CoL VIII: Stop Mucking Up the Waters, Flannagan's "To Hell with All That"

Joan Walsh at Salon gives Caitlin Flanagan (and her ilk) what I wish I had.

Is Flanagan trying to fool her publishers, her readers, or is she fooling herself with this at-home mother shtick? It's really hard to tell. Lots of feminist writers have rebuked big-name editors for giving the anti-feminist Flanagan such great perches -- the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and now a hyped book. I don't usually bother second-guessing other editors. But it's hard not to agree with Daphne Merkin, who told Abraham she thinks Flanagan is the brainy-mag "it girl" of the moment (and, yes, apparently there can only be one) because she's a "throwback to a less threatening, more reassuring kind of woman writer," one who has infinite sympathy for the troubles -- "call it the 'ache,'" Merkin told Abraham slyly -- of being a man.

But rather than inspiring criticism of male editors for advancing Flanagan's career, "To Hell With All That" invites a different kind of editor rebuke: Some editor, somewhere, should have protected the mixed-up essayist from many things in this book, but particularly for congratulating herself on being the type of woman whose husband treats her well while she has cancer. Bad things do happen to good people, as well as to bad people, to feminists and anti-feminists, to women who forgo careers for their families as well as women who just pretend to. Flanagan's book is a sad and scary fable about fear of abandonment, and its supposed happy ending really isn't one.

This whole feminisms vs. patriarchy (don't dress it up nice for church by calling it 'tradition' -- tradition is turkey at Thanksgiving and eggs at Easter and wine with Dionysus and colorful dresses for your wedding day, traditions come and go baby -- patriarchy is a deeply embedded socio-mytho-sexu-econo-political structure that needs to change, and if it were JUST TRADITION, we would really live in a post-feminist world, jeeeeez) would be a LOT easier to talk about and work on and explore if writers (all of us) would just get real about the actual conditions of our lives and stop trying to sell Martha Stewart Brand Fakery to the public. Your life and your work are not the set and plot of a TV show. Stop it. Be real. Changing a culture is long, hard, scary work and it creates confusion. Have some patience, deal with your life clearly, stop blaming strangers for your misery. --- Shakti returns to her dais to hope and consider alternative futures.

There are serious issues to address at every level of society, culture, and human experience. Real feminist are serious about them, and these cheap-ass-wouldn't-pass-in-freshman-composition-course-badly-composed-fallacy-filled-writings-by-disengenuous-patriarch-petting-un-feminists (anti-feminists who won't cop to benefiting from feminism) are just soooooo tired. These gals really need to get off their pretty leashes. (Here, girl, sit, girl, wag for a treat, write for daddy, pass daddy's laws, yes, girl, there's a good girl, have a nice fat publishing contract/op ed column/seat in Congress/raise/spot on the Sunday talk circuit/&c., and then we'll take you out for a walk, yes we will.) Men and women of good heart and intention are trying to negotiate our way to a future that will be better for all of us --- where, for instance, Caitlin, women are not forced by "duty" to have sex in marriage when they don't want to, and imagine this hon, find that when not forced/expected they actually want to have sex more often. Have you forgotten/never known that martial rape was declared a crime until the 1970's (when what new social movement was in it's second wave???), and only just got declared so in Italy in the late 90s, and lets just not talk about less developed countries, shall we? the ones where your nannies come from. Nothing, dear woman, is less fun than having sex when you are not feelin' it, much less when it's forced on you. Funny how that can work. Now, if more men would learn about sex and sharing it well from something other than porn (say any one of the 'traditional' sexual texts from the East, 1000s of years old some of them), they would be more fun to fuck, and they would get fucked more often. And that might go a long way to changing a culture. Lysistrata in reverse: teach them good sex, give them lots of it, and build a new world while they're at it. Oh, yeh, that was Circe. I liked her too. --- Kali returns to her dais to calm down --- because it's just not time yet.