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Jess, I can’t possibly say it better than Emily just did, but I can say this: All the naval-gazing we’ve witnessed in recent weeks—about loveless marriage and companionate marriages and coldly calculated political marriages—is happening in mad, crude stereotypes. From Michael Wolff’s hilarious rant against cold, emasculating bitch wives, to Sandra Tsing Loh’s tedious metro-sexual husbands, the discussion always plays out with all the subtlety of the Mommy Wars. This is how we talk about important things—by painting the other side as a Flintstones character.
I found myself liking the Caitlin Flanigan piece. I liked it despite her overheated warning about our how our kids will collude to set us out on ice floes some day, because we have modeled only narcissism and selfishness. I liked it because she’s right, we are narcissistic and selfish. We really do think that our life should be a series of Love Boat episodes in which we are entitled to fall deeply in love with mysterious Argentinians every night, then do it all over again next week with a Frenchman. It’s true: Marriage isn’t the Lido Deck with the moonlight every day. More often than not, it’s slamming grimly around the kitchen in the morning trying to find the Nutella for school lunches. But like Emily says, maybe romance is finally finding someone who’s more important to you than yourself. That’s epic. That's Shakespeare ...
Photograph by Getty Images.
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A guest post from Linda Hirshman:
With a cover story by working mother scourge Caitlin Flanagan, next week’s Time takes the occasion of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s staggeringly banal adultery to tell America that “Marriage Matters.”
Why does marriage matter? Not, of course, because of the harm to the deer-in-the-headlights brigade—Silda Wall Spitzer, Jenny Sanford, etc. That would put Flanagan on the side of the adult females.
Marriage matters, because single parent families are bad for children, the only people who count. “Drastically” bad: “on every single significant outcome ... children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households ... If you can measure it, a sociologist has; and in all cases, the kids living with both parents drastically outperform the others.”
OK, maybe poor people, more often single than their critics from the elite Flanagan class, have worse outcomes, but aren’t those problems more about, say, poverty than single parent families? And in fact sociologists have been looking for reliable data that sorts that out since the invention of sociology in the nineteenth century and as recently as 2005.
But instead of looking at the recent work, Flanagan gives us her usual brew of autobiography (my parents’ fifty-year marriage, my husband’s caretaking), outmoded studies, and interviews with experts from right wing foundations such as David Blankenhorn, President of the Institute for American Values (and a loud spokesman against marriage for same sex people), and Heritage’s Robert Rector.
Unbeknownst to Flanagan, in 2005, the centrist Brookings Institution published “Marriage and Child Well-Being,” which included a report from Penn State’s Paul R. Amato on “The Impact of Family Formation Change on the Next Generation.” Looking at a decade’s work, Amato reported “the results of individual studies vary considerably: Some suggest serious negative effects of divorce, others suggest modest effects, and yet others suggest no effects.” When Amato ran his own numbers, he concluded for example, that “if the share of adolescents living in two parent families returned to its 1970 level, it would have ... a relatively small effect on the share of children experiencing these problems. In general, these findings, which are likely to disappoint some readers, are consistent with a broad, sociological understanding of human behavior."
Broad sociological understanding or Flanagan’s autobiography, take your pick. Most children are raised by women. Given the state of marriage, most 21st-century American children are going to spend some time with single mothers. Everything else being equal, probably two parents are “modestly,” as Amato says, better. But the last thing Time should be doing is running another unsubstantiated, apocalyptic cover on the awful consequences of most American women’s fates. Remember Newsweek’s “You’re more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to find a husband after the age of thirty-five?” Decades and infinite cultural damage later, they had to take it back. With the Internet, Time could just take it down.
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Jessica, my husband and I have been married for 15 years. Last weekend, we drove from Maryland to New Jersey and during the many hours of crawling in traffic we wrote a rap song together about the Delaware Toll Plaza. We stay up too late talking to each other. We hold hands at the movies. Since we're in our fifties, sure we've talked about who's going to get to pull each other's plug—but eventually being able to do this honor is not why we're together. So do not despair that marriage is an enterprise devoted to raising children, fighting over litterbox scooping duties, and holding the horror of fidelity over each other's heads.
There are long-time married couples who still genuinely enjoy each other's company and would be bereft without their spouse. I say this as someone who grew up in a home where my parents' marriage required the police to be called in. So finding marriage to be an oasis has been one of life's sweet surprises.
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Speaking of being bummed out, I felt oddly blue after reading Mimi Swartz’s excellent piece in The Daily Beast about empty-nesters in the Obama administration. Swartz, who also writes for Double X about being an empty nester herself, talks about (and to) White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, and also offers up WH Social Secretary Desiree Rogers and First Lady Chief of Staff Susan Sher, among others, as collective proof that professional life isn't over for women—in some ways it's just beginning—when their kids leave for college. This may well be true, and it's striking to see so many redoubtable women in positions of power. I admit to a keen fascination with Jarrett and Rogers, who live in the same apartment building on the Georgetown canalfront and who I like to think of as popping into each other's apartments, like the cast of Seinfeld, or Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda, borrowing clothes and gossiping. I hope their glam fortysomething-and-beyond lives are indeed representative of what women can achieve in late midlife. And I do know women in their 40s and 50s who, successful all along, are now enjoying that long-awaited shift into professional overdrive.
Part of me, though, isn't so convinced that they are representative. Age doesn't feel exactly like an advantage, now, at least not in the media industry, which has gone through such swift and wrenching changes—not only economically but technologically. Older workers tend to be expensive, and they can't necessarily aggregate and Twitter. My worry is that when many women pass the 50 or 60 mark, or men for that matter, at least some workplaces will regard them as doddering.
Swartz's piece also served as a weary reminder of how, for women, “sequencing” is such a relentless challenge. The fact that it’s so easy for these women to work 24/7 just underlines how much energy is expended, by women, mostly, adjusting to the stages of working and parenting that come before that. When your kids are little, you struggle with whether to work part-time or full-time and what sort of child care is right; this segues into the teen years, when many mothers uncomfortably suspect that what their kids really need is them, not a babysitter, to be home and available to talk through the zillions of treacherous moral choices teenagers are called upon to make every day. This is why lots of women I know ask their bosses if they can get to work really, really, really early so as to be home early as well. (At a certain point you can't work part-time because your other reponsibility is to make enough to send them to college.) Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes it's a puzzled comment: "Your kids are teenagers—they don't need you anymore."
Just recently a friend talked to me about how, if her employers would just give her a few more years of flexibility to get her last child into college, she'd gladly move into the city and come into the office 80 hours a week, work all the time, dedicate herself, monastically, to work. I overhead another mother talking about how much she loved her son but how in a way she was looking forward to when he went to college and she didn't have to rush to get him from after care any more. If we're not careful we'll end up wishing our lives away.
And here's the thing: This wasn't supposed to be an administration dominated by female empty nesters. It was supposed to be a family-friendly administration where it was possible to be a working parent and actually parent. Back in January, Jackie Norris, a mother of three young children, said upon taking a job as Michelle Obama's chief of staff that she expected to "work my heart out during the day and work my heart out as a mother at night." Now Norris has been replaced by the empty-nester Sher, and Ellen Moran, who has two young children and who started out this year as White House communications director, has left that post for family reasons. It’s great that older women are coming into their own, but does this mean that the younger ones are washing out? Or burning out, rather? And without them, how can an administration that has set out to improve the nation's work-family policy show the way?
Photograph of Desiree Rogers (left) and Valerie Jarrett by Paul Morigi/Getty Images.
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Yes, I understand that Internet surveys are hopeless, and yes, I understand that 448,000 lonely hearts do not a random sample make, but still I ask: What is the deal with this OK Cupid map of debauchery by state? The dating site asked users whether they would date someone “just for the sex.” Westerners, God bless them, answered with a resounding “yes.” But the East Coast and Midwest pretty much demurred. If you’re in it just for wanton carnal stimulation, Vermont and Pennsylvania really do not want to date you.
So why the variance, readers? A surplus of men in the West and women in the East? Are there only a dozen or so very desperate OK Cupid users west of Missouri? Or is the East really leading a reactionary crusade against the forces of unconstrained libidinousness? Hold the line, Oklahoma!
Photograph by Getty Images.
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It's been a rough couple of weeks for marriage. First, Sandra Tsing Loh came out swinging against the institution in the Atlantic (and we discussed it ad nauseam), and simultaneously Mark Sanford and John Ensign and the Gosselins paraded their broken relationships in front of the nation. In Time, Caitlin Flanagan takes up for long-lasting unions in an essay called "Why Marriage Matters." Flanagan's defense of marriage can be boiled down to: The reasons to get married are to raise children and not die alone.
And she doesn't mean "dying alone" as in your husband or wife leaving you or kicking the bucket first, she means "dying alone" as in dying without someone to wheel you to the E.R. on New Year's Eve. She implies that young folks today will leave their elderly parents to be eaten by housecats because they were the products of divorce: "[T]he current generation of children, the one watching commitments between adults snap like dry twigs and observing parents who simply can't be bothered to marry each other and who hence drift in and out of their children's lives—that's the generation who will be taking care of us when we are old."
But, the thing that all these polemics for and against marriage seem to miss when they speak in extremes and use cartoon examples (Jon and Kate; Tsing Loh's sexless, miserable friends) is the quiet joy of sharing a life with someone. They miss the mystery implicit in a bond between only two people. Flanagan touches on it, almost, when she talks about what's shared between Barack and Michelle Obama, but she uses their example to show how important sacrifice is in a lasting relationship.
I don't expect my marriage to be perfect, or to be without sacrifice on both our parts, but you married Double Xers out there: Isn't marriage about much more than just baby making and providing for old age?
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Carte Noire, a British coffee brand, has a new online video campaign directed smack at cubicle-dwelling, former English majors (i.e., me). Every week, a hottie actor of the Anglo persuasion reads a love scene from a new or classic novel. Here's Dominic West—Jimmy McNulty of The Wire—reading the scene from Pride and Prejudice in which Mr. Darcy declares his love for Elizabeth Bennet.
I can't tell what I like more about this clip: the cosy, English-country-home vibe (the armchair! the books on the windowshelf!) or West's own "luxurious, velvety flavours." It's not quite up there with the Taster's Choice soap opera, but then, what is? Shameless, yet delicious.
Thanks to Farhad Manjoo for the tip-off!
Image is a screenshot from cartenoire.co.uk.
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Good news to wake up to: New Delhi's highest court has decriminalized homosexuality—for New Delhians, at least.
The law overturns Section 377 of India's penal code, a colonial-era statute that prohibits "carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal." The New York Times quotes from the judges' 105-page decision: “The inclusiveness that Indian society traditionally displayed, literally in every aspect of life, is manifest in recognizing a role in society for everyone ... Those perceived by the majority as ‘deviants’ or ‘different’ are not on that score excluded or ostracized."
The ruling isn't without controversy, and the decision only applies to New Delhi, India's capital city. But according to the Times, there are likely to be ripple effects—lawyers and advocates say that the government will be forced to "appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, or change the law nationwide."
A friend of mine posted this article from the Hindu on Facebook a few days ago—it's an account of Chennai's first Rainbow Pride Parade:
"I never thought this would happen in my lifetime in Chennai…,” D. Chandrasekaran, an IT professional, said laughingly. All around him hundreds marched on the Marina on Sunday evening, united by the belief that "Hues may vary but humanity does not."
India, of course, is a huge and sprawling country, and social mores won't change overnight in all corners. The line that killed me in the Hindu article was this one:
“We should not be afraid to come out and say we are gay,” said a participant who had come from Chidambaram, wearing a mask.
Hopefully, a day will come in India when the masks won't be necessary.
Photgraph of women celebrating in New Delhi by Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty Images.
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Sara, you said that childhood stardom was such a destructive force for Michael Jackson, and you were right. But the current issue of Vanity Fair has a cover story on Heath Ledger that shows for a sensitive adult, stardom ain't all its cracked up to be, either. This isn't a new idea: That's why "the price of fame" is such a cliched phrase. But Peter Biskind's story of the Ledger demise is particularly heart-stomping, since Heath was so young, so talented, and being a movie star really did ruin every aspect of his life.
It started in 2001 when Sony was trying to sell him as the next teen heartthrob after A Knight's Tale. Ledger "ran into the men's room, sequestering himself in a stall where he had a panic attack." Things plugged along for years after that, because Ledger was not yet a household name, but that all changed with Brokeback Mountain, and the accompanying Oscar press created a real fissure in Ledger's world. Terry Gilliam, who directed Heath in The Brothers Grimm and also in Ledger's last movie, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, said of the Brokeback hoopla, "You have to whore yourself around ... And on Brokeback he really did whore himself around, doing all the things he hated. He felt angry with hiimself for going along with the way the system worked. He felt dirty. And then he didn't win." What's more, Ledger's girlfriend Michelle Williams did take the Oscar stuff seriously, and it caused the rift that would eventually end their relationship.
The Susan Boyle situation isn't really analogous to the Heath Ledger tragedy, but this article did make me think of Boyle's recent breakdown after the sudden avalanche of press she received. Opening your life up to massive public scrutiny in any area is psychological pressure that only the most steely egos can handle.
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Palin is back among us not only as a God-loving runner (is that a strange shot with the flag, or what?) but also as a hard-charging mama bear. In Todd Purdham's Vanity Fair profile, which Dayo and Jess dissected earlier this week, are new tidbits about Troopergate, Palin's corrupt-seeming axing of Walt Monegan, who was Alaska's head of the Department of Public Safety. My favorite: Twelve days before he was fired, Monegan sent Palin an e-mail telling her that a state legislator had reported that she'd been seen driving with her baby Trig not in an "approved car seat." "I have never driven Trig anywhere without a new, approved car seat," Palin wrote back. "I want to know who said otherwise—pls. provide me that info now." For me, the most interesting thing about Palin (and yes there is lots to choose from) is her success in forthrightly making sexy motherhood the core of her image. The Runner's World spread misfires because it makes her seem ever more lightweight, and also vain. But the car seat story resonates. Oh, the shame of ever driving a child anywhere without one. What mother accused of such sin wouldn't want revenge on the tale-bearer?
Photo by Getty Images.
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