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I read Judith Warner's latest column [2] for the New York Times this morning. My first reading was not a good one. In fact, the whole column sent me into a rage. Luckily for me, it snowed last night (you may have heard that the Northeast experienced a (what else?) Nor'easter last night). For those of us who do not have servants or husbands to shovel our driveways and sidewalks for us, what that meant was that, after my routine cups of coffee and a bowl of cereal, I donned clothes (the sweats I wore yesterday, pulled out of the dirty clothes hamper), a hat, coat, gloves, and my iPod, and grabbed a shovel.
As it turns out, the snow wasn't all that bad. Only about six inches, and while it had been icy coming down, creating hazardous road conditions, on the end of my shovel, it felt fairly light. Of course, it could have been my anger was fueling me, and I did find that the only music that I'd allow the iPod to play had to have a driving beat. I attacked the snow, making a game of seeing just how far I could launch it off the end of the shovel and onto the yard. I seethed about the article, and now, having showered, drunk a cup of tea, and, tucked under blankets to try to keep warm in my old, draughty house, I am trying to articulate why the article made me so goddamned mad.
But first, before I get to that, there's something that may tie into the same sense of visceral rage. Something has re-triggered (and sometimes, I think that the safety on that trigger is permanently off in my head) my suspicion that the "blame mommy first" crowd is up to its tricks again.
Earlier in the week, I went to see Little Children, the movie. I should say that I have not read the book, but I had certainly read plenty of movie reviews that intimated that Tom Perotta's novel had benefitted greatly by its conversion to screenplay. I can't judge whether the novel would have put me off my feed as badly as the movie did; I can tell you that my desire to read the novel has been permanently snuffed by my reaction to the movie. (I should also say that I read a couple of literary novels a month, and I still can't keep up with everything I want to read, so any excuse to knock something off my list works for me.) I don't want to provide any spoilers, but here's what I will say. The movie lures you into believing that it finds white, middle-class, suburban values stifling and crippling of the human soul. And then, somehow, at the end of the movie, it turns into a morality play, wrapping everything up in a pretty pink bow and letting you know, wink, wink, that really, those values rock, especially if they involve young women who are ambivalent about their identitites as full-time moms suddenly discovering that all they really need to be is somebody's mommy.
I'm fucking allergic to that kind of message. I'm allergic to that message as a person, and I'm allergic to that message as the mother of two daughters who, I hope, will get to one day live in a world where their choices will get to be more nuanced than the boxes we have returned to trying to shove women into. (And yes. I know there's a whole plot element in the movie about dads, too, but mostly, what we learn there is that men who try to escape their assigned roles are, at heart, 13-year old adolescent dicks.)
So, Judith Warner's piece today is about how in all of the hand-wringing we've been doing as a culture of late about our sexualized girls, nobody's really looking at one of the major culprits: you guessed it—the moms. Blame mommy, again.
To be fair to Warner, I think there's a positive message at the heart of it: women need to learn to love themselves before they can teach their daughters to learn themselves. I'm okay with that. I'm not okay, however, with the idea that a woman's desire to stay sexual after she has given birth to children is somehow the problem. The op-ed opts for the easy solution—WOMEN, FIX YOURSELVES—rather than the complex one: American women live in a culture that tells them that no matter what, no matter what they are, it's never enough. Ever. And if you think you've got "enough" in one area, well, just wait, we'll change the fucking rules on you and make you feel inadequate in another area. Why? Well, because how else is capitalism going to work unless we are always striving to be something else? And what better way to do that than to buy it? Buy. Buy. Buy.
The subject of Warner's piece is supposedly, hypocrisy. The hypocrisy of mothers telling their daughters to love themselves when we're out there getting plastic surgery, complaining about our bodies to our daughters, and wearing bodacious outfits to pick up our kids from school that cause our daughters to snigger. Who, exactly, is Warner talking to? I'm assuming that she's assuming that all the moms she's addressing hang out in her social/class circle. I know a lot of moms, and I have to say, I don't know a single one of them who has had plastic surgery. Yes. Many of us, myself included, still struggle with notions of what our bodies are "supposed" to look like: but unlike the moms that Warner insists are out there, every mother I know NEVER harps on her own body in front of her daughters. Why? Precisely because we are trying like hell, we are trying the best we fucking can, to not have our daughters grow up with those same body images. (On a personal note: if Warner thinks that "Limited Too" is where we're shopping for kids' clothes, she's sadly out of touch with the reality of what most of us can afford to spend on our children's sartorial choices.)
What really seems to have set Warner off though, is the fact that women have abandoned their books clubs for stripper classes. (They have? Christ. I am so out of touch with what's trendy on the Upper West Side these days.)
Maybe it’s time to take a break from bashing the media and start to take a long, hard look instead at the issue of mothers’ sexuality, which is, apparently, after a long and well-documented dormancy, enjoying a kind of rebirth — thanks, it is said, to things like pole dancing classes and sports club stripteases. These new evening antics of the erstwhile book club set are supposed to be fabulous because they give sexless moms a new kind of erotic identity. But what a disaster they really are: an admission that we’ve failed utterly, as adult women, to figure out what it means to look and feel sexy with dignity. We’ve created an aesthetic void.
Ms. Warner: I'm all ears. What is the adult aesthetic of sexy with dignity? Can you define it? Because I'm not seeing a definition anywhere in your complaint about moms and their negative influence on their daughters. Perhaps, just perhaps, if I could have read this op-ed and gotten some sense of what it is that I'm supposed to be striving for, I might have had more to work with in my response to you other than an inchoate rage.
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