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Like Slate's Jack Shafer, I'm curious to see whether Maureen Dowd uses her next Times column to address the mini-plagiarism scandal surrounding her last one (Dowd admitted to unintentionally lifting a paragraph
from Talking Points Memo blogger Josh Marshall, blaming the confusion
on a conversation with a friend who quoted the passage to her without
attribution.) But I can't agree with Shafer that Dowd's explanation
sounds "plausible—if a tad incomplete." Her account of how Marshall's observation found its way into her column is patently absurd. Unless the friends in question are... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Hanna,
I hear what you say about moxie. What interests me about Edwards is that she
doesn't fit any clear mold. She seems at once very strong and very vulnerable.
One almost feels that in the very fact that she has lived with advanced cancer
for such an extraordinary length of time. On the other hand, Susannah's
close reading of the passage about Rielle Hunter is spot-on, to my ear. In
this description of how the affair began, Edwards uses language that implicitly
depicts Rielle as a fierce, amoral hunter (her last name, after all), and John as
little more than biological silly putty; if Elizabeth doesn't quite make John out
to be an innocent pup, she does suggests he is merely too pliable. The agency is all the Huntress's.
I suppose that's natural; most of would be angry at the other woman,
especially if she's as touchy-feely as Rielle sounds. Do any of you remember this Newsweek piece by
Jonathan Darman about his encounters with her? If I were Elizabeth, I'd
be both threatened by Rielle's brand of sinuous femininity and put off by it. If
you buy the portrait painted in the Darman piece, Rielle seems to possess a
brand of sexual wile that I can’t help feeling is somehow more deeply
associated with womanhood, to this day, than almost any other quality. When I read
about these women, with their New Age sensitivity, their way of leaning in
close at the bar and asking “What sign are you?” I often find myself thinking
they're the true "XX" and I'm, say, X and a 1/2.
What's interesting to me about the passage Susannah posts is how you can see
that Edwards sort of feels that too, otherwise she would never use words like “target.”
The Rielle that Edwards writes about is just a new version of Crystal Edwards from
The Women. She sees something she wants and doesn't hesitate to wreck a
marriage to get it. These days, though, Crystal Allen doesn’t sell perfume at the
perfume counter; she is into astrology and cleanses and freelance video
work. In this reading, Elizabeth, of course, is the wholesome wife (Mrs.
Stephen Haines) played by Norma Shearer; only the movie doesn't end with her
reconciliation with her husband. It ends with her on a talk show, sharpening
her nails a bit. And who could blame her?
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Meghan, Susannah, Hanna, I think Maureen Dowd is right when she asks: Why is Elizabeth Edwards dragging this scandal back before the public? It just makes her look naive and foolish, and reminds us what a slimy cad her husband is. Dowd mentions, as have so many others, that Elizabeth herself could have been a successful politician. Her situation now speaks to the dangers of subverting one's entire life to the ambitions of someone else. Anne, I also agree that Margaret Thatcher doesn't get the credit she deserves for being a path-breaker and a role model. But also a model was her husband, Denis. He had been a successful businessman and while he was supportive of her career, he mostly stayed out of the way. Angela Merkel's husband, a scientist, barely ever shows up for her official events. These husbands of successful, ambitious women are perhaps better role models of what we should expect of a political spouse than Elizabeth Edwards' head cheerleader.
And while we're on the subject of ambition and marriage, Dahlia and Hanna have a fascinating look at why so many of the women on the short list for the Supreme Court are single. They raise the point that the pressures of getting to the top of the legal profession may discriminate against women with children. So it's comforting to remember that two women who got to the Supreme Court first, when women in the law were a distinct minority, were both happily married with children.
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Meghan, I think Maureen Dowd's column on the Edwards debacle now chronicled in Elizabeth's new book, Resilience, is spot-on to call the media spectacle the book has spawned a wife's public flogging of her errant husband. What I find off about Elizabeth's take on the matter is her seemingly recurrent positioning of her husband as a victim of a wanton woman. After John revealed his affair to her, she called for him to “protect our family from this woman."
"It didn’t occur to me that at a fancy hotel in New York, where he sat with a potential donor to his antipoverty work,” Elizabeth writes in her book, “he would be targeted by a woman who would confirm that the man at the table was John Edwards and then would wait for him outside the hotel hours later when he returned from a dinner, wait with the come-on line ‘You are so hot’ and an idea that she should travel with him and make videos. And if you had asked me to wager that house we were building on whether my husband of then 28 years would have responded to a come-on line like that, I would have said no.”
Targeted? Rielle lying in wait? Give me a break. When it comes to adultery, women too often posit the other woman as the enemy, their husband as the victim, the affair the two had some kind of sordid transgression that never would have happened were he not coerced by this Jezebel. Too bad that in her attempt to share the truth, Elizabeth got mired in the quagmire of not vilifying her husband for his misdeeds enough.
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So Maureen Dowd has a slightly caustic column about Elizabeth Edwards' new book, which details her reactions to her husband's affair, online today here. She says that Elizabeth is dragging John out for a public "flogging" and then notes, of Elizabeth's bewilderment about the affair: "She may be smart, but she doesn’t seem to know much about men." It's hard to imagine a man writing this acerbically about another man's savvy about the other gender. But I'm curious: Who agrees with MoDo, and who thinks that she's wrong to describe this book as a public "flogging"? Does John Edwards merit a flogging, in any case?
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I’m with you, Dayo. I cannot quite believe we are entering the third week of sleevegate, wherein America cannot find anything more interesting to pick over than Michelle Obama’s right to bare arms. You’re correct that Maureen Dowd’s fainthearted “defense” this weekend was hard to follow. She sets up David Brooks as the Neanderthal who finds the first lady’s display “ostentatious” but then half piles-on, smirking that “the only bracing symbol of American strength right now is the image of Michelle Obama’s sculpted biceps. Her husband urges bold action, but it is Michelle who looks as though she could easily wind up and punch out Rush Limbaugh.”
I keep wondering if her critics have a problem with Michelle Obama because she's too sexy, as they say, or because she has pretty much flushed the glamour rulebook down the toilet. Unlike past political glamazons, from Nancy Reagan to Sarah Palin, Mrs. Obama doesn’t meet a fashion rule she hasn’t busted. It’s not just that she shows her arms instead of her gams (a la Palin) or the high-lowbrow fashion mix (shocking!) even Dowd grudgiungly admires. It’s more that she just doesn’t seem to care what any of us think of her, including America’s Next Top Model, David Brooks. And that must be driving Washington mental.
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What to make of Maureen Dowd’s column on the first lady in the New York Times today, which—-from its fem-apologetic opening sentence to its “give ‘em hell, Michelle” conclusion—seems be of two minds about the role of women in public life. The narrative revolves around the series of sleeveless dresses that Michelle Obama has been sporting in the dead of winter. I have my thoughts on that, but here’s the key quote:
Washington is a place where people have always been suspect of style and overt sexuality. Too much preening signals that you’re not up late studying cap-and-trade agreements.
I think that’s pretty accurate, despite Dowd’s typically scattershot treatment. But later, from the mouth of Dowd’s Times bedfellow David Brooks:
She should put away Thunder and Lightning. ... Washington is sensually avoidant. The wonks here like brains. She should not be known for her physical presence, for one body part.
Part of why I like Washington so much is its nonrunway atmosphere, the slightly schlubby khaki culture that puts a premium on policy rather than couture aesthetics. Yet its conservatism does translate to gender roles, especially in fields as dominated by men as politics and journalism, or—where I sit—political journalism. Brooks, et al., provide the anti-peer pressure, the incentive to flatten hipness or personality, or treat each as the opposite of smarts. In D.C., just wearing a colored blazer makes one feel a bit flamboyant. (A group of motivated, high-octane girlfriends and I just finished debating my recent moratorium on purchasing clothing that is “not appropriate for work”—more on that later.)
In the end, Dowd counseled Obama to be herself, assuming that her fluency on the intricacies of climate legislation (a facile proxy for things wonkish) will make its own impression, and noting, “the only bracing symbol of American strength right now is the image of Michelle Obama’s sculpted biceps." This was comforting news to one who feared that the hardnosed lawyer and hospital executive was being forgotten in all of the risotto-scooping and playhouse constructing (by choice!) that has peppered her schedule of late.
But it still irks me that Brooks seems more cowed by the FLOTUS’ guns than he has any right to be. Who’s dividing whom into constituent parts? Oh, right—"Washington."... Obama’s toned arms look great, but are probably the most androgynous, least sexual part of a woman’s anatomy. So his complaint is not really about inappropriate sexuality; there’s nothing shameful (in America’s puritan sense) about being known for that “one body part.” His beef is in fact about power, of the incredibly banal corporeal variety. So Obama's "physical presence" threatens him. Yawn—we covered this with the Williams sisters. As euphemistic as he attempts to come across, I think Brooks is just being sexist. He should be more afraid of her pillow talk on Medicaid. Thoughts?
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This Vanity Fair profile of Tina Fey, written by Maureen Dowd, has been making a big splash in the blogosphere the past couple of days, mostly because the thesis, boiled way down, seems to be that Fey's only made it big since she lost weight and prettied up her look while keeping her decidedly non-diva personality. For the most part, as a huge Fey fan, I lapped up the profile uncritically. What struck me, though, were the accompanying photos (to echo Nina's point about the power of a magazine's art department). Annie Leibovitz styles Fey as Wonder Woman-ish on the cover and Sasha Fierce-era Beyonce in the music video shots—obvious Glamazon girl power images. Then there are the shots of Fey in a low-cut white button-down and killer red pumps, which are supposed to be Fey as her own sexy librarian self, right? But I couldn't get rid of the feeling it was another reference to, perhaps, another tart social critic who's gotten a lot of buzz for using her feminine wiles to her advantage—the outfit and pose look an awful lot like a Maureen Dowd pastiche. So what's Vanity Fair trying to say—is it just a clever reference to their smartly assigned byline? Or are they explicitly setting up Fey as the new, updated version of Dowd, the smart, pretty woman all the dorky girls want to become? (For the new millennium: now younger, more neurotic, on TV instead of in those dying newspapers.) I trade 30 Rock lines with friends the way I e-mailed them Dowd's columns a few years ago. Fey certainly was the woman with the most incisive political satire this election season, and that's not even her day job. But did she only get to supplant Dowd in that role because she became more Dowd-y than dowdy, someone for whom the attendant sexy self-possession of a Beyonce reference isn't so crazy?
The piece closes with these lines:
Everybody wants to be Tina Fey, I tell her. Who do you want to be?
"I don't want to be somebody else," she says.
And why would she?
I'm not sure Vanity Fair entirely agrees.
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People who've never been in a Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she has never summered in Tuscany.
—David Brooks on Sarah Palin
When I read the part of Maureen Dowd's column yesterday that said she had "sautéed'' herself in "Sarahville" and ventured into a Wal-Mart to see how the other half shops, I figured she had taken the David Brooks Challenge. I also was picturing her at the superstore in Alexandria -- and even that I would have given a pretty to see, as my granny used to say. (Was she wearing sunglasses? Did an assistant approach the tattooed woman for her?) But if she went personally to the pray-away-the-gay church in Wasilla, that's a whole other field trip.
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Yes, I think it's safe to say that Clark Hoyt doesn't get Maureen Dowd, despite her efforts to explain herself to him (what a fun interview that must have been). Dowd said that she's playing with sexist gender constructs, not aping them. She also defended herself as an equal opportunity offender—she questions Obambi's masculinity as well as Hillary's womanliness, and this makes it all more OK. That works for me, most of the time.
It does drive me crazy, though, when women writers or TV commentators, or whoever, make their name by taking supposedly brave stands against what they've decided are feminist platitudes. I'm not talking about Dowd. The easy-mark offender of late is Charlotte Allen, and sometimes Caitlin Flanagan plays this game; in past days, Ruth Shalit had it nailed, if I remember right.
Today in Slate, Amanda Schaffer has a series that takes on a related breed: two scientists (Louann Brizendine and Susan Pinker) who say they're feminists, have read the literature on sex differences in the brain, and emerged to tell us what they frame as the politically incorrect truth—women really are from Venus and men really are from Mars. Specifically, they say that women have better verbal aptitude, talk more often and use more words, are better at empathizing. Men are better bets to be top mathematicians and scientists, a la Larry Summers, and that's not likely to change as the culture changes. Amanda expertly goes in and takes her own look at the science and finds that Brizendine and Pinker played down the contrary evidence, made various questions seem far more settled than they are, and hype the idea that differences are innate, and fixed, when that may well not be the case. She also interviewed various scientists who said, hey, Pinker and Brizendine made my work stand for a proposition it doesn't stand for.
Amanda has also done some thinking about why the reluctant truth-teller female scientist walks among us so prominently at the moment. (Other than the obvious ka-ching, ka-ching answer: Brizendine's book, which came first, was a best-seller.) That part of the series won't run til next week. In the meantime, any thoughts? Do you think that bashing principles or ideas that feminists hold dear fast-tracks certain women to success? Or am I oversensitive, huffy, and in need of a tall glass of iced tea since it's too early in the day for a drink?