The best post I read yesterday was Michael Moynihan on Katha Pollit’s new book Learning to Drive or rather on Toni Bentley’s review in the Sunday Times and her interview with Deborah Solomon. Moynihan makes fun of Pollit’s radical views and on Bentley’s reaction to it. Sugary excerpt:
Bentley succinctly summarizes Pollitt's argument:
Have you heard the latest? "Men are rats." This directly from the desk of Katha Pollitt, a longtime feminist columnist at The Nation.
Learning to Drive charts Pollitt's relationship with an unfaithful boyfriend, offers her thoughts on plastic surgery, and bemoans the yuppification of the Upper West Side. In one of many beyond parody passages, Bentley recounts Pollitt's attempt to crack into her boyfriends email account:
She relishes the moment when he will betray his new girlfriend (he marries her, fingers - his and ours - crossed) and attempts to read his e-mail by guessing his password: " ‘marxism,' ‘marx,' ‘karlmarx,' ... ‘belgium,' ‘chocolate,' ‘godiva,' ‘naked,' ‘breast,' ‘cunnilingus,' ‘fellatio.'"
One can only wonder why she didn't try "theworkerscontrolthemeansofproduction."
When Pollitt sees her ex and his new beau crossing Riverside Drive, she imagines running them both down, retiring as a prison librarian and "becoming a lesbian." To this, Bentley objects. Sort of:
It's not that I'm against killing unfaithful men - especially one like Pollitt's, who "walks out the door after seven years with a wooden spoon, a spatula, a whisk." It's the loss of self-respect that bothers me. Isn't there a better way for women to show their superiority?
After reading Moynihan, I had to have a laugh but then I realized that I didn’t know whether I was laughing because of Moynihan’s take on Bentley’s review or simply because the review’s itself was funny because of the lack of distance of Bentley to Pollit’s writing and Pollit’s to her own experience. Here is an excerpt of Bentley’s essay:
Pollitt often uses her considerable imaginative dexterity to soften and divert her even more impressive rage. She imagines, for example, that the “world-class womanizer,” his new girlfriend and one of his other girlfriends are walking across Riverside Drive, and she, her newfound driving skills still a bit shaky, runs all three down. “I could,” she reflects, “settle into comfy middle age, reorganizing the prison library and becoming a lesbian.” But in the end, this kind of “what if” mulling, which Pollitt indulges in frequently — the poet trapped in prose — is anticlimactic. Neither pure vitriol nor pure wit, it feels uncommitted, and one longs for a touch of either Elfriede Jelinek or Oscar Wilde to tip the balance. It’s not that I’m against killing unfaithful men — especially one like Pollitt’s, who “walks out the door after seven years with a wooden spoon, a spatula, a whisk.” It’s the loss of self-respect that bothers me. Isn’t there a better way for women to show their superiority? If not, maybe we aren’t superior, and who wants to consider that possibility.
I realize that it was Bentley's review that was funny because although it is true that distance isn’t a requirement to serious writing, but a lack of it tends to lead to extreme personalization that in turn makes the serious comical. That said Bentley’s review is great even though her own prejudices (which she doesn’t seem to be aware) and ideas about feminism are omnipresent, but then again, a review doesn’t have to be objective or neutral to be relevant and serious.
In her interview, Katha Pollit said two things, which caught my attention:
Just because you are part of a social-justice movement, which is how I think of feminism, that doesn’t mean you are some brick wall of impermeable stalwartness in every area. Feminism, for me, is not about presenting a facade of perfect strength to the world.
[…] To certain women out there, feminism seems to mean buying what you want instead of being what you want. Young women live these contradictions and everyone’s down on them because their skirts are too short. I don’t blame them if sometimes they just want to go shopping. Women don’t actually buy more junk than men.
These two quotes made me understand the tone of Bentley’s review because it is difficult not to find humor in something that takes itself so seriously that it stops being aware of its own contradictions and absurdity. Laughter is an appropriate response to the realization that something that demands serious analysis and that judges and condemns without taking enough distance for self-criticism and self-analysis. I think that feminism has stopped to be about the “me” to become about the “them” because self-actualization is difficult and requires deep thoughts and a mirror. Self-actualization almost always lead to personal responsibility when judging others makes it easier to sustain the illusion and self-indulgent fantasy that women are all the same and shouldn’t be bad, dirty, victims, or in ruins because certain choices are unwomanly as if womanhood were a form of godliness. Feminism is in a coma, because it has become a religion.