It's no mystery why Maddow has become the darling of the progressive blogosphere: She's one of them. Aside from the minor fact that she doesn't actually have a blog, she otherwise fits the bill quite nicely. She's young. She wears those black hipster glasses (or did--before MSNBC's makeover squad got to her). She worked as a barista. And most importantly, she's an unabashed geek who loves talking (and arguing) about policy: Before taking up hosting duties on Air America, she wrote her dissertation about AIDS and served as a prison-reform activist. Meanwhile, her academic credentials are impeccable. Want to send a liberal into a swoon? Just start quoting from Maddow's resume. She got her B.A. from Stanford! She was a Rhodes Scholar! She has a doctorate in political science! From Oxford! (Trust me--no liberal can discuss Maddow without mentioning the D.Phil.)

How did American men get themselves into such a mess? And how do we get them to grow up already? (Or should we even try? For guys in crisis, the slacker man-children in Apatow's movies seem to be having an awful lot of fun.) No matter. It's time to put away childish things--and that includes the remote, the copy of Playboy, and the Wii. Or so say man's latest self-appointed saviors, columnist Kathleen Parker and sociologist Michael Kimmel. American masculinity is in crisis, both say, and something must be done.

Labels: gender wars, journos, shameless self-promotion

I was a bit surprised that neither the discussion of Linda Hirshman's article about the feminist movement nor the original piece bring up what might well be the main problem with "intersectionality," that is, with a "feminism" that has morphed into a universalist struggle against oppression, namely that some fights for the underdog contradict the more basic principles of feminism. When discussing, say, radical Islam (or radical anything else, but Islam is the one that comes up the most), while a feminist would condemn certain practices or traditions, a "feminist" who is simply a leftist or a humanist will point to the oppression Muslim men face in this or that country; will insist that Muslim women are more oppressed as Muslims than as women; and in extreme cases, will denounce as sell-outs those Muslim women who subscribe to a 'Western' feminism.

To put fighting anti-Semitism above all else is, goes this line of thought, a waste of energy, one could even say, it's like a "feminism" centered around the plight of women who, relatively speaking, are not that oppressed. Do Jews in America, in France, in Israel, have it worse than the rest of humanity, now, in the year 2008?

Labels: gender wars

[F]eminists weren't going to do things the old-fashioned, "political" way. Instead, faced with criticism that the movement was too white and middle-class, many influential feminist thinkers conceded that issues affecting mostly white middle-class women -- such as the corporate glass ceiling or the high cost of day care -- should not significantly concern the feminist movement. Particularly in academic circles, only issues that invoked the "intersectionality" of many overlapping oppressions were deemed worthy. Moreover, that concern must include the whole weight of those oppressions. In other words, since racism hurts black women, feminists must fight not only racist misogyny but racism in any form; not only rape as an instrument of war, but war itself. The National Organization for Women (NOW) eventually amended its mission statement to include interrelated oppressions.

[snip]

Meanwhile, white middle-class women, who had started the movement, had already gotten a lot of payoff from the removal of many gender-only barriers, such as sex-segregated help-wanted ads, two-tiered wage structures and prohibitions against pregnant schoolteachers. Once the most insulting abuses were removed, many of these women, somewhat ignobly, lost interest. Research among U.S. college women in 1987 (a largely white group) revealed that only a small proportion called themselves feminists; in 1989, a Time/CNN poll revealed the same thing.

Labels: gender wars

Welcome to the Land of the Park Slope Stroller Mom, where every compliment is a veiled insult, and every choice no matter how mundane or personal - home birth vs. hospital, disposable vs. cloth diapers - is taken as a declaration of your progressive bona fides (or lack thereof). If you're not run down by a passing Bugaboo stroller, you'll likely soon be by the nonstop passive-aggressive sniping of the other mothers. "You let Baby Bjorn have non-organic carrot sticks? What kind of monster are you?"

Labels: gender wars, shameless self-promotion

Labels: gender wars

I was groping gingerly for his intellectual keystone, but not gingerly enough. There are certain quagmires to be avoided with people. You can find yourself liking someone who appears intellectually normal and then have him let drop that his favorite book of all time is The Prophet. That wasn't the particular danger with Denoon, but there were others. A guy who tells you the best novel ever written in Clarissa, which also happens to be the first or second novel ever written, is also not unlikely to tell you that the only music he likes to listen to is motets and that art has never really advanced over the cave paintings at Lascaux. I suppose I was on the qui vive for some variant if this reflex because Denoon has said his favorite novel was War and Peace, so I was thinking, Oh no, it's going to be Beethoven for music and Shakespeare for plays. It isn't that these positions are not defensible, but taking them may mean someone is not very individual. One thing you distinctly never want to hear a man you're interested in say softly is that his favorite book in the whole world is The Golden Notebook. Here you are dealing with a liar from the black lagoon and it's time to start feeling in your purse for carfare.

Labels: gender wars, I want to marry Norman Rush, lit crit

Labels: gender wars

Labels: gender wars

I don't have a lot of hope for the public morality[....] But can we at least end this barbaric practice of dragging your wife before the cameras while you confess your shameful guilt? If she wasn't there in the hotel room when you did your crime, don't ask her to do your time.

[T]he practice requires a man to turn the best instinct of his wife -- to unite behind the family in crisis -- into an instrument of her own public humiliation.

And another thing: Can we end the public practice of trying to shame these wives into divorcing their husbands?

There's a reason we feel impelled to do this these days. Adultery has been redefined as a "private matter," as Spitzer put it in his vain, Clintonian attempt to redirect attention from his crimes to his sin. Because we no longer have any public punishments for adultery, we have turned wives into instruments of the public morality: If she doesn't punish him by divorcing him, he will go unpunished, which is intolerable.

Labels: gender wars

Labels: gender wars

Labels: alas, gender wars, the arts

Labels: gender wars

Labels: gender wars

I swear no man watches "Grey's Anatomy" unless his girlfriend forces him to. No man bakes cookies for his dog. No man feels blue and takes off work to spend the day in bed with a copy of "The Friday Night Knitting Club."

Labels: gender wars

Labels: gender wars

But when you drunken text message a guy at 2am and show up to his room drunk and get naked and give him a blow job, do you really expect he is going to respect you?

Labels: gender wars

Earlier, it might have been argued that such a double standard speaks to inherent gender differences--men are more sexually aggressive by nature, and women less likely to seek out intercourse, so women must be protected from men.

Labels: gender wars

I'd thought that in our little bubble, a bubble, it should be said, that was defined not by class or money or education, but rather by goodness and decency and values and realness (even I am laughing now), the men were somehow different from the men Out There who dated women multiple decades younger than themselves, prized them for their looks and their fecundity and fell in love with the magical rejuvenating mirrors they found in the women's adoring young eyes.

Labels: gender wars

[W]hen it comes to the family, America really has become two nations. The old-fashioned married-couple-with-children model is doing quite well among college-educated women. It is primarily among lower-income women with only a high school education that it is in poor health. This fact may not conform to the view from Hollywood; movies from Kramer vs. Kramer to The Ice Storm to the recent The Squid and the Whale, not to mention unmarried celebrity moms like Goldie Hawn and moms-to-be like Katie Holmes, have helped reinforce the perception that elite women snubbing a conformist patriarchy were the vanguard of a vast social change. Now it's pretty clear that this is a myth saying more about La-La Land than the reality of American family breakdown.

Labels: gender wars

Labels: gender wars

"Being a married man, I don't get that many chances to see naked women other than my wife," said David Eddie, a novelist who flew in from Toronto for the Beeman weekend. "So I guess I felt like that would have been an opportunity." Although he enjoyed the pate, the first-growths and all the clubby perks, he felt that something was lacking. "My thought was, There's only so much happiness you can take in through your mouth," he said.

Which suggests how pro forma strippers can be. More often than men would like to admit, bachelor parties happen at strip clubs because that's what our culture has expected of men. What's more, the bachelor party used to be the last time a man could expect to see a naked woman other than his wife; but in these days of American Apparel advertising, starlets wear Oscar dresses more revealing than much of what used to pass for burlesque wear.

Labels: gender wars