Contra La Flanagan

I had been meaning to get to Pamela Paul’s defense of Caitlin Flanagan’s upper-class anti-feminism–which essentially argues that people vociferously disagree with Flanagan’s crude gender stereotypes and bourgie conformism because they secretly agree with it, but fortunately Ann Bartow, Amanda and Echidne are all on the job. Make sure to check out the comments at Pandagon, which also raise some good points. The Happy Feminist notes Flanagan’s baffling sexual politics, which are captured perfectly in this paragraph cited by Amanda:

If marriages are sexless, it’s because ball-breaker women, exhausted from long hours at the office and from nagging their husbands to fold the laundry properly, are not home putting home-cooked hot meals on the table, not greeting their husbands at the door in heels and slinky negligee and, worst of all, not putting out. “Under these conditions,” she writes, “pity the poor married man hoping to get a bit of comfort from the wife at day’s end. He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual maneuver, and still doing a slow burn over his failure to wipe down the countertops and fold the dish towel after cooking the kids’ dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his e-mail, catch a few minutes of SportsCenter, and call it a night.”

We’re all but in Kass meets Dowd territory here: passive women who see sex as a grim chore desired only by men (and hence we would lose any interest in sex once they’re “financially independent”), sexual pleasure as something women give to men period, women controlling the domestic sphere while the man trudges home with his briefcase who just wants his wife to bring his pipe, slippers and a hummer and is that really to much to ask? (And, to mount another hobbyhorse, she also implies quite frequently that anyone who doesn’t share her fastidious standards for domestic labor don’t merely have different priorities or aesthetic preferences but must be guilty of some moral failing.) I can assure the Times‘ reviewer that I don’t criticize this stuff because I agree with it.

Also odd is her defensive claim that “I am pro-choice, anti-war, anti-Bush, I’m a Democrat, and only a conservative on family issues,” but whining that “I’ve got nothing but derision from the left–you’ve got to check everything on the menu to please them.” As a couple of commenters note, this isn’t surprising given that the family issues are pretty much all that she writes about. If she wrote mostly about abortion or the war, nobody would criticize her, and if Charles Johnson did nothing put post pictures of the sky nobody would criticize him either…