination paid for "private schools for future children." My daughter grew up a steadfast professional who loves her demanding work as a documentary maker, pays her own mortgage, and looks forward to having children to complain about. My Prince Charming and I are now child-free, both at-home writers' with offices on separate floors. Some days we leave the house only to work out at the YMCA. Samantha, you and your generational cohorts may not build the same cozy lifestyle as your parents but you may be thrilled to discover you build something more exciting and enriching when you work harder for it. In the end, the fantasy is whatever you make of it.
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I am breaking into the sugar daddy thread at my peril, I realize. But for a moment, another topic: Elena Kagan, Obama's choice for solicitor general. Dahlia writes, correctly, of the kvelling for Kagan--law professors have been calling me to volunteer their praise for her management of Harvard law school and her knowledge of constitutional law. But there's also an undercurrent of surprise about this choice. Kagan isn't a member of the Supreme Court bar. She has never argued a case before the high court; and while I don't know she hasn't definitively, I haven't heard of her arguing cases before other courts, either. Does this matter for the SG's job? Or is it like Leon Panetta for the CIA--a matter of being differently experienced, but not necessarily less qualified?
Linc Caplan, my friend and mentor, and everyone's wise man about the SG's office, since he wrote the book on it, isn't worried about Kagan's lack of record as an oral advocate. He says that while appearing before the court is the most visible and glamorous part of the job, that the "main role of the SG is to shape the legal positions of the U.S.
government in the federal courts." For that, he says, Kagan’s experience at Harvard and before that as a lawyer
("a law clerk at the Court; a couple of years at Williams & Connolly; a few
years at a high level in the White House") is all on point. That makes sense to me. Still, there will be an extra shiver of anticipation about Kagan's first argument as the first woman SG.
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Maybe I'm mistaken, but I don't think we're all talking about the same thing. "Wouldn't it be nice if I found a nice and cute man/woman who happens to be loaded" versus "I don't care what he/she's like, I need the cash and can't be bothered to provide for myself." The first take, is, to my mind, a harmless if telling fantasy. The second is prostitution.
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The more I read these posts about the struggle of the work-life balance, the more I realize that I should refine my initial definition of the sugar daddy that I at some level, coldly practical though it may be, want. To have a true sugar-daddy/daughter relationship (wow, it sounds a whole lot grosser when you add the "daughter" half), the woman is supposed to be sort of indebted, right? Even if he tells her she isn't? I'm picturing a Pretty Woman scenario: No matter how much you've changed his life in that sexy red dress of yours, as long as he's still the sole provider, you're still the whore.
That's not what I want. That's humorously far from what I want, and I'd imagine the same is true for many women my age. But Melinda, I've had those co-workers you mention, the ones who pull me and other twentysomething women aside and tell us that they're making less money now than they did before they left to raise their kids. It doesn't make me resent them; it makes me terrified.
So the fantasy, as June calls it, of the rich white knight who takes all your money worries away is just my flippant answer to the troubling questions that bubble up when that co-worker spouts the truth about salaries after a lengthy maternity leave, or when I read those doomsday articles. I don't really think a man will take all my troubles away, nor do I let that vague hope prevent me from the sort of aggressive self-promotion you advise, E.J. (Believe me, it took a painful amount of that to get hired at Slate!) But instead of tackling how I'm actually going to make the whole thing work—which at this point seems more an exercise in self-induced anxiety than practicality—I just pencil in the easiest solution, the fantasy solution: a rich husband. (For the record, in that fantasy, he's someone I love and respect, and part of that means he's someone who wants me to keep up my job and be successful. He just wants to pay our bills while doing it.)
The part that troubles me is that I think males probably pencil in something different when they're confronting problems, and it's probably more along the lines of "work harder." So as much as I believe I'm doing my damnedest to get ahead despite my deep-pocketed-dream-man backup plan, I wonder if I'd be going at it differently if I hadn't grown up thinking "maybe my financial situation will someday be solved by marriage," and instead had spent those years expecting that I'd have to fix it myself.
A question for the mothers of the group: If your daughter ever said "When I marry my rich husband ..." as I started doing from a frighteningly young age, would your stomach drop? Would you think you had failed somehow as a role model?
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Dahlia, when you give these work-life balance talks, do you tell the young women who've come to hear you the unvarnished truth? Because I'd have to say that I tend to accentuate the happier truth (that writing is one of the most flexible careers around, girls, because you can tailor and re-tailor it to meet your ever-changing needs!) over those other, unhappier true facts: And your childless colleagues will resent the hell out of you, while you more or less constantly reproach yourself for falling short both at home and at work. While I agree with Dana that there's plenty to be done in terms of restructuring the American workplace to make it more family-friendly, even in the most accommodating circumstances, stories don't write themselves and kids need you when they need you. But you know what? Lucky, lucky us if that is our worst problem. Marjorie Williams wrote a great column about this one time, to the effect that what the complaining childless people don't get is that part of their compensation is: they don't have to deal with children. And that what complaining people with children tend to forget is: part of our compensation is that we do.
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That's a good question, Dahlia, and the answer for me is definitely wanting that economic security later. I don't claim to speak for all of twentysomething ladies, but when I fantasize about my work-life balance, I want what my parents had. They're both doctors who met in med school. My mother is a psychiatrist, my father, a cardiologist. From the time my brother was born, we had a housekeeper who did not live with us, but was with the family from 9 to 5 on weekdays. When I was 8 or so, my mom went into her private practice full time, and so worked from home, though was largely not available during the day. We always had dinner as a family and when we were little, my dad did the majority of the playing with my brother and me. Also, we went to a good suburban public school, if that's relevant. My parents both still work more or less full time.
Do I expect the full time housekeeper on a writer/editor salary? Of course not. Does it sound nice in my fantasy world? Dear God, yes. As both Dahlia and Dana expressed, I have no idea what the reality of working motherhood is like. As Noreen points out, this is all still theoretical. I agree that the scars of this financial downturn will change the way Gen-Y thinks about money, Noreen. However, I also think we're more resilient and technologically adaptable than some of the generations before us. Even before this meltdown, we didn't expect company loyalty or consistency, so beyond the cosmetic (less conspicuous consumption, botox, and $400 strollers) I don't think there will be a major restructuring of romantico-fiscal relationships (and yes, I just made that word up).
And even though I aspire to my mother's example, she still likes to tell the story about how my brother burst into tears at his kindergarten class picnic because she had to leave and go to work. "You can't leave me!" he cried. The story is told jokingly, but you can tell that 25 years later, she still feels vaguely guilty. Maybe, as Dana suggested, Obama can help move policy toward helping working women, but I'm not holding my breath. Nor am I expecting to not feel conflicted about my work-life balance. Jeez, this conversation is making me really glad that I'm living in child-free, economically unencumbered sin with my boyfriend.
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Dahlia, now I'm cracking up at the image of you racing off to give talks on work-life balance while two midgets yank at your coat begging you not to go. "Hands off! I have to go talk about work-life balance!"
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Jessica, I'm not so sure craving the scenario Samantha describes isn't at least a little bit a generational thing (and I think what she's talking about isn't exactly opting out—I don't personally know any fellow Generation Y-ers who say they hope to do that entirely).
For most of us, the 20s aren't the most financially stable decade of our lives. But it doesn't seem that bad, since we've been instilled with the sense that there is a way to practice what E.J preaches, to "figure out how to dive in and turn your education and talents into your own income." Eventually the instability will be a charming memory, and you'll be nostalgic for a simpler era when you ate scrambled eggs for dinner multiple times a week.
Except if you're in your 20s right now, you're likely to toggle your browser from your slim checking account to front page headlines not just about staggeringly high unemployment rates and the collapse of the financial system as we know it, but also the slow death of various industries, perhaps including your own. Building a sustainable career in certain industries starts to seem less achievable, even one that's not the sparkling husband-supported freelance romp we're all debating. So, on the one hand, the Samantha scenario seems coldly practical. But, as June aptly pointed out, it's also a delightful fantasy, one that seems tailor-made to counteract the scary front-page news these days. If, as Susan Faludi has written, that after 9/11 we collectively fantasized about cowboys and supermen, retreating to old-fashioned gender roles to comfort our terror, what fantasy are we going to cook up in this depression, when we're confronted not with death but with financial ruin? Maybe it's just that stable guy or girl who is just as much checkbook-affirming as life-affirming.
And of course, these fantasies aren't just coming from our isolated brains, as my sister pointed out in an e-mail to me this morning, "In romantic comedies that the heroine is always somewhat artsy or in publishing and 'independent' and powerful, but then the guy comes in and typically one of the plotlines involves her professionally and personally dissolving." There will probably be lots more film moments like the odd Mama Mia! one Dana noticed coming up, since naturally we love to see comfort fare when we're down. But what will be really interesting will be to look in ten years or so, when the Gen Y-ers have made more of our choices. Dahlia's right that it all seems a little theoretical now for most women my age (the Mr. Howell fantasy is at least in part a way of buying mental space and allowing yourself time to work on your career without making money your main motivation) but philosophy shapes practice. So how will the scars of this scary financial moment affect the way we structure our careers and marriages? Or will they—am I overblowing this?
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Here’s the only quibble I have with your smart (if depressing) post, Dana. I wrote yesterday assuming that younger unmarried women are fretting about such things as work-life balance when constructing their fantasy lives. But on second thought, I wonder if that’s really what’s driving Sam and some of Jessica’s young writers into the arms of Daddy Warbucks. I'm reconsidering because I’m sometimes asked to speak to students about work-life balance, and two things always strike me: 1) Men never show up to these talks; and 2) women can’t really imagine what its like to have a toddler yelling “mommy don’t work” as they struggle into their Spanx, because until you’ve actually experienced the sheer lunacy of working motherhood, it seems like it might be sort of manageable. So I guess I am asking the younger women in the group to clarify whether they want Mr. Howell for now or for later?
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Jessica, I want to know: What are these fabulous, creative, part-time jobs that we would all be enjoying if only our putative sugar parents would subsidize us? Is there a job, freelance or no, that offers "lucrative assignments and continued relevance" (not to mention a dental plan) and that doesn't entail longer hours of work than anyone with a child (or anyone who wants a rich personal life outside of work) can possibly spare? I fear that Dahlia's stark assessment of the reality of working motherhood is soberingly true: If you dedicate yourself to excelling in your field, you will daily find yourself enacting scenarios from the Harry Chapin ballad "Cat's in the Cradle," that AM-radio classic in which a busy father misses out on his son's childhood because ... oh, don't make me describe that song, I'll start weeping. I talked about this a bit in Slate's Movie Club yesterday when I described my daughter yelling "Don't work!" as I hustle off to yet another movie screening at 6 p.m. To be a working mother is to be told daily by everyone, including an authority as irrefutable as your own 2-year-old, that you're doing it all wrong. And they're all, in some way, right—but what's the alternative? Is there any middle ground between "Cat's in the Cradle" and sitting home smoking Djarums on someone else's dime?
It seems to me that what Jessica's asking for—and it's a completely legitimate thing for the next generation of women to want—isn't so much a wealthy suitor as a restructuring of the American workplace, not to mention the American educational system. Why marry Thurston Howell III to ensure your kid a spot in private school when there's a good public school down the block? Maybe Barack Obama will be our Prince Charming. But with the economy in the shape it's in, he ain't gonna be anybody's sugar daddy.
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OK, that's a lie. But I was the breadwinner for a while when we lived in Italy, where this man spent mornings lingering over his cornetto and cappuccino, and got to know everyone in our neighborhood. "Ciao, Bill!'' they all called, every time he stepped outside. Or so it seemed, on the rare occasions I was on the premises. For months, I thought him quite a guy for driving to school every day to retrieve our children—until I picked them up myself one time and met the friendliest mommies there, awed that a male of the species had actually shown up for carpool: "It is not every man who can do what Bill can do,'' this one told me. (Or maybe it was her sister,) Yet he hated not working, was bored reading and lunching and doing the daily shop, and even groused about being surrounded by his gorgeous fellow spouses at dinners—"at the kiddie table again.'' Now, had our roles been reversed, I just know I woulda somehow made the best of it, cause that's the kind of can-do Amer-i-can I am. Only, if being kept is so great, why don't more men aspire to it? The women I know who are professional wives, with multiple houses and a staff, work pretty darn hard at it. And often seem more anxious than your average newspaper reporter about keeping the gig.
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Hanna, I think it's a misnomer that wanting a "sugar daddy" is a generational thing. While I posed the initial question, it was more an observation based on themes in The Secret Currency of Love rather than a personal conviction. Purely anecdotally, I've noticed that my fellow Gen-Y female friends would rather die than "opt out," sugar daddies or no. We've heard horror stories about women leaving their fast-paced jobs for several years to tend to their children, and when they come back they're unemployable; we've seen women of our mothers' generation spend their days with the PTA until a divorce sends them back into a workplace for which they're ill-equipped. Here's a cautionary tale that I often think about: A female rock star from the '90s with a cult following now has an incredibly rich and well-known boyfriend. I heard through the grapevine that all she does these days is sit in his townhouse and smoke cloves and go to yoga. She never writes music. That story makes me want to barf.
As a group, I think we're incredibly ambitious, and I can at least say for myself that I would hate going freelance unless I was so wildly successful that I could guarantee a series of lucrative assignments and continued relevance. It would make me too nervous otherwise. I like having a title and, like Dahlia, a dental plan.
I think what Sam is getting at is not that women in their 20s want a benefactor; it's that they want to work hard and succeed in the field of their choice and not worry about paying for private school for their future children. Perhaps in these economic times it's entitled, E.J., or a pipe dream, June, but I don't think it's an entirely unreasonable hope.
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Dahlia, how would a sugar daddy give you the freedom to work and take care of your kids, too? Because then you can outsource the rest of the treadmill, not just doing the dishes but also buying Hanukkah presents?
My own feeling about work-life balance is that the problem isn't work and it isn't the kids: It's all the other expectations of middle-class life, some of them, at least, self-inflicted. Do I—do my husband and I, I should say—really need to have friends over for brunch this weekend and throw my older son's birthday party? And so I do fantasize about a fairy godmother who whisks all the errands away. (In the meantime, shopping on the Web helps. A lot.) But I'm with Hanna, for this reason along with many other good feminist ones: Money is power. If you make it, you also make decisions. If you don't, you often end up deferring to the breadwinner. Not always, but often, and no matter how well-intentioned and theoretically equality-espousing both partners or spouses are. Such is my observation, anyway.
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Dahlia, I think you've introduced the missing ingredient that Dana, too, stirred into the equation: kids. And Hanna, mother of three, I wonder what you say to this: the fantasy of having the security (courtesy of a spouse with a regular, and large enough, paycheck or some other source of support) to mix being the person overseeing the kids and their care with being a freelancer who also pursues meaningful, if sometimes less-than-predictable, work.
Isn't that a reality that plenty of well-educated, lucky couples pursue, or would like to? (I'm not saying they choose each other with that in mind, or that it's the savviest course given the prospect of divorce, but it's where they end up.) I agree that it's more often the woman who gets the child + part-time work gig, while the man does the more regular breadwinning. And I would say that she may well sometimes publicly gnash her teeth that she isn't the one who's been able to pursue the "real" career while perhaps privately not really being so sorry that she gets to be with the kids a lot and have a more flexible, and often less stressful, work life. Does she face up to the contradictions of her predicament? Perhaps not; we all have our fantasies. But sometimes—increasingly, I would hope—the man may well be the juggler, and my bet is he's all but guaranteed to be belly-aching rather than thanking his sugar-mommy, whatever he really feels.
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I agree with June. Except it’s not that I suspect that all journalists secretly fantasize about becoming freelancers (two words: dental plan). I just suspect that every working woman secretly fantasizes about marrying someone with boatloads of money. Not because, as Jessica suggests, we all secretly dream of princess-hood. No, I think it’s because the myth of work-life balance has been so thoroughly demolished at this point that any rational woman understands it’s not to be had.
Sarah Palin? Bad mom for refusing to defer her career for her kids. Caroline Kennedy? Bad senator for refusing to defer caring for her kids to pursue her career. Only way out? Marry someone so rich, you can work and take care of your kids at the same time! I’m not sure that opposing such a strategy makes you a retro-feminist, Hanna. I just think that given the sheer impossibility of balancing work and kids, a young woman isn’t totally insane to dream of a corner office and a nanny.