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More from Tim:
We should probably share with XX readers Slate’s rough consensus that the censored word in “Joey doesn't want me. S- this campaign, I'm quitting” was Screw. Why the Journal would omit the word screw here I can’t explain. On the very same day, the Journal quoted Dylan Lauren, daughter of Ralph Lauren and founder and CEO of Dylan’s Candy Bar on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, describing her daily carb intake this way: “"I have to have breakfast otherwise it screws up my whole day. ...” Six days earlier, in a Journal excerpt of Donald Ray Pollock’s book, Knockemstiff, the author’s father was quoted expressing the following opinion of motion pictures: “Screw a bunch of make-believe.” Indeed, it’s hard to see how anyone could publish a newspaper or magazine about the world of business without printing the verb screw on a fairly regular basis. But for some reason the editors omitted screw from Solis Doyle’s quote. Unless it was a different word. Other candidates suggested by Slate staffers included stuff, shove, stop, sauté, shore up, and sod.
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The pertinent fact about Patti Solis Doyle's explanation for leaving Hillary's campaign (that her little boy cried for Daddy instead of for her) seems to me to lie outside its factual veracity. It's probably a fictionalized condensation of something that's happened many times, to Doyle and to every working parent, especially men (who, if they quit their jobs over a toddler snub, get less moral credit for it than we do). Though I can identify with the pain of being the (momentarily) rebuffed parent, the unspoken assumption that the mother must be the child's default choice (or be a bad mother) makes me want to say, boo-frigging-hoo. So Junior wants Daddy in the middle of the night? Great, more sleep for me!
What really makes me smite my forehead is Doyle's choice to use the anecdote now—and make no mistake, true story or not, the woman is cannily using it to protect herself and her boss. It's getting downright painful watching powerful women shoot feminism in the foot in their attempted support of HRC's campaign. Thanks a lot, Patti, for making the rest of us sound as if we're crying wolf when we talk to our bosses about needing flextime or extra sick days. If "my baby needs me" becomes the new "it's my time of the month," an all-purpose cop-out available only to women, that's just one more way to convince the misogynist wing of Hillary-haters (and, paranoid as Erica Jong may be, they're out there) that we're incapable of holding down the big jobs—like, say, president of the United States.
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Granted, Tim, the timing is convenient for Patti Solis Doyle's mommy crisis. But couldn't both versions of events be true for Hillary's former campaign manager? Say your life's work is going down in flames—to the point that One Life to Live seems more realistic all the time, and that storyline about waitressing in Paris, Texas, not altogether unappealing. And just when you're at the absolute snapping point, the one bright spot in your life ... wants Daddy? Not that this is a historical first, no, but when you're overwrought, I could see it being a moment of clarity, just as Hillary needed to make a change. (And as Paul Begala said on CNN the other night, when a campaign is in trouble, you can't fire the candidate, so somebody else has to take the hit.)
"The kids needed me'' may be poll-tested, but it's also a narrative I can't say no to—unless, and this is absolutely unfair—a man is telling the tale. For instance, I heard George Allen on the radio Tuesday saying how it was worth losing to Jim Webb because his 9-year-old daughter made him pancakes last Saturday, and that I found pukatrocious.
As for the crazy goddesses, I'm just as fond of them all the same as I was of my Aunt Ginny who spoke to dead people; they've earned those off-the-meds moments, and may even feel they are required. Though snits like that do suggest that somebody's power is being threatened, which is why I also take them as a sign that the abortion lobby worries that Obama—who is 100 percent pro-choice, despite Hillary's claims to the contrary—might fail to get into the kind of big pointless fights that raise a lot of cash for interest groups.
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Yesterday, Erica Jong argues the current feminist equivalent of the Jews control the media. "Unfortunately the Hillary-Haters are in charge," she writes in Huffington Post. "They monopolize the networks, the newspapers, the talk shows—both radio and TV. They are crossing their legs for fear of castration."
Crossing their legs for fear of castration? I mean, come on. Who talks like that anymore? Jong's earlier piece in the Washington Post was a relatively sane defense of women of her generation, who had to fight twice as hard to get half as much. In this new post, she's gone off the deep end. God, I don't even know where to start.
First, it's the usual—they make fun of Hillary's thick ankles and wrinkles. They say she pimps her daughter. They say she slept with Vince Foster and then something about bees and royal jelly, which was over my head. Then there's some subtle racism about Michelle Obama (a blind spot which seems to afflict women of a certain feminist generation). Then: "They believe HRC boils eye of newt with unborn baby's hair and little Jewish children not yet circumcised."
And that's not even the best one. The best one is: Hillary Haters Can't Spell.
Well, which one is it, they're in charge or they can't spell?
Unfortunately, Jong is not alone. Ever since Hillary lost Iowa, the icons of pop-feminism have been going crazy—Robin Morgan, Gloria Steinem, Erica Jong. Either they can't stand to watch Hillary lose, or their publishers are urging them into a crazy war, a la East Coast and West Coast rappers.
Its not that the zipless fuck was War and Peace or anything. I guess I just want my feminist icons frozen and preserved in their era. It is such an absolute pleasure to watch Germaine Greer and the rest of the feminist street poets take on Norman Mailer in that 1971 town hall, which I recently watched on video. Nothing they are saying is at all relevant to my current existence. Greer is going on about the oppression of housework (which I rarely ever do), and the rest are slamming about their vaginas and the pleasures of lesbian sex, and they are sexy and kick-ass and not faintly ridiculous because that's what it was all about back in the day, and you can watch the good NYU girls in the audience practically ripping their bras off as they stare at Greer in awe.
But that same rant fast-forwarded to the Hillary age DOES seem ridiculous and out of place. A woman is a viable candidate for president, for God's sake!! I cringe to think of what a Germaine Greer tirade about Hillary's oppression would sound like now. In fact, maybe as an exercise I'll watch the video again tonight and rewrite it substituting "Barack" for "Norman," just to see how crazy it sounds.
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A guest post from Timothy Noah of Slate's "Chatterbox" column:
It's the recently that provokes my skepticism. Are we to believe that Solis Doyle's 6-year-old reached his mommy-deprivation limit at precisely the same moment that Solis Doyle's candidate began to falter in the polls? That would be a remarkable coincidence.
Emily Bazelon responds:
I am with Dahlia on this: I find traveling to be the hard part of working. Tim, you also must be right that the timing of the story is too good. I can't decide whether to be offended because the mommy narrative is being used as a transparent cover or grateful that another working parent is saying out loud, as Karen Hughes did before her, that some demands are just too great. I loved it when Mark Warner gave spending time with his kids as a reason not to run for president, making this about fatherhood, too.
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A report in the Wall Street Journal today about the departure last weekend of former Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle offers up this explanation for the departure:
Ms. Solis Doyle recently returned home after two months on the road to find a family accustomed to her absence, she told colleagues. When her 6-year-old son cried out one night recently, he rebuffed his mom, saying, "I want Daddy." Ms. Solis Doyle flew out of the room in tears and told her husband: "Joey doesn't want me. S- this campaign, I'm quitting."
Aside from prompting a desperately funny string of intramural Slate e-mails about what the S stands for (Fraysters???), the anecdote raises a whole lotta questions for the mommies and daddies on this blog: Like doesn’t this scene happen to every mom after every single business trip? My heart goes out to her. My 4-year-old spent much of October ritually biting some kid at preschool every time I left town. On the one hand I was about ready to quit over Coby’s daily nibblings (especially when he started telling his teacher “Mommy is on vacation in Washington for 100 days” each time he did it). On the other hand, this smells like a gender-fraught cover story to justify what Josh Green says was definitely a firing. Help?
Follow the rest of the conversation.
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Dahlia, your post about McCain's powerful message of hopelessness cracked me up and reminded me of this great spoof of Obama's "Yes We Can" video: You might call it McCain's "No, We Can't." Check out the actors' expressions toward the end.
That said, I have a grain of admiration for McCain's willingness to take a politically unpopular position during the season of high political posturing. I cringe when McCain argues that we could be in Iraq for 10,000 years, and should be, if that's what it takes. But then I also cringe after watching the Oscar-nominated Iraq documentary No End in Sight, as I did last night, and realize that an early withdrawal from Iraq could leave not only America but Iraq much worse off in terms of security. I'd love to believe in the message of hope but it needs to be anchored by some pragmatic foreign policy, and sometimes I wonder just how pragmatic these pull-out-of-Iraq plans are. We don't want to bolster America's terrible (i.e., nonexistent) postwar strategy with a terrible withdrawal strategy.
Meanwhile, anyone who hasn't seen it yet should check out No End in Sight. It's not exactly a Valentine's Day treat, though.
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A couple of years ago, for reasons that I can't remember, if they ever existed, I decided to do an unscientific research project on circumcision. I asked men who'd been circumcised as adults and experienced sex both ways, to write in about which they liked better. My findings, two Valentine's Days ago:
Of the 79 men who'd experienced sex snipped and unsnipped, 43 said sex improved (55 percent) after their circumcisions, 23 said it went downhill (29 percent), and 13 said there was no change or a mix of pros and cons (16 percent). My numbers don't differ much from the latest research: Based on a sample of 84 men who'd been circumcised as adults for medical reasons, a 2005 article in Urologia Internationalis found a 61 percent satisfaction rate, with 38 percent saying that penile sensation improved after the procedure, 18 percent saying it got worse, and the rest reporting no change. (Read more if you really want to.)
In the meantime, to my surprise the topic has become unfrivolous. Studies have shown that circumcision helps prevent the transmission of HIV and AIDS. In the absence of a vaccine, it looks like the next best thing. (Though apparently only for men--no evidence that it decreases the risk for women.) A South African study found that men who thought that circumcised men enjoy sex more than uncircumcised one were seven times more likely to have the procedure. And so a research team in Uganda conducted a large-scale study: 2,210 men were randomly chosen for the snip; 2,246 served as a control group. They were followed for two years. Results: A sexual satisfaction rate of more than 98 percent for both groups.This is so high that it seems incredible. But Ronald Grey, one of the lead researchers and a Johns Hopkins professor, defends it. He pointed out to me that in know-nothing studies like mine, people who feel strongly are inevitably over-represented, and that could bring the anti-snip folk out in droves. The Urologia study has a different problem: The men in it were circumcised for medical reasons, which means their experiences may not reflect other men's. The Uganda research, Grey thinks, is the first and only effort to track thousands of men who were perfectly healthy etc, before and after. So for the moment, at least, the question seems to be settled: circumcised men shouldn't worry about what their missing. Except there's just one thing: The researchers didn't ask them the relative question--whether sex got better or worse after the snip. Next study. Or maybe there are some things we're better off being left to wonder.