"I, like many a young woman, was once wildly judgmental about plastic surgery. I grew up in the 1990s..."

"... at the bizarre, lonely intersection of second-wave feminism and Manhattan privilege. Many of the girls in my private high school had their breasts enlarged and their noses shrunk. I congratulated myself for not following suit, even though I didn’t have a bump on my nose and I wasn’t flat chested. My mother, the writer Erica Jong, had a whole gestalt back then: pro-sex feminism, which of course meant keeping herself appealing enough for men to want to have sex with her. She worried about her own weight and beauty constantly. Julia Phillips, a successful film producer and writer, once compared her to 'Miss Piggy when her face is in repose'.... My mom was the concubine of more than a few powerful men. To preserve that status, she had a face-lift in her 50s. Many of the feminists who populated my mother’s narrow townhouse — Andrea Dworkin, Betty Friedan and Phyllis Chesler among them — did not believe in molding themselves into something different for men’s delectation. These women rejected the beauty-obsessed power structure that my mother embraced. Instead, they hoped to change that culture by refusing to comply with it...."

Writes Molly Jong-Fast, who got a deep plane face- and neck-lift, in "I’m Not Going to Lie About My Neck" (NYT gift link).

"All I wanted was to grow up in peace, deal with my bodily changes and these pesky new zits without it being recorded. But my mother was omnipresent, her phone an extension of her arm … every little moment was mined for content."

Writes Shari Franke, "The House of My Mother," quoted in "Is It Abusive to Make Art About Your Children? It’s not quite #MeToo, but a spate of new memoirs is forcing a reckoning on what consent means when your parent is the artist" (NYT).

Shari Franke is the daughter of "mommy vlogger" Ruby Franke, who was ultimately convicted of child abuse. The article also discusses Sally Mann, the photographer we talked about a couple days ago, here.

Mann has her own memoir, in which she concedes, “I wanted attention for the work and the easiest way to get it was obviously to put forward the most attention-grabbing imagery.... To be an artist means you must declare a loyalty to your art form and your vision that runs deeper than almost any other, even sometimes deeper than blood kinship.... When I stepped behind the camera, and they stepped in front of it, I was a photographer, and they were actors and we were making a photograph."

There's this quote from Molly Jong-Fast: "In [my mother's] view, she did spend time with me — in her head, in her writing, in the world she inhabited. I was there. I may have felt that she was slightly allergic to me, but to her, she was spending time with the most important version of me."

By the way, did you know "Christopher Robin Milne resented his father’s use of his likeness in the Winnie the Pooh stories, and Peter Llewelyn Davies, the inspiration for 'Peter Pan,' seemed to live in a permanent state of rage at being associated with the character."

The article is by Parul Sehgal, who writes: "If the child’s perspective goes unacknowledged, and their compliance confused for collaboration, it might be because our focus has so often been elsewhere — on the needs and rights of the artist-parent, on the struggle to have domestic life and, specifically, motherhood, accepted as a subject worthy of study."

That feminist issue has overshadowed the childist perspective. Is "childist" even a word? Actually, yes, but this is the first time I'm thinking of it, and I had to check to see that I wasn't coining it.

"In 1973, Ms. Jong published 'Fear of Flying,' a roman-a-clef in which the young, pretty and privileged Isadora Wing leaves her husband and road trips through Europe..."

"... seeking creative and sexual fulfillment. The message was that women didn’t have to stay in unfulfilling marriages. That bigger, richer lives beckoned. That message sold more than 20 million copies and made Ms. Jong a celebrated figure. This year, that book got another kind of sequel, when Molly Jong-Fast, Ms. Jong’s only child, published a memoir called 'How to Lose Your Mother.' The book depicts Erica Jong, now suffering from dementia, as a narcissist, a drunk, a disinterested parent who was either mining Molly’s life for material or ditching her to pursue her own adventures. The memoir, like [the sequel to 'Sex and the City'], serves as a generational rebuke to the women who prioritized careers and sex and fame and fortune over family, and a warning to any mothers foolish enough to follow Ms. Jong’s bad example. For those of us who loved the originals, the rise of the reboots feels chilling...."

Writes Jennifer Weiner, the novelist, in "In ‘And Just Like That…’ a Craven Era Took Its Revenge on Youth and Hope and Fun" (NYT).

"In its various iterations across books and films, the dementia tragedy narrative tells a story of inexorable decline and universal diminishment..."

"... in which the afflicted person steadily vacates her body until she becomes essentially absent. While this process may include moments of lucidity or levity, nothing substantially positive, life-giving or new can emerge for the person or her family and friends — because the person as person is disappearing. 'My mother is just a body now,' Ms. Jong-Fast writes. 'She has dementia. She has breath and hair and pretty blue eyes but Erica Jong the person has left the planet.' She is 'dissolving,' 'slipping away,'  'a faint fragment,' 'an echo,' 'a zombie.' The trouble with this well established approach is not that the tragedy narrative is completely false."

Writes Lynn Casteel Harper — a Baptist minister and the author of "On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear" — in "We May Soon Be Telling a Very Different Kind of Story About Dementia" (NYT).

"Writing about one’s own children has always been a delicate matter. It’s itchy and complicated..."

"... and there is no right way to do it. As a child who was often a subject of the writing of my mother, Erica Jong... I have very mixed feelings about the phenomenon. I like to think I truly hated being written about, but who can remember? Later, I found it gave me a profound lack of shame and no expectation of privacy, which helped me pursue a public-facing career I might otherwise not have...."

Writes Molly Jong-Fast, in "When Your Mom Is Famous for Hating Motherhood/In Heidi Reimer’s novel, 'The Mother Act,' a daughter grapples with being parented (or not) by an actress who happily mines her life for material" (NYT).

"Personally, I have found that there is no solution for having a parent who uses your life for content. There is no salve for the resentment it produces. Would I have been normal had my mom not written about me?... Am I uncomfortable on this planet because I always knew my mom was squirreled away working on a novel in which I would figure prominently, once as twins?"

By the way, Erica Jong is still alive — she's 82 — and Molly Jong-Fast has children of her own — 3 of them.

What was your mom doing when she was squirreled away? Did it make you "uncomfortable on this planet"? Or are we all, always, residents of our mother's planet? In which case, why are you not comfortable in the world you were born into — born out of?

"There is a lot of sex in 'Fear of Flying,' but the novel is rarely sexy. Intercourse, relentlessly anatomized..."

"... fails to delight Isadora, much less the reader. 'I longed to have orgasms like Lady Chatterley’s,' she sighs. 'Why didn’t the moon turn pale and tidal waves sweep over the surface of the earth?'... Jong [fought in] the struggle for women’s pleasure... during that fleeting moment when sex struck some feminists as the thing that would set us once and forever free. The decades have proved them wrong.... Today every woman is Isadora. Or maybe none is. Americans are lonely — marrying less, partnering less, even having less intercourse than ever.... The marriage plot, the abortion plot, the screw-me-sideways-without-a-zipper plot: Each has run its course without effecting the longed-for revolution. Many of today’s feminist narratives wallow in pain more than pleasure...."

Writes Jane Kamensky, in "'Fear of Flying' Is 50. What Happened to Its Dream of Freedom Through Sex? With its feminist take on sexual pleasure, Erica Jong’s novel caused a sensation in 1973. But the revolution Jong promoted never came to pass" (NYT).

I'll just quote Bob Dylan:

Then she says, “You don’t read women authors, do you?”
Least that’s what I think I hear her say
“Well,” I say, “how would you know and what would it matter anyway?”
“Well,” she says, “you just don’t seem like you do!”
I said, “You’re way wrong”
She says, “Which ones have you read then?” I say, “I read Erica Jong!”

"It’s a normal part of the life cycle for adult children to start parenting their parents. This generational role reversal may be a prelude to the demographic shift to come..."

"... as baby boomers age out of late-late 'middle age' and are forced to relinquish their invincibility, while their children take on the burdens of caring for elderly—yes, elderly—parents. But the pandemic has pressed the issue, putting many people in their thirties and forties in the tense new role of protectors and even scolds. It’s a twisted inverse of the generation gap of the sixties, when young boomers screamed across the table at their parents about Vietnam—except that now we’re telling ours not to leave their homes. The literary agent Lucy Carson pleaded on Twitter, 'Best advice for convincing a diabetic boomer parent to stop commuting into the city? Rage-sobbing into the phone isn’t helping my cause.' At Vogue, Molly Jong-Fast wrote about a similar dynamic with her 'fabulous feminist mother,' the generation-chronicling author Erica Jong. 'I know everyone is going to get mad at me, but this is not about your conflicted feelings about growing older,' Jong-Fast wrote.... A journalist couldn’t convince her parents to ditch their theatre tickets, until the theatre closed and they had no choice.... The writer Robin Wasserman reasoned, 'My theory is that coming of age at the height of the Cold War/nuclear panic inculcated a faith that no matter how scary things look, the Bad Thing never actually happens.'"

From "Convincing Boomer Parents to Take the Coronavirus Seriously" by Michael Schulman (in The New Yorker).

"Her heroines have been seen as ‘unlikeable’ – does anybody ever find a male hero ‘unlikeable’?"

"Never! Whether it’s Tony Soprano or Philip Roth’s Zuckerman, or even James Bond, male protagonists are never subjected to such criticism. But when it comes to women – every critic feels that he or she has the right to complain. I once read a 19th Century review in which a cranky male critic said of Jane Eyre, 'I would never hire her as a governess!' This may seem funny to you – it’s certainly absurd, but it happens all the time to women who write. I’ve often wondered how we can change this. In the US, Hillary Clinton was pilloried for being ‘unlikeable’ so we got Donald Trump who, not even three months into his presidency, has historically low approval ratings – yet was he somehow more ‘likable’?"

Erica Jong, riffing on likeability. (The "her" in the post title is Lena Dunham.)

Normalize, part 2.

Part 1, earlier this morning: "Trump steals their word: Normalize."

Now, I want to look at the history of the word "normalize." It makes me think of the sort of words that Strunk and White disapproved of:

-ize. Do not coin verbs by adding this tempting expression. [...] Never tack -ize onto a noun to create a verb. Usually you will discover that a useful verb already exists. Why say “moisturize” when there is the simple, unpretentious word moisten? 

They even single some -ize words out:

Finalize. A pompous, ambiguous verb....

Personalize. A pretentious word, often carrying bad advice. Do not personalize your prose; simply make it good and keep it clean.

Makes me feel like singing the Bob Dylan song:

I ain’t lookin’ to block you up
Shock or knock or lock you up
Analyze you, categorize you
Finalize you or advertise you

All I really want to do is, baby, normalize you. 

The OED traces normalize back to 1864,* to a New York Times article about the abuse of government power: "These attempts to normalize despotism display the impotency as well as the malignity of the Executive." Here's the article, "Prussian Politics."

Measures to confirm and legalize the most arbitrary acts of the recess have been prepared and introduced into both Houses. A new anti-press bill, which embodies some of the most oppressive and odious provisions of the ordinances, has been carried through the Herrenhaus; while a projet de loi, which will entitle the Minister to raise revenue and make disbursements as often as the Deputies decline to sanction his budget, is before the Second Chamber, and will form the first subject for debate after the holidays. These attempts to normalize despotism display the impotency as well as the malignity of the Executive, for, of course, neither one measure nor the other will ever become law.

Normalize there meant to pass laws that would support what the government was doing. It's a synonym of "legalize," which also appears in that paragraph. The word "legalize" is no neologism. It goes back to the 1600s.

And, by the way, "finalize" was a new-ish word when Strunk and White bitched about it. (The OED says 1919.) "Personalize" goes back to the 1700s, if the idea is to represent something as a person — e.g., "The Poets are fond of personalizing both physical and moral Qualities" — but the annoying meaning begins in advertising with this bit of crap from 1910:

The Calvert label in a garment..identifies the best there is in Clothing Woolens; the highest grade of modeling and making. They've got the snap and the style that personalizes them; they've got the intrinsic worth that substantializes them.

As for "substantialize" — which looks quite idiotic to my modern eyes — it goes back to the 1700s. ("A sedate yet fervent sense of gratitude towards God... substantialized in the practice of every Christian virtue.")

The OED has an entry on the "-ize" suffix. The earliest word seems to be "baptize." There's a set of words that came to English from the Greek, and perhaps words with this pedigree are more... normal:

characterize, crystallize, harmonize, idolize, monopolize, organize,  stigmatize, symbolize, systematize, tantalize, agonize, apologize, philosophize, sympathize, theorize....

Can't object to those great words! They're not pompous or pretentious. They're solid English words, words that make you glad English is your native tongue.

The OED make a separate category out of words that came to English from Latin:

actualize, authorize, brutalize, civilize, colonize, familiarize, fertilize, formalize, fossilize, humanize, immortalize, legalize, memorize, nationalize, naturalize, neutralize, patronize, pulverize, realize, satirize, scrutinize, solemnize, sterilize, terrorize, vocalize....

They start to look weird when you see them all together, but these are also great words.

But is there some rule against creativity here, something wrong with ize-izing beyond the Greek and Latin? What bugged Strunk/White so much? The OED lists words "from later sources":

bastardize, jeopardize, villanize, womanize....

And words based on ethnicities — Americanize, Anglicize — and names — Bowdlerize, galvanize, mesmerize — and substances — carbonize, oxidize — and some odd "recent uses" like "The troop of nakedized children rushed downstairs" (from 1885).

Now, I have to go get dressed. I've got places to go, appointments to keep.

Please keep up the conversation. Verbalize. Conversationalize. Scrutinize Donald Trump and help determinize whether he ought to be normalized or Hitlerized... if you can believe your own eyes.
______________________________

* There's one earlier medical use of the term from 1847, but I'm going to ignore that. If I was going to take a tangent here, it would be about the use of normalize in a couple of famous fairly recent novels:

Erica Jong "Fear of Flying" (1974): "You always insist on normalizing your life."

Bret Easton Ellis, "American Psycho" (1991): "One should use an alcohol-free antibacterial toner with a water-moistened cotton ball to normalize the skin."

"There are novelists who still should win (yes, Mr. Roth, that list begins with you)..."

"... and there are many others who should have won (Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov, Auden, Levi, Achebe, Borges, Baldwin . . . where to stop?), but, for all the foibles of the prize and its selection committee, can we just bask for a little while in this one? The wheel turns and sometimes it stops right on the nose."

Writes David Remnick of the "astonishing and unambiguously wonderful thing" that is Bob Dylan's winning the Nobel Prize in literature.

The wheel turns and sometimes it stops right on the nose.

The wheel turns and sometimes it stops right on the knows.

The wheel turns and sometimes this wheel’s on fire/rolling down the road/best notify my next of kin/this wheel shall explode!

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade says:

If it were up to me, I'd have given the award to Erica Jong. 

I know what he means, because I understand Dylanspeak. He's gesturing at a song called "Highlands":

Then she says, “You don’t read women authors, do you?”
Least that’s what I think I hear her say
“Well,” I say, “how would you know and what would it matter anyway?”
“Well,” she says, “you just don’t seem like you do!”
I said, “You’re way wrong”
She says, “Which ones have you read then?” I say, “I read Erica Jong!”
She goes away for a minute
And I slide up out of my chair
I step outside back to the busy street but nobody’s going anywhere

And I go away for a minute, because I have this rat picture I want you to see:



It's Rattatz, the official rat of the Althouse blog. You voted, remember? I had to run off and get him, because "Highlands" is one of the 5 Dylan songs with "rat":

Windows were shakin’ all night in my dreams
Everything was exactly the way that it seems
Woke up this morning and I looked at the same old page
Same ol’ rat race
Life in the same ol’ cage

3 of the 5 songs have "rat" in "rat race." The other 2 are "Clean Cut Kid" ("They said Congratulations, you got what it takes'/They sent him back into the rat race without any brakes") and "It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)" ("While one who sings with his tongue on fire/Gargles in the rat race choir/Bent out of shape from society’s pliers/Cares not to come up any higher/But rather get you down in the hole/That he’s in").

And I don't care to come up any higher, but will get you down in the rat hole that I'm in, and say that the other 2 of the 5 songs are "Froggie Went A Courtin’" ("Uncle Rat laughed and he shook his fat sides") and "Motorpsycho Nightmare":

I was sleepin’ like a rat
When I heard something jerkin’
There stood Rita
Lookin’ just like Tony Perkins
She said, “Would you like to take a shower?
I’ll show you up to the door”
I said, “Oh, no! no!
I’ve been through this [movie] before”
I knew I had to split
But I didn’t know how
When she said
“Would you like to take that shower, now?”

Well, I couldn’t leave
Unless the old man chased me out
’Cause I’d already promised
That I’d milk his cows
I had to say something
To strike him very weird
So I yelled out
“I like Fidel Castro and his beard”
Rita looked offended
But she got out of the way
As he came charging down the stairs
Sayin’, “What’s that I heard you say?”

I said, “I like Fidel Castro
I think you heard me right”
And ducked as he swung
At me with all his might
Rita mumbled something
’Bout her mother on the hill
As his fist hit the icebox
He said he’s going to kill me
If I don’t get out the door
In two seconds flat
“You unpatriotic
Rotten doctor Commie rat”

The woman Trump "moved on... very heavily" was Nancy O’Dell... and later he tried to fire her.

The heavy moving — which included furniture shopping — was talked about in 2005 in the now infamous "Access Hollywood" video.

Oh! "Access Hollywood" has newly conspicuous double meaning. Not just reporters getting access to celebrities, but celebrities getting sexual access to... well, to hear Trump tell it, to just about anyone they want... except Nancy O'Dell.

The attempt at firing —  O’Dell was set to host the Trump-owned "Miss USA Pageant" — came 2 years later in 2007. Trump failed at the fuck and failed at the firing. But he tried, and we hear of the failure, not the success. But he's a winner. He likes to win.

In fact, if you watch the whole video, you see him winning with another woman, Arianne Zucker, the one who, in Trump's words, is "hot as shit, in the purple." Zucker is the one who inspired him to say "I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."

And in fact, you see the female version of that power trip: The woman plays on the man's sexual interest. Grab them by the crotch. Zucker looks entirely pleased with herself, demands to walk in the center and grabs the arms of both men. If that is what is expected and that is the norm in your workplace, how can you be the cold one who keeps her sexuality to herself?

I invite you to contemplate why this got me thinking about Erica Jong's concept of the "zipless fuck":

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one. 

Erica Jong, who's nearly 70, would like you all to know that she's so much sexier than her daughter, who is 32.

Molly Jong-Fast will be 33 on August 19th, and Erica Jong, writing in the NYT, says that her daughter is "in her mid-30s." Ouch. Mom! That hurt. Let's take a closer look at that mother-daughter relationship. Jong prattles on, purportedly revealing what young people think about sex but really revealing how she, an aging woman, looks at young women:

Daughters always want to be different from their mothers. If their mothers discovered free sex, then they want to rediscover monogamy. My daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, who is in her mid-30s, wrote an essay called “They Had Sex So I Didn’t Have To.” Her friend Julie Klam wrote “Let’s Not Talk About Sex.” 

Klam! What a great name — an aptonym — for a woman who doesn't want to talk and specifically wants to close off the topic of sex!

The novelist Elisa Albert said: “Sex is overexposed. It needs to take a vacation, turn off its phone, get off the grid.” Meg Wolitzer, author of “The Uncoupling,” a fictional retelling of “Lysistrata,” described “a kind of background chatter about women losing interest in sex.” Min Jin Lee, a contributor to [Jong's] anthology, suggested that “for cosmopolitan singles, sex with intimacy appears to be neither the norm nor the objective.”

Generalizing about cultural trends is tricky, but everywhere there are signs that sex has lost its frisson of freedom....

Not only did we fail to corrupt our daughters, but we gave them a sterile way to have sex, electronically....

Jong thinks young women use the internet for "simulated sex without intimacy."  Jong was famous in her youth for seeking actual in-person sex without intimacy . Or... no, she wasn't! She was famous for writing about seeking actual in-person sex without intimacy. Writing... reading... hello? That's a simulation. On the internet, women find actual real partners and then meet them in person. How many women are just hanging out on porn sites? Men, maybe, but Jong purports to tell us about young women. And Jong's evidence is what other women writers are writing. These are the writers, the simulators. What are other young women doing, the one's who aren't cogitating and regurgitating cogitations?

Just as the watchword of my generation was freedom, that of my daughter’s generation seems to be control....

In this intergenerational battle, who is the real control freak?

The backlash against sex has lasted longer than the sexual revolution itself. Both birth control and abortion are under attack in many states...

Lust for control fuels our current obsession with the deficit, our rejection of passion, our undoing of women’s rights....

Now, she's all over the place. I think it's funny that she made "control" a big theme, then mentioned "birth control" and didn't notice the irony. Birth control... why not say the feminists who wanted to control birth were the ones obsessed with control?

The ultimate in control is determining the things that will be controlled and the things that will be kept uncontrolled. Can we talk honestly about that? After you've finished preening over how free you are about the things that you like to be free about?

Tired of pink men.

"I am so tired of pink men bombing brown children and rationalizing it as fighting terrorism. I am so tired of pink men telling women (of all colors) what to do with their wombs--which connect with their brains--in case you forgot. I am so tired of pink men telling us we should stay in Iraq for generations. I am so tired of pink men buying bombs and cheating schools. I am so tired of pink men having wives who stand behind them and nod sagely on television. I am so tired of pink men expecting that someone--a brown, black, yellow or white woman--will trail behind them changing light bulbs, taking out garbage, washing laundry, keeping food in the house, taking care of kids of all ages, of parents of all ages. I am so tired of pink men whose wives double or triple the family income thinking they can spend it without doing a damn thing at home. I am so tired of pink men spouting nonsense on TV. I am so tired of pink men arguing, blathering, bloviating, predicting the future--usually wrongly--and telling women to shut up. I am so sick of hearing that another pink man has dropped his children out a window, off a bridge or killed his pregnant wife or killed his unpregnant wife because he was infatuated with another pregnant woman. I am so sick of pink men making war and talking about peace. I am so sick of pink men appointing their mediocre cronies to judgeships, to political advisors, to cushy jobs, to columns in the paper, to multimillion-dollar posts as CEOS or actors (while the actresses make less) or producers or writers or newsreaders or talk show bloviators or supposedly sage counselors at law. I am so tired of pink men."

That's Erica Jong, in one of "The 10 Worst Quotes From The Huffington Post For 2008."

Pink men? Reminds me of this:



I am so sick of pink men appointing their mediocre cronies to judgeships, to political advisors, to cushy jobs.... Well, how do you like Barack Obama appointing Leon Panetta to run the C.I.A.? How pink/unpink/mediocre/unmediocre is that?

It's boring to ask why men have affairs, so let's just talk about why women have affairs.

Emily Bazelon wants to talk about infidelity:

Like everything else about male sexuality, the male desire to lie with another woman is boringly uncomplicated. But why do women have affairs? The judgment of literature (Anna Karenina, Madam Bovary) is that they feel trapped and oppressed, or, less sympathetically, that they're easily gulled by preying males one or two notches up the social ladder. Two centuries later, I would imagine that life is a bit different. The answer we heard from writers like Erica Jong and Gael Greene back in the swingin' Plato's Retreat 1970s was that women crave sexual variety in precisely the same way men do. Three decades later, though, feminism no longer insists that women's desires and inclinations be identical to those of men. It may even be permitted to recognize that, at least superficially, the female sex drive seems, in the aggregate, less pronounced (or at least less conspicuous) than the male sex drive. You don't hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex. You do hear stories about women telling their husbands they no longer want to have sex.

So, if sex, especially variety in sex, is less important to women, we must have more complex and fascinating reasons for committing adultery.

"They're tired. Dog-tired. The stallion makes heart-stopping speeches. And the beaver just beavers along."

Erica Jong — her mind addled by animal imagery — tries to write about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

[T]he stallion is drunk on his own rhetoric. Why not? It's great rhetoric.

We need beavers and we need stallions. Beavers get the work done. Stallions inspire us. And they both have limitations. Stallions have fragile legs (think Barbaro). And beavers are nothing without their teeth....

So let's stop talking about race and gender and let the beaver and the stallion both serve our country — in their own inimitable ways.

Fabulous metaphors, Erica. I understood right away about talking horse that gets drunk and breaks its leg. I couldn't find that episode of "Mr. Ed," but here he is in his home state of Hawaii:



(Thanks to reader_iam for pointing me to this goofy HuffPo rant.)

Gen-Xers for hypocrisy.

Andrew Sullivan writes:

Dan [Savage] and I agreed that moderate hypocrisy - especially in marriages - is often the best policy. Momogamy [sic] is very hard for men, straight or gay, and if one partner falters occasionally (and I don't mean regularly), sometimes discretion is perfectly acceptable. You could see [Erica] Jong bridle at the thought of such dishonesty. But I think the post-seventies generation - those of us who grew up while our parents were having a sexual revolution - both appreciate the gains for sexual and emotional freedom, while being a little more aware of their potential hazards. An acceptance of mild hypocrisy as essential social and marital glue is not a revolutionary statement. It's a post-revolutionary one. As is, I'd say, my generation as a whole.

Erica squirms at hypocrisy because she's old? Accepting or rejecting dishonesty is a generational matter? Does this have the ring of truth? I don't think it does. There has always been a range of opinion and tolerance for lies in relationships. And what people squirm at in public or say they accept may not be the same in private. And you don't really know exactly what Jong's nonverbal expression meant. Maybe she was remembering something she was dishonest about. Maybe Dan and Andrew were preening about their "discretion," and it rubbed her the wrong way. I mean, Andrew's preening about it now isn't he?

ADDED: Sullivan's typo "momogamy" just kills me. It's the ultimate in Oedipal.

"The yield of her legendary scrutiny informed by a worldliness more political than clitoral."

Do you trust a writer who writes like that to tell you why one writer is better than another?

Her spare precise locution rewards not spectatorship but collaboration: the reader's full discovery of the dread she leaves largely tacit.

It's not hard to see that Joan Didion is a better writer than Erica Jong, but that doesn't mean that trying to write like Didion and not Jong will make you a better writer.

Time to go after the pro-sex feminists again.

Here's another article about Ariel Levy's book "Female Chauvinist Pigs."

"Women had come so far," or so the thinking went, that "we no longer needed to worry about objectification or misogyny." If male chauvinist pigs "regarded women as pieces of meat, we would outdo them and be Female Chauvinist Pigs: women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves."

Well, Ms. Levy is having none of it, and she is not the only one. Even Erica Jong seems to feel that something has gone wrong. Known for popularizing the idea that a woman may want consequence-free sex, Ms. Jong today declares: "Being able to have an orgasm with a man you don't love . . . that is not liberation." It isn't? Someone should tell this to Annie, a blue-eyed 29-year-old who admits to Ms. Levy that she "used to get so hurt" after a night of sex that didn't yield an emotional bond. Now she has gotten over it, or tried to: "I'm like a guy," she brags.

How did this happen? Why did feminism sell its soul to the sexual-liberation movement in the first place? After all, the original feminists were fighting to be taken seriously. Hugh Hefner, by contrast, said that his ideal girl "resembles a bunny . . . vivacious, jumping--sexy." There seems to be a contradiction here.

First of all, doesn't anyone read "Fear of Flying" anymore? Well, everyone read it when it came out, and I can assure you that the Erica Jong character in that book, after pursuing the "zipless f**k" for 300 pages, finally gets the opportunity and realizes it's a bad idea. ("My zipless f**k! My stranger on the train! Here I'd been offered my very own fantasy. The fantasy that had riveted me to the vibrating seat of the train for three years in Heidelberg and instead of turning me on, it had revolted me!") So what's with this "even Erica Jong" business?

Second of all, doesn't anyone remember the Andrea Dworkin/Catharine MacKinnon era anymore? There was a whole theme back then about how pro-sex liberals were ruining feminism (and how real feminism had to be very hostile pornography). There's an indignant little anthology from 1990 called "Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism." Feminists have been fighting forever about whether to be pro- or anti- sex or something in between.

It may be that, like Ms. Levy, a lot of feminists now regret getting in bed with Mr. Hefner. Yet if you mention the word "modesty" within 20 feet of them their heads spin around like Linda Blair in "The Exorcist." This is where they get stuck. Only if feminism can embrace the more traditional ways that men and women have courted throughout the ages can it have anything practical to offer young women. To the extent that feminists dismiss as worthless anything that is perceived as "backtracking," they only help to perpetuate the "raunch culture"--even as they deplore its effects.

Take a beach scene that Ms. Levy recounts, when the male "friends" of two girls pressure them to take off their suits. Soon surrounded by a circle of 40 screaming men, the girls say "no way!" but eventually give in and spank each other to appease the crowd.

Hmmm.... I wonder who's going to buy Ms. Levy's book? There doesn't seem to be anything new here about feminism -- which it apparently distorts ridiculously. Maybe the intended reader is the virtuous, puritanical sort who finds these lame sex stories exciting.

The author of the linked opinion piece (from the WSJ) is Wendy Shalit, who, we're told, wrote a book called "A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue."

Well, I'm sure Shalit encounters plenty of feminists who don't like her word "modesty," but her assumption that they have bought into a Playboy vision of free sex is absurd. They just hear social conservatism in that word. It's quite possible to reject social conservatism without falling into some exaggerated libertinism. Shalit's title advocates going back to old-fashioned values, so it's no wonder most feminists balk. They rightly want new ways to think about what is good for women, not a re-insertion into the old set-up.

And as for that "Exorcist" imagery: that's a pretty old cliché. Can we have something fresh?