Priss ([info]pr1ss) wrote,
@ 2008-06-10 10:25:00
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Entry tags:links, log, prisskids

Media Reality
Poignant article on the whole mother daughter dynamic. If any of you guys read it, comments here would be great. What it made me think about is that our lives aren't going to be idyllically perfect. Family life is stressful. That's why so many people who are financially able to live alone, end up doing so. (Then some of them bemoan their lack of a partner.)

The Zbigster is graduating from High School today, and Maddy is trying to get out of attending based on her homework and dance rehearsal obligations. Empty nesting is just around the corner here in Prisstopia.


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The Albatross
[info]montecristo
2008-06-10 07:16 pm UTC (link)
"A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."
— Gloria Steinem

There's an awful lot of tapdancing and empty hand-wrining in that article. I was reading it with the expectation that Chesler would have a point, something other than, "Well, these things happen." About the only point she does make is the tired lamment: "However, great men are allowed every excess and failure; great women are never forgiven for making a single mistake."

So much of feminism has been not that men have failings they should correct but that women should be granted the same pass for vices and failings of one sort or the other. Chesler certainly avoids philosophy. Her analysis deftly dodges the idea that ideology or philosophy played any part of what happened in the Walker women's lives. It's a cop-out. I read the original Rebecca Walker piece, and the woman certainly makes a case that second-wave feminism has some poisonous premises in it and comes with some hidden price tags that have dearly cost many women who adopted it enthusiastically. Chesler's column entirely evades the substance of Rebecca Walker's complaints with hand-waving and smoke-screens that merely sound like reasoning.

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[info]pr1ss
2008-06-10 10:16 pm UTC (link)
To me her point was that there is no right way to be a feminist that excludes all other ways. And that while this is the story of a daughter who is by no means a youngster, she still cannot fully empathize with a generation that is older than hers. Because by the time we fully finish maturing, we are ready to no longer be above the sod. There is still a double standard for the sexes. Men are not chastised for personal expression or for youthful high jinks the way women are, and motherhood in an always present, completely sacrificing mode, is still an expectation.

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