"Even the most apparently conservative and decorous women writers obsessively create fiercely independent characters who seek to destroy all the patriarchal structures..."

"... which both their authors and their authors’ submissive heroines seem to accept as inevitable. The madwoman in literature by women is not merely, as she might be in male literature, an antagonist or foil to the heroine. Rather she is usually in some sense the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage."

From "The Madwoman in the Attic," quoted in "Sandra M. Gilbert, Co-Author of ‘The Madwoman in the Attic,’ Dies at 87/A poet, scholar and literary critic, she turned a feminist lens on 19th-century writers like Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, creating a feminist classic" (NYT).

“People forget that, when they were writing, even to talk about women writers as having anything in common, as having a story of their own, as being connected in any way to each other, was incredibly controversial,” Katha Pollitt, the feminist author, told The Washington Post in 2013. “Now it seems completely obvious.”

"What do you do when a big swath of Americans believe things that are demonstrably false...?"

"Are we a nation of lunatics...?... We’re told to trust the voters because ordinary folk know what’s what, but how can you trust the voters if so many of them think their paranoid delusions are reality?... My friend Alan, a Marxist historian... compares our present moment to the world described by Johan Huizinga in The Waning of the Middle Ages. As feudalism began to break up in the 1300s and 1400s... [p]essimism, fear, and a sense of cultural exhaustion prevailed.... Maybe, Alan suggested... [w]hites and Christians feel their cultural preeminence slipping away, and they just can’t handle it, especially if superpatriotism, racism, and male supremacy were all they had to begin with. Well, maybe. It would be better for Alan’s theory if present-day irrationalists were, like the members of other right-wing movements, disproportionately young white men enraged by their downward mobility and lack of girlfriends. But according to The New York Times, QAnon appeals to a much broader swath—'health-conscious yoga moms,' for example.... It’s as if the Internet is bringing together all existing forms of credulousness: Covid denialism, Trumpism, health nuttery, hyperlibertarianism, New Age woo-woo, fundamentalist Christianity, and an unhealthy fixation on exaggerated or imaginary dangers to children."

 
From "The Age of Irrationality/With the rise of QAnon and the anti-vax movement, skepticism has become the province of the paranoid" by Katha Pollitt (The Nation).

"New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay's comments on MSNBC have been irresponsibly taken out of context."

"Her argument was that Trump and many of his supporters have politicized the American flag. The attacks on her today are ill-informed and grounded in bad-faith."

Tweets NYTimes Communications/@NYTimesPR.

That's about the controversy we were talking about yesterday, here. I said: "I think this is an honest revelation: American flags really do disturb Mara Gay." And: "This is a pretty standard aversion to the flag. It made me think of Katha Pollitt's famous reaction to flag displays after the 9/11 attacks...." 

The NYT tweet came out yesterday, so I guess what I wrote is within the category "attacks on her today" and my circumspect and considered remarks have been denounced as "ill-informed and grounded in bad-faith."

So I'm going to say that tweet is ill-informed and grounded in bad-faith! What a ridiculous blanket statement with no regard for the individuals who listened to Gay and made our own interpretations and expressed our opinions.

It's so hypocritical to obsessively protect her while attacking all her critics with broad-brush insults!

IN THE COMMENTS: You can see email, along with responses from me, on the subject of whether the American left has an aversion to displays of the American flag. I am reminded of this photograph of mine that I posted on the 4th of July in 2005:

At the time, I wrote: "In my family, this is known as my 'most right wing photo' and jokes have been made along the lines of: 'What if you put that on your office door? What would people think? What would they say?'"

There were a lot of comments at the time, including one from a colleague who said: "I quite like the photo and resist the idea that the right owns the flag. " I was motivated to post what I called "my most left-wing flag photo, from the Kerry rally here in Madison last fall":

I think this is an honest revelation: American flags really do disturb Mara Gay.

This is the full context of the comments of an important writer with the NYT Editorial Board, @MaraGay, that are well worth listening to given how pervasive these views have become rather quickly in elite media circles: https://t.co/IGDq5A5fMu

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 8, 2021

This is a pretty standard aversion to the flag. It made me think of Katha Pollitt's famous reaction to flag displays after the 9/11 attacks. Here: "Put Out No Flags" (The Nation, September 20, 2001):

My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war. She tells me I’m wrong–the flag means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism.... It seems impossible to explain to a 13-year-old, for whom the war in Vietnam might as well be the War of Jenkins’s Ear, the connection between waving the flag and bombing ordinary people half a world away back to the proverbial stone age. I tell her she can buy a flag with her own money and fly it out her bedroom window, because that’s hers, but the living room is off-limits.

"The Nation Magazine Betrays a Poet — and Itself/I was the magazine’s poetry editor for 35 years. Never once did we apologize for publishing a poem."

Writes Grace Shulman (in the NYT).

We followed a path blazed by Henry James, who in 1865 wrote a damning review of Walt Whitman’s “Drum Taps,” calling the great poem “arrant prose.” Mistaken, yes, but it was James’s view at the time. And it was never retracted....

Last month, the magazine published a poem by Anders Carlson-Wee. The poet is white. His poem, “How-To,” draws on black vernacular.

Following a vicious backlash against the poem on social media, the poetry editors, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith, apologized for publishing it in the first place: “We made a serious mistake by choosing to publish the poem ‘How-To.’ We are sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities affected by this poem,” they wrote in an apology longer than the actual poem. The poet apologized, too, saying, “I am sorry for the pain I caused.”...

As Katha Pollitt, a columnist for The Nation, put it, the magazine’s apology for Mr. Carlson-Wee’s work was “craven” and “looks like a letter from re-education camp.”...

It would not be proper for me to comment on the aesthetic merits of Mr. Carlson-Wee’s piece. That’s the job of the magazine’s current poetry editors. But going forward, I’d recommend they follow Henry James’s example. Just as he never apologized for his negative review of Whitman, they had zero reason to regret their decision.

You can read the poem and The Nation's apology here. Give The Nation some credit: It left the poem up. It just has this heavy-handed "Editor's note" introducing it. I'll reprint the whole thing:

"Are We Finally Getting Over the Belief That Periods Are Embarrassing?"

Asks Katha Pollitt at The Nation. Subtitle: "To fight for pads and tampons for all, we have to talk openly about menstruation." In case you were going to say why do we have to talk about it. That's Pollitt's answer. I'd like to talk about it because it entails embarrassment, and embarrassment is an important and interesting topic, but Pollitt doesn't talk about embarrassment. She talks about fairness and economics. It's all about menstruation supplies...

Pads and tampons cost women up to $120 a year—and that’s not counting pain relievers like Midol or Advil. Over a lifetime, it can add up to as much as $4,500.

Nature is not fair, so if you are a man, consider giving $120 a year to a charity like the Alliance for Period Supplies.

ADDED: Nature is unfair to men in that they die, on average, 5 years earlier than the average woman (in the U.S. (worldwide, it's 8)). But one way to spend less, a lot less, is not to live. Why do men live less long?

Men tend to take bigger risks... have more dangerous jobs... die of heart disease more often and at a younger age... be larger than women... commit suicide more often than women... be less socially connected... avoid doctors....

Note that some of those factors are things that will save you money before you die, notably that failure to go to the doctor. But some of those factors suggest that you will make more money — taking bigger risks and having more dangerous jobs. One thing will cost more: Having a larger body. You'll need more food for that, but perhaps men tend to buy less expensive food.

By the way, did you know that "Across many species, larger animals tend to die younger than smaller ones"? I'm not sure whether that means that the larger species have shorter life spans than the smaller species or just that within any species, the larger individuals have shorter life spans than the smaller individuals. It's very obvious that among dogs, the shortest-lived breeds are large and the longest-lived breeds are small. A chihuahua lives an average of 17 years and an Irish wolfhound only gets 7 years.

"Should Bill Clinton’s sexual misdeeds be an issue for Hillary Clinton’s candidacy?"

The NYT does one of its forums on this question, asked of 4 women and one man.

1. Katha Pollitt says there's "no evidence that Hillary actually did 'enable' Bill’s philandering" or that she "slut-shamed Paula Jones or any of the other women who accused Bill of sexually aggressive behavior." She muses "What is enabling, anyway?" Is it really so different from "love, loyalty, credulousness, naivete, practicality, forgiveness, saving the marriage, protecting the children, just getting on with life"?

2. Kristin Collins Jackson (a poet and writer) mildly concedes that Hillary's "victim-shaming" "deserves attention"  for its inconsistency with her "platform that prioritizes women's issues and combating sexual assault on campus."

3. Joshua Coleman, a psychologist, says Hillary's "alleged attempts to discredit the women with whom her husband cheated may not be considered a good form of sisterhood, it certainly could be considered a reasonable act of motherhood." He says we've overinflated the idea of "romantic love" and offers respect to Hillary for staying with her husband instead of reacting in the "more destructive" way he's seen in some of his patients.

4. Cathy Young observes "the ambiguity of [Hillary's] status as a hybrid of modern female politician and traditional political wife" and "the greater paradox... that she is being hurt by the same feminist revival from which her campaign has sought to draw strength." Young puts some blame on "modern feminism" for going "to unhealthy extremes on fetishizing victimhood and conferring absolute credibility on self-proclaimed survivors" and likes the idea that Hillary's current trouble may move some feminists to back off from these extremes.

5. Nona Willis Aronowitz, a Fusion editor, says: "Even I, a progressive feminist, tend to think of Bill Clinton as a sleazy ex-boyfriend I can’t stop drunk-texting but not, you know, a rapist. He’s one of us, after all. One of our dudes." But she's looking critically at that tendency: "Those of us not married to Bill Clinton should ask ourselves why it’s so hard for us to accept that he might be brilliant, likable and a misogynist all at the same time?"

"If you think fetal-tissue research is wrong and should be banned, would you refuse to use any therapies that may come out of it?"

"I thought not. I’ve posed this question to abortion opponents before, but so far, no one has said, Yes, Katha, I would rather let Alzheimer’s turn my brain into cottage cheese and ketchup than benefit from this diabolical practice. If I get Parkinson’s, HIV, breast cancer, diabetes, or the flu; if I go blind from macular degeneration; if I have a miscarriage, so be it. Treatments for those conditions are still being developed, but surprise! If you have been vaccinated for polio, mumps, measles, chicken pox, hepatitis, or rabies, it may be too late for you to stand your ethical ground: You have already benefited from fetal-tissue research. This is, after all, a practice that’s been legal since the 1930s. In 1954, John Enders, Thomas Weller, and Frederick Robbins won the Nobel Prize for work on the polio virus that paved the way for the Salk and Sabin vaccines. They used fetal tissue, the monsters. Should their heirs return the medals?"

Writes Katha Pollitt in The Nation in a piece titled "Fetal-Tissue Bans Are All About Making Abortion Providers Look Like Monsters/Life-saving research is collateral damage in the war on Planned Parenthood."

I was sure this was an anti-abortion illustration — a pretty peevish, nasty one — and I'm still finding it hard to believe the NYT used it for a pro-choice op-ed.

That's a snippet of the illustration — by Ruth Gwily — which you can see enlarged and in full here. The op-ed, by Katha Pollitt, is "How to Really Defend Planned Parenthood." Pollitt's op-ed is somewhat interesting, because she does seem to be struggling over what to think and how to talk about abortion in the wake of the disturbing Planned Parenthood videos. ("[T]he videos do cleverly evoke visceral feelings of disgust — graphic images, physicians using the words 'crush' and 'crunchy' — to activate the stereotype that abortion providers are money-grubbing baby killers.") Pollitt wants pro-choice people to speak up, loud and clear, rather than to keep their head down and only pipe up when there's something — like these videos — that needs a response. But in the end, I don't think Pollitt has said anything that will change the low-profile of the pro-choice crowd.

We need to say that women have sex, have abortions, are at peace with the decision and move on with their lives. We need to say that is their right, and, moreover, it’s good for everyone that they have this right: The whole society benefits when motherhood is voluntary. When we gloss over these truths we unintentionally promote the very stigma we’re trying to combat...

There are truths on both sides, pro-life and pro-choice, and the truths on the pro-life side lend themselves to loud, passionate assertion. On the pro-choice side, there's more reason to exercise restraint. These are hard truths. The whole society benefits when motherhood is voluntary can be paraphrased as That dead baby would have been a bad citizen anyway. And the pro-choice side got its passion extracted when abortion became a right. Rights are supposed to make you feel secure, and, feeling secure, why should you have to yell about what you want anymore?

But let's talk about that illustration. I thought some right-wing website was portraying feminists as creepy, ugly jerks! The rat teeth, the sneering nose, the greasy, stringy hair, the misshapen ear that seems twisted a few notches to the left. That's the pro-choice image of a pro-choice woman?! I don't get it. Why make her repulsive?

It also makes no sense to use a tiny megaphone to express the idea that her voice is not being heard. Pro-choicers can get all the social and mainstream amplification they want. They are choosing to be low-key. That's Pollitt's point!

I'm assuming that you immediately perceive the thing in the woman's hand as a megaphone. I called Meade over to look at the illustration, and at first glance, he "saw" a little baby about to be eaten by the woman.

I did a Google image search for a megaphone to get an idea of how accurate the illustration is and I came up with this Planned Parenthood image:



I strongly suspect that Ruth Gwily (the illustrator) used that photo as her reference. I think it explains the protruding teeth and the sneering nose. It seemed, I'm guessing, like a good idea to turn the pretty model into a "real" woman, and nobody with decision-making authority had the perspective to notice how awful she looked.

"There are no abortion cakes."

A sentence written by Katha Pollitt. Context:

It’s no news that support for abortion rights is stagnant while gay rights become ever more popular.... I understand that same-sex marriage and reproductive rights are different: marriage is about love, and abortion is about freedom. There are no abortion cakes. But freedom is a bedrock American value, even when it’s for women.

Actually, there are abortion cakes. I could find them on line. Nothing I want to show you though.

"I'm going to argue here that removing 'women' from the language of abortion is a mistake."

"We can, and should, support trans men and other gender-non-conforming people. But we can do that without rendering invisible half of humanity and 99.999 percent of those who get pregnant. I know I'll offend, hurt and disappoint some people, including abortion-fund activists I love dearly. That is why I've started this column many times over many months and put it aside. I tell myself I might be wrong...."

For the annals of hand-wringing, I offer you this, from Katha Pollit in The Nation.

You know, if you're going to fret about "erasure" in the context of abortion... well, good lord, how blind can you be?!

"[F]or a 'pro-life' argument to make sense it has to make sense..."

"...that it follows from a spiritual instinct, or from religious dogma, however deeply held, is not something that rational people have to pretend to respect. It is easy to cite the source of moral ideas in religious vision. Don’t you know that Dr. King was a Christian minister? Didn’t the ideas of the Abolitionists rise from the Northern churches? It’s perfectly true that many good and noble and necessary ideas have come from churches and chapels—as many others have come from temples, universities, Masonic lodges, and presumably one or two from a Satanic cult. But their relevance and plausibility have nothing at all to do with their source; they have to do with the moral and practical sense they make to those who don’t have any special respect for their origins. Dr. King was a Christian minister whose ideas about equality and social justice were crucially affected by his faith; those ideas were just as crucially affected by Gandhi and, for that matter, as J. Edgar Hoover would have pointed out, by the Communists in King’s entourage. His 'Dream' speech, though deeply rooted in his faith, appealed not to the authority of religion but to the common language, irresistible to all, or almost all, of justice and moral order and practical benefit. Lincoln may have entered politics with a passionate hatred of slavery, but once he was a politician his arguments were distilled from passion into reason and law, and sometimes even into legalism."

Writes Adam Gopnik — in  "Arguing Abortion" — explicating one of the
two major originalities" in Katha Pollit's book "Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights."

"Maybe there’s a difference between a blowjob and a slice of pie — one that is occluded..."

"... when all types of service work are collapsed into one, a difference that today’s young left feminists don’t want to think about."

A sentence from Katha Pollitt's "Why Do So Many Leftists Want Sex Work to Be the New Normal?" that has it all. Blowjobs, pie, the word "occluded," an absurdly unnecessary and timidly stated observation that 2 things may — may! — be different, and daring lefty-on-lefty/feminist-on-feminist/old-on-young action.

"I’m not so sure why we want more people on our crowded, overheated planet..."

"... where world population is projected to increase by 2 billion before finally beginning to fall. But if [NYT conservative columnist Ross] Douthat really thought through what it means to have and raise a child these days, I’m sure he could come up with a lot of great ways to help women and families. The trouble is, he couldn’t be a Republican anymore. He’d be a socialist."

That's Katha Pollitt over at The Nation, reacting to Douthat's reaction to the plummeting birthrate in the United States, which we were talking about here. I'd asked:

If it is an emergency, what could be done? Is there a role for government? What if government wanted to get involved, really deeply involved? Suggestions? Don't violate any rights. This is a government of laws, in which women have reproductive freedom. But there is the taxing power and the spending power and so forth.

So I agree with Pollitt on where the solution to the problem lies... except that she's not ready to see how it's a problem.

Have you seen the cover of Newsweek?

5 or 10 years ago, it was a routine, almost daily practice for me to wander around a bookstore and so I always knew what was on the covers of the usual magazines like Newsweek. You could catch my eye. Nowadays, my daily glancing about is done on line, and crafty editors can't grab me with striking covers. But I did notice this:



Now, that's really silly. Who is this "working woman"? I guess by "working woman," Newsweek means a fashion model. And for all the striving to convey sexuality, the particular woman — with her plank chest and clothes-hanger shoulders — epitomizes abstemiousness, not lust of any kind. Anyway, had I seen that on the newsstand, I would have laughed at the embarrassingly striving effort to lure me into checking out the article. Don't I want to know "Why Surrender Is a Feminist Dream"? Uh, no. I was with the radical feminists back in the late 1980s/early 1990s when it seemed very important to take "The Story of O" seriously. And to despise Katie Roiphe, by the way. Who is the author of the Newsweek cover story, though her name isn't on the cover.

Why did the feminists attack Roiphe back then? The daughter of a famous feminist, she'd come out with a book "The Morning After: Fear, Sex and Feminism" when she was only 26, undermining the work of feminists who'd strained to expand the category of behavior to which the term "rape" attaches:

Writing for The New Yorker, Katha Pollitt delivered a scathing review of The Morning After, writing, "It is a careless and irresponsible performance, poorly argued and full of misrepresentations, slapdash research, and gossip. She may be, as she implies, the rare grad student who has actually read 'Clarissa,' but when it comes to rape and harassment she has not done her homework."

Oh, but that was nearly 20 years ago. I haven't been keeping track of Katie Roiphe since then, though I see I have a tag for her. I don't remember mentioning her on the blog before, but obviously I have. Anyway, she's getting cranked through the Tina-Brownified Newsweek that I'm not going to read, but I did notice the Virginia Heffernan attack on Roiphe's cover story:

Tina, my onetime boss, from whom in the late 1990s I learned the dark arts of buzz production...

Were vibrators involved?

... loves to seduce and betray female writers. And she's got skills. As she once proudly told the editorial team at her short-lived magazine Talk, she likes to ask lady writers to deliver humiliating "personal histories" that feature self-loathing and lurid intimate disclosures, on the promise that they can publish anonymously.

Once the droning, predictable, scandalous articles are done—Daphne Merkin likes to be spanked!!!!!—Tina appeals to the writer's vanity. The article is terse and fearless and elegant! You're Joan Didion! (always Joan Didion). You must put your name on this!

Disgrace. You want to know about gender politics during this trumped-up "war on women"? That's one way power is wielded between women—the alpha girl feigns sympathy to get her henchwoman to confess or act out and then sits back and sneers—and it's no joke. 

I'm cutting a lot here. Please read the whole thing. Roiphe, per Heffernan, "sneers" at the "older, suburban, possibly Midwestern woman" who is titillated by this popular new porn book "Shades of Grey," and this supposedly entertaining sneering is leveraged by Roiphe's own sexual confessions:

Tina has forced Roiphe into this uncomfortable pose, and in public (does any woman really want to boast, "I'm more twisted and accustomed to sexual violence than anyone!"), and Roiphe comparably trusses up Newsweek readers. Over a series of bad-faith and gibberish paragraphs, she sets up the reader as a hayseed who is turned on by lite porn because she's never seen how they do it in Berlin or whatever; or—worse still—so unsuccessfully feminine and so outside of the charmed circle of female literary power that she's satisfied by regular guys who don't hit her. 

The real sadism, it seems, comes from the powerful editor (Brown) who once oppressed Heffernan, who longs to get the upper hand at long last. Now, that's lurid (but not at all sexy, unless you're way more into the world of publishing newsrags than I am).

Anyway, I'm reading Heffernan, because I wandered by Slate this morning and saw a piece that successfully caught my eye with the title "Why Is Virginia Heffernan Being Sexist Toward Katie Roiphe?" It was written by a character with the silly name J. Bryan Lowder. He says:

Heffernan suggests that Roiphe has been “humiliated” by the article, but, by my reading, it’s the former who’s actually out to humiliate the latter in some twisted form of victim-blaming. It’s as if Heffernan is saying, “Tina Brown editorially raped you, Katie Roiphe, so why don’t you just slink away in disgrace!”

Key words: by my reading. Heffernan had her reading and you, J. Bryan, have yours. And your reading is that her reading is not the right reading. Readings, readings, readings. If it's all readings, we can choose which one to read, can't we? And Heffernan is more readable. And she's got the inside experience with Brown. Meanwhile — I just got to the end of J. Bryan's cryin' and I see he's "a former student and research assistant of Roiphe’s." Ha. I stand by my choice of readings.

The secret pain of the feminist Katha Pollitt.

From The Daily Caller's Journolist revelations:

“I hear you. but I am really tired of defending the indefensible. The people who attacked Clinton on Monica were prissy and ridiculous, but let me tell you it was no fun, as a feminist and a woman, waving aside as politically irrelevant and part of the vast rightwing conspiracy Paula, Monica, Kathleen, Juanita,” [The Nation's Katha] Pollitt said.

Ah! How Katha suffered for Bill Clinton! She would prefer to have a more pleasurable life, full of the fun of being true to the principles of the feminist movement, but there were more important things to be done at the time. Caring about rape, sexual harassment, male privilege, and female subordination — that was a self-indulgence brave Katha rose above.

"As the writer Katha Pollitt (who is also my ex-wife) puts it: 'I get a ton of hostile, misogynous, idiotic comments from anonymous trolls...'"

"'...when I blog at The Nation. Sometimes I feel like I am dancing on the table for an audience of drunks. Not only is it dispiriting — and let’s not forget that women writers on the Internet receive vastly more hateful comments than male writers — it has nothing to do with the brisk and vigorous exchange of ideas often said to be the reason for anonymity. Because there are no ideas and no exchange.'"

Oh, no?