Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Modern Girl Right Here Like everyone else in my crowd I read Maureen Dowd's NYTimes Sunday Magazine piece: What's A Modern Girl to Do? I thought I should write something in rebuttal to its sterotyped and facile observations, but just got disheartened. There's been too much of this kind of lazy crap, pardon the expression, lately, and the crap itself seems a trend, like it's fashionable to coo over lost feminism, even though it's not lost, just that Dowd doesn't care to be seen in public with it. But I'm too tired to explain if you don't want to know and prefer Dowd style over substance. But fortunately in Women's eNews,  Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett, journalism professor and a research scientist, respectively, have dissected the myths and half-truths and shoddy generalizations on top of generalizations that is the bedrock, or maybe the quicksand, of Dowd's thesis about the disintegration (yet again) of feminism. So read here. The only shame of it is that Dowd is so popular her book will no doubt have lots of gullible readers who buy into her strictly upper class vista of angst. Like I said. it's crap. And by the way, if a one person anecdote can be put up against Dowd's own first person story, (sounds like she has chronic man trouble) I should tell you that, from personal experience, there are plenty of smart successful men who like smart successful women. I never noticed any kind of problem. I do concede the fashion point. I landed my Harvard man way back when with a clingy red Diane von Furstenberg wraparound dress. Vive la difference! -RH p.s an excerpt of the b.s. I spoke of. The concluding paragraph of the article. (maybe Dowd hasn't noticed across the country that women now form the majority of college graduates and the majority of medical school students too. I think young women have a fine future. ) Having boomeranged once, will women do it again in a couple of decades? If we flash forward to 2030, will we see all those young women who thought trying to Have It All was a pointless slog, now middle-aged and stranded in suburbia, popping Ativan, struggling with rebellious teenagers, deserted by husbands for younger babes, unable to get back into a work force they never tried to be part of? It's easy to picture a surreally familiar scene when women realize they bought into a raw deal and old trap. With no power or money or independence, they'll be mere domestic robots, lasering their legs and waxing their floors - or vice versa - and desperately seeking a new Betty Friedan.   8:23:22 PM    comment []

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