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I found myself gagging at the first line of Sandra Tsing Loh's article
where she says, "Sadly, and to my horror, I am divorcing." Something
about that horror part got under my skin—that she was trying to
convince us, her readers, that divorce was something that "just
happened" to her, outside of her control. And that was only the
beginning of the pity-party. Having an affair, she confesses, "was a
surprise." Her decision not rebuild her marriage: "heart-shattering."
Words to induce our pity, to absolve her responsibility to her
committment, her husband, her friends, and her children. The whole
article, to me, read as ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Hanna, I read the Sandra Tsing Loh piece not as a condemnation of modern marriage, and not even as a parable about the impossibility of modern motherhood,
but as a cautionary tale about building your life around what Tsing Loh
describes as a life spent “taking with me ... to my bed, a glass of
merlot and a good book.” Because the only villains in this piece are
the books—the piles and piles of books that she uses to arrange her
life. From what she depicts as her “lazy, undisciplined attachment
parenting” to the nearly pornographic, Pottery Barn descriptions of her
friend’s kitchen renovation, the story leaps from one fashionable
marriage book to the next. She won’t hire a nanny because of Barbara
Ehrenreich’s dictum that she’d “never let another woman scrub her
toilets.” Her friends’ absurd husbands are either “cheating” with
subscriptions to gourmet magazines or bookmarked porn sites. Whole
conversations with her girlfriends ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In this month’s Atlantic, Sandra Tsing Loh
writes about her recent divorce from her husband of 20 years. Divorce
is not, for her, what it was in the Gloria Gaynor days, a path to
delirious freedom and dramatic rebirth. Instead, her marriage dissolves
the way it was lived, with haggling over domestic tedium. Tsing Loh,
who had the affair (as she confesses obliquely), guiltily offers to
keep changing the kitty litter.
What’s ultimately distressing about her essay is not the details of
the divorce (affair, alienation, what to do with the kids) but her
dismal portrait of the modern American marriage. Long-term monogamy is
obsolete and unnatural in any age, she argues, with some support from
anthropologists. But in our age, when relationships are governed by
children’s needs and defined in management speak, they are doomed.
“Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I can not take on
yet another arduous home and self improvement project, that of
rekindling our romance,” she writes.
The piece has its exaggerations and tropes—for example the scene
where her group of girlfriends, who stand in for all womankind,
suddenly break down and confess that they, too, are dying to get
divorced.
But many of the details in her very vivid and damning portrait are
bound to resonate. The most common and seemingly happy marriages are ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Ann, thank you for bringing up my Atlantic story on transgender children. When I was reporting, I felt the opposite: Culture weighed very heavily on the boys and not so much on the girls. A girl could go a long time in gym shorts and cropped hair before anyone thought she was anything but a tomboy. But a boy in a ponytail and a skirt? Totally unacceptable. The girls I talked to generally never showed up at a psychologist's office until about age 8 or 9, which is when their love of toy guns and spy gear suddenly seemed conspicuous and when puberty was looming. Boys showed up at age 4, with parents already worried that their sons played with Barbies or dressed up in tutus.
In this little slice of the world, feminists of the Hillary generation can look back and see what they have to be grateful for. In the simplistic, Free To Be You and Me view of gender relations, girls have come a long way. They can be doctors or bus drivers and they no longer do housework alone. But the boys seem stuck in a narrow retro space. William and his doll still raise a big red flag.
That said, maybe there is a stronger biological imperative for boys, as you say, because boys pay such a high price for wearing that skirt that something unstoppable must be driving them to put it on.
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