Don't Gel Too Soon

Women Bloggers Are NOT Cute Little Girls: Tell the New York Times

  What is it about women who blog that scares s o many people - even other women -- even the New York Times?  Once again this time, they've decided to offer an "analysis" or a "portrait" or an I don't know what about bloggers who are women and moms.  And when they do, they write with a condescending, bemused attitude that is what I remember from the early days of the women's movement, when men would joke about our desire to open our own doors, earn our own livings, make our own decisions.  It was kind of cute to want to be able to get credit cards without a husband's permission, to cover a story without having to go up in the balcony, to keep our names when we got married.   Feminism was just so adorable.

Now, we're free on so many levels, and one manifestation of that freedom is the vibrant world we've created online.  Sisterhoods that cross race and politics and religion and age as we share ideas and pain, joy and pride, birth and loss and every other story that is part of living a life.   There have been a couple of wonderful responses to this irritating TIMES piece (and it's not the first...)  One of my own favorites, Mom-101, whose admirers are legion, wrote 

"...once you get past the first half of the article, there's actually some solid information in there....But I wish [all] that had been to focus of an article about my favorite blogging community that just made the front page of my favorite section of my favorite Sunday paper.  I wish it had opened with the yearning of bloggers for the community to return to good writing, and the evidence that in the end, that's mostly what pays off....  

Of course, there are more.  My friend Danielle Wiley, known to many of her friends as Foodmomiac but also an executive at Edelman PR, has also weighed in.

I invite you to read the full piece and form your own opinions, but sentences like “bringing together participants for some real-time girly bonding” might very well stop you in your tracks. As I write this, my husband (and fellow Edelman executive Michael Wiley) is at SXSW. Would Mendelsohn classify that experience as macho bonding? Or would she write that he is attending a conference for the purposes of education and networking? Why do people, including Ms. Mendlesohn, continue to refer to networking among women as girly bonding? I seriously doubt the participants at Bloggy Boot Camp were wearing jammies and braiding each other’s hair. However, from the tenor of the piece, it was pretty easy to jump to that conclusion.

Here's the bottom line:  I'm old enough to be the mother of both of these women and many of their peers yet they have welcomed me as a sister - a blogger and a friend.  They've honored the sappy posts I've written about my sons and my marriage and they've shared ideas and advice in comments, in twitter and even in real life.  They and their compatriots are talented, skillful compassionate, ornery pioneers who have built what I think of as the new quilting bee, the new Red Tent where they share the wisdom and mysteries that are women's lives.  And they do much more - just go check out the list in Liz's post.  Not for one moment are they silly or unaware or careless or trivial.  And to gain a few points with silly headlines and denigrating phrases isn't bad taste, it's also bad journalism.  Go see for yourself.

 

 

 

 

 

Jewish Women, Feminists, and Esther -- Across the Centuries

How can there be a women's story that women are not allowed to tell?  Today is Purim - the celebration of the rescue of the Jews from the Persian King Asueras' evil adviser Haman.  In a classic (and highly fortunate) intermarriage, she became the favorite wife of the powerful king.  Unaware that she's Jewish, he's chosen her from all the maidens of Shushan and fallen for her - hard.  The story is intricate but it ends with a bad guy trying to get the King to kill all the Jews (sound familiar?) and the Jewish Queen Esther convincing the King that the bad guy is indeed bad, and thus saving the day.

It's an old story with both sexist and feminist implications but today it emerged with a new life - at least for me.  Here's why: it's required that Jews hear the story of Esther, the Megiila Esther, read twice during the holiday.  It's read with a melody - a "trope" that's quite lovely.  Usually, in observant Judaism, men preside.  Prayers and readings are the domain of the male voice.  But women are "permitted" to read the Megilla for a gathering of women.  It's a act of Jewish feminism.  And that's what happened this morning.

I wish I could describe the emotion that arises as one hears the women's voices together, and the single voices, one by one, reading out the story.  It's an act of faith, an act of love, really, but it's also an act of community - the community of women coming together to share the story of a feisty queen who overcame fear to save her people.  

Of course you would be correct to suggest that the simplest solution would be to choose a branch of Judaism that has made its way past such rules and you'd be correct.  But we've chosen, despite the difficulties, to live this life, partly because of the very community that produced this day.   And it comes, as a friend reminded me last night, as a package.  So there will be moments - many of them - of frustration and anger.  Of a sense of deprivation and loss.  And the, just when it seems terrible -- something lovely happens.  Something like today.

Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck and Roman Holiday: a Political Lesson? No, Really.

It was a fairy tale about a princess on a journey. Doing her duty, kind of like Diana (but, since she was played by Audrey Hepburn, even classier,) she came to Rome, after Athens, London and Paris, to conclude her mission. 

But she was young and beautiful and sick of receptions and parades. And so, in the middle of the night, she snuck out the embassy window and ventured across the Piazza di Spagna and into the Roman night. 

If you know this movie at all, you remember with sweet nostalgia the way you felt the first time you saw it.  The princess asleep near the Trevi Fountain on the Roman equivalent of a park bench is awakened, like Sleeping Beauty, by reporter Joe Bradley, played by Gregory Peck. ( If the film has a flaw, it's that we know some of what will happen once we see him there.  He's a good guy and that's who he plays.  He is Atticus Finch, after all.)   

The film was released in 1953, right in the middle of the 1950's.  Written by Dalton Trumbo, "Roman Holiday" was credited to a "front" named Ian McLellan Hunter, because Trumbo, blacklisted as a member of the Hollywood Ten, wasn't permitted to write for movies any longer.  It's one of the darkest chapters in Hollywood history, very much a part of the image of the decade and a sad facet of a beloved film that won three Oscars and introduced the world to Audrey Hepburn.

There's something else though.  The people in this film behave well.  There are things that they want, desperately, but there are principals at stake, and they honor them.  When Peck meets Hepburn, he doesn't recognize her but lets her crash at his apartment.  Once he figures out who she is, he knows this "runaway"  could be the story of his life.  Even so, after a brief, idyllic tour of the city, (SPOILER ALERT) she honors her responsibilities and returns to her royal duties, and of course, he never writes the story.  It was very much an artifact of the "Greatest Generation" ideals, manifested with such courage during WWII and very much the flip side of the jaundiced (and just as accurate) Mad Men view of the 50's.  Duty and honor trump romance and ambition. 

Once again, I'm struck with admiration for the people of these times.  Yes the 50's did terrible damage and made it difficult to be eccentric or rebellious or even creative.  But films like this one, or Now Voyager and similar films of the 40's, sentimental as they may be, remind us of what else these people were.  They'd lived through the Depression and the war and they had an elevated sense of responsibility.  As we watch much of our government (and some of the rest of us) disintegrate into partisanship and self-interest, it makes a lot more sense than it did when we rose up against it all in the 1960's.  Doesn't it? 

Legendary Game Fable Previews #3 (ulterior motive, but you know that)

YES the first person on this video is one of my brilliantly talented, lovely sons.

So Long Mr. Salinger, and Thanks

 All I wanted when I was a kid was to be Franny Glass.  To be part of the Glass family, intellectual, quirky, and with lists of beautiful quotes on a poster board on the back of their bedroom door.  They were sad and weird and wonderful.

And now, today, we lose their creator, most beloved for Holden Caulfield, the eternally adolescent hero of Catcher in the Rye.  Holden is worthy of every affectionate word written about him, and his palpable pain is familiar to those who've journeyed through the teen years, but the Glasses -- well  -- they were a different kind of lovely.

They are all the children of one man, and he died today.  I wish I could tell you what it felt like to read Catcher in the Rye at 13.  I can remember where I was sitting as I read it - how I felt - and the deep sadness that accompanied Holden's story.   It must have been traumatic though, because later, when my son and I read it together, I was shocked to learn that Holden's brother had died.  I had jammed that fact someplace hard to reach, which means it was even more disturbing than I remember.  Reading it with my own child was a beautiful experience to share with a young man of deep compassion and great sensibility - a memory I cherish.  So Salinger gave me that, too.

(I'm not mentioning Joyce Maynard here.  She had a right - but sheesh!)  And I really don't have much to say about the quiet recluse in the hills of New Hampshire.    Farewell to him, yes, but also to yet another connection to the days when I was young - and more like Holden than like women of a Certain Age.  The passions, the pain, the poetic anger at people for not being what we expect them to be and the desperate longing to rescue the imperiled and the lost.

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all.  Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me.  And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.  What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.  That's all I do all day.  I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.  I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."  

I guess those who don't dream of being the catcher long to be the one who is caught.  And those longings don't go away whether you're 13 or 63 (right - I first read it FIFTY years ago!)  Imagine.  No, it doesn't go away, but your perspective changes.  The loveliness of that kind of protecting -- or being protected - it isn't around much in the real world.  All the more reason to be grateful for the rare observer who can remind us of its sweetness, and of what we are capable of aspiring to. 

And grateful I am.  For Franny and Zooey and Seymour and all their craziness and for Holden, what he gave me then, and what I remember, even today.

Conan versus Jay: Yet Another Generation Gap (see SNL)

What do you watch at 11:30?  Are you even up?  The Daily Show is over, but there's still Steven Colbert.  Or are you sucked away from basic cable to join one of the Established Hosts on those antiquated broadcast networks?  And if you are, which one?   The answer to that question probably depends on how old you are.

Last week's Saturday Night Live  included this imaginary Larry King Show, mocking, as both hosts have, the ham-handed dismissal of the younger Conan to honor expensive contract obligations made to the older Leno.  For many of us, this is simple: Jay Leno is old and grouchy (well not as old as I am but still...) and O'Brien younger, more creative and definitely holder of the "younger, cooler, hipper" mandate.  (Yes I know there's David Letterman (and George Lopez) but for now let's think about NBC.)

Younger viewers have been up late watching Conan for years - after many of the rest of us had gone to bed - and they know and like his ironic, goofy, smart persona.  The Harvard-educated O'Brien, (who wrote for the university's humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon,) and served as a long-time writer for Saturday Night live and later for The Simpson's, is a perfect 21st Century personality. 

Leno, on the other hand, is a real 20th Century man.  He came up through comedy clubs and Tonight Show appearances and is a car collector and motorcycle freak.  His humor is less subtle and, somehow, although less arch than Conan it's also less friendly.  Mostly though, it's old-school.  In my view, it's for the dwindling older audience and not for the emerging majority of TV viewers (and of Americans) born well after we Boomers had finished college.  

It's funny, but as much as I loathe the idea of age discrimination, I also see this decision as a symptom of a generational division visible in the women's movement, in life on the Web and in the politics that brought out so many younger voters for Barack Obama and then betrayed them with posturing and partisanship.

I first thought about all this when I saw an interview with the gifted and admired Dick Ebersol, long an icon of sports coverage who has led NBC Sports for many years and presided over several Olympics seasons on the air.  In the Huffington Post, he called Conan's Tonight show a "spectacular failure."  In his long career, in addition to sports, Ebersol was an executive in charge of the TODAY SHOW (full disclosure, I worked for him - and happily) and of Saturday Night Live so he's no slouch.  But it seems that seven months, preceded by a failing Leno show with ratings so bad the affiliates, bleeding audience for the local news that followed Leno, demanded a change, was hardly the best audience-builder for Conan, whose show followed that news.  More than all of that though, Ebersol is far from the days when he had his finger on the pulse of the emerging audience, the Gen Xers and Millennials and those younger than they are.  They want something different, something cooler, something more like -- Conan.

I've written about, and been on panels about, the generational divide.  The economic crisis has only exacerbated it as young people consider the disappearing Social Security benefits and their own futures in a world where job security and benefits is hazy history.  They're mad at the Boomers, blame us for more than we're responsible for and often have no idea what we really accomplished in the 60's and 70's -- for the better.   Events like this one, however superficial and entertainment-based, are just another example of the disregard in which they are too often held.  NBC will pay for that -- in the PR game it already has (did you see the Golden Globes?) and, I fear, in a larger sense, so will the rest of us "older" Americans.  We should be listening to them about more than product preferences and if we don't, we'll be sorry.

What Do You Get When You Cross Bruce Springsteen and Jon Stewart?

Well what else is there to say?

RePost - Don't Gel's Best of 2009: Pete, Bruce, Beyonce and Obama: the Changing of the Guard

There they are: two of the cultural icons of my political life.  Pete Seeger, close to 90, peer and colleague of Woody Guthrie, creator of We Shall Overcome and Turn Turn Turn, of Abiyoyo and Sam the Whaler, leader of The Almanac Singers and the Weavers.  If there was a civil rights rally or a labor rally or an anti-war rally, he was there. 

Beside him, Bruce Springsteen, a modern troubadour whose songs speak for many Americans whose opinions are never sought, whose voices are seldom heard.

As they stood together at the Lincoln Memorial in celebration of the Inauguration of Barack Obama, they represented, to me, all that I had believed and tried to help bring into being.  To many, though, they were "the ultimate in subtly old-left populism."  Speaking about the concert early Sunday before it began, I kept talking about Bruce.  A younger friend gently suggested that he was probably not the day's headliner.  That would be Beyonce Knowles, she said.  I'm sure she's right. 

As one who was present the last time "the torch was passed to a new generation;" as a strongly defined Baby Boomer, it's painful to hear anchormen celebrate the fact that "there will never be another Baby Boom President."  It' s not that I mind the fact of that; it's just painful that it seems to be something to celebrate.  So many of us have tried so to be productive agents of change, have spent our lives working either full or part of the time to see that our country offers more to the least powerful, demands quality education, justice and maybe, even peace.  So to hear Joe Scarborough revel in the fact that "16 horrible years of baby boomer presidents is over" really hurts.  All my adult life we've been tarred by the brush of the least attractive of us while the work of the rest of us went unnoticed.  For most campaigns, as I've written before, we were the secret weapon of the right.

So as exciting as all this is, especially for one who has supported Obama for so long, it's also bittersweet because I feel the shadow of the disdain in which so many of us are held.  I really don't know how to respond.  If I were to try, it might be by offering some of the words to Si Kahn's They All Sang Bread and Roses.  It's better with the music, but it does the job.

They All Sang "Bread and Roses (Si Kahn, 1989, 1991)

The more I study history,

The more I seem to find

That in every generation

There are times just like that time

When folks like you and me who thought

That they were all alone

Within this honored movement

Found a home.

 

And 'though each generation fears

That it will be the last,

Our presence here is witness

To the power of the past.

And just as we have drawn our strength

From those who now are gone,

Younger hands will take our work

And carry on.

Ellen Goodman Doesn't Write there Anymore

As long as I've worked in media, which is a long time, Ellen Goodman's been there too.  Her Pulitzer-prize-winning column, originating in the Boston Globe, has been a beacon and a landmark and a treasure. 

And now it's ending.  No, nobody fired her, she still has a large audience and many adoring readers but she's decided to stop.  Here's part of what she said in her valedictory meditation on covering women in America - and I recommend you go read the entire thing:

My generation -- WOMEN -- thought the movement would advance on two legs. With one, we'd kick down the doors closed to us. With the other, we'd walk through, changing society for men and women.

It turned out that it was easier to kick down the doors than to change society. It was easier to fit into traditional male life patterns than to change those patterns. We've had more luck winning the equal right to 70-hour weeks than we've had selling the equal value of care-giving. We have yet to solve the problem raised at the outset: Who will take care of the family?

As a young mother and reporter, it did not occur to me that my daughter would face the same conflicts of work and family. Or, on the other hand, that my son-in-law would fully share those conflicts. I did not expect that over two-thirds of mothers would be in the work force before we had enough child care or sick pay.

Yes - those things are true.  My own sons expect (and one has) wives who keep their names and expect to remain in the workforce.  And yes, they still face issues of child care and equal pay and glass ceilings.  The sad thing is, they won't have the provocative, inspiring, funny and very gifted voice of Ellen Goodman to cheer them on.  Maybe she'll write another book though; if she does, I'll send a copy to each of them.

Repost - Best of Don't Gel 2009: Loving London

That old rascal Samuel Johnson told us that when we were tired of London, we'd be tired of life.  I know it's summer when any city is inviting but this week is cool and bright and breezy and London is full of British school groups and kids from everywhere else too, and we have an apartment right in the middle of Covent Garden (well NOT the market, God forbid, just the neighborhood) and our older son and his new wife are only 40 minutes away and we have friends here, too.  So how could we be tired?

What you see here is the view from Waterloo Bridge (and yes that's St. Paul's Cathedral in the background.)  This morning I went out and walked all along the Embankment, over where the trees are, then crossed a bridge just out of view on the right and returned via South Bank, London's wonderful (relatively) new arts and museum area.  My entire walk was around three miles and I'm realizing that it's much easier to do the walking when there are new things to look at, not just the old neighborhood or, as lovely as it is, Rock Creek Park. 

The wonder of a great city is that it's always changing, that even the most trivial journey is full of surprises.  On my way home tonight I came across a group of teenagers - one of dozens of g The wonder of a great city is that it's always changing, that even the most trivial journey is full of surprises.  On my way home tonight I came across a group of teenagers - one of dozens of groups we've been seeing ever since we got here.  The reason they're all sitting on the sidewalk is that they're exchanging addresses and spelling them out - different nationalities, different spelling.  Kind of an EU photo.

Of course there's lots else going on here.  Huge waves of immigration, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, what looks to me to be an appalling amount of youthful alcohol consumption and unemployment all take their toll.  There's something about the place despite those issues though.  The day after the 2005 subway bombing that killed 52 people, Londoners got back on the train and went to work.  They did that all during the Blitz as much of the rest of the world watched them face down Hitler almost alone.

Cities are supposed to change.  That's what makes them exciting.  Even so, London has seen more than its share: waves of immigration that have transformed it, an early history of wars and fires and plagues, contemporary royal scandals and of course the "troubles" between Belfast and the rest of Ireland and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.   After all, who would have believed before it arrived to help celebrate the Millennium, that there would be a ferris wheel right in the center of town?  They call it the London Eye to make it sound fancy but it's still a ferris wheel, here in same town that has a real live queen living in a real live palace?  It's pretty amazing.

I'm thinking that while we're here I can try to get past some of what I've written here and learn a bit of what it's like to truly live here.  It's got to be different from wandering around with no need to be on time or face the traffic or crowded mass transit and infinite numbers of tourists and, incidentally, deal with what appears to be an enormous amount of alcohol consumption - especially by men.  I'm hoping to keep you posted as I make my way.  I hope you'll come along.