Fe-Mail Cat Fight
I came across this on Slate Magazine, which published a heated email exchange between two feminist authors.
It's between Laura Kipnis, a Northwestern professor and author of the books The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability and Against Love: A Polemic and Daphne Merkin, author of the novel Enchantment and a book of essays called Dreaming of Hitler.
Round 1: The Commotion About Gender Roles.
Daphne first sent Laura an email about her book The Female Thing. It's intended to be a critique, but she throws in some subtle and not-so-subtle barbs about her writing style, like "...you insist on peppering your text with a Cosmo-like seasoning of italics and exclamation marks. (Do you know that Helen Gurley Brown once said that exclamation marks were the sexiest form of punctuation? Don't you just love it?!)"
Round 2: Bratty and Contrarian vs. Dry and Authoritarian.
Laura writes back and defends her book. Then takes a few jabs at Daphne's writing style: "I feel on slightly thin ice here, as I'm corresponding with someone known for confessional writing. My own reaction to this genre is...a little mixed. Well, to be honest, I often find myself appalled...Not only by the magnitude of the narcissism, but by the losing battle between the requirement to display self-knowledge..." Laura also reminds Daphne of an essay she wrote about her enjoyment of being spanked.
Round 3: Bratty Beauties and Babyish Boys
Daphne's turn (she's getting pissed now). "Hi Laura, Thanks for your considered response, which addressed some of my points, side-stepped others, and, I thought, deliberately misunderstood others the better to feature yourself as an unfashionably un-"confessional" writer..." Then, she defends her spanking essay. "My more-than-a-decade-old spanking piece will forever be held over my head—notwithstanding hundreds of other pieces of writing—as a sign, a signpost, an object of derision, an object of envy. Now, that's a subject we should talk about one day: female envy."
Round 4: Did I Touch a Nerve?
Laura brings up another essay Daphne wrote: "I must reveal that one of the scariest things I've ever read was a piece of yours* [an article in which Daphne rips on another female author, Gail Sheehy] in the Times magazine complaining that if you're a woman over 50, you can't get laid, because men all treat you like you're their mother. I was reaching for the cyanide capsule before I even got to the end of the paragraph. But then I read on, to a line about men being "poor befuddled creatures," and I remember thinking...that if you don't condescend to them quite so much, maybe they won't think you're their mother! I found a small shred of hope in this and put the cyanide away..." Laura throws in another remark about the spanking essay, probably because she knows Daphne is embarrassed about it. "...after all, who doesn't like a good spanking now and then? I could tell myself that I was doing it to expand the sexual horizons for womankind, and thus performing an important social service and so on, but … I might suspect myself of blowing smoke."
Round 5: What Makes a Genuine Subversive?
Daphne, once again, gets defensive about the spanking piece and attempts to explain why she wrote it. She moves on to defending herself for the Times piece regarding Gail Sheehy, then signs off with, "although what began on my part in a spirit of generosity seems to have ended in something of a ... what does girl culture call it when the mutual claws begin to show? A catfight?"
Round 6: Calling it Quits and Moving On
Laura gets in the last word.
*If you can't view the article at the New York Times website, you can download it here in Word format.
It's not Feminism that bothers me, it's Feminists
Which is why I don't like when women write books or form groups and try to define feminism for me and for other women. I appreciate their insights, but I don't like being told what my role in society should be or what I should think of myself as a woman. Some feminists complain that men objectify and degrade women (which is true if you let them), but I've found that these feminists are the most judgmental of other women, especially when they don't fit into their narrow, definitive feminist scope.
