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Hanna, I think it's a misnomer that wanting a "sugar daddy" is a generational thing. While I posed the initial question, it was more an observation based on themes in The Secret Currency of Love rather than a personal conviction. Purely anecdotally, I've noticed that my fellow Gen-Y female friends would rather die than "opt out," sugar daddies or no. We've heard horror stories about women leaving their fast-paced jobs for several years to tend to their children, and when they come back they're unemployable; we've seen women of our mothers' generation spend their days with the PTA until a divorce sends them back into a workplace for which they're ill-equipped. Here's a cautionary tale that I often think about: A female rock star from the '90s with a cult following now has an incredibly rich and well-known boyfriend. I heard through the grapevine that all she does these days is sit in his townhouse and smoke cloves and go to yoga. She never writes music. That story makes me want to barf.
As a group, I think we're incredibly ambitious, and I can at least say for myself that I would hate going freelance unless I was so wildly successful that I could guarantee a series of lucrative assignments and continued relevance. It would make me too nervous otherwise. I like having a title and, like Dahlia, a dental plan.
I think what Sam is getting at is not that women in their 20s want a benefactor; it's that they want to work hard and succeed in the field of their choice and not worry about paying for private school for their future children. Perhaps in these economic times it's entitled, E.J., or a pipe dream, June, but I don't think it's an entirely unreasonable hope.
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Dahlia, how would a sugar daddy give you the freedom to work and take care of your kids, too? Because then you can outsource the rest of the treadmill, not just doing the dishes but also buying Hanukkah presents?
My own feeling about work-life balance is that the problem isn't work and it isn't the kids: It's all the other expectations of middle-class life, some of them, at least, self-inflicted. Do I—do my husband and I, I should say—really need to have friends over for brunch this weekend and throw my older son's birthday party? And so I do fantasize about a fairy godmother who whisks all the errands away. (In the meantime, shopping on the Web helps. A lot.) But I'm with Hanna, for this reason along with many other good feminist ones: Money is power. If you make it, you also make decisions. If you don't, you often end up deferring to the breadwinner. Not always, but often, and no matter how well-intentioned and theoretically equality-espousing both partners or spouses are. Such is my observation, anyway.
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Dahlia, I think you've introduced the missing ingredient that Dana, too, stirred into the equation: kids. And Hanna, mother of three, I wonder what you say to this: the fantasy of having the security (courtesy of a spouse with a regular, and large enough, paycheck or some other source of support) to mix being the person overseeing the kids and their care with being a freelancer who also pursues meaningful, if sometimes less-than-predictable, work.
Isn't that a reality that plenty of well-educated, lucky couples pursue, or would like to? (I'm not saying they choose each other with that in mind, or that it's the savviest course given the prospect of divorce, but it's where they end up.) I agree that it's more often the woman who gets the child + part-time work gig, while the man does the more regular breadwinning. And I would say that she may well sometimes publicly gnash her teeth that she isn't the one who's been able to pursue the "real" career while perhaps privately not really being so sorry that she gets to be with the kids a lot and have a more flexible, and often less stressful, work life. Does she face up to the contradictions of her predicament? Perhaps not; we all have our fantasies. But sometimes—increasingly, I would hope—the man may well be the juggler, and my bet is he's all but guaranteed to be belly-aching rather than thanking his sugar-mommy, whatever he really feels.
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I agree with June. Except it’s not that I suspect that all journalists secretly fantasize about becoming freelancers (two words: dental plan). I just suspect that every working woman secretly fantasizes about marrying someone with boatloads of money. Not because, as Jessica suggests, we all secretly dream of princess-hood. No, I think it’s because the myth of work-life balance has been so thoroughly demolished at this point that any rational woman understands it’s not to be had.
Sarah Palin? Bad mom for refusing to defer her career for her kids. Caroline Kennedy? Bad senator for refusing to defer caring for her kids to pursue her career. Only way out? Marry someone so rich, you can work and take care of your kids at the same time! I’m not sure that opposing such a strategy makes you a retro-feminist, Hanna. I just think that given the sheer impossibility of balancing work and kids, a young woman isn’t totally insane to dream of a corner office and a nanny.
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I’m with Hanna, June, and E.J.: I prefer my sugar self-administered and have never entertained the fantasy of being kept by a sucrose parent of either sex. (Having money and nice things, without having to work hard to pay for them … that’s a whole 'nother fantasy.) Before going on (unpaid) maternity leave, I freelanced like a mofo to sock away money, embarrassed by the prospect of going to my partner hat in hand—though I’m sure he would have been both willing and able to spot me on living expenses had I run short at the end. Maybe this is a result of growing up with a Jill Clayburgh-ian '70s working mother (though my parents stayed married and were well enough off). Honestly, I’ve never even understood what still seems to be an acceptable default assumption that a man should pick up the tab in restaurants on dates. Why, because I have a physiognomy that’s potentially capable of childbearing, should I not be responsible for providing my own nutrition? And doesn’t that moment when the guy gets out his wallet and you don’t do jack make the whole dinner feel like a sordid transaction?
Of course, there’s a world of difference between “someday my prince will come” and a couple with a child making a life that makes sense for them: You work while I take care of the kid for a few years. Then later, when the kid is in school, I go back to work, or maybe we take turns. For people doing it, this arrangement, which often makes more financial and emotional sense than “let’s both work like dogs to pay the baby-sitter,” is often experienced as the furthest thing from a luxury.
I remember thinking about this stuff when Meryl Streep’s character sang “Money, Money, Money” in Mamma Mia!, as a fantasy sequence showed her being kept in style by a zillionaire. The character Streep played, an independent ex-hippie single mother running an inn in Greece, seemed an odd candidate to entertain such a reverie. But, you know, they had to work all those great ABBA songs in somehow.
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Or so said Harold Robbins. And I agree. Twelve years in the freelance game—sometimes making a lot of money, sometimes making very little money—oh, what I wouldn't do for a sugar daddy. Freelancing is a tough, lonely business. The idea of a man lining my pockets with enough cash to not have to worry about the rest and focus on the writing sounds like a small slice of writerly heaven to me.
Walter Benjamin: "For you ask all too timidly: 'Either all women are prostitutes or no women are?' No: 'Either all people are prostitutes or no one is.' Well, choose your own answer. But I say: We all are. Or should be."
I'd venture if the stigma was lesser, there'd be more male writers out there riding the sugar-mommy train. Too bad feminist rhetoric doesn't pay my bills.
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Isn't the sugar daddy—or, for some of us, the sugar mommy—just a lovely fantasy? And aren't people's fantasies supposed to be off limits for criticism? (I'm not entirely sure what the official position is on that last issue these days.)
I love my job, but are there times when I wouldn't rather pursue my own wonderful creative flights of fancy—research and write the stories I think are fascinating and important? Sure! Doesn't everyone with a full-time job fantasize about walking away, at least now and again? For those of us in journalism, that fantasy has a name: going freelance.
Of course, the reality is rather different. There are many successful, high-earning freelance journalists—several of them contribute to this blog—and then there are a lot of people struggling to pay the rent and others being subsidized by their families.
I would never voluntarily go freelance—I'm an immigrant, and I don't have family who could bail me out if I didn't sell enough stories or if a check didn't come through—but naturally I've dreamed about that special someone reaching across the dinner table and saying, "Pookie, your ideas are so wonderful, I don't want to deprive readers of them any longer. Why don't you give up your job and just focus on your own projects? Don't worry; I'll take care of the bills so we can stay in our lovely apartment in this fabulous neighborhood, and we can keep premium cable, and have a fresh batch of bonbons delivered every Monday. ..."
And then I wake up.
In other words, writers (and just about every other group of people) would be crazy not to have this fantasy. Just so long as they don't expect it to come true ...
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Samantha and Jessica: My objection to the sugar-daddy system is that I don't think it actually helps female journalists or journalism. Instead, sugar daddies have contributed to a Carrie Bradshaw-wannabe effect among women writers. Rather than serving as the means to a career goal, these men and the lifestyle they've supported become the material. And women, who are still not often enough asked to contribute content that has nothing to do with gender, aren't doing themselves any favors by writing more personal essays about marrying up or how-tos on the art of the affair.
Entry-level journalism jobs are high on gruntwork and low on both pay and respect, it’s true. And while I'm not sure how much a sugar daddy would help the respect aspect of that equation, they do help stave off being broke. So I don’t have a problem so much with the existence of sugar daddies—I just don't want to read about them.
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Jessica, Samantha: I recognize this impulse, the vague belief of some middle-class or upper-middle-class girls and young women (primarily white, I think; don't know if brown and black women have this too) that the world owes them a living so that their creative, artistic, interesting inner selves can be supported and thrive. I certainly had this in my 20s, when I graduated from college with my brilliance in English literature and writing poetry. I was shocked by the cold, brutal world of the itty-bitty paycheck and the boring filing jobs. I think this vague sense that we will be rescued—whether by NEA grants, as I imagined, or by a sugar daddy—is a serious problem in girls' upbringings and inner lives. It's what worries me about the cult of the princess toys for girls.
Here's what I've come to feel, in the decades since: I was insanely lucky to be a lesbian. Not just because girls are so much cuter than boys (ahem!!), but because it's forced me to test myself in the harsh world of the market ... and to grow up. No more protecting my precious creativity! I've had to market it. It's terrifying at first, but a gas, really, to get good at negotiating and at making demands in charming ways, to stop being afraid of being smart in public, and all the other challenges that grow from knowing that no one is ever gonna support you—so you have to figure out how to support yourself (and potentially a family). Honestly, I feel my life is much bigger, more rewarding, and richer precisely because I never had the sugar-daddy option.
So Samantha—don't do it. Don't retreat. Figure out how to dive in and turn your education and talents into your own income. Not only will you be safer from the post-divorce poverty that struck my mother waaaaay back in the late 1970s, which still strikes too many women who rely on their husbands' incomes, and of course, from the widow's poverty that strikes when the husband's pension and Social Security dies with him—but you'll respect yourself more in the morning.
Toward that end, some interesting reading: Linda Hirshman's Get To Work struck me as harsh, but I know a lot of young women who have found her message to be bracing and helpful. Anna Fels' Necessary Dreams takes a good look at the female retreat from work as well. And Hannah Seligson's New Girl on the Job has some good practical suggestions about how to cope with the scary, nasty office.
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This conversation is scaring me. I have never, ever had a thought like this in my life, I swear. Either that's because I grew up with no money (although I suppose that could have had the opposite effect). Or because I am of a different generation. How did this happen, that it's suddenly old school to think that, as a woman, you should be able to independently support yourself, even if you are married? I wonder if this is because I grew up in the Donna Summers era, when all my friends' moms were getting divorced, so they had to be self-sufficient. There are moments in my marriage when I feel I am drifting into dependency, letting my husband take care of all the bills and car repairs, etc. And then I feel very, very annoyed with myself. I was very happy when Tami, Coach's wife on Friday Night Lights and my favorite TV wife, finally got a paying job and put baby Grace in day care. Am I like some kind of retro-feminist now?
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Susannah,
Thank you for sharing the news about Shepard Fairey and his famous Obama artwork. One thing that struck me right away was how he handled his displeasure that Obama selected Rick Warren to give the invocation. Instead of throwing a tantrum, he's going to take some of the earnings he's getting for an inaugural poster and donate them to the movement to overturn Prop 8 in California. It's a targeted response, and very smart and level-headed.
Which strikes me as a great contrast to the way some other artists—pop and rock musicians—behaved during the election. Heart, John Mellancamp, and others, upon learning that the McCain campaign had licensed their music to use at campaign rallies, stomped their feet and whined and sent cease-and-desist letters. Wouldn't it have been more appropriate, especially from these wealthy celebrities, had they said to themselves, "Wow. I'm not comfortable having made money from a politician whose views I don't share. Let me take that money and give it to a cause I believe in." It would have been more appropriate, but a cease-and-desist letter is free AND attracts attention.
Fairey's gesture, on the other hand, seems far more meaningful.
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Jessica, I fear I am solidly, if not proudly, in Abby Ellin's camp. It's not that I want to be rich, exactly, but I do want those upper-middle-class comforts: separate bedrooms for the kids; occasional family vacations to far-flung countries; the assurance that I'll be able to send my kids to the college that's right for them, even if it's not the cheapest option. And, at least at age 8 or so, I also wanted a second car for my house in the country ... but that's a dream I'm willing to give up.
I remember in college having a long discussion about exactly what kind of sugar daddy would be right for me. I figured an investment banker or corporate lawyer wouldn't really work, since I find those professions fairly dull and have always had high on my List of Traits for My Future Husband that he have a job I enjoy hearing about at the dinner table. The other obvious choice was old money, but that didn't seem right either—I had spent a year of high school at a ritzy Manhattan private school (sandwiched among 12 years of public school in suburban Maryland) and found it tough to relate to the über wealthy there. By the end of that college conversation—still completely unaware of what my starting salary would be after graduation or if I'd even manage to snag a journalism job—I had at least one thing sorted out: I'd need to find an inventor of some kind, a creative thinker entrepreneurial enough to turn his grand idea into an equally grand paycheck. And then I'd need to marry him.
I don't think that any of that fantasizing (creepy as it was) took away from my assumption that taking care of myself would be my responsibility long before I brought a partner on to share the burden. My first priority out of college wasn't finding that inventor; it was getting health insurance. And unlike Karen Karbo, I've never let my boyfriends pick up all the tabs.
But I will say that I get it. I get how someone with a strong working mother can still grow up with this notion that she will be provided for in a vague sense that, when probed, starts to materialize as a man. And although I'm sure part of that stems from growing up in a society that continues to trumpet the notion—although obviously more subtly these days, than in the Mad Men era—of woman being cared for by man, I think another part is just the general tendency for people of both sexes to imagine things they can't have, then make the logical leaps to whatever missing factor might make those things possible. I've known for a long time that I won't have a job that gives me that extra car for my country home. And it seems less dangerous for me to occasionally wonder if a marriage might make that possible than to start hoping something like the lottery will.
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Emily, I also agree with the Obama ban on strollers at the inauguration, but not because the crowd needs to be protected from babies (and their means of transportation). Here I am wondering whether it will be safe to take newly minted teenagers into the crowds that day—most parents I know are leaning against it—and toddlers would surely be at risk, no?
Update: Oops, now that I have read Hanna's post, I take it back: I'm sure it will be fine!
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Emily, I, like you, am long past the days when I think I am entitled to bring my baby absolutely everywhere. I, too, have embarrassing memories of nicking ankles on the streets of San Francisco, or Brooklyn, or downtown D.C. and blithely walking on by as the offended pedestrians burned holes in my back with their eyes. But here is my current reality: I live here. I have three children, one of them an infant. I feel like missing the opportunity to witness this moment because of some small, boring concerns (he needs to nap, she will get tired, blah blah blah) is pretty depressing. And frankly, a stroller will make all the difference. There are only so many hours on a winter day you can hold a baby and satisfy two other children. With a stroller, I can just shove the baby in and the snacks on the bottom and be on my merry way. So yes, the Park Service is probably right, but they are seriously ruining my day.
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Hilary Black, the editor of an anthology called The Secret Currency of Love: The Unabashed Truth About Women, Money, and Relationships, was on the Today show this morning, gabbing with Ann Curry about—what else?—love and money. I read a good chunk of the anthology earlier this week and was struck by a thread running through several of the essays, most of which were written by women who supported themselves as freelance writers. Many of these women came from upper-middle-class backgrounds, and while it took them a while to admit to themselves, they all secretly expected that some wealthyish dude would ultimately rescue them from their quasi-bohemian, small trust-funded existences. Abby Ellin described it best in her essay, "Tool Belts, Not Tuxes":
And okay, there's this: I've always been taken care of. My family never had great wealth, but my parents managed to send me to camp and college and graduate school—an extraordinary gift for which I'm eternally grateful. And they even bought me an apartment. ... And so this leads to a mortifying admission—especially for a feminist who was taught that every woman should possess both her own bank account and the ability to be self-sufficient. On some level, I always believed that eventually someone else would take care of the big stuff. That someone, of course, would be my husband.
Another contributor to the anthology, Karen Karbo, expressed similar sentiments in her essay "The Secret Economy of Women" (which appeared in a truncated form in the Times Modern Love column as "Accidental Breadwinner"). All of which leads me to the larger question: Do loads of smart, educated, feminist women avoid less flexible, more time-consuming career tracks not because they're fulfilling their inner artist or because they want to have time for kids but because deep down they still expect that some man will take care of them? Or, as Ann Curry put it this morning—does every freelance writer secretly want to be a princess?
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No strollers at the Obama inauguration? As a mother who once rolled her jogging stroller down crowded Market Street in San Francisco, front wheel blithely nipping at people's heels, I was all set to bristle over this. But you know what? That's an embarrassing memory. Strollers don't fit absolutely everywhere. Sometimes they cause trouble for other people, and sometimes, no matter how precious the children in them are, those other people's interests should win out. If the no-strollers proviso applied to the entire Mall, I'd be on the side of all those parents of toddlers out there who are now scrambling to figure out what to do with the 2-year-old. But it's only the 240,000 ticket holders for the swearing-in ceremony who are affected. If the Park Service thinks the space they'll be crammed into can't accommodate strollers or diaper-changing stations—well, maybe they deserve the benefit of the doubt.