I started a Tumblr about the situation in Iran.  Just kidding, I started a Tumblr about Things I Ate That I Love.  It exists to catalog and sometimes minorly analyze or contextualize the things I ate that I love.  It features blurry cell phone photos of same.  Sometimes there are also pictures of my cat or other people’s cats and minor analysis or contextualization of foods that I or you might eat and love, or not love, at some point in the future. And that is the sum total of what to ever expect from this Tumblr.

Sometime in the next couple of days I have to sit down and write two paragraphs about my generation of women in preparation for a panel at the 92nd Street Y on June 8.  The other people on the panel (Patricia Bosworth, Judith Warner, Sheila Weller, and Joanna Smith Rakoff) are also writing two paragraphs about their respective generations of women, to be shared at the outset of the panel.  What is my generation of women all about? I’m sure plenty of people will agree with me that I’m not qualified to say.  But I have been thinking a lot, lately, about women.  Specifically I have been thinking about the ways that women publicly and privately police other women’s speech and actions in the supposed service of the greater good, or something they call “feminism.”

A manufactured mini-scandal arose recently because Slate needed to attract attention to the launch of their new women’s-interest blog.  So they published a linkbait blog post by author Linda Hirshman, who had axes to grind against various past and present editors of the Gawker Media women’s-interest blog, Jezebel.  Hirshman’s tone was provocatively dismissive and snide — I think the old folk call it “snarky”?* — and she pushed a major button when she accused some Jezebel writers of “incoherence” because they decried sexism but did not report being sexually assaulted as teenagers.  She misrepresented and glossed over basic facts to try to prove that Jezebel and ‘Jezebel feminism’ have led “women” astray.

The blog’s editors’ plan worked, of course: many blogs and even one British newspaper weighed in on the manufactured controversy.  I read some of these responses — Tracie Egan’s response, Anna Holmes’ response, the Feministe response — with a mingled sense of satisfaction — yes! they’re right! — and frustration.   I was frustrated because I knew that the whole thing was only a stunt to boost a fledgling site’s pageviews.  I was frustrated because I knew that the whole thing, while only a stunt, had almost accidentally scratched the surface of issues that are vitally important to every woman - not to every pundit, not to every female writer, not to the relatively rarified group of women who are able to avail themselves of the luxury of paying attention to blog squabbles — but to every woman.   And also I was frustrated because I knew that, to anyone not tangentially involved in the invented squabble**, the whole thing would be dismissed as a “catfight.” “This is what a smackdown looks like,” noted women’s rights proponent Nick Denton wrote, on his Twitter.  Everyone had missed the point, again, entirely.  This kind of thing keeps happening, and all of us keep missing the point.

When a woman presents herself to the public eye as a multi-dimensional being — like my friend Moe Tkacik [UPDATE: Moe's response to Hirshman's column] who is capable of writing incisive and compulsively readable dispatches both from the frontlines of both a political campaign and from her own bedroom — she will often be accused by other women of exploiting herself.   If she is attractive — if she even betrays any sign of wanting to be perceived as attractive — the criticism multiplies.  You cannot be pretty and be taken seriously, still.  You cannot be honest about your own experiences and be taken seriously, even if your own experiences are the best examples at your disposal of social and cultural phenomena that affect us all, even if your experiences are ones that you know or suspect that hundreds and thousands of other women share.  Other women’s voices aren’t being heard, you’re told, because you are hogging the spotlight  with your salacious sexual stories.  You are only getting attention because you’re pretty, or slutty, and how dare you steal that attention from someone who deserves it more, because there is only room in everyone’s minds for one iconic thing called Woman.  Maybe I should just let Rebecca Traister say it in her own words: “In a media landscape in which there are a severely limited number of spaces for women’s writing voices, the ones that get tapped become necessarily, and deeply inaccurately, emblematic — of their gender, their generation, their profession. More annoying — and twisted — is that those meager spots for women are consistently filled by those willing to expose themselves, visually and emotionally.”

While it’s true that the mastheads and bylines of the magazines that used to represent this country’s cultural elite are still predominantly male, I have never thought of there being a “severely limited number of spaces for women’s writing voices.”  When I was younger and found I had no outlet for my “writing voice,” I spent ten bucks on a domain name and fifteen bucks on hosting and then, bingo, I had one.   And as for voices that “get tapped”  being “innacurately emblematic of their gender,”  I feel like Rebecca Traister and Linda Hirshman and their ilk imagine a hypothetical audience member — male, I guess, so let’s call him Bob — who is constantly trying to make his mind up, about Women.  Bob is on the fence, and everything he hears and reads might sway him.  Should women be paid as much as men, should women have the same opportunities as men, can they be trusted to run our corporations, our media, our country?  Should they be raped, or not?    Rebecca and Linda don’t give Bob much credit for being able to parse ambiguities.  They would like everyone’s message to be as crystal clear as possible, so that Bob doesn’t get confused and start raping people.  “No, no!” they keep trying to tell him.  “Those aren’t women, we are!  And we don’t like those women!”

Sometimes these women say they feel “sorry” for the women they are writing against.  They feel “sorry” for women like Meghan McCain who, they say, undermine themselves and whatever socially and politically relevant messages they might have — simply by confessing that they are human beings.   The apologetic women aren’t really sorry, though — they are angry.  These stupid little bitches are fucking it up for all of us, they seem to be saying, and they should be punished.  Bob won’t do it — he does not, after all, exist — so they are going to have to do it for him.

The most upbeat thing I can think to say about all this is that I am genuinely, wholeheartedly shocked (though progressively less so) every time this kind of internecine ugliness among women bubbles to the surface.  And I think that shock speaks to something interesting about, you know, My Generation.   I was lucky to be raised by a mother who worked and whose work was important to her, and who always made sure I knew that I could grow up to be anything I wanted to be.  She and her generation paved the way for me and my generation to take so many fundamental freedoms for granted!   We slip up, though, when we imagine that we have transcended the old cultural interdictions against being honest and outspoken.   All we have transcended, it seems, is the idea that the patriarchy is the authority that enforces these interdictions.

In the face of these attacks,  the women of my generation — who have more outlets than ever for making their voices heard– need to make sure that we are judging our words carefully, that we aren’t saying anything we don’t actually believe, and that we are accurately representing ourselves.   This is what I am trying, and sometimes failing, to do.  This is all we can do.  It’s not anyone’s individual job to represent femininity as a whole — not Linda Hirshman’s, not Meghan McCain’s, not Rebecca Traister’s, and certainly not mine.

*ha ha.

** like I was. Linda Hirshman lumped me in with the Jezebels — an unearned honor, since I wrote a scant handful of posts for them about a year ago.  Per Linda, “Emily Gould published a story in the New York Times Magazine about chronicling her  relationships and sex life online for a year; the cover photo was a shot of her in her bed.”  The blog had to post a correction that eliminated the phrase “for a year.”  I think Linda’s inclusion of that phrase revealed that she had not actually read the article, but had assimilated all she thought she needed to know from the pictures. 

I met a girl at a party the other night who’s an actress with a stultifying day job, and she was telling me about how she sits at her desk and reads Gawker all day because “there is nothing else to do.”  She was I think a little shocked at the vehemence of my response to this, which I had to explain — she didn’t know I had worked there, and after I told her she probably did not think me any less of a crazy person.

Anyway, lucky for her, there is now something else to do!  Choire and Alex (Balk) are trying a brave experiment in, do we need another news aggregation site.  When they were first launching it I wasn’t sure that we did.  “Post-Twitter, we don’t need another aggregator blog,” was what I said to Choire, in an email.  I was wrong.  Turns out, it is really nice and useful to have two people who are so good at sifting through the dross of the entire Internet, and figuring out what’s actually important and interesting on it, sitting there all day and doing that.   Besides being great curators those two guys are very funny, though I don’t always agree with them.  And of course once in a while they or their columnists lapse into the kind of knee-jerk dismissive nastiness that dogs the medium — that actually, at this point, dogs the media.  But mostly I think they’re as aware as anybody can be of the avoidable pitfalls of internet writing.  And they are geniuses at coming up with tags and headlines — total disregard for search engine optimization a la “People are idiots and yet I am responding to that idiocy” will always be beautiful to me — and they have *never once* very rarely mentioned the Hipster Grifter.

Also they let me have an advice column, which so far has been kind of hit or miss, but the one about Twitter and the one about pot and the one about karaoke were all solid.  Though we are running through the areas of my expertise rather quickly.  Anyway, please send questions.

I deleted my Twitter. I don’t think Twitters in general are evil or anything but I do think that for a person like me (impulsive, given to over-disclosure) they are poison.  The brand called me can do without my <140 character deep thoughts, probably, and I can do without having another medium for obsessing about how friends and randoms respond to those deep thoughts.

Today, after years of listening to the song “Strange Loop,” I finally looked up what a “Strange Loop” is.  According to Wikipedia (so, salt-grain taken):

“A strange loop arises when, by moving up or down through a
hierarchical system, one finds oneself back where one started.

Strange loops may involve self-reference and paradox.”

Like writing on your blog about how you have deleted your twitter, I guess, or always finding yourself in the same fight because the part of your personality that attracts people to you is the same part that makes them hate you eventually.

I took a semester off from college between Kenyon and Eugene Lang, which meant that I ended up graduating midyear. But because Lang was too small to have a graduation ceremony for people who graduated midyear, I had already been out in the working world for what seemed like forever (six months) by the time graduation and all the attendant festivities — which I imagine seem anticlimactic even under ordinary circumstances — rolled around. I will always associate sunny cold spring weather with that time in my life, which means, I can’t relate to you people who love this time of year at all. For me this weather resonates with the special kind of terror you feel when your brain and body betray you, which I felt then for the first time.

What happened was, I was invited by a classmate whose name I can’t even remember to a graduation party at her parents’ Central Park South pied a terre (they lived mostly in Napa). I remember I wore a pastel dress from the 50s that I’d bought at a flea market. In the gleaming white daylit room my yellowed pink dress definitely read as ‘used,’ not ‘vintage,’ and probably my hair could have been cleaner. My classmate wore a green silk dress I’d seen in a magazine. There were trays with blanched asparagus spears and there was a person who had been hired to come around and endlessly refill your glass with champagne. I wandered from room to room, looking out of the massive windows and wondering if I would ever even visit an apartment this nice again. It was on maybe the 20th floor, not high enough to completely miniaturize the park but far enough above the treeline so that the variegated bright greens of the treetops looked like a lush patterned carpet you could step out of the window and onto.

My own apartment at that time was in a tenement building along the upper reaches of Nassau Avenue in Greenpoint, right at the epicenter of the underground oil spill. No trees grew on my block, and there was a poopish tang in the air from the nearby waste treatment plant whenever it rained. I sat on the stoop of this building the next morning, dressed and ready to go, on the phone with my Mom, unable to either stop crying or move. I was supposed to go into the city and meet my family at the big New School graduation ceremony but I felt strongly that I couldn’t do this. I kept telling my Mom that I was sick, and I did legitimately feel that I was going to puke at some point. A disgusting champagne hangover probably had something to do with it. But also I had all these other, stranger symptoms, like, my heart was racing and my breathing was shallow and I thought that if I ventured off the stoop at all I would die. And I knew this feeling wasn’t rational but knowing that did not help. I tried to explain my impending death to my Mom, who encouraged me to suck it up and get on the subway, because it was my college graduation and I would regret having missed it and they’d come up from Maryland and everything. Now I can see my Mom’s point: if you’ve never had a panic attack there is no reason you would feel sympathetic towards someone who is having one because the thing is, there is nothing actually wrong with that person, and there is no possible way for you to understand how the panic-attack-having person is feeling. They always say they feel like they’re dying, for starters, which sounds so dumb and overdramatic. Long before I experienced the symptoms of what doctors call “anxiety and depression,” I would read descriptions of them in books and think, like, ‘get a grip, lady! Get up off the couch, nothing is wrong with you! Bell jar what?‘ Until you’ve felt the breeze of a 55 degree spring day chill the layer of clammy sweat that’s covering your body and looked up at the cloudless sky and felt like everything about the world you are living in, which appears so benign and pretty, is actually conspiring to squeeze the air out of your body and press you paper-doll flat between two heavy panes of glass, you won’t be able to sympathize. Which is fine, actually: I hope you never feel this way.

Five years and some therapy and three discrete interludes of this variety of feeling later, I am still figuring out what tripped my wires that day. The easy-ish explanation is that I had been pretending to myself that some legitimately harsh and scary realities were normal and okay, and some layer of my brain could not maintain this pretense any longer. Even though this explanation seems too obvious I think it’s mostly correct. It’s one thing to read novels and newspapers and “know,” about the world, that some people maintain second homes on Central Park South while others live in the park itself, but it is another thing to wake up every morning and rush to an office to answer someone’s phone in order to maintain your Nassau Avenue toehold in that world. And everybody (mostly) has to do this, but that doesn’t mean it’s not harsh.

I hadn’t thought about this day for a while and then last night I found myself very randomly at a stranger’s book party in an apartment where, from the living room window, the Tribeca skyline conspired with the building’s angles so that the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge were visible in the distance. When one of the sunburned gentlemen standing near the window drinking champagne asked me where I lived, I pointed and said, “Over that bridge and then you make a left.” His small talk was about the rules of petanque and about summering in Blue Hill, ME and wintering in (on?) Tortola. His job is “consulting,” which means that he sits out on the deck in the morning with his Blackberry doing emails for an hour and then he’s done, “thank you very much.” (He had a British accent).

I think at one time I thought of adulthood as a continuum of achievement that could potentially culminate in my becoming one of these people, which is extra bizarre when you consider that I have never shown the slightest interest in or inclination towards law, medicine, banking, or dating anyone with a greater net worth than mine (which is, btw, smaller than yours, assuming you have a job). Would I even want this, now? I don’t know. I don’t think so. For certain there is a species of elation that it’s only possible to feel in those giddy bubbles high above the city, but probably a lot of it has to do with longing and transience. And also I know now that money or status can’t confer immunity from that clammy feeling of impending death, because nothing can. That feeling can be fended off, though, with a battery of intangible possessions that are more precious than designer clothing or beautiful artworks. This is stuff that I think I am just starting to figure out how to possess.