who the hell is this caitlin flanagan?

Every time I read antifeminist firebrand Caitlin Flanagan, I fight with her in my head for days. And so the appearance of her radioactive New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly essays — on nannies, housework, sex — in To Hell With All That has had me fibrillating for a week.

Part paean to 1950s housewifery, part polemic, this fiercely intelligent, maddeningly smug collection is built around Flanagan's most cherished belief: ''What's missing from so many affluent American households is the one thing you can't buy: the presence of someone who cares deeply and principally about that home and the people who live in it.'' In other words, Mom. Flanagan can be persuasive celebrating the dignity of homemaking and lost domestic arts. Alas, she argues, today's shrill working mothers are too busy exploiting brown-skinned babysitters and denying their ''poor'' husbands nooky to acquire these vital skills. Her unforgiving portraits of women, and the free pass issued to their mates, make my blood boil.

Still, the peeks into Flanagan's home are worse. ''Paloma, Patrick is throwing up!'' Flanagan used to tell her son's nanny. ''She would literally run to his room, clean the sheets, change his pajamas, spread a clean towel on his pillow,'' Flanagan recalls. ''I would stand in the doorway, concerned, making funny faces at Patrick to cheer him up.'' I put my kids in day care and I can't iron. But I've never stood in a doorway when my child was puking, and I resent being lectured to by someone who has.

Although I posted on this facetitiously on our blog...
http://reinventioninc.blogspot.com
...the comments from men cheering me on are worth a good read.

kindly,
kirsten

pretty good takedown in ms., but an even better one in elle.

that said, shes a great writer and asks an uncomfortable question: what do we do with the domestic, denigrate it or worship it but never treat it as real...and someone gotta clean the shitters (w. flannagan its the maid, but thats beside the point)

We've been here before

Inevitable result of having a chattering media class = some portion of the conversation that comes from inside it will be the conversation of that class, its own status issues, assumed as representative of Everything and symbolic/symptomatic of What's Happening in America. This is one of many reasons it's not necessarily bright to swallow pronouncements about the state of the American home from people who aren't doing any kind of hard sociological research on what the American home is really like -- it's the one topic we all think we know from experience, but we honestly have no idea whatsoever, whatsoever. (I think this is why Wife Swap and Nanny 911 are popular, actually.)

so perhaps i don't have kids...or a husband...and as a ceo (my blog comment trolls say today) the odds that i will ever get married are slim to none.

sadly, my current boyfriend suggests I am NOT SUCCESSFUL ENOUGH.

a gal just can't win...

Good bone structure? Are ya kidding me?

I would take a rich husband who would care for my every need and buy my shoes for me. Given a choice between working hard for the money and being "kept in high standards" -- I think quite a few men and women would gladly sign up.

kindly,
kirsten

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200605/mommy-wars speaks to a lot of what nabisco's saying

For lots of women (most women!) those questions don't exist in a vacuum: they have children unselfconsciously or even by accident; they work not for the self-satisfaction of a "career" but just to put food on the table; they plunge in and tackle whatever they can. They're busy looking to establish basic independence and self-suffiency, to have families and raise kids as well as they can manage, to have spouses who make them happy; the struggle's just to have those things at all, not worry about managing them and defining oneself around the ideals they represent. But this means that there is a grain of importance to the "afflufemza," because here we have women who've been given the opportunity to sort this stuff out in an actual "what do you really value" vacuum, and their decisions have ... well, yes, symbolic interest.

http://www.theatlantic.com/about/people/images/flanaganpic.jpg

i think that the domesitc sphere is much more complicated then making the beds, i think its the locus for our conversations about gender, and its discontents--and i think that the crisis of who "will serve and who will eat" in the words of leonard cohen, have yet to be solved.

but i dont think i hear v. many people say well i have two choices, work or starve, (my kids) and i think for (perhaps the majority) thats the desc folx make about their kids--and its something that flannagan has never considered

can i just

i was listening to on point on the radio on the way home (i love this show btw) and she was on and she was talking about her latest book and using every opportunity to make up shit that a straw feminist, in fact even twisting callers' words in order to do so. grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

make up shit that a straw feminist would say in response to her argument

i guess this book is called girl land and it is about how awesome caitlin flanagan's childhood was because feminism didn't have a chance to ruin it

Was this the thing she did with Irin Carmon?

she actually suggested that mothers who want their daughters to be independent are "just fine with having their daughters service boys they hardly know." then she clarified that by "service" she indeed meant perform oral sex on.

hahaha omg

maybe, Jenny? i had the horrible luck of only catching flanagan's sections and i kept listening for thirty seconds and having to change the station while i yelled at my radio. then i would change it back because i had to hear what she said.

when i was almost home some reasonable lady who i guess used to write for Jezebel responded quite calmly

there is just a void where her humanity shld be

i kept imagining being on the panel and cutting in with YOU'RE SO FULL OF SHIT GUESS YOU'LL NEVER GO BROKE BLAMING EVERYTHING ON FEMINISM

i can't imagine why i am not the kind of person who gets called to be on these call-in shows

rebelling against one's privileged childhood takes extreme measures

http://www.salon.com/2012/01/19/the_creepy_condescension_of_caitlin_flanagan/

I keep seeing her books on the shelves at work and I am just so sorry she's a terrible person because she's a good writer, I think, and her books always look great. Sadly, I am doomed to disappointment.

she over-adverbs things

her essay on joan didion was p sloppily done imo

otm and it was still the best thing by her i've ever read

when i was almost home some reasonable lady who i guess used to write for Jezebel responded quite calmly

― horseshoe, Wednesday, January 18, 2012 7:43 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

That's Irin Carmon! She wrote the Creepy Condescension piece J.D. linked.

she was otm but she was too nice

not in the piece, on the radio

like caitlin flanagan knows exactly what she's doing when she trolls feminism; someone needs to call her on that shit

or i need to turn my radio off

'now you listen to me you pie-faced goon...'

i feel bad cause though she was one of the prime reasons i no longer subscribe to the atlantic, i thought her didion piece had some points.

it is discouraging to see trolling elevated to a profession tbh

her didion piece had some points, many adverbs. she's not stupid. she's completely disingenuous, though; it's infuriating.

If you read her profile of Oprah you'll learn that she's an Oprahmaniac who sits around eating paninis.

She suffers hugely from that thing where you imagine that talking to and about your immediate class and social sphere is the same as talking to and about the nation.
― nabisco (nabisco), Friday, April 21, 2006 11:34 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is still what she's all about

just wrote a drunken email to james fallows all like, why do you print professional trolls

I know a lot of people like her Joan Didion piece, but I hated it. She seemed to still draw so much pleasure from Joan's awkwardness and social phobia when she visited her family. It seemed like a case of mean girl condescension.

she is v mean

i think she legit can't help it; i think the mean condescension was a byproduct of her argument rather than the argument itself, but it is characteristic of everything she's ever written.

she can probably help being a terrible human being she just chooses not too

As a mean person myself, I'm not UNsympathetic to her pointed jabs, sometimes it feels (wrongly) like your tightest, best moments and ideas are the flip, spiteful ones. It's the celebration of them, and then the ELEVATION of them to some kind of carefully defended philosophy, that grates.

are you really a mean person

I have a lot of mean thoughts that I spend too much time tumbling around in my head, refining the wording of until they feel skewer-like enough to satisfy. It kind of seems like what CF does.

but do you use them?

(let alone make a career out of them)

Sometimes. :/ They don't pay the bills, though.

But I mean condemning her for that feels hypocritical. Luckily there are about 100 other things to condemn her for.

There's room for people like this in my room, but they should enter the room in a tiny car. The giant line of them would pop out of the car, say a few ridiculous things, and then disappear in a puff of smoke.

kinda feel like Flanagan style thinky troll pieces is the future of long-form journalism like the Atlantic, not just in the obvious sense of sensationalism but also in that every time a piece like that appears it goes through a kind of media cycle where everyone gets to affirm their beliefs and identity yet again. it's like a constant drawing of boundaries, or a self-perpetuating kind of cultural or intellectual demarcation. like the media produces these viruses and then out come the antibodies to shout it down and so on, like an autoimmune disease.

So the Atlantic is trolling us for page-views, is what you're saying?

yes

yeah that goes for most atlantic writers tbh

their cities section is good

VMIC <3 <3

well im kinda also saying that, say, Salon is getting page-views for anti-trolling. there's like this idea that a "debate" of some kind is going on, meanwhile it's pretty much a dog and pony show for the respective audiences of those magazines or websites.

like the last time I watched Rachel Maddow and she spent 20 minutes describing some dastardly thing Rush Limbaugh (or whoever) said.

i feel like my bumping of this thread falls on the reactionary side of that picture and i can't really argue but the shit is infuriating. i can't blame rachel maddow.

i dont blame anyone. i clicked on the salon link because i was like "fuck C Flanagan." it's just a weird and exasperating media cycle.

people are horrible and worthless, regardless of gender or ideology. go ahead and blame whoever you want. god, maybe.

that said, flanagan deserves some sort of special punishment in hell for the didion thing.

strongoism otm

no what makes caitlin flanagan horrible is specifically about gender ideology.

i am pretty sure it can be reduced to "she's a human being" but

http://www.slickpins.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/53c321c892051cdfcb60fec481decb87/d/i/different-strokes-02.jpg

i'm sorry but i'm pretty sure you did not spend 30 minutes yelling at her on the radio today >:[

no the only thing i did with a radio today was listen to "midnight at the oasis" and "brandy (you're a fine girl)" on my drive home from work

i received a pleasant response from james fallows that did not address the trolling in question

i honestly had no idea caitlin flanagan was a thing until reading this thread. my first exposure to her was the didion thing. the whole thing read like a just-out-of-college blog type who scored a big assignment in a well-known venue that they weren't ready for, intellectually or otherwise. it was only after realizing they age discrepancy -- if she was old enough for her parents to have entertained didion then...etc etc. -- that i realized this must be a middle-aged woman of some sort.

she's kind of the archetypal "backlash" writer...she's been getting pieces about how feminism runs counter to women's true domestic yearnings published for years now.

blood is boiling again just thinking about that piece.

she has a talent for that

well that's why god invented rail gin

While I don't like that this lady (who sounds like she's full of shit) got you all riled up, I have to admit that I sort of love the image of you yelling at your car Radio, HS.

rail gin? nb: not to be mixed with texas medicine, or so I've heard

i feel a little madeline kahn in clue about caitlin flanagan, E

looking up and reading katha pollitt takedowns of her right now is helping

u irl earlier tonight

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lw2zk5qQX41qdahvn.gif

i will never tire of that gif

me neither

ha, was reading about her book and the reviewer reprinted this gem of hers
“spoken-word, hard-core pornography that is rap music.”

i googled that phrase just to see if anyone else commented on it and came across this rather lengthy book review from 6 years ago when she used the exact same words. it seems to be a dry run for "Girl Land"

http://www.powells.com/review/2006_01_17.html

i think rappers must be literally the only men she's ever criticized

Tipper Gore's heroic campaign

burn the witch.

oh lol, it was katie roiphe who pointed it out, another horseshoe fav

yeah i ran across some katie roiphe piece criticizing flanagan (maybe the didion piece? flanagan suggests roiphe is an addled fangirl in it) and experienced considerable cognitive dissonance when i agreed with roiphe. i think she was saying when flanagan writes about femininity she's really just writing about herself.

the piece i read was in slate, from yesterday i think. she does not care for "Girl Land"

theres an obv strikethrough candidate in that last sentence

has this been posted? it's pretty crazy.

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/61880/april-19-2006/caitlin-flanagan

ugh i found it okay i disagree with her too

xxp

this review is hilarious. i may be all turned around on caitlin flanagan.

pretty sure caitlin flanagan advocates marital rape in that colbert interview nbd

I didn't even know about Caitlin Flanagan til now.

That Didion piece reads more like a passive-aggressive takedown. Nicole otm with the 'mean girl' tone. Christ.

http://www.theimproper.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/carvey-snl.jpg

Were these nice kids -- the ones playing AYSO soccer and doing their homework and shopping with their moms -- behaving like little whores whenever they got the chance? It was like some weird search for communists -- was the sweet, well-spoken daughter of a friend actually a blowjobber?

only thing i remember about that "blowjobber" piece (years later!) is HERE ARE AMERICA'S GIRLS -- ON THEIR KNEES

as a 16-year-old boy i was like LOL I GET IT

peak of my appreciation for caitlin flanagan, it's a market she prolly doesn't know she has

i can't believe i missed out on years of hilarity here

i can't believe i missed out on "rainbow parties"

(and being able to wonder abstractly whether or not i should get a job)

those millennials and their rainbow parties

it was especially hilarious in the on point interview that aired this evening when she tried to link the phenomenon of rainbow parties with feminism; like yes, i remember that part in dworkin's woman hating where she insists it's imperative that 13 year old girls suck anonymous dick.

it was in the second edition, i think

i'm actually sympathetic to her bringing up girls (or anyone) having the internet in their room, because it's the generation or whatever riiiiiiiight after mine that's grown up immersed in the net and i think it does this weird thing where on the one hand obv it is top five greatest ever tools for engendering connection+communication+empathy regardless of geography/nationality/even language, and on the other hand when you're a teenager on the internet (especially a teenage girl maybe?) anonymous people are just the worst to you, all the time, in a totally unpoliced and adult-free space where you can be cruelly and intricately deceived, and the only way to survive it psychically is to erect even sturdier FUCK YOU I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK barriers than everyone already has to erect anyway, which is 1) in a sense a good life lesson but also 2) alienating and isolating and deadening to exactly the kind of pan-species connection the internet makes possible, so while we may all be plugged into crowds of people orders of magnitude larger + more diverse than the social circles of basically any previous generation we're also sitting here alone in our rooms building our walls. i guess caitlin's just worried about it cuz of porn tho.

A friend who attended a leadership conference for girls from some of the country's top schools told me, "Friendships haven't changed a bit since our day. But sex has changed a lot."

Christ like half of that rainbow parties article is like this. "I heard from a mom in my neighborhood that her daughter's friend's teacher said the following provocative thing."

pretty sure caitlin flanagan advocates marital rape in that colbert interview nbd

― horseshoe, Wednesday, January 18, 2012 11:35 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

colbert interviews w/disagreeable people always freak me out but this may have been the apex

i'm actually sympathetic to her bringing up girls (or anyone) having the internet in their room, because it's the generation or whatever riiiiiiiight after mine that's grown up immersed in the net and i think it does this weird thing where on the one hand obv it is top five greatest ever tools for engendering connection+communication+empathy regardless of geography/nationality/even language, and on the other hand when you're a teenager on the internet (especially a teenage girl maybe?) anonymous people are just the worst to you, all the time, in a totally unpoliced and adult-free space where you can be cruelly and intricately deceived, and the only way to survive it psychically is to erect even sturdier FUCK YOU I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK barriers than everyone already has to erect anyway, which is 1) in a sense a good life lesson but also 2) alienating and isolating and deadening to exactly the kind of pan-species connection the internet makes possible, so while we may all be plugged into crowds of people orders of magnitude larger + more diverse than the social circles of basically any previous generation we're also sitting here alone in our rooms building our walls. i guess caitlin's just worried about it cuz of porn tho.

― occupy the A train (difficult listening hour), Wednesday, January 18, 2012 11:53 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

honestly the most maddening thing about the radio interview to me is that she would verge on making a good point about the ways the ubiquity/inescapability of the internet might be detrimental to kids in general as you say, but also particularly to girls, but her solution was always to return to a simpler time, let girls have their own rooms (you don't have enough money for your daughter to have her own room? she doesn't really count as a girl, then), encourage her to indulge her princess fantasies so she can meet a prince one day, etc. etc.

it's funny because she almost sounded like andrea dworkin at times, but then instead of blaming patriarchy she'd blame feminism for giving girls the independence to suck cock or something.

she has all of paglia's I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THE PROBLEM IS AND IT'S YOU MISGUIDED BITCHES and none of her lovable intense wackiness

they're the same person

this is really weird

I'm not, however, terrified by the oral-sex craze. If I were to learn that my children had engaged in oral sex -- outside a romantic relationship, and as young adolescents -- I would be sad. But I wouldn't think that they had been damaged by the experience; I wouldn't think I had failed catastrophically as a mother, or that they would need therapy. Because I don't have daughters, I have sons.

i've always assumed paglia is the same person as norman mailer

aw, i like norman mailer

let's not talk about paglia

So much wrong with everything about this person omg

i can't say i'm surprised that she thinks boys bear no responsibility for sexual encounters but seriously she's the worst

i still have bad dreams about my personal experiences with paglia tbh

though (confession time) i totally snowed her into giving me a passing grade

i think paglia might be stupider than flanagan tbh

xp!

i like norman mailer too!

lol that i-don't-have-daughters reveal

also i am so sorry you had to be taught by camille paglia i can't even imagine

haha horsehoe it was worse than you could possibly imagine

I don't have daughters, but I fanfic about my anxiety for my imaginary ones. This is my story.

i watched some of a panel talk about pauline kael the other day and there was this woman on it who just seemed totally unable to contain herself, she kept interrupting everyone and interrupting herself and stammering out rapturous paraphrases and misquotes and intense half-finished theories and everyone else was sitting there in sort of polite worry and i was like lol who is this and then i realized oh it's paglia

what it was like to be taught by paglia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrbumvF-Oe4

except three times a week for 90 minutes a pop

yes but now you are automatically an intellectual at least

ROCK MUSIC WAS PERFECTED BY THE ROLLING STONES AND CREAM

</paglia>

whoops, sorry everybody

i guess caitlin's just worried about it cuz of porn tho.

i read her atlantic piece on the rise of oral sex (ha) and she concludes by arguing that for girls sex has to be private and that they have an overriding need 'to keep her own sexuality—the emotions and the desires, as well as the anatomical real estate itself—private, secret, unviolated' which is made much harder by the internet. but i mean also im not entirely unsympathetic to her arguments abt pornography either tho!

whoever said it upthread is basically right tho she cant seem to imagine any young girl feeling differently about sex or their bodies or abt boys than she has and if they do then theyre wrong. shes managed to project all the preconceptions and biases and fears she has abt sex and girlhood onto an entire nation w/o managing to say much of anything abt what is or isnt happening

i don't remember any of her arguments about porn tbh but i mean sure i am certainly :/ at best and worried at worst about the weird psycho direction it's been taking for the past few decades and also about what happens wrt sexual expectations and physical ability to empathize+compromise w/ the expectations+delights of others when a generation grows up having had their specific idiosyncrasies v. precisely stroked throughout their formative years because there's pretty much nothing you can be into that you can't now totally immerse yourself in. i guess these are pretty standard cliches tho, "fragmentation" and all that. should post it in the rock is dead thread

kinda feel like Flanagan style thinky troll pieces is the future of long-form journalism like the Atlantic, not just in the obvious sense of sensationalism but also in that every time a piece like that appears it goes through a kind of media cycle where everyone gets to affirm their beliefs and identity yet again. it's like a constant drawing of boundaries, or a self-perpetuating kind of cultural or intellectual demarcation. like the media produces these viruses and then out come the antibodies to shout it down and so on, like an autoimmune disease.

― ryan, Thursday, 19 January 2012 03:09 (7 hours ago) Permalink

So the Atlantic is trolling us for page-views, is what you're saying?

― It means why you gotta be a montague? (Laurel), Thursday, 19 January 2012 03:15 (7 hours ago) Permalink

yes

― mookieproof, Thursday, 19 January 2012 03:16 (7 hours ago) Permalink

what it is

i still have bad dreams about my personal experiences with paglia tbh

Jess, there should be a story (or at least a thread!) about this.

^^^^

I've never heard of this lady before so am reading some of her stuff right now, specifically an article in the Atlantic about why married ppl don't fuck. She is so damn wordy! Also, mostly idiotic.

somewhere on ilx i yammered about how much i can't stand this woman, but i will not spend one more minute tearing apart why she sucks.
SHE JUST SUCKS.

lol otm

if anything, she inspires me to be a better person because i can't deal with the idea of letting people like her win

It's frustrating because she sometimes sounds like she's actually starting to make a good point but then she follows with something so ridiculous that it negates anything even semi-intelligent that she might have said.

if anything, she inspires me to be a better person because i can't deal with the idea of letting people like her win

I sometimes think that the only way to win is to be a really great person and not interact with this crap. But really, it's kind of rewarding if you can keep your cool and just go blank when someone says something particularly clueless.

somewhere on ilx i yammered about how much i can't stand this woman

at the beginning of this thread

see, i knew i did and i couldn't even be bothered to get riled up again reading it

But really, it's kind of rewarding if you can keep your cool and just go blank when someone says something particularly clueless.
major part of my job

<3

still scary rich woman hair
http://media.salon.com/2012/01/Caitlin-Flanagan-460x307.jpg

I had to stop watching the Colbert Report interview after the "date nights are dumb, women should just be ready to receive their husband at any time" shit.

most stomach-turning sentence (fragment) I've read in weeks: "The circle jerk of old—shivering Boy Scouts huddled together in the forest primeval, desperately trying to spank out the first few drops of their own manhood"

Jesus Christ, what is that from?

Her Rainbow Party article linked above.

Someone lead her publisher out behind the barn and do the merciful thing.

it takes a lot to make something called a rainbow party sound sinister

http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/the-battle-for-planet-flanagan

p otm. bustillos is kind of hard on ariel levy, whom i like, but maybe there's some backstory there i don't know about.

I had no idea Flanagan was married to the Barbie executive responsible for all of those godawful movies! I feel like it explains so much.

haha i know it's almost too perfect.

so gauche tho

I read "The Wifely Duty" over the weekend & from my male decade-plus-married-with-children perspective I thought she did a good job of putting some light on a pretty dark part of the married life I know about first-hand & hear about from my married-with-children male friends. She flirts with saying that married sex was better when women didn't work outside the home, & I agree that that's batshit, both because of the lack of evidence & because of what it would mean for women's freedom. But I dunno, it's hard to talk about it, but high-ish-powered work lives + children seems to get in the way of good sex lives for a lot of married couples I know. ILX is probably not the right place to talk through this problem, but I just wanted to say that Flanigan's article didn't strike me as misguided in at least putting light on something that's hard to talk about.

OMG that interview is hilars.

Also I tried to watch her Colbert report appearance for the first time, and are we sure she hasn't just spent the last 15 years being hungry?

HOW is she a good flirt btw, if you please?!?? I watched about 2/3 of that interview and failed to see the amazingly adept flirting that was mentioned.

Someone lead her publisher out behind the barn and do the merciful thing.

Don't do this, okay?

HOW is she a good flirt btw, if you please?!?? I watched about 2/3 of that interview and failed to see the amazingly adept flirting that was mentioned.

I guess if a person believes smirking = flirting, then she is a master flirt.

She flirts with saying that married sex was better when women didn't work outside the home, & I agree that that's batshit, both because of the lack of evidence & because of what it would mean for women's freedom. But I dunno, it's hard to talk about it, but high-ish-powered work lives + children seems to get in the way of good sex lives for a lot of married couples I know.

I are not a married, so! However, I'm sure (and rather glib, for which I'm sorry, but this is what I've got) that it must be easier to have better sex, if you're a man, when your wife is living in a culture that reinforces her responsibility for making sure you have good sex, regardless of whether she also does. Or wants to in the first place.

I also admit this culture may NEVER HAVE ACTUALLY EXISTED, but CF would like you to think it did, so you can be fake-nostalgic for it.

"The circle jerk of old—shivering Boy Scouts huddled together in the forest primeval, desperately trying to spank out the first few drops of their own manhood"

marykayletourneau.jpg

it is interesting how the false-nostalgia industry so often takes aim at feminism (rather than, say, our current standards for what is "masculine") as the perceived core of the problem. almost like the typical mid-life crisis takes the form of acting more like a teenager than the adult you never became in the first place.

I think we can all at least agree that the 1950s sitcom version of what a family is like was pretty much an invention and didn't really reflect anything other that people trying to put a shine on a really mediocre domestic homefront

/revision liberal, here

i think a pretty pervasive feature of modern life is a whole host of media charged with the task of reconciling people to the choices they've made, whether consumer choices or live choices. hence, all those sitcoms about the minor indignities of married life are more in fact about reaffirming the choice to live that way.

yeah, Laurel, I get that, & you're right: if a woman doesn't want to have sex with her husband, then she shouldn't have sex with him; good sex isn't even on the table (or bed, since we're talking about Flanigan). But I think your glib response misses something, which is that people (ime) enter marriage with good sex lives, & then that deteriorates, for among other things the reasons Flanigan surveys: you get busy & wrapped up in your children's lives. & a lot of my (male) friends end up really unhappy with this! (probably my female friends too, but we don't talk about this.) So I thought her article did a good job of raising that fact, even if it doesn't put us a lot closer to figuring out what to do about it.

Missing from my glibness is also that I think "what to do about it" is just not to live in a way that requires both partners to work full time and then divide up childcare and house-keeping and all the shopping and cooking, etc ON TOP OF both their day jobs. The economy is probably more responsible for the over-commitment of peoples' time than feminism is.

but doesn't Flanigan agree with that? re the economy

like, I don't read her as saying that women are suited for housework whereas men are not; that's a reality from the past that worked qua married sexual happiness (about which the evidence seems dubious to me, but no matter for now); but I don't think she's arguing against a new reality in which men worked part time & women worked full time

agree that being around the home together more is conducive to a good sex life (would say more but TMI)

She does explicitly argue (at least in To Hell with all That) that women are simply more suited to be the ones who take care of the home, because ... men. I mean, really, you'd never eat off a floor your HUSBAND washed, who could trust him? That is literally the full extent of her reasoning.

sexual happiness in a married household circa the 50s = missionary every time with nothing before or after, right?

Yes. She also literally says in THWAT that for heaven's sake, women, shut up and stop thinking you're supposed to want it in order to say yes to sex. Just get into things and maybe your frigid, distracted, overly busy self will find your humanity reawakened by his touch and you'll surprise yourself by liking it.

but high-ish-powered work lives + children seems to get in the way of good sex lives for a lot of married couples I know.

even w/o the high-powered work lives, kids middle age and just being together for a long time change things

ms flanagan strikes me as a female analogue to clarence thomas. surely she benefitted from feminism just as he did from affirmative action yet now they seek to discredit/dismantle the revolution that put them in power

sexual happiness in a married household circa the 50s = missionary every time with nothing before or after

I suspect that, like most any generation, they just were doing whatever came naturally. They just were too embarrassed to talk about it much.

I read the title of this and was like wtf is this 1940 and then I saw the byline...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/adolescent-girl-hysteria.html?_r=1

Parents, school officials and doctors investigated possible organic causes of this troubling event

did they check... feminism

Do you think she thinks she's really daring for using loaded words like "hysteria" in her titles?

as I read that i kept waiting for this moment:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-y9wKCR7tKkI/Tw2BbAkgN6I/AAAAAAAAAdY/24sq35Ww2OU/s1600/church-lady-satan.jpg

she really has to force her point on that one.

and I mean, do you really want to delve into physicians diagnosing women with hysteria as a point against feminism? good luck with that.

I think she thinks she's being funny? That whole "opinion" piece contains two paragraphs about her googling and the opinion that adolescent girls "need their space"

I always feel like such a stupid sucker for driving any traffic toward her inane writing, but I can't help it -- she drives me CRAZY! Maybe I am a cheerleader with Tourette's!!

HYSTERIA

She really seems to simply hate girls and young women.

she's like the female Nuge

i cancelled my "atlantic" subscription and said i'd consider resubscribing when they dumped caitlin flanagan. i can't give money to a magazine that gives this woman a pulpit.

and honestly it wasn't the retrograde gender politics that did it as much as the rank stupidity. she was obviously trolling in a way not worthy of a respectable magazine, as opposed to some blog in some dimly-lit corner of the internet.

that anybody reads her books or puts her on talk shows is testament to the fact that manufactured controversy is still a major selling point in the mass media. there's nothing there other than that -- no reasoning, no research, no nothing. just a bunch of calibrated-to-offend rhetoric tossed into the wider discourse.

the "work" of B. R. Myers, a book reviewer, was what spurred me to cancel my Atlantic sub a few years back. It's the same kinda thing as Flanagan: calculated trolling with seeds of good points. Charitably they both envision their work as "conversation pieces" but they make the conversations feel like ones I wish I could have with different people.

if i was talking to flanagan at a bar i'd probably think she was interesting for a few minutes then i'd start to get the general vibe and walk away.

yep

i don't recall myers, but christopher hitchens, who is otherwise leagues above these folks, wrote some embarrassing book reviews in the atlantic that were basically opportunities for him to sound sophisticated and pissy and hit you over the head with his oxford or cambridge education. performative, basically. i actually hitchens was like this a lot of time and it always irritated me.

myers was the author of that terrible 'reader's manifesto' which basically picked four authors with nothing in common (delillo, auster, cormac mccarthy, and annie proulx) and used it to argue that 'literary fiction' sucks. also included this gem:

It has become fashionable, especially among female novelists, to exploit the license of poetry while claiming exemption from poetry's rigorous standards of precision and polish.

poetry's rigorous standards of precision and polish

this person knows nothing about writing or poetry

Or the Polish.

Oh, oops.

those broads

http://bitchmagazine.org/post/10-quotes-from-girl-land-made-palatable-by-cat-photos-flanagan-feminism-lolcats

I had to nab this one for this thread:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7153/6803672483_66387d115e.jpg