Hissy Cat

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November 08, 2005

Mo' MoDo, Mo' Problems

Or, Dowdiana, Part Two, Wherein I Move Beyond My Critique of the Critiques of the Article and Offer My Own Critique of the Article

Actually, this is less of a critique with a particular point than a more general reading or interpretation of the article with special attention to places where my interpretation diverges significanty from those of other feminist bloggers.

A lot of bloggers complained that Maureen was blaming feminism for the bad deeds of the patriarchy, and that she was using the feminist movement as a catch-all scape-goat.

Dowd starts off with a reminiscence about her college years, remembering, "I didn't fit in with the brazen new world of hard-charging feminists. I was more of a fun-loving (if chaste) type who would decades later come to life in Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw. I hated the grubby, unisex jeans and no-makeup look and drugs that zoned you out, and I couldn't understand the appeal of dances that didn't involve touching your partner. " Ann Bartow at Our Word takes particular offense at this passage, taking it to be insulting. I don't find it insulting. Personally, I thought it was kind of funny, in the same way that I find it funny when Woody Allen or Phillip Roth exaggerate cultural stereotypes with a knowing wink at the reader. Maybe this is the New Yorker in me. I recognize the wink. Maybe Dowd's stroke wasn't PC or feminist, but it sure made me chuckle, as did the bit about how she longed to "live the life of a screwball heroine like Katharine Hepburn, wearing a gold lamé gown cut on the bias, cavorting with Cary Grant, strolling along Fifth Avenue with my pet leopard." Hey, I've entertained those fantasies, too. How could anyone who's seen Bringing Up Baby not?

I realize that it's a fools errand to explain a joke to convince someone uncharmed to find it funny, so I'll give it a rest. I think the more important and much broader reason I give Dowd a pass on the feminist-fashion-is-funny jokes has to do with the overall tone of the article, which is one of ambivalent but nagging regret. Note that Dowd is not saying 'I don't fit in with feminists because they dress funny and I'm too dashing and glam.' Rather, Dowd is recounting the particular way in which she, as a younger woman, imagined herself in relation to feminits and feminism. The image of herself she had was one colored by the grande dames and femme fatales of old films, and however deluded her imagination might have been on that score (and she admits it was deluded; her momma told her so), that was how she saw herself then. How many of us really had realistic notions of ourselves when we were eighteen? Well, I didn't.

Importantly, I think Dowd's ambivalence towards feminism is one that many, many women feel. Dowd, whatever stance she took on issues of women's equality to men, didn't feel she fit with feminists, or at least not with the people she imagined feminists were. I think a lot of women have that experience of feeling apart from or "not like" feminists. We see it in the whole "I'm not a feminist, but--" phenomena; a large number of women feel that, though they are pro-choice, desperately want health care, are pissed off that they get passed over for promotions as their male colleagues advance, cringe when their boyfriends make some asshole, sexist joke, etc. don't feel that they fit with-- or don't want to fit with-- their image of who feminists are.

It's not surprising that someone growing up in mainstream America would be put-off by feminism or that the kind of women she thinks are the feminists are hairy, media-whory, hysterical harpies. If you live way out yonder where Bust is not stacked on the magazine shelves and your parents keep the radio tuned to a Fox station you'd get the impression that feminists are a rather unappealing bunch. Even if our hypothetical hickette doesn't dislike/ fear/ feel threatened by hairy armpits, she might logically believe that since she happens to shave her own pits, she's just not part of the club.

Now, you and I know that's a bunch of hooey and that for every feminist who rocks an au naturel look there is a feminist who shaves and wears make-up, and that for every feminist who is a short-haird single lesbian living a life of delicious hedonism in San Francisco there is a feminist who is a wife and mother sporting a sensible shoulder-length 'do in Midwestern Suburbia. But if your ideas about feminists and feminism come from the mass media or the village elders in a Baptist hamlet, you'd have no idea. Combine that with the pressures girls and women get from all sides to be attractive, to attend to their looks, to evaluate themselves in terms of how boys see them and to form a self-image that is largely about how closely one conforms to a narrowly-defined beauty, and well, no wonder a lass would hesitate to call herself a feminist.

Where this fits in with Dowd is that I think it is this kind of extremely common experience of ambivalence that she is tapping when she writes, " I didn't fit in with the brazen new world of hard-charging feminists," and then follows up with regret that she "took the idealism and passion of the 60's for granted, simply assuming we were sailing toward perfect equality with men, a utopian world at home and at work. I didn't listen to [my mother] when she cautioned me about the chimera of equality." To the extent that this is an essay about Dowd's relationship with feminism-- the concept, the movement, the wardrobe, whatever-- it is not about how feminism has let her down but about her regret about not taking feminism (and her mother's warnings) seriously. If we pull out the core story Dowd uses to structure her observations, arguments and broader points, it is the story of her transformation from a naive young woman who, caught up in dreams of personal glamour, stayed aloof from feminism, assuming her burlier sisters could take care of things without her, to a more mature woman who, faced with a troublingly sexist and increasingly reactionary culture, questions her old view of feminism and comes to see that view as misguided and naive. She was wrong, she says, we do need feminism.

It is the personal transformation that I find most compelling in the piece (that, and I am charmed by her wry humor and predilection for Old Hollywood glamour and Howard Hawkes movies, which I happen to share) and that I think is probably of most value. In a way, I think the audience best served by this piece is not people like me who are already self-identified feminists, people who already read and think and write about feminism and feminist issues. It would be my guess that this article is most relevant to women who, like Dowd, are very ambivalent about feminism. For anyone's who's read Backlash, there is nothing new or surprising about the arguments she puts forth. But when I think of women like my mother, or like the sorority girl in an English seminar who was clearly and vocally bothered by the limited, rather sexist interpretations of the TA but who blushed and looked genuinely shocked when someone accused her of being feminist, I think, you know, maybe an article by a very femmey woman, who is very sexy-looking and has pretty, shiny red hair and wears make-up; who admits to familiar feelings like ambivalence, or wanting to be attractive and who still comes to the conclusion that feminism is in need now more than ever-- maybe that kind of article does have a value.

I'm tempted to shut my trap now, and leave at that, but there are a couple more, whaddayacallem, interpretive issues to address. At this point I'm going to break down by critique by the section headings Dowd uses in her own article for the sake of clarity and specificty, as well as for expediency (as I said, I find her "arguments" much less compelling than her narrative and see them as basically a milder, more class-specific and less clear version of Susan Faludi's arguments in Backlash).

Here we go. Whee!

Courtship
Dowd shows anecdotelly how certain restrictive, sexist notions that feminism once seemed to make passe have come back in fashion. Such notions include: frilly aprons, "landing" a man, playing hard to get, the unbecomingness of women who are sassy, brash-mouthed and sarcastic.

No objections here. Moving on.

Money

Dowd notices a trend in her social circle of men picking up the checks at the end of a date. She notes that many women seem to expect or want the man to pay, that some men like paying to "demonstrate their manhood." We also learn that the term "girl money" is becoming common parlance in some social circles. Also, she says "quid profiterole," which a lot of people thought was very funny and/ or confusing.

Lots of objections were raised to Dowd's argument here on the grounds that (1) no one had ever heard the term "girl money" before and therefore (2) the people that use terms like "girl money" are a rare breed of extremely wealthy and incredeably wacky.

Sure, Dowd could have picked more familiar examples of this trend. For instance, she could have pointed out the tabloid fuss over the size and expense of certain famous young ladies' engagement rings. He point, though, that that the apparent trend of evaluating a woman's worth and desirability in terms of how much dough she can get a man to spend on her still stands.

I don't think she draws this strand out far enough. More troubling than caddish comments about "girl money" is the reality that women still do make seventy-five cents for every dollar a man earns. Dowd's argument is incomplete, not incorrect.

Power Dynamics

This seems to be the section readers found most problematic, and it's not difficult to see why. Instead of sticking to anecdotes, as she has been so far, she pulls in some shoddy statistics and evolutionary theories. To make matters more confusing, it is not clear to what ends this evidence is being employed. Does she endorse it? Does she trot out the experts because she believes the conclusions of evolutionary psychology or because she holds them as another example of the retro sexism so prevalent today? I'm not sure because she never comes out and says so.

I do give Dowd a lot more credit than the readers who take her words at face value. I detect more than a little irony on her part when she writes things like "There it is, right in the DNA: women get penalized by insecure men for being too independent." And sarcasm. And condescension. And wry amusement. I don't think it is with much fondness or respect that she delivers Bill Mahr's charming theory.

Where she slips up is in the paragraph that begins "Women moving up still strive. . ." She is now, I believe, making a point that she does think is true, but there is no clear delineation between Dowd-speaking-in-her-mocking-voice and Dowd-speaking-in-her-serious-voice, and that makes everything confusing.

Moving on.

Posted by hissycat at November 8, 2005 05:36 AM

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