"If low-wage men don’t present women with much of a good deal, why not double, or triple, or quadruple them up?"

"Pool resources, boost household income, and promote family values at the same time?" writes Judith Warner at Time Magazine, quoted at Weekly Standard under the headline "Time Magazine Endorses 'Polyandry.'"

Well, Warner is employing humor to critique the conservative argument that marriage is the solution to poverty and to highlight the problem of low wages. I guess her use of the word "seriously" threw some readers off. Noting something Barbara Ehrenreich said that made an audience laugh, Warner wrote: "But I think we should take Ehrenreich seriously." Like you never heard a comedian, upon getting one laugh, set up the next joke with "But seriously...."

I know, it's difficult to perceive humor coming from women. You don't expect it, and then it's a little subtle sometimes. Maybe if a woman has multiple husbands, at least one of them will get each of her jokes. I'm serious.

Let's judge Michele Bachmann by how she deals with her migraine headaches.

Says Judith Warner (who, herself, gets migraines):

While there is much about migraines that will forever elude her control — weather changes, for example, can trigger terrible headaches — managing migraines involves a lot of meaningful decision-making. 

So... like... being President involves a lot of meaningful decisision-making, so... how you deal with headaches is a test of what kind of President you'll be.

Warner observes that the Bachmann campaign has only disclosed that she takes medicine to prevent migraines and medicine to relieve migraines. But what medicine? And how much?

I’m not a doctor, but reports that Mrs. Bachmann’s condition had her admitted to an urgent care facility three times in six months suggest that she is perhaps suffering more than she has to. It’s fair to ask: Is she getting the best possible care from doctors who practice mainstream science? Does she fully acknowledge the reality of having a chronic disability by regulating her diet, sleep, exercise and stress levels, as frequent migraine sufferers must? Or does she refuse to acknowledge her limitations?

In the absence of information about the preventive steps she is taking to, as she puts it, control her migraines, we are left with the impression that it’s the migraines that control her.

Are we left with that impression? Or do we just think she has a common affliction and — her achievements reveal — she deals with it well.

Warner seems to be applying a liberal political template to Bachmann's headache issue: She shouldn't just rely on pills (like a right-winger dealing with problems through military force and tough prison sentences). She should regulate all aspects of her life: diet, sleep, exercise and stress levels (like a left-winger with endless regulations and social programs).

Judith Warner reflects on the occasion of ending her NYT family life column.

Now, this is freaky. Just 2 days ago I ripped Judith Warner:

I don't — I can't —use the raw material of my home life for blog posts ... and I've been noticing how much these various female columnists do.... They just go right ahead and talk about whatever is right there in their home and make casual generalizations about what people are like these days.

Like Judith Warner, writing in the NYT this week about her daughter... The daughter has "endless girl dramas," and the mother has adopted a "respectful distance" strategy of parenting. But part of that "respectful distance" is blabbing about the dramas in the New York Times. Well, that is a kind of distance....

This is the style of these relationship columns for women these days. Write openly about your own family. Of course, it's fundamental that you have a lovely, happy family — and that they won't get any less happy and lovely if you make them your material.

And now, today, here's Judith Warner, signing off, saying:

I’m glad now to have the chance to get back to being more fully present in the life I’ve been mining for material these many years.

Now, I'm not suggesting I had anything to do with ending Judith Warner's column. Even if I think my writing has some effect, I don't think it could work that quickly. But I do think I perceived a problem that Warner herself really did feel. Or maybe she's just looking for the bright side.

"If I were Judith Warner writing in the New York Times about my daughter I could write about it."

I don't — I can't — use the raw material of my home life for blog posts. Maybe you think I do, but basically, I follow a rule against it, and I only reveal little things around the edges. I'd love to use lines from breakfast-table conversations and riff on them, and maybe this post is an example of that. It's something I just said. But, really, this post is about how I can't do that, and I've been noticing how much these various female columnists do. They don't research what's happening in other families or even pretend they are writing about some third person. They just go right ahead and talk about whatever is right there in their home and make casual generalizations about what people are like these days.

Like Judith Warner, writing in the NYT this week about her daughter:

... my elder daughter, Julia, is now in 7th grade, which means, of late, that she lives in a world filled with endless girl dramas of the most unfortunate and, alas, ordinary kind.

As I watch her attempt to make sense of all this, I try to keep a respectful distance. There is no greater error, I’ve come to think, than for a mother to get down in the emotional mire of her daughter’s girl stuff. It is undignified. Inappropriate, even. And ultimately, judging from what I’ve seen thus far, it’s deeply toxic.

So I try to sit back and act like an adult.

Ironically, Warner is writing about keeping aloof from her daughter's dramas. But that is her home life. The daughter has "endless girl dramas," and the mother has adopted a "respectful distance" strategy of parenting. But part of that "respectful distance" is blabbing about the dramas in the New York Times. Well, that is a kind of distance.

I won't "get down in the emotional mire" with you. I'll climb up here onto my mainstream media perch where your problems can be summarized as "stuff," and the story will be about me and my distance (and — read the whole thing — what life was like for me when I was young).

Warner gives her daughter some modest cover even as she uses her for a jumping-off point. And, to be nice, I'm going to assume the daughter read the column and approved the revelation. I'm also going to imagine that there were other, more revealing column drafts that touched off one of the daughter's endless dramas and got rewritten.

And here's Hanna Rosin, writing about the nonproblem — supremely non — of having a husband who loves to cook: "The Rise of the Kitchen Bitch — Ladies, it’s time to reclaim cooking." I've already complained about the endless Elizabeth Weil article in the NYT about a husband who cooks too much, and Rosin — an admirer of the Weil piece — is following on with a my-husband-too. You have a man who (somehow) cooks too much? I have a man who cooks too much. It's the way we brag now. Whatever it is, pretend it's a problem. Rosin writes:

My husband is not a tenth [as bad as Weil's husband]. He is a food snob but not obsessive; he is fast and has dinner on the table by 6:45, in time for us all to eat together. The problem is more subtle and at least half my fault. Before we had kids, we both loved to cook and did it prodigiously and with great joy. After we had kids, everything changed. When we got home from work, we had the choice of cooking or hanging out with the kids. I always chose the kids. When I did cook, it was out of a sense of duty and obligation, while he continued to feel the joy.

Ahem. So you have a great husband. You have great kids. You got a choice of cooking or playing with the kids in the pre-dinner time slot and you chose the kids — because you're a great mom as well as a great cook — and this went swimmingly well for both you and your husband and now... now you can even generate a popular column — it's #1 on the DoubleX "most read" list — out of how it's really this resonant modern problem.

This is the style of these relationship columns for women these days. Write openly about your own family. Of course, it's fundamental that you have a lovely, happy family — and that they won't get any less happy and lovely if you make them your material.

"A woman in an airport bathroom who, I felt, had addressed my daughter Julia with an unforgivable tone of officiousness and disdain..."

Oh, the things that have become unforgivable.

If it turns out teenagers aren't having that much sex, does some credit go teaching about abstinence?

The NYT reports that most high school kids these days are virgins.

Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1 percent in 1991.

A less recent report suggests that teenagers are also waiting longer to have sex than they did in the past. A 2002 report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old girls had experienced sex, down from 38 percent in 1995. During the same period, the percentage of sexually experienced boys in that age group dropped to 31 percent from 43 percent.

The rates also went down among younger teenagers. In 1995, about 20 percent said they had had sex before age 15, but by 2002 those numbers had dropped to 13 percent of girls and 15 percent of boys....

As for that supposed epidemic of oral sex, especially among younger teenagers: national statistics on the behavior have only recently been collected, and they are not as alarming as some reports would have you believe. About 16 percent of teenagers say they have had oral sex but haven’t yet had intercourse....

Judith Warner — the NYT's women-and-children columnist — processes the information:

[T]he overblown focus on messed-up kids affords parents the possibility of avoiding looking inward and taking responsibility for the highly complex problems of everyday life....

Certain kinds of children have certain kinds of vulnerabilities that make them particularly susceptible to the toxic elements of our culture. This is true of those who do or don’t fall victim to stress and anxiety, and it’s true of those who do or don’t engage in too-early, too-risky sex. Certain kinds of policies can help children. (Abstinence-only sexual education clearly does not help in combating teen pregnancy.) Certain kinds of parenting can help or hurt, too.

Having a family life that’s so atomized and disconnected that children have the physical and emotional space to upload nude pictures of themselves onto the Internet, and lack the self-esteem and self-respect to know better is obviously undesirable. Being a stressed and frantic, frazzled and depressed parent is harmful, too....

[W]e – the adults in this society – are “a mess.” I think it’s time to stop projecting our dysfunction onto our children.

I think that was mainly about why adults believe myths about kids and then how adults are pretty screwed up. But the news was good: Kids aren't having so much sex. Shouldn't we give ourselves credit for teaching them well, and shouldn't we give the teenagers credit for conducting themselves well? How did this turn into another occasion for hand-wringing? Is that a liberal disease? If there isn't one problem, quick, see another problem, because programs will be needed to solve them?

Now, the only mention of abstinence education was in the context of preventing pregnancy. And there — hey, I'm impressed that the NYT hot-linked to the Washington Post — we've seen a slight upturn in teen pregnancies after years of decline. Do we know enough about the cause-and-effect to say that abstinence education "clearly does not help" with this? I don't know, but it would seem to me that if teenagers are keeping abstinent, one reason might be that adults are successfully presenting abstinence to them in a positive light and teaching them the social skills to avoid sexual activity when they prefer abstinence.

***

I must say that, reading Warner's column, I had this image in my head — it may be just my Myth of the Stereotypical New York Times Reader — of an upper middle class, middle aged woman reading the column and enjoying tingles of resonance with her own life: Yes, I'm so busy, I'm frazzled, I'm stressed, and frantic....

I spend less and less of my news reading in the pages of the NYT over the years, and one reason is that I feel that more and more the paper is written for that reader. Ironically, I am an upper middle class, middle aged woman, but I'm not her... especially if she's the kind of person who wants the newspaper written to resonate with her exquisite emotions.