Monday, February 02, 2009 - Posts
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While we're parsing our octuplet obsession, it's worth reading Judith Warner's recent column on child-related panics in general—whether they're about teenagers and sex, or overscheduled kids, or overmedicated kids, or commodified kids. She makes the good point that such panics rarely clarify children's real situations, much less inform good decisions. Instead they tend to blur subtleties and obscure hard choices, while letting adults project their own anxieties and wallow in concern over lost innocence. (Overscheduling, for example, isn't exactly the universal childhood problem you'd think from affluent parents' alarm. Overextended adults, though, are a problem, not least because they're too frazzled to focus on the urgent problems of poor kids with too little to occupy them.)
As for the octuplets, let's hope their arrival prompts a hard, cold examination of assisted reproductive technology rather than endless appalled voyeurism. This isn't the first fertility freak show to unfold during hard times: Remember the story of the poor Dionne quintuplets 75 years ago? Then the government—the girls were born in Canada—did step in, in the name of protecting the babies from exploitation and danger. But instead of helping, the effect was to perpetuate the circus: The girls were sequestered in Quintland, which became a national tourist attraction up there with (or even beyond) Niagara Falls. That's not part of a stimulus package we need, but here is a market that surely needs regulating.
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On Sunday, the NYT business section ran a piece called "Why the Sting of Layoffs Can Be Sharper for Men." It's got some not particularly evidence-based generalizations about how men are harder hit because their self-esteem is based on professional success more than women's. Also more interesting, if anecdotal, reports from psychiatrists that increasing numbers of men are coming in to talk about anxiety and depression related to the economic crisis. I'm skeptical about the broad claim that men feel the pain of layoffs more than women do. But I'm curious about how the downturn is playing out along gender lines. Are male egos collapsing because of the crisis? Are female ones? How are women supporting their laid-off or unemployed male partners, and how are men supporting the jobless women in their lives? If any of you readers have a story along these lines that you're up for sharing, please send it to doublex.slate@gmail.com. E-mail may be quoted in Slate unless the writer stipulates otherwise.
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I want to welcome Willa Paskin, who comes to the XX Factor from dear departed Radar magazine, where she covered high and low culture with equal enthusiasm. I agree with Willa on the He's Just Not That Into You pheonomenon: It always seemed bizarre to me that the book, and now the movie, are marketed as empowering. Since when does inaction make you feel in control? It's ultimately the same philosophy behind The Rules, just covered in a lacquer of sass.
Elisheva, I sort of disagree with you that no one should judge the Duggars and the Gosselins. They have made the active choice to portray their bulging broods on television. It's the same way I feel about tell-all memoirs. The writers of such memoirs, like the Duggars and the Gosselins, are airing their laundry to a public for a fee, and that puts their choices on an elevated cultural plane. Maybe in an ideal world, no one would judge their parenting choices, but when those choices are broadcast to millions, isn't audience judgment— which is to say, forming an opinion—the entire point?
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Noreen, I feel your pain. As the oldest of 11 children, I am no stranger to the raised eyebrows that come with the large-family territory, and I am constantly taken aback by the questions people feel they can ask me (like whether I think my parents are "done" and the ever-popular question of whether I know all my siblings' names). I have even been asked, "Wait, you have 10 siblings and you're not crazy?"
And, yes, people always, always want to judge my parents. (My father's standard response is, "Which one would you give back?") All of which has taught me, if nothing else, to be wary of judging anyone's family decisions, though I'm not sure I would choose to feature those family decisions on television. I don't think there is such a thing as the objectively perfect mother, and I don't think good parenting has anything to do with how many children you have or how many children you can have at once. It has to do with making the best choices for yourself and your children, and it's dangerous to judge someone else's parenting choices.
When the time comes, I want to be able to decide for myself what will make me the best mother to my children, irrespective of anyone else's parenting decisions.
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In the Sunday New York Times, Ginia Bellafante praised USA's sleek and cheeky Miami spy show Burn Notice as a "winning post-feminist revenge fantasy." Why? The series' leading lady, Fiona (played by Gabrielle Anwar) has zero respect for the He's Just Not That Into You meme.
Unlike women following the advice of the aforementioned self-help book, Fiona refuses to accept her super spy, ex-boyfriend Michael's frequent rejections, regularly engaging in jealousy-inducing, bikini wearing antics to win him back (while, simultaneously, helping him blow things up, shoot people and clear his name). In Bellafante's reading, this shameless behavior doesn't make Fiona pathetic, it makes her a badass who has tapped into her own masculinity. Instead of feeling powerless and mortified because she loves someone who doesn't love her in return, Fiona won't "regard her romantic pursuit as a pitiable behavior in need of reform."
While Bellafante might have reserved the "post feminist revenge fantasy" compliment for a character who doesn't spend her time "interrupting stakeouts and shooting sprees and manhunts to ask Michael for a key to his apartment," she's got a point: He's Just Not That Into You may be common sense, but it's also based on a woman's (supposed) total powerlessness in starting relationships.
If he's into you, he'll call. Doing anything proactive would be a waste of time, not to mention, pathetic. (As the trailer for next week's film version of He's Just Not That Into You makes abundantly clear, that one extra, unsolicited phone call could be really, really embarrassing.) God forbid, you should pursue some one you truly liked; you might get rejected to your face, which would be so much harder to bear than getting passively rejected by an unanswered voice mail. If the prospect of a real-time dismissal seems worth the risk in certain, obviously rare!, cases, He's Just Not That Into You can't help. Fiona could. Maybe she should write her own book (if she can find time between all the fire fights). It could be called He's Just Not That Into You: Who Cares?
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Just when I thought that nipping and tucking was falling out of favor in the brave, new “frugalista” era—this creepy, yet informative Washington Post story about Martha Washington sucks us all back in. Apparently, our first FLOTUS was not some dowdy pincushion of a woman; in fact, she liked to get down. Choice quote:
"[George Washington] was clearly sexually excited by her," said Patricia Brady, a historian who wrote the first revisionist biography of Martha a few years ago. "When Martha decided to marry George, she didn't marry him just to be a kind stepfather to her two children. He was a hunk, and I think she decided to make herself happy. ..."
Nice. It is a bit unfair that Martha Washington has been essentially interchangeable with Mrs. Claus in the popular imaginary. But the next Angelina? I respectfully question the intentions (probably commercial) of the “handful of historians” who
are seeking to revamp the former first lady's fusty image, using the few surviving records of things she wrote, asking forensic anthropologists to do a computerized age-regression portrait of her in her mid-20s and, perhaps most importantly, displaying for the first time in decades the avant-garde deep purple silk high heels studded with silver sequins that she wore on her wedding day.
It’s cool to know more about Martha. And I get that first lady fashion is back like black—the Smithsonian is displaying a beautiful onyx pocket watch worn by Mary Todd Lincoln after her husband’s assassination/ (I have it on good authority that DVF is an admirer.) But must we describe Martha’s shoes as “the Manolo Blahniks of her time”? I’m more interested in the mention of her late 18th-century management of five tobacco farms. What was that like? Ironically, this extreme makeover ends up bounding its subject within a rather retrograde portfolio, comprising what she wore and how she related to men and who wanted to diddle her. Exchanging the trope of the schoolmarm for that of the proto-Bovarian fashionplate isn’t really progress, is it?
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