NAN MOONEY

The latest from Nan Mooney

2010-07-13T16:59:00.001-04:00

The timely and alarming book that tells the story of our declining professional middle class...

Educator, artist, social worker, not-for-profit administrator, journalist—these white-collar professions are typically populated with college-educated, middle class professionals who forgo big-money careers in finance, medicine or law to pursue more “meaningful” work in creative and service-oriented sectors.

But increasingly, these career choices are leaving middle class professionals struggling to make ends meet, let alone fulfill social expectations and reach the economic stability of the “American dream.”

Through hundreds of interviews with families and individuals from across America, award-winning journalist Nan Mooney traces how and why today’s educated professional middle class is experiencing financial volatility more profound and paralyzing than the struggles experienced by previous generations. In (Not) Keeping Up With Our Parents, Mooney illustrates how members of this class are increasingly opting out of creative and service-oriented careers, choosing to delay or forgo having children, carrying significant debt well into middle age, and struggling so hard to keep their own finances secure that they have little resources to offer those less fortunate. The issues they face—negotiating massive student loan and credit card debt, struggling to pay for health and child care, and choosing between funding their children’s education and their own retirement—reveal an entire segment of society teetering on the edge.

In response, Mooney encourages today’s professional middle class to overcome their sense of fear and resignation and engage in the prospect of change. She proposes ways individuals and communities can stop the economic downward spiral—from advocating for more government support for education, child care, health care and retirement, to initiating a shift in values so that self worth is no longer defined by the size of one’s bank account.

Who's Stripping Who?

2006-01-09T14:30:00.000-05:00

So, Morgan Stanley has made the bold move of firing four lower level male employees (an equity research analyst and three institutional equity sales staffers) for visiting a strip club in their off-time while at a company conference in Arizona. Read all about it in Wall Street Folly.

The ramifications are fierce. Wall Street is quivering in its gold-plated boots. Where will brokers go to do business? Golf courses are a whole helicopter jaunt away and it takes hours of chipping away at that little ball before any real deals get struck. A restaurant? Or, god forbid, the office? Strip club owners are positively apoplectic. Without the Wall Street crowd, 90% of them are sure to go under in six months or less. First the Disneyfication of Times Square and then this? It’s just not right.

But women? Hmmm…Way to go Morgan Stanley. Way to put yourself out there and make a stand for equality in the workplace. None of that “this is just for show” stuff. We look after our women. We give them how much maternity leave? We have how many women on our board of directors and management committee? We give how much back to women-oriented charities? Ahem, cough, cough. Excuse us. Doesn’t someone have a merger they want us to discuss?

Those high level women who sued you for gender discrimination, with the backing of the EEOC, didn’t do it just because they wanted you guys to stop going to strip clubs. They did it because they worked in an old boy biz where they were denied raises and promotions they’d earned just as surely as Mr. Heavy Breather next door. And out of that $54 million settlement you agreed to in 2004, I don’t recall the judge earmarking a single cent for strip club visit reduction.

Taking steps to de-emphasize the crude and lewd that’s typically been part of Wall Street culture isn’t by any means a bad thing. But it seems to me that focusing on one faux pas by four horny little analysts is for the most part beside the point. Unless – oh, you clever, clever Morgan Stanley boys (and at the tippity top, the board of directors, it’s all still boys but one) – such distraction was the point.

Interesting strategy.
But I don’t think the girls are going to fall for it.

One Fundamental Pain in the Ass

2006-01-04T15:47:00.000-05:00

A quote from Sheila Nevins, president of HBO’s documentary and family division:

"In corporate life, you have to summon up the courage to be what may appear to be difficult in the name of your talents."

A somewhat more circumspect way of saying you can’t be afraid to piss people off. I pulled this from a profile of Nevins on womensenews.org in which she also refers to herself as a “fundamental pain in the ass.” In a way that makes it clear she’s very proud of the fact.

Nevins is a risk-taker of the first order. HBO documentaries don’t feature a lot of cuddly characters and dry talking heads. She’s also a woman with a passion and a vision (not to mention one serious hair-do) who doesn’t sit around and whine and cower when things don’t go her way. She’s learned to master the two big B’s – bitchcraft and balls – and we’re all better off because of it. You've gotta admire that kind of fearlessness.

Go Sheila go.

One of our Own

2005-12-30T11:26:00.000-05:00

I love all the “Best and Worst of” lists that come out this time of year. Sometimes they veer towards the absurd. Often times they veer towards the redundant. But you’ve got to admit it’s useful to find someone who has literally seen every movie to come out in the past 52 weeks and is willing to winnow it down to just 10.

Of course the low point collections are far more entertaining than the high. Humanity boiled down to its most appalling. Take this Media Matters for America list of the “Most Outrageous Statements of 2005.” Obviously, the Media Matters people had a treasure trove to draw from, but I was pleased to note that the only woman who made the list was the infamously offensive Ann Coulter (though she did make it twice). I know this is in part because there aren’t as many female pundits. But I also like to think it’s because women aren’t quite a quick to say stupid things.

Now I could make some crack here about Raging Ann really being a man or just barely qualifying for womanhood or whatever. But I think the far more provocative point (and if there’s one thing that lady understands it’s provocative) is that Ann Coulter is pure woman, from her goldilocks tresses right down to the stiletto heels. Just because there’s not an inch of her that’s soft and sweet, just because she wants to bomb North Korea out of existence, doesn’t make her any less female than Mother Teresa. There are those women, those feminists, who would say her hard-line conservative rhetoric and propensity for posing with handguns make Ann “other.” Just like there are those who find Condoleezza Rice or Margaret Thatcher beyond the feminine pale. But once we’ve crossed that line, it’s awfully difficult to come back again. What makes a woman a woman? True, I find Ann Coulter offensive, but she’s got just as much claim on her femininity as I do. There was a time not so long ago when being ambitious or having a career or even voicing an opinion made a woman so offensive, so unwomanly, she was ostracized from society.

The array of options open up to women these days has taken us down some dark roads, revealing that female does not necessarily equal compassionate and maternal, but none so dark as the road that says real women are required to act and react a certain way. The idea that if women ruled the world there would be no wars or violence seems outrageous enough to make the Media Matters list. What would we do with the Ann Coulters and Margaret Thatchers? Hang them in the town square? If we’re going to say a whole world of choices should be open to women — and it most certainly should — then we have to be willing to allow for the choices those women make.

Three Cheers For Dirty Politics

2005-12-24T11:11:00.000-05:00

This one doesn’t require much interpretation from me. The item is cribbed from Wonkette, who deserves her own entry one of these days since the woman climbed to blogger infamy due almost entirely to her slutty, sassy and oh so self-centered self.

The details of the story go as follows: Detroit city councilwoman elect, Monica Conyers, wife of Democratic Representative John Conyers, apparently punched another woman, Rebecca Mews, in the face in the middle of a birthday party at some bar in Detroit.

Accounts of the actual incident vary. Shockingly, some alcohol consumption and shouting of obscene invective seem to have been involved. But one thing’s damn clear. Ms. Mews walked away from things with one hell of a shiner (Wonkette runs the photo to prove it).

Conyers’ representatives labeled her behavior as “vigorously defending herself” but we know better. Barroom brawling is a close and much more exciting cousin to bitchcraft. No “good girl” knows how to throw a punch like that.

Contingency Plans

2005-12-20T13:56:00.000-05:00

This may not, on the surface, seem directly related to the subject of bitchcraft but stay with me because I do have a larger point. And because I’m sitting in New York in the midst of a transit strike which means I’ll be walking 100 blocks to work in 30 degree weather and don’t really know how I’ll get home again.

Mayor Bloomberg has come up with what he calls a contingency plan for commuters. For the most part, it entails carpooling, walking and riding your bike. This isn’t such a bad plan. Though many city residents don’t own cars, it’s a cold day but sunny, and most of us could benefit from some brisk fresh air. But really it only works for the 9 to 5 crowd.

For example, when I get off work at nine p.m. tonight it will be dark and it will be cold and there are a few “sketchy after nightfall” blocks between there and here. I can’t walk home. And there’s a whole night economy - waitstaff, maintenance workers, musicians, actors, anyone employed at a restaurant, club, or movie theater - that will emerge into the city at nine or midnight or four a.m. needing a way home. Most of them depend on mass transit because they fall into that financial category for which hopping a cab (presuming you can find one) to the outer reaches where most of them live isn’t an option. Add to this the fact that plenty of these after dark workers are paid by the hour and can’t afford to just not show up, nor can they work from home. The city’s contingency plan has left a good portion of those people who rely on mass transit literally out in the cold.

So here’s where I get to the women part. I see this as just one example of a larger problem: a society that never looks beyond a 9 to 5 working world, despite that fact that much of its population lives, breathes and struggles like hell there. For those who don’t hold typical day jobs, it’s near impossible to get loans, apartments, insurance, and the list goes on. And women – because we’re poorer, shoulder heavier family responsibilities, and are more likely to work odd hours – often wind up the prime residents of this fringe world. Without some help from the higher ups, without a few contingency plans that take us into account, we’re going to wind up shattering to a gazillion pieces.

And men, god bless them, are not know for their skills with cleaning up a mess.

The Bitchcraft Soundtrack (Part Two)

2005-12-19T14:20:00.000-05:00

Had it with holiday odes to virgins and angels? Try slipping in some of these bad girl tunes instead:

A Woman’s Worth – Alicia Keys
Just Like a Woman – Bob Dylan
Lady Marmalade – Patti LaBelle
The Lady is a Tramp – Ella Fitzgerald
Women Hate Women – Chris Rock
Natural Woman – Aretha Franklin
Too Many Good Looking Women – The Country Knights Band
I am Woman, Hear Me Roar – Helen Reddy
Two-Faced Woman – Nappy Brown
W.O.M.A.N. – Etta James
Thug Girl - SPM
Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves – Aretha Franklin
The Girl Is on to You – Bette Midler
Lady – Lenny Kravitz
How Strong Is a Woman – Etta James
I’m Just a Girl - ABBA
Lady Sings the Blues – Billie Holiday

Let the good times roll…

What's Behind Shrub #1?

2005-12-15T14:09:00.000-05:00

When it comes to women who excel at Bitchcraft, Anna Wintour has earned her spot right at the head of the pack. How many people have had an assistant write not just a thinly veiled novel, but a raging bestseller about her boss’s over-the-top evil deeds? (Lauren Weisberger’s “The Devil Wears Prada”). When it comes to dealing with minions, and for the Editor-in-Chief of Vogue almost everyone qualifies as a minion, Anna does demanding and difficult like Lance does the Tour de France.

For example: Check out this story in Gawker about Miz Wintour’s “lunch” date at Balthazar in New York’s Soho earlier this week. (Lunch in quotes because I don’t think this woman exists on anything but Red Bull and ground glass). Anna insisted on a private room. Balthazar insisted there were no private rooms to be had. Anna insisted again. So, the always eager to bow and scrape to celebs restaurant did the next best thing. They built a hedge around her table. Yes, you read that right. They built a hedge right there in the restaurant for Anna and company to hide and hold court behind. Keep in mind that Balthazar is in the concrete heart of New York City. Gardening only happens here under the most extreme circumstances.

Now, one could ask why Anna couldn’t just order in and enjoy plenty of privacy in her own office, even her own floor, at Conde Nast. But of course the point wasn’t not to be seen, but to be seen not being seen. The point was to be demanding and difficult. The point was to be a bitch.

Sure Anna is a special case. But she’s a damn powerful woman and there are few enough of those that we can’t simply write any of them off as an exception to the overarching sisterhood rule. When people assure you that women who rise to the top would never abuse power the way men do, all you have to do is point a big fat finger at scrawny Ms. Wintour and say:

“Look at her.”

Presuming, of course, there are no hedges in the room at the time.

The Money Girls

2005-12-12T10:30:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, the L.A. gossip blog Defamer (the tinseltown sister of the NY gossip blog Gawker) ran a tidbit about the ten highest paid actresses in the biz. You can consult the defaming experts for the fully skinny on what these girls make, but here are the names in question, ranked in order of most valuable to least (as their pay ranges from 20 million to 9, the word least here is extremely relative):

Julia Roberts
Nicole Kidman
Reese Witherspoon
Drew Barrymore
Rene Zellweger
Angelina Jolie
Cameron Diaz
Jodie Foster
Charlize Theron
Jennifer Aniston

I just think this list tells us so much about what we as a culture value in our women. All young, white and skinny. Predominately blond or blond-ish. Predominately expert at the sweet, goofy, lost, vulnerable, bumbling sort of a role. Predominately incapable of managing their personal lives. We’ve got mostly good girls (Julia, Reese, Cameron, Jennifer, Rene). A couple bad girls (Angelina and possibly, in a stretch, Nicole). But a definite lack of complicated girls who stretch our imaginations, not even one of those sharp, sexy femme fatales of yore. A few of these have tackled rough, complicated, not entirely likable roles in the past – think Jodie Foster in "The Accused," Charlize Theron in "Monster," Nicole Kidman in "To Die For" — but it's stuff like "Charlie’s Angels" and "Legally Blond" that’s made them America’s gold-plated sweethearts. In fact, if not for the fact that Jodie Foster (god bless her) is still clinging to the bottom end of that list, this could easily double as the cast for the next Victoria’s Secret prime time fashion show.

Let’s face it. We don’t like our women strong and complicated. Even though they are. I guess my point here is to encourage women to fight it. Don’t sugarcoat and sanitize yourself. Be strong and complicated. Hell, be a femme fatale if you can pull it off. I wish I could. Do whatever you want, but don’t fall for the message (engineered mostly be men wishing like hell they could bag her) that Cameron Diaz is the new feminine ideal. Hollywood may not be able to better than that, but we can.

I Can't Believe She Wrote That

2005-12-09T09:49:00.000-05:00

One more note on Maureen, then I’ll give you a break on the Dowd front. I promise.

A couple readers have mentioned to me that they “can’t believe” what Maureen Dowd did to her friend Judith Miller (i.e. writing a column blasting Miller’s professional ethics), and isn’t that just what I’m writing about and how sad to see women backstabbing each other at such a high and highly visible professional level.

The answer is: What are you talking about? No, it’s not what I’m writing about, at least not in the way you think. I applaud Maureen Dowd 100%. Let’s consider our priorities here. Personally, I can’t believe what Judith Miller did to the reading public, not to mention the journalism profession, by feeding us straight from the source White House claptrap on the Iraq War. I can’t believe other women think Maureen was supposed to stand by and say nothing because she should appear unconditionally supportive to her fellow female reporters. I do believe that she made a choice that was totally within her rights, in fact part of her journalistic responsibility, to call Judith Miller to task for sinking so low. How could she in good conscious do anything else?

Though Dowd begins her column with the words “I’ve always liked Judy Miller,” simple admiration does not a friendship make. From what I’ve read elsewhere, these two women were never friends and assuming such buddy-hood just because they work together starts us down a dangerous road. Dowd and Miller were two women in the same office. Period. They existed with a respectful tension that got shot to pieces when the truth about Miller’s questionable ethics went public. There’s no reason on god’s green earth that Maureen Dowd should have been nice to or easy on Judith Miller. It wouldn’t have served Dowd or Miller or women in general for the members of the Gray Lady sisterhood to cover for each other no matter what.

My guess is that if Judith was Jim, and Maureen was Marty, no one would be questioning a single fork-tongued word. Maureen Dowd did her job as a journalist by calling Miller out, and she did it well.

End of story.

The Educated Choice

2005-12-06T14:21:00.000-05:00

There’s an article by Linda Hirshman in this month’s American Prospect that’s been making the rounds among young mothers I know. It’s a dense article, one that I could easily crack open and examine piece by piece, but after subjecting you to a mini-lecture on the Maureen Dowd-ing of single female America the other day, I’m going to keep it relatively short and sweet. But I encourage other to read the entire, entirely thought-provoking, piece and let me know your reaction.

In very brief, Hirshman tackles the idea of whether women truly have a choice about whether to pursue careers or stay home to raise a family. Her premise is that though women now have opportunities in the workplace, we’re still held back by the fact that we’re expected to be entirely responsible for managing the domestic sphere. Her article focuses on the privileged, college (really Ivy League) educated few, and I take exception to her assertion that those women set the trends and therefore merit more attention. But she is shining a light on a problem that affects many of us ordinary folk: the impossibility of juggling it all.

I agree with Hirshman that domestic responsibilities need to be more evenly split, for the good of both genders. But perhaps this cutback on women’s in-house duties isn’t the only thing that has to change. I was struck by how easily Hirshman equated being professionally successful and making piles of money with mattering in this world. Granted those who accrue wealth and power can often be far more influential, for better or worse, than those who don’t. Bill Gates giving away 58% of his net worth is going to have a hell of a lot more impact than me giving away 58% of mine. But Cindy Sheehan isn’t rich and she single-handedly rocked the public perception of the Iraq War. Martin Luther King wasn’t raking in the bucks. Neither was Rosa Parks.

I don’t see paving the way for women to have high-powered careers as the answer. It’s not like men get all the glory because they get to go to the office all day. By now, women should know better than that. Work can be grueling, thankless, torture on the ego – both for hedge fund managers and stay at home parents. When given the choice to leave the corporate killing fields, to “opt out,” plenty of us, male and female, would step up and say “yes, please.”

One of Hirshman’s primary suggestions is to make college education for women more vocational and less, well, educational. She talks about stream-lining women onto business oriented tracks so they have an easier time getting jobs that will earn them actual nest eggs instead of flitting around in fields like art and history. But is the point of education to make money? Isn’t there a larger issue at stake here? Like making us better human beings? Like giving us the knowledge necessary to make choices about our futures and future values? Do we really want to tweak our education system to further enforce the message that money = worth?

It seems that the problem here lies in the fact that there’s so little middle ground, that it’s either sacrifice everything or opt out entirely. What if workplaces treated career and family as something everyone should be balancing in their lives? If hours were shorter, and the cost of living less mind-bogglingly expensive (forgive me but in live in New York city where there’s a $20 toll just to get out your front door)? Idealistic, I know, but I majored in theater, so what do you expect?

Here’s a quote from a speech Toni Morrison made at a Barnard College graduation in 1979:

“If education is to have value as well as price; if it is to have meaning as well as substance, then it must be about something other than careers and power. The pursuit of a liberal education and the pursuit of the arts and sciences cannot be simply about husbanding beauty, isolating goods and making sure enrichment is the privilege of a few. The function of a twentieth-century education must be to produce humane human beings. To refuse to continue to produce generation after generation of people trained to make expedient decisions rather than humane ones. You are the women who will take your place in the world where you can decide who shall flourish and who shall wither; you will make distinctions between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor; where you can yourself determine which life is expendable and which is indispensable. Since you will have the power to do it, you may also be persuaded that you have the right to do it. As educated women the distinction between the two is first-order business.”

Now that’s what I call a noble end.

The Perils of Maureen

2005-12-04T11:44:00.000-05:00

I’ve noticed a new phenomenon among single, college-educated women in their mid-thirties to mid-forties. I call it the “Maureen Dowd Effect.” It’s similar in content to that mid-eighties “women over 40 have a better chance of getting killed by a terrorist than getting married” hysteria and it goes something like this: “Oh my god, did you see/hear that piece on Maureen Dowd in/on (insert The New York Times, New York Magazine, NPR etc.). If someone like Maureen Dowd can’t find a man then I’m definitely doomed,” usually accompanied by melodramatic hand gestures.

Now that terrorist study was proved flawed, notably by Susan Faludi in her book Backlash, and I’m assuming that Maureen Dowd, who’s not even a study but an individual, will prove flawed as well. But I think this fear she awakens, that as smart and ambitious single women we’ve done something wrong which ensures we’ll never find love, is very much worth addressing. And though I don’t agree with Maureen that smart men are looking for dumb women, I don’t entirely disagree with her either.

The thing is, relationships – particularly the long-term sort – require work. And in the past, most of that work was taken on by women. We didn’t have careers and other weighty outside concerns the way men did. Nobody was expected to do it all. Instead, there was this tidy professional/domestic labor split. Men tended to the outside world, women to the in. Obviously that’s now changed. These days women – and I think the real heavy surge starts with women in the 35-45 range who grew up in the seventies – are pursuing careers just like the guys do, with all the investment of time and energy that entails. But in the throes of the women’s movement, we forgot that, with everyone working so damn hard on their careers, no one would be working on the relationships. Except, of course, those women who aren’t chasing success as hard as their male counterparts. These women can feel threatening because they’re rolling in what so many career women either can’t find or are so precariously juggling, marriage and family. It’s unfair and condescending of us to call those other women dumb – in fact choosing not to get on some professional rat-track could be considered the most brilliant choice around – but these women and their choices can, understandably, feel threatening.

The results are twofold. First, now that women are taking a greater part in the professional world men will have to take a greater hand in the domestic world. That doesn’t just mean more vacuuming (though that would be good too). That means successful two career relationships require both parties tending to the home fires. And those hyper-powered men Maureen Dowd is chasing frankly don’t have time for that. Their jobs are their lives. Much as they may enjoy her clever company, the demands of being a CEO or Editor-in-Chief often require a support structure rather than a sparring partner, and that support is what a non-career woman has time to provide.

I don’t think the solution here lies in batting our eyes and pretending to be sorority sisters turned first grade teachers. It’s admitting that you – the female you or the male you - have to take time off the “I’m going to be so powerful and successful” track to foster a relationship if you really want to have one. And sure women get the short end of the stick here because it’s a lot harder to find a man who will fall in to that supporting role than it is to find a woman. But I think that if Maureen had gone ahead and questioned people who have orchestrated a literal or figurative marriage of equals – and there are plenty of them out there - she would find such relationships hinge on compromise. We come back to that new old chestnut. You can’t have or do it all.

In closing, I’d like to say that we also need to step back for a moment. Yes, it’s frustrating and discouraging to hear the biological clock ticking away and see no prospects on the horizon. Yes, we want to feel like someone else has an answer, even a depressing one. But let’s get real here. You are not Maureen Dowd. The fact that the only female columnist at the New York Times can’t seem to land a man isn’t all that relevant to anyone’s life but her own.

The Bitchcraft Soundtrack (Part One)

2005-12-02T10:39:00.000-05:00

I guess not surprisingly, there are a lot of songs out there about complex, unattainable or just plain fed-up women. Plenty of them are penned and sung by confused men, but there’s also no shortage of women celebrating their own oh, so unpredictable selves.

So, without further boring ado, I bring you the “Bitchcraft Soundtrack,” Part One. This list was arranged (with the invaluable aid of friend Kate) for maximum contrast, but any aspiring DJs out there should feel free to mix and match.

Thank Heaven for Little Girls – Rosemary Clooney
American Woman – Lenny Kravitz
Women Be Wise – Bonnie Raitt
Uptown Girl – Billy Joel
Lady Be Good – Ella Fitzgerald
California Girls – Beach Boys
Material Girl – Madonna
No Woman No Cry – Bob Marley
9 to 5 – Dolly Parton
Femme Fatale – Velvet Underground
Bad Girls – Donna Summer
Girls! Girls! Girls! – Elvis
Hoochie Woman – Tori Amos
I Got a Woman – Ray Charles
Hollaback Girl – Gwen Stefani
Three Times a Lady – The Commodores
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun – Cindy Lauper
Hard Headed Woman – Cat Stevens
Nasty Girl – Destiny’s Child
I Enjoy Being a Girl – Rogers & Hammerstein
Evil Gal Blues – Aretha Franklin

All Hail (and Obey) Queen Naomi

2005-12-01T13:41:00.000-05:00

I promise this isn’t going to become a celebrity blog. I promise I really don’t find them that interesting. But insanely famous people do tend to do things in such extremes, they can make perfect illustrations for the more complicated dynamics that unfold among the rest of us.

Case in point. Just weeks after playing all kissy and make-up-y (my spell check informs that though kissy is not a word, make-up-y is. Go figure…) with her former runway nemesis – Tyra Banks – on, naturally, the Tyra Banks Show (see 11/23/05 post “Attention All Catfighting Supermodels”), Naomi Campbell is back on track. We can all breath another huge sigh of relief, girls. Super-cat Naomi hasn’t quite shed her stripes.

This information comes from the Daily News Lowdown gossip column by way of Gawker. Worthy sources? Sure, why not (as worthy as the New York Times anyway)…Apparently, Miss Naomi ran into one Nicole Ritchie at the no longer quite-hot New York nightclub Bungalow 8 the other night, where she proceeded to read Nicole the riot act for hanging out with Naomi’s alleged nemesis, Nicky Hilton. According to the story, Naomi more screeched her profanity-laced riot act over Nicole’s head (not hard to believe since I’d guess Naomi is about a foot taller), loud enough for the surrounding crowd to appreciate, I’m not sure what the Nicky Hilton nemesis thing is about, but as Tyra showed us Naomi has no shortage of enemies for no shortage of reasons. Of course, publicists for both parties kind of denied the whole thing, but that’s what publicists do (when not trying to get you on Leno or the Today Show.)

I’m not going to say I told you so, but…People, Naomi just ain’t nice. She’s got a rocking body, a serious strut and some even more serious attitude. But she’s a capital D Diva and she likes to have control of everything and everyone around her. Another starlet “writing” junky novels with a bunch of bling on the cover? No way. That girl’s got to be put in her place. I say give it up Naomi. Stop even pretending to care whether other women like you. It doesn’t suit you. Leave that shit for Oprah and Gloria Steinem and just give us a good old-fashioned stilettos and claws bitchfest every once in a while.

The Guilt Track

2005-11-29T13:08:00.000-05:00

Check out this article in the New York Times, or the commentary on said article in Salon. Apparently, there’s a new trend among single career women: quitting their jobs to care for aging parents, something the Times is calling “the Daughter Track.”

This article (Times, not Salon) irks the hell out of me.

It irks the hell out of me because it sets up this template for the modern woman that’s so fucking sweet and feminine and goody-goody and out of touch.

It irks the hell out of me because it taps all that guilt we grown women have as daughters, as if the guilt we have as either mothers or potential mothers isn’t enough. That kind of guilt coming from both ends can’t help but squash you like a bug. Or turn you into a Ritalin-snorting serial killer.

It irks me because now I feel like one more layer has been added to the “you’re not enough” pile. As a member of the single, childless and long in the tooth contingent, I like to think I’m not a mother yet because I’ve been career-focused. But being career-focused hasn’t actually landed me a career, at least nothing that resembles the radio news anchor, six-figure salary position formerly held by the woman featured in the Times. Now add to that the fact that I’m a terrible daughter because not only did I not quit my non-career to care for my aging parents – and never will – but I live clear across the country from my aging parents. I haven’t seen them in a year and keep ducking questions about when I’ll come because I can’t afford a ticket or the days off work, especially as I took two trips this fall – Napa Valley and London – to visit friends instead. In fact, even when my mother had cancer and was puking her guts up I only went back to visit once for a long weekend and then only because a friend sprang for the plane ticket. I suck, I know. And thanks, New York Times, for driving that fact home.

These holier than thou expectations are ludicrous. Dress us up in flouncy frocks and we’re right back in Jane Austen land (on not nearly so arch and clever). The article claims most women are happy to make this shift, since by the time they’ve reached their 40s and 50s they’ve had it with corporate culture anyway. But if they’re so fed up with corporate culture, why can’t they just quit without an excuse?

I can guarantee there won’t be any trend articles about men giving up their jobs to take care of their parents, even if it’s happening. Men may want to do it – more power to them if they do – but no one actually expects them to. And granted I don’t know all that many people, but I’m dubious about this being a phenomenon since I haven’t personally heard of one single career woman who’s done this. Not one. Have any of you? And we won’t even get into the fact that the majority of women couldn’t up and quit even if they wanted to because even those of us who are single and childless do still have rent to pay and one hungry mouth to feed.

Let’s just get this straight. There are plenty of women out there who aren’t perfect mothers or perfect daughters or perfect success stories, who aren’t overflowing with generous thoughts or life-altering sacrifices. It’s the 21st century. We get to be that way. Remember the seventies (ah, the seventies) when we cracked the shackles and set ourselves free? Stop with the ball and chain stuff, won’t you?

JUST LET US BE

Educational TV

2005-11-28T10:40:00.000-05:00

Due to holiday scheduling at the yoga center where I work (if you want Vinyasa yoga in New York there’s no place finer), I actually caught the last half of “Desperate Housewives” last night. And there were some very juicy, and realistic, developments on the Lynette front. In brief, she wound up going behind her boss’s back to get her in a little hot water with upper management by suggesting a recently fired employee, who also happened to be her boss’s boy toy, demand his job back. But the plan slightly backfired. Instead of asking to be reinstated, Mr. Boy Toy decided to file a multi-million dollar harassment suit, a good chunk of the company was fired – including Lynette’s boss – and Lynette got promoted to a job she’s not so sure she really wants. Only then, finally, FINALLY, does Lynette go to her boss – who’s standing on the threshold of her ex-office downing a glass of wine — and say “Look, I was just trying to get you to be a little nicer.” And only now, when all the shit has hit the fan and been blown to kingdom come, does the boss, Nina, explain to Lynette that’s she’s such a tough cookie because the job is miserable (we’re talking the job Lynette just inherited) and their boss is a nightmare and who wouldn’t be a little cranky if she had to eat, sleep and breathe the company mess.

Now I know the show isn’t exactly know for its natural realism — the other story-lines involved Gabrielle’s husband being seduced by a nun from the South side of Chicago and Bree dealing with a suicide attempt by her bicycle-riding, homicidal stalker — but this thing with Lynette is exactly what I’m talking about. Why do women wait until the last possible second to openly ask, “What’s the problem here?” Are we so afraid that someone’s feelings are going to be hurt? Most of the time — like with Lynette and Nina — there’s a pretty good reason why things are coming down like they are. Hell, given the circumstances, those two women might have been allies rather than enemies, which would have both of their lives a whole lot pleasanter. It’s part of conflict resolution 101. You have to put the problem out there or its only going to get worse. Issues don’t magically disappear (trust me, I remain a stubborn, diehard fan of this solution and it never works). The longer you ignore an issue, the longer its sits there and festers, and the more twisted and explosive it is when it finally come out. We’re not being good women or nice women or supportive women by negotiating our conflicts with little passive-aggressive pokes in the arm. We’re being cowards. If we’re going to scale those professional heights, remake the workplace and the world, we’ve got do better than that.

Desperate Times

2005-11-25T11:57:00.000-05:00

A number of women I’ve spoken to of late have mentioned a recent storyline on “Desperate Housewives” in which Felicity Huffman’s character Lynette — a one-time stay-at-home mom who recently returned to a high power office job —has suffered a series of confrontations with her single and childless female boss, circling around the question of whether it’s possible to both raise a family and hold down a demanding career. I don’t watch the show because – ironically – I work Sunday nights. But I do know that this storyline hits on an issue that generates a whole lot of heat. Among the women I interviewed for my book, work-family issues were some of the most contentious. And for good reason.

When it comes to balancing our personal and professional lives, women are incredibly vulnerable. I hear it from everyone and feel it myself. There’s this immense pressure to do it all and do it all perfectly — successful career, perfect husband and family, not mention being beautiful and in shape. If you fall short in any of these areas, and let’s face it most of us do, it’s easy to wind up feeling like a failure. It’s also easy to assume that we’ve made the “wrong choice,” that our family is suffering because we have to work so much; that we have no career and therefore no worth because we’ve cut back our hours; that we’ll never find anything close to domestic bliss because we’ve shot all our time and energy trying to make it big on the job. Unfortunately, we often assure ourselves that we’ve made the right choice by choosing to believe that other women’s choices, their different choices, are the wrong ones. Therefore, Lynette’s boss can’t believe that Lynette is capable of balancing a career and family because that means her career-centered life is inadequate and incomplete. All these very strong, often negative emotions come swaddled in so many layers of guilt. We want to support other women on the job, especially when we see them struggling, but our resentments and fears and raging jealousies have a nasty way of driving a wedge.

Complicating things yet again is the fact that the workplace rarely helps women to ease any of these pressures by providing flexible scheduling or generous maternity leave or even letting us skip out one afternoon to take a kid to the doctor. Too often, we wind up relying on each other’s unofficial help to make it through. When another woman can’t or won’t come through for us, we can be quick to cry betrayal and those betrayals can feel like the deepest and most damaging sort.

Here’s one note of comfort. I just interviewed over a hundred women from all kinds of professions and backgrounds and, lovely as other people’s lives might look from the outside, no one is doing it all. You look at me and think: “God how can I ever keep up with someone who has time to write blog entries the morning after Thanksgiving.” I look at you and think: “What I wouldn’t give to be too distracted by my mate and my kids.” We all make different personal choices and sacrifices and we all have insecurities about those choices. I know it makes life a lot more complicated to accept this, but when it comes to this work-family stuff there’s just no such thing as right or wrong.

By the way, it is good to see pop culture tackling some of these issues in a non “crazed Apprentice candidates scratching each other’s eyes out” kind of a way. Don’t you think?

Attention All Catfighting Super Models

2005-11-23T11:14:00.001-05:00

Well, we can all breathe an enormous sigh of relief. I know it’s something that’s been haunting the American public for over a decade now, but apparently supermodels Tyra Banks and Naomi Campbell have made peace (or, according to the literature “made peace!) Not privately, over dinner or plates of French fries or magnums of champagne or whatever supermodels gather over. They did it on national television, on an episode of — you guessed it — “The Tyra Banks Show.”

I admit that at certain times in my life I have followed the goings-on of the supermodel set a little more closely than is healthy. I know enough that this sordid history if diva dueling comes as no great shock. Big money, big egos, and — let’s be honest — room for only one black supermodel at the top. All the ingredients, in hyper-format. Naomi was the finger-snapping, hip-swishing queen of that catwalk. But models start getting long in the tooth two weeks after they hit puberty and when another foxy young girl – even worse, another foxy young black girl — started making waves I think Naomi was probably wise to assume it’s her or me. She was catty, bitchy, double-crossing, backstabbing. Tyra got her feelings hurt, so much so that she eventually bowed out of modeling full-time (to take on more humbling pursuits like hosting her own talk show). End of story.

Except that it wasn’t. Here’s where things get a little interesting, at least on the women and competition front. Instead of seeking flat-out revenge, Tyra’s looking to take the high road. She’s on a mission to stop competition and catfighting among women and, I quote from her website, “urges you to take the first step towards building a sisterhood of united women, a crusade for us to become one and stop the hate!”

While I admire the impulse, that word sisterhood always sends up a red flag. This “let’s all stop competing and just support and love each other” mindset can create as many problems as it solves. Tyra’s “crusade” reminds me of the early days of Ms. magazine when Letty Cottin Pogrebin published an article in which she equated competition between women with “raising ourselves on the crushed remains of your sisters.” I find this whole anti-competition stance scarily simplistic. We don’t help ourselves by setting a standard by which women aren’t allowed to conflict or compete with each other at all. We’re humans, we live high pressure, high stress lives, and we’re going to clash and disagree. It’s crucial that we acknowledge rather than ignore this, and that we start discussing how to communicate about our problems — like Tyra did by calling Naomi out — rather than sending some message that we should all just unequivocally love and support. Because I’m telling you, that’s just never going to happen. As soon as we’re not allowed to both have conflicts and be “good women,” those conflicts start going underground and they can resurface in some pretty twisted ways.

I’m also curious about the part where Tyra asks you to send in videotapes or photos of your girlfriends in the act of betraying you. Unless you hired a PI who caught her in bed with your husband, I can’t imagine what anyone could come up with. These kinds of betrayals are usually too subtle for instant replay. They come in the form of little digs that eat away at our trust, or behind the back moves that dawn on us weeks later. If we were out there clunking each other on the head with a hammer it would be a hell of a lot easier to say, “Hey, what do you think you’re doing.” (If we were clunking each other on the head with hammers, we’d be men). I know that I’ve been put through the wringer, and even put people through the wringer, and don’t have photo evidence of a damn second of any of it.

That said, it’s a rare day when you get to look to supermodels for life lessons. Best of luck to you on this one Tyra.

Girls Who Do Scathing

2005-11-21T10:57:00.000-05:00

How can I not start off this blog with a few musings on the woman who’s been front and center on every news and talk show of late. Not because she’s a sweetheart but because she is — in a subtle but not too subtle way — as dangerous and controversial as they come. (No, I don’t mean Nicole Ritchie, though her public fallout with Paris Hilton could merit a spot on the low-brow end of this blog). I’m talking, of course, about Maureen Dowd. These days, she’s got everyone stirred up because of her book about men, namely about how men don’t appreciate smart, sharp, savvy, scary women. I can’t say I think many of us share Maureen’s problem. You really don’t get all that much more intimidating than her. I went to hear Paul Krugman speak the other night – and I consider him fairly smart, sharp and savvy himself – but he said he’d stopped doing highly political columns because, and I quote, “No one does scathing like Maureen Dowd does scathing.” And she certainly doesn’t retract her claws when it comes to the fairer sex. One look at the scratch marks all over the now shamed and defamed Judy Miller tells us that.

If you’ve got any doubts that Maureen is a complicated woman, just check out the article about her in New York magazine a few weeks ago. (Disclosure: This blog is not going to be one of those late-breaking news type places. Thirty-five years in, I’ve come to accept the fact that I don’t live on the cutting edge. If I’ve heard of it, chances are most other people have too.)

I like how Maureen admits she finds taking a hard-ass stance intimidating, but she takes one anyway. I’m less convinced when she throws around comments about her girlfriends, all of who happen to share her role of prominent NY Times writer, but none of who are as prominent as she is. I’m pretty convinced that Maureen isn’t the type to have a lot of close girlfriends. I think she’s too busy chasing power and influence, which is exactly the same thing Judy Miller was doing only she didn’t do it as cleverly or elegantly and that’s what nailed her in the end. As I culture, I don’t think it’s so much that we don’t like our women powerful as that we don’t like them hamfisted. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this. It seems unfair, since men are allowed to be as hamfisted as they please. On the other hand, I’m not particularly fond on hamfistedness in either gender so maybe pushing women to attack via the smooth and sinuous track is not such a bad thing.

My main point here is that the women we admire, the women we listen to and read about, aren’t the sweethearts. I personally find Maureen kind of fascinating and, yes, a little scary. I don’t know that I’d want to have dinner with her one on one — for all her grousing I think she prefers male company, powerful male company, and besides, I doubt I could keep up my end of the conversation — but I’d sure choose her as a party guest over Laura Bush or even Gloria Steinem or Marie Wilson. Maureen, bless her ambitious and evisceration-happy heart, would tell it like it is.

Note: I’m trying to compile a soundtrack of songs featuring the words woman, girl or lady. Any ideas?