“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 their Stereotypes' Category
Dig In!
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"!
With Friends Like These: Edley and Dowd Throw Kagan Under the Bus
Published May 21, 2010 ...and their Stereotypes , Faculty , Higher Education , Politics , Single Women 4 CommentsTags: Christopher Edley, Elena Kagan, Higher Education, liberal arts colleges, Maureen Dowd, Single Women
What a brutal week Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan has had. In a Washington Post op-ed Berkeley Dean Christopher Edley uses her to front an incoherent apologia on behalf of academic “elites.” Dean Edley’s essay, a gloating reminder of just how much power certain admissions officers wield, does nothing to enhance Miss Kagan’s chances for confirmation.
Dean Edley: Which one should I choose to keep out the smelly populists?
Then New York Times spinster Maureen Dowd weighs in with a column superficially taking critics to task for their curiosity about Miss Kagan’s marital status. Miss Dowd’s column is in reality a thinly veiled screed of self-loathing unmarried women everywhere would do well to avoid.
With friends like these, Miss Kagan must be thinking, who needs Republicans?
“With friends like these” is something single women everywhere wonder about all the time.
The thesis of Miss Dowd’s column is that women of a certain age undergo a transition from “single” (juicy and available) to “unmarried,” (still available, but juiceless) and Elena Kagan, at age 50, has made such a transition. If this sounds suspiciously like the “change of life” to you, then you are on to Miss Dowd’s hideously ageist indictment of her own gender, which renders an entire sex useless after its menses cease. Miss Dowd is not simply characterizing some unknown troglodyte’s perception of single women, she is describing her own.
“For some reason, Kagan’s depressing narrative,” Miss Dowd opines, “is even more depressing because it’s cast in the past tense, as if, at 50, Kagan has resigned herself to a cloistered, asexual existence ruling in cases that touch on the private lives of all Americans.” Who, besides Maureen Dowd, has decided that the accomplished Elena Kagan’s narrative is “depressing”?
Lest any reader doubt that Miss Dowd is completely in agreement with the bigoted view of single women she purports to decry, take another look at her final paragraph:
Why is there this underlying assumption that Kagan has missed the boat? Why couldn’t she be eager to come to Washington to check out the Obama-era geek-chic bachelors, maybe get set up on a date by Michelle Obama, maybe host some single ladies fiestas with Sonia Sotomayor, maybe even sign up for JDate with a new and improved job status?
In other words, Miss Dowd’s cure for the “unmarried” woman: find a man, anyone will do. We’ve come long way, haven’t we baby?
Look, Maureen, it's a MAN!
Even the most enlightened among us think that spinsterhood is condition that requires a cure. I ran across this gem in today’s Inside Higher Education. Here are the opening lines from the “Mama PhD” blog, a regular feature of IHE:
Once, years ago, I found myself at a party talking about what it would mean to divide by zero. (No wonder I was terminally single at the time!)
Fantastically, the post goes on to congratulate several about-to-be alumnae, all seniors at Ursuline College, a Catholic institution for women. The author of the blog, Rosemarie Emanuele, is a faculty member at Ursuline, and she delivers the predictable pre-Commencement palaver about the wonderful new lives these women are about to discover. Ursuline is an interesting place. Its educational philosophy, in part, commends the college to help “students achieve their educational and career goals by emphasizing the whole person.” Too bad Professor Emanuele believes the only “whole” people are the married ones, in that the unattached have a “terminal”—her word, not mine—condition and presumably won’t be around long enough to achieve their goals.
I hope I’m around long enough to see the end of this socially acceptable bigotry, the glorious day when women are judged not by what’s on the third finger of their left hand, but by…well…just about anything else would be an improvement.
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.
A Christmas Miracle
Published December 21, 2009 ...and their Social Life , ...and their Stereotypes , Single Women 3 CommentsTags: Christmas, dating after 40, Single Women
Just when you think that you’ve grown too old to get caught in the grip of Christmas spirit, it sneaks up while you’re not looking and snares you in its web. And just like that you are once again believing if not in Santa Claus, then at least in Christmas miracles. So, there I was last night, falling for one of the oldest if not the most preposterous miracle of all: “How to Meet a Man at 40,” a five-page, step-by-step guide shining out like the Star of Bethlehem from the pages of the London Times Online to lead me to my prince.
And so, reader, I clicked on it.
I am a great fan of the British press, especially the tabloids, and avidly follow the gossip in them. I read of the sorrowful demise of Jade Goody, I follow the blossoming fashion career of Mrs. David “Becks” Beckham, nee Posh Spice, and I keep up-to-date on the latest travails of Waity Katie. So of course the Times Online would be my reliable go-to source for dating advice.
Unfortunately, instead of a sugarplum, “How to Meet a Man at Forty,” turned out to be nothing more than the usual lump of coal a spinster finds in her stocking each year, regardless if she’s been naughty or nice. Oh for the chance to be naughty! Now that really would be a Christmas miracle!
Yeah, yeah…I can see your eyes glazing over: you’re thinking “another rant about life’s unfairness to single women.” And you’d be right. But indulge me, please, just once more. If the following excerpts from “How to Meet a Man at Forty” are not enough to convince you that old maids should be considered a protected class, up there in the pantheon of victimhood along with the rest of the alphabet soup of sexually disenfranchised losers, then you are part of the problem.
“How to Meet a Man at Forty” begins reasonably enough, roasting all the old chestnuts about being too picky, holding oneself too aloof, but then, having lulled the reader into a false sense of familiarity, the article turns mean, and launches its ad feminan full frontal assault:
If there is one thing the single woman cannot afford to be, it’s a burden. You must be sunny and amenable, the best guest, the most reliable friend, the tonic at the party and the one who blends in on the family holiday. Precisely because you are not part of a couple, you need to give out the message, loud and clear, that you are no trouble and guaranteed life-enhancing. Being successfully single means having lots of different options and knowing plenty of people who might think, “Yes, bring her along!” rather than, “Maybe not.”
Gotcha. Remember the old belief that in order for a black person to be accepted in the workplace, she must work twice as hard as her white counterparts? In what way does the above paragraph (written, I might add, by a married woman) differ from the prejudiced thinking that held the black to a different standard? The answer of course is that it is no different at all, except—and this is a big one—that discrimination against people because of their skin color is not only against the law, it’s socially unacceptable, thank God. All you recovering racists out there, take heart! You have a new outlet for your prejudice. But I digress.
“How to Meet a Man at 40” continues, “People notice single women getting drunk more than they would notice any other demographic. They are waiting for you to get swervy and take to the dance floor, on your own, clutching a bottle of champagne, and then collapse sobbing on the shoulder of some man who has long since married your best friend.” Ah yes, poor Aunty Lucy, she loves her schnapps, doesn’t she? It keeps her warm at night.
What I don’t understand is that when I say things like that, my married friends look at me as if I were crazy. “Deluded” in fact is how one of them puts it. But leave it to a British tab to print an article that vindicates my views. What a gift! Maybe there are Christmas miracles after all.
Maybe Crashing Is the Answer
Published December 4, 2009 ...and their Social Life , ...and their Stereotypes , Politics , Single Women 1 CommentTags: Christmas parties, Michaele Salahi, party crashing, Single Women
A friend of mine asked me why I hadn’t written about the Salahis, America’s newest fun couple, and I replied that just like Michaele Salahi’s midriff, the topic had been overexposed. And besides, as someone pathologically allergic to parties of any kind, the thought that anyone anywhere anytime would voluntarily seek entry to a gathering to which they weren’t even invited confounds me. It’s bad enough to make a forced appearance as a matter of friendship or familial duty.
Of course, I chalk my anathema up to being single, and to having read one too many of the discrete “no singles need apply” sign most couples have posted near their doorbells. Try walking alone into a holiday open house in any suburban neighborhood. If you are smart you will head straight for the bar; if you were really smart, you would have declined the invitation in the first place. Drink in hand—better make it a double—what will you find should you attempt to mingle? Most men and women will self-segregate, and even in an academic town such as mine the men will likely be talking sports. Moving on. The women will be talking about their husbands or children or both. OKaaay. The few mixed-sex clusters will likely have husbands and wives in fused dyads…best not to intrude and upset their equilibrium. As a last resort, you look to the kids for companionship and if they are well mannered it is here you may strike conversational gold for a moment or two. By this time you’d best head back to the bar for a refill.
Single women everywhere know the strategies for surviving parties: help pass hors d’oeurves, volunteer to sit with senile Aunt Josephine, enlist as a litter patrolman and police for discarded napkins, glasses and plates. In other words, they assume the role intended for them by the hosts: unpaid laborer. “Working the room” has a very literal meaning for single party-goers. So why do we subject ourselves to such abuse? To placate the inner child for whom the words “Christmas party” signify ineffable excitement and possibility even though experience has taught the grown-up otherwise. To dress up in outlandish sweaters and jewelry that by their decorative themes have limited runs on the calendar. To scope out ideas for our own repertoire of Christmas recipes. Whatever our reasons, year after year, many of us continue to be authors of our own agony and show up like the good sports we are.
But what of the Salahis? Do they, like me, have a terrible time of parties to which they are invited? Did they, unlike me, think that in their desperation they’d have a better chance at enjoying themselves at one where they were not wanted? Could be. In that case, may the holiday season bless each of them with more invitations than they can accept. I couldn’t imagine a more fitting punishment for their crime.
The Crime of Loneliness
Published October 13, 2009 ...and their Stereotypes , Single Women 1 CommentTags: Jack Levin, loneliness, loners
It will come as no surprise that single people are occasionally lonely. They go about their lives happy and content then seemingly out of nowhere they’re overwhelmed by the lack of a sense of connectedness that everyone else seems to share but that the solo can only observe. Such moments are rare and unpredictable, so much so that it makes sense to let you know when they are least likely to occur.
Case in point: long walks on the beach, those staples of dot com dating sites and other lonely-hearts scams. This month I have the great good fortune to be holed up on Cape Cod. The crowds are pretty much gone, and the weather is gorgeous. The National Seashore is still home to an astonishing variety of birds, and one can walk and walk along the beach with only their negligent companionship. Pure bliss. To be honest, I don’t want any other company: I walk at my own pace, skip a stone when I want to, slip a shell in my pocket without worrying about having to share, and decide for myself when I’ve walked my fill.
Case in point: dinner for one at a swanky restaurant. I travel a fair amount, and I look forward to new dining experiences. A club sandwich and cold room-service fries are not for me. Dining alone can be a sublime experience. I secure I reservation and specify the kind of table I want, dress up, show up on time, and order a drink—gin martini,very dry, very cold, up with olives. As I sip my drink, I read a book or magazine; I do not feel obliged to make friends with the wait staff, but I do pay attention to their recommendations and I do tip generously. If there are sweetbreads or fois gras on the menu, I order them (yes, sometimes both at the same meal!) and luxuriate not only in their unctuous, decadent lusciousness, but also in absence of lectures about corpulent geese or askance looks at the offal on my plate. When that plate arrives, I set aside whatever I’m reading and concentrate on the food, wholly. It may be that I’m a pisspoor multi-tasker, but I find that when I am dining out alone the meal becomes the focus of my attention and I can experience and appreciate its nuances far better than if every bite is punctuated with conversation. I have wine with dinner, and I end with coffee and dessert.
Final case in point: concerts. I want to connect with the performer or performers. I want to lose myself in the music. I do not want to listen to sotto voce real-time critiques or feel obliged to offer them myself.
So, when do I feel the chill of loneliness? When I’m smacked upside the head by “experts” who single out loners in their solitude as deviants.
********
A terrible crime was committed in New Hampshire last week: a pack of rabid boys killed a woman in her home and nearly killed her young daughter. The attack was so horrific that I’ll bet the ink is drying now on the contracts for the made-for-tv treatment of the tragedy. The setting was bucolic, the innocent victims believing themselves safe in their home, the homicidal bipedal wolverines from good families. And yet they took their knives and hacked to the death a mother and chopped away at a child.
As the news of this murder and attempted murder broke, I braced myself for the inevitable, and I didn’t have long to wait:
“Across the country, similar homicides have been carried out by teenage males who are sad and lonely”: Boston Globe, October 12. The story continues: “‘A strong sense of community is wonderful if you happen to be accepted,’ [Jack] Levin [Irving and Betty Brudnick Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Northeastern University] said. ‘But if you are regarded as an outsider, you may feel profoundly rejected . . . Their peer group is the only game in town. If they are rejected, they have nowhere else to go.’”
Lonely and nowhere to go. There you have it…the recipe for murder. The expert says so. Never mind that the four thugs arrested for this crime were not friendless, solitary outcasts (read the reports in the Boston Herald and the Manchester Union-Leader and you find that to the contrary they had many friends), and never mind that least one of them abandoned his medication for depression. And ignore the fact that several of them were obsessed with knives. No, the salient fact here is that they were “lonely.” So loneliness and loneliness alone, it seems, is what drove them to kill and maim two strangers.
I don’t know what turns teenage boys into killers, but I am fairly confident that if every kid whoever felt rejected by his friends, misunderstood by his parents, and—horror of horrors—lonely picked up a weapon and used it, there’d be a dearth of victims in short order. We’d all be dead.
Let me put this as simply as I can:
1) Being a loner does not mean an individual longs for companionship.
2) Being alone and being lonely are not one and the same.
3) “Sad” and “lonely” are not synonyms.
4) Being lonely is not a crime, nor does it lead to crime. All humans experience loneliness from time to time.
I am well aware that I maybe treading a fine rhetorical line here, so I am trying to sort out its threads as precisely as I can. It comes down to this, I think: every time a deranged or demonic teenage boy commits a heinous crime, some egghead (alone in his Ivory Tower, no doubt!) will explain away the behavior by writing it off to “loneliness.” The perp will inevitably be described as a “loner,” and the conflation of the two terms will be well cemented. And every time this happens, those of us who prefer our solitude, and accept our rare bouts of consequential loneliness for the ephemeral moments they are, feel just a little more marginalized, just a little bit more misunderstood. Do we then turn to violence? No. We read a little Wordsworth, have a spot of single malt, and take a long walk on the beach.
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.”
