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

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