“Miss” is back, ready to serve up a juicy tart of academic hijinks, scandals, and misadventures…with a whipped topping of political intrigue, hackery and hypocrisy.
Get out your knives and forks and dig in!
Archive for the '…and Politics' Category
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Published November 4, 2010 ...and Politics , ...and their Social Life , ...and their Stereotypes , ...in the Work Place , Higher Education , Life and Culture , Single Women , Worth a Thousand Words Leave a CommentTags: Call Me "Miss"!
More “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Hypocrisy: Why Elena Kagan Should Tell All…even if she has nothing to tell and it’s none of our business anyway…
Published May 11, 2010 ...and Politics , ...and their Social Life , ...and their Stereotypes , ...in the Work Place , Higher Education , Politics , Single Women 5 CommentsTags: "don't ask, don't tell", Elena Kagan, hypocrisy and higher education, hypocrisy and politics
I wish Supreme Court Justice-nominee Elena Kagan all the best, just as I do any woman being considered for a tough, important job. I even feel a passing kind of kinship with her, perhaps because she is from New England and the academy and she’s unmarried. Full disclosure: I’m pudgy, too.
But you know what? I also know if I met her, I wouldn’t like her. Because she represents the very worst of academic-lefty do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do kind of double standard. It’s OK for Miss Kagan to keep the details of her private life out of the limelight. Fine. Great. Personally I think she probably doesn’t have time to have much of a private life. But it’s not OK, then, for her to have banned ROTC recruiting from Harvard Law School, when she was dean, because of the persistence of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” President Clinton’s brilliant, Solomonesque solution to keeping homosexuals in the armed services.
Miss Kagan can keep her mouth shut to land the job of her dreams, but she does not accord G.I. Joe or Swabby Sue the same privilege. Score one for the hypocrites.
Miss Kagan has made this her motto. How times change!
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” is one of the precious few policies of President Clinton that I respect. Indeed, my respect for the policy, and the president’s wisdom in promulgating it, has only deepened. Here’s why: “don’t ask, don’t tell” actually preserves the recruits’privacy, in exactly the same way that Miss Kagan has so carefully preserved hers.
In practical terms, what I believe this policy acknowledges–and this is why it is so brilliant–is how we behave in groups and as individuals. Imagine a barracks’full of green recruits. Some from the inner city, some from the rust belt, some off the farm. Their degrees of sophistication and of exposure to a world wider than ten city blocks or the north forty are as varied as their skin tones. What’s job one with this untested mass of muscle and testosterone? Assessing then building individual fitness, physically, mentally, and, in the sense of group cohesiveness, socially. Job one point two? Cementing that group cohesiveness, so that this company of men can, in times of duress, think and act as one. These early days of making a fighting force out of young and ignorant strangers are really hard: why make them more difficult by introducing the exotic element that even unto today homosexuality represents? Let group-think prevail, until the group is forged and the individual bonds of its member are strong. At that point, “don’t ask, don’t tell” ceases to matter, because that gay guy over there has become your point man, and you’ve learned he’s a tough fighter and a good poker player. You’ve learned something about diversity that I assure you no college kid attending LGBTQ workshops would recognize if he/she/te fell over it.
Don’t ask. Don’t tell. Don’t change the policy. Do call Elena Kagan on her hypocrisy.
On a different subject entirely: Yes. As a single straight woman of a certain age, it annoys the heck out of me that it’s a common assumption that spinsters are lesbians. Yes. Elena Kagan is entitled to her privacy. But not at the expense of her intellectual honesty.
Gay “Poverty”: The New York Times Gets It Wrong
Published October 4, 2009 ...and Politics , ...in the Work Place , Single Women Leave a CommentTags: gay marriage, New York Times
Yesterday’s on-line edition of the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/03/your-money/03money.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=gay%20partners&st=cse) contained a long story bleating about the “High Cost of Being A Gay Couple.” It seems, according to the Times’s calculations, that gay couples are doomed to shelling out anywhere between $40,000 and $140,000 more, over a lifetime, than married straight couples of identical fiscal circumstances. The big villains: insurers, taxes, Social Security and the costs of child-production. How tragic. How unfair. Boo-hoo.
Of course, a torrent of comments followed, virtually all of them sympathetic to gay couples who struggle with their position behind the financial eight-ball. A couple of brave souls, though, suggested that the Times run a similar analysis comparing the costs of being single to those of being coupled—gaily or straightly. While I applaud the suggestion, I doubt it’ll be followed. In the first place, there is no social agenda to be advanced in pursuing such an analysis. In the second place, it might put the economic “suffering” of couples in an unflattering light. And in our culture of victimology, it’s a fight to the finish to see who ends up at the bottom of the heap. It wouldn’t do to have the victims du jour wind up on top.
In my last post I wrote about health insurance, so I’m not going to revisit that topic here. But I would ask the Times if, when looking at work-place sponsored insurance, it considered all of the benefits to which employees—gay, straight, married, partnered, single—are entitled. Health insurance is only the beginning. Where I worked, for example, family members (defined as spouse, partner, or spawn) were entitled to use the athletic facilities and the library. For singles, there was no alternative benefit. Tuition remission was provided for children, partners, and spouses. For singles, there was no alternative benefit. An on-site facility provided subsidized day-care for the children of faculty and staff. For singles, there was no alternative benefit. These benefits were not a zero-sum-game: real institutional costs were incurred by making them available. Once again, a “family” of two or more simply has that many more hands to stick in the benefits cookie jar. While the singles are just stuck, hoping for a crumb to be tossed their way.
Next the Times should consider the costs of running a household. Heat and electricity charges are the same whether there are one, two or twenty-two people in the abode. Ditto for landscaping services. Ditto for snow removal. Ditto for property taxes: the larger the family, the better the deal here. Schools, libraries, public facilities all have heavier usage by families, and yet the single-homeowner pays exactly the same tax for demonstrably less service.
And then of course there are the costs of travel. I challenge the Times to explain how gay couples who take cruises, packaged vacations, or who simply stay in hotel rooms are worse off than their straight counterparts. Or to compare the cost of these luxuries to what a single pays for the same commodity. In the case of the hotel room, the cost is exactly the same, effectively doubling what the single is expected to cough up. In the case of the cruise or vacation, the steep “single supplement” tacked on to the published “double occupancy” fare makes it clear that singles aren’t welcome.
Then finally there is the social tax on singles, the invisible burden of being the “extra person” that no partnered gay or straight must ever shoulder. My next post takes up this levy. I hope you’ll check it out.
Why ‘Call Me “Miss”‘?
Published September 2, 2009 ...and Politics , ...and their Social Life , ...and their Stereotypes , ...in the Work Place , Single Women 3 CommentsTags: old maids, Single Women, singles, spinsters
I’m writing Call Me “Miss”! (CMM) to take on the stereotypes and myths about single-for-life women, or SOLOs (singles over a lifetime only). I’ll use CMM to define the experience of single women in America and draw of the personal experiences of dozens of them of varied ages, professions and interests. CMM will examine the preconceived notions of proselytizers of family values, the misplaced pity of married friends and coworkers, and the self-righteous sanctimony of partnered (married or otherwise) gays. For inspiration, I look to Class, Paul Fussell’s perennially-in-print poisoned-pen valentine to American social mores. What Class did for out-of-sights and proles, I hope CMM will do for spinsters and old maids.
CMM will examine the touchstones society uses to interpret the life of a SOLO, the archetypal Dizzy Dames, Culture Vultures, Ice Princesses and Swingin’ Singles who populate literature, television, movies and the biases of most marrieds. CMM will also focus on the real lives of real Solos: the SOLO Sisters (SOLOS), a demographically diverse group of women, will share their experiences and insights throughout the text on topics as diverse as themselves—from good-luck-trying-to-buy-a-car to thank-you-but-I’ll-take-the-table-by-the-window-not-the-kitchen-door to I-get-all-the-hot-sex-I-need-on-Saint-Martin. And I’ll spill my guts as well. Full disclosure: occasionally I’ll be snarky, and at times, to be completely truthful, I’ll indulge myself in a bracing, gut-busting, soul-satisfying rant. Readers can just sit back and let it wash over them…waves of feminine pheromones telegraphing the message: “I’m independent. I’m well off. I’m not lonely. I like my life. Deal with it!”
Just as Fussell used Class as his platform to delve into the totems of social status, I’ll use my quirky world view to shed light on the unique accoutrements that SOLOs are believed to possess: the cloak of invisibility, the calendar of perpetually free time, for example, and share with you the pecking order that couples and partners use to establish the hierarchy of SOLOs:
- So-Be-Its (Women over 65 who have never married, so-be-its are regarded as honorary wives or widows. Universally addressed by nurses, tellers, and clerks as “Mrs.”, so-be-its long ago gave up correcting the hired help.)
- So-Lows (Any woman 40-65 who has never married is really at the bottom of the barrel—too young to be considered an elder stateswoman, too old to “have a chance,” the so-low is society’s vessel into which all un-PC prejudices and biases can be dumped without fear of retribution.)
- So-Disappointings (Any woman under 40 but over 32 who’s yet to wed; there’s still a chance, albeit a remote one, that a so-diss will marry, but her partnered friends and associates are bracing themselves for the worst.)
- So-Hopefuls (Any woman under 32 who’s yet to marry: young, hip, a so-ho’s got time on her side, so she’s welcomed as an almost-one-of-us by the married and the partnered. For now.)
CMM will venture into the work place, the market place, vacation destinations, and home. We’ll do reconnaissance in the most impenetrable suburbs, where real estate signs still proudly advertise, “no singles need apply,” and the denizens would no more have a dinner party or a card game with an “extra woman,” than they would mix up martinis in which guests could actually taste the vermouth. It is in these venues that the life of a SOLO stands in stark contrast to those that surround her. You might be surprised—and maybe even a little abashed—to visit these places and see them through SOLO eyes. You’ll definitely never look at them the same way again!
In the nearly fifty years since Helen Gurly Brown coined her memorable phrase, the sex life of a SOLO has changed—for the better, no question. But with the good comes the bad and the outrageous, as you’ll read in my reports from the world of post-adolescent dating. Together we’ll de-brief them. And believe me, there is nothing that gets a SOLO really fired up as a good de-briefing!
CMM will also review the honor role on contemporary and historical SOLOs of note. The list—from Elizabeth I to Condoleezza Rice and Janet Neapolitano—is empowering and inspiring. We’ll look for clues to discover whether, like many SOLOs, these women simply forgot to get married in the course of their impressive lives, or if there is some one fundamental element of singlehood that characterizes such women of accomplishment.
Perhaps the darkest topic I’ll take on in CMM is the negative fallout from school shootings, fast-food firefights, and lone-gunman hostage situations. We sit by our TVs or radios, and once again are forced to listen to a “grief counselor” sagely opine that “he was a loner” or “he kept to himself” or “he like to read instead of play with the other kids” as the explanation for criminal, for insane, for deadly behaviors. We take cold comfort in the fact that the perp is inevitably a he and not a she. Indeed, the loner-as-crazed-killer paradigm has so infiltrated popular culture that all singles—crazed or otherwise—can’t help but wonder if it’s true. Or if that Uzi under the bed really is there just for protection. Of the many stereotypes applied to singles, this is the most vicious and insidious. We’ll take apart and lay it to rest.
I am eager to begin this journey. I hope you’ll come alone. I mean “along.”
