Hold On To Your Hats and Glasses, Grrrrls

MoDo's got a retrospective on "feminism" in this weekend's NYT Sunday Magazine.

She concludes with a look down the road to 2030: "It's easy to picture a surreally familiar scene when women realize they bought into a raw deal and old trap. With no power or money or independence, they'll be mere domestic robots, lasering their legs and waxing their floors--or vice versa--and desperately seeking a new Betty Friedan."

I'd say that puts us all on a 72-hour Drum Watch!* Can't you already feel the hair on the back of your neck starting to rise?

*Well, we need something to fill the newshole left wide-open by indictment/Miers fatigue.

Comments

[Lauren]

No comment. No comment. No comment. No comment. Fuck, no comment.

[Amanda Marcotte]

Is it wrong that this makes me want to get out some peanuts and a folding chair and watch the parade?

[Roxanne]

No, it's not wrong. It's basically what I plan to do.

[Ann Bartow]

I'm glad I seem to meet far nicer, more diverse and interesting people than Maureen Dowd does. While I can't quite bring myself to feel sorry for her, she might be a very different person if she'd had more friends who were less critical and judgmental of her. Then again, to have a friend, you have to be one...

[Ann Bartow]

A few more thoughts here: http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/002326.html

[julia]

Anyone else notice that MoDo's girlfriends seem to play the same role for her that those "traditional" women play for the men in their lives, twittery and unserious and (of course) not having achieved more than she has?

Perhaps she'd do a little better in the market if her model for "successful" weren't "brooking no challenge to one's primacy"

Also? Almost twelve years of marriage have taught me the sad and mournful fact that sometimes when you plant your feet and dig in, you're really truly not making a stand for female autonomy and the principle of equality, although it's lovely and comforting to think so. Sometimes when you plant your feet and dig in, it's you insisting on being right because, well, adolescent humans of both sexes like to think they're always right.

Perhaps instead of blaming the feminists whose message she completely missed or the society she's done her bit to help point in the direction that alarms her so (hey, did you know Monica was, like, not thin?) she could productively harness the energy of all that desperation into growing the fuck up.

Sadly, when your career is pretty much built on being the queen of the Heathers, this is not amongst your options.

Not putting your personal business into the OpEd page of the Times might be a good start, though, dear.

[MarkC]

Oh, like Paul Krugman can stop dishing about what the Council of Economic Advisors are wearing. Where's the asymmetry? Where's the asymmetry?

[eli]

shorter MoDo (same as all the other MoDo pieces): i'm emma peale. and you're not

[paul]

Julia (Oct 31, 2005 8:28:26 AM) writes

growing the fuck up

I dunno. The fuck-up is already pretty big. If MoDo hasn't already had a hand in growing it to that size, I don't think I want to see it after she gets through with it.

[Michael Hussey]

A friend of mine wrote about what Dowd speaks of.

"Why can't we be more regular? Well let me tell you? It's hard to be more 'regular' when I'm smarter than 75% of the the male sex, I work longer hours and I make 75 cents on every dollar he makes. I watch his sex climb past me on work I've done, because he has a cock. On top of that, I'm losing out on peak earning years to stop my life and give birth to more of his sex. But I don't get paid for that work either. I just sit out the game for 10 months while he goes about business as usual and hits happy hour every night. I bring life into the world, growing within my BODY, as my organs are pushed and shoved out of the way into unnatural positions and I then actually tear my own flesh to give this person a life. I don't get a medal for this. I don't get a bonus. I get a second job. And that's another full time job."