I’m late on weighing in on this, but I wanted to get past the din of everyone’s ridicule of the book, Shades of Grey; to move beyond the predictable bewilderment and hostility that accompanies monster success like this. That it’s terribly written. That the heroine is silly, dumb, ignorant, naive. That the book isn’t even …
When I think of where I’ve been all my skiing life, it hasn’t been Utah. Alta, yes; but somehow I’ve never associated Alta with the beehive state. Rather, its iconic status always seemed to stand alone, stately but stateless; the purists’s place, as Wildcat is the daredevil’s place or St. Anton, the ritzy one. I …
March is Women’s History Month, and last week, on March 8, we observed International Woman’s Day. What’s new today–not just this one day, but in our lives–is the idea of women helping women. Not just women in trouble; women helping each other thrive. Women mentorship. In honor of helping each other in whatever way we …
In any story, whether we read it or see it on film or in a store window, we have to know who is speaking. Whose voice is telling us what story? Whose point of view is it? A great story at the moment, spoken by the Census, is about women’s increased power. Women are now …
In reading Deborah Solomon’s interesting review of the new book, “My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Steiglitz”in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, I was struck once again by how free literary and artistic men have historically felt to reveal themselves in all their egomaniacal splendor or horror (think Picasso, …
“So, Georgia, Are Those Flowers Really Vaginas?” Read More »
Now that we’re no longer a married culture; now that we have more single people floating about the country than wedded ones, it’s fun to watch the family-values contingent race to point fingers. Who is responsible for this cultural sea-change? Who, they want to know, is bad, and who is good? I always want to …
Why the Very, Very Righteous Make Me Very, Very Nervous Read More »
The construct of the Wife, that traditional icon of virtue, has depressed many a woman and killed many a traditional marriage. Luckily for gay men and women, they won’t face this horrible cultural construct. And I say Amen to that!
More evidence that women’s attitudes toward marriage have changed dramatically: The Pew Research Center, which analyzes census data, confirms what I’ve been hearing from women: the desire to make their own self-expansion as important as it has always been for men and children. Women want more space in their relationships. Yes, I know, we used to mock …
That an entire book has to be written about the way in which the French put pleasure first in their lives–a pleasure gleaned from a lovely long lunch; a good cheese; a natural (as opposed to a creepy or inappropriate) flirtation, makes me sad that our culture comes out so unfavorably. It’s true that in our culture, “pleasure” seems to …
My favorite new fact about marriage is not the Census Bureau’s 2010 report that four in ten Americans feel that marriage is becoming obsolete. (In my book, Marriage Shock, I’d already found that women were running away from marriage in droves–even young, newly married women. And that was over ten years ago.) No, the great new …
