The XX Factor: What women really think.

Another Day, Another Republican Has an Affair

There’s something fishy about Nevada Republican Sen. John Ensign’s admission yesterday that he had an affair.... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Katha Pollitt Responds to Linda Hirshman

A guest post from the Nation's Katha Pollitt, responding to a recent piece in Slate by Linda Hirshman.

Linda Hirshman seriously misrepresents both me and my book Learning to Drive. In brief:

1. Linda equates me with a battered woman who stays with her abuser. My actual situation, unambiguously described in the book: I discovered AFTER MY PARTNER LEFT ME that he had been unfaithful many times. Linda strongly implies I knew about this all along and stayed out of sick romanticism. In fact, I would never stay with a philanderer, much less an abuser. I have never been in an abusive relationship. Learning to Drive cannot rationally be used to explain why a battered woman would stay with a violent man. Because that is not the situation it describes.

2. She compares me with the excessively romantic (her view,  Flaubert's is a little more complicated!) Emma Bovary, who killed herself (actually not for love, As Linda implies, but because of debt). My book is about getting over a subtly infantilizing, undermining relationship and painful breakup by becoming a more independent, self-aware and skeptical woman, a woman less prone to denial, which, again IN THE BOOK, is connected to other kinds of rose-colored glasses (about politics, alcoholic parent, motherhood, etc.).

3. She ignores the fact that Learning to Drive is not a flat-footed piece of journalism, it is a book of essays which use various literary strategies, like, um, humor, exaggeration, irony, whimsy, verbal play, and self-satire.  Every single quote she uses she takes literally, when they are all comic, i.e., calling my philandering partner a "psychopath." Obviously, he wasn't really a psychopath, he was a garden-variety manipulative charmer. "Psychopath" expresses  rage and frustration in an over-the-top way that is meant to suggest maybe there's something funny about finding oneself in this pickle. It's not a clinical diagnosis. Similarly, obviously,  when I describe his hat and coat in a romantically exaggerated way I am aware that it is a romantic exaggeration.

It's English 101: There is space between the autobiographical narrator and the autobiographical subject. As in fiction, the writer knows more than the character. Emma Bovary didn't write Madame Bovary! I can understand why that would be too subtle for Linda, who sees everything in black and white and whose main aim in life seems to be proving herself the world's only true feminist.