Let's Blame Oprah

Gosh, I’m sorry you don’t feel special anymore, by zuzu at Feministe.

From the “Everything can be blamed on a woman” files: Oprah Winfrey is single-handedly responsible for ruining the marathon.

The piece is an extended, and dishonest, whine about how they let just anybody run marathons nowadays, instead of special, dedicated men who did it for the thrill of competition and the frisson of self-denial — oh, and Americans aren’t winning marathons like they used to, which is Oprah’s fault.

After Oprah won her beef trial, I thought we were done blaming her for the ills of America and the world . And by "we", I do not mean people like me.

Book Reviews and Nannies

From Jennifer Weiner's blog, Snark Spot:

So I’m having my own little Kanye West “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” moment over on the New York Times’ book blog...

...Things started on Tuesday TBR senior editor Dwight Garner posted a roundup of what other newspapers were reviewing: Michael Chabon, Woody Allen, your typical assortment of Living Dead White Men who the Times routinely covers to death and beyond, leavened with a review of Tina Brown’s take on the ten-years-dead Diana.

I posted a comment pointing out that it was interesting that the Times itself has reviewed all of those titles (in Chabon and Brown’s cases, twice), and wondered whether book review editors the world over got some kind of top-secret list as to which books to write about each week...

To find out what happened next, follow the thread here. You can read my comments on Jennifer's MySpace blog here. I was incensed, yet humorous. It sounds like something catherine would be interested in, since she "of course [she writes] romance novels."

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Next. From Salon via Racialicious: The other mothers, by Lynn Harris.

Separation anxiety, race and class, our very identities as women and parents: This is precisely the bumpy terrain that Lucy Kaylin explores in her new book, "The Perfect Stranger: The Truth About Mothers and Nannies." Said "truth" -- refreshingly -- is not, say, research twisted to assert that mothers who employ nannies have higher rates of self-hate, or that their children tend to grow up to be sociopaths. Kaylin's book -- her own nanny story, woven into interviews with other mothers and nannies, too -- shows that, actually, it's messier than that.

Kaylin's responses to the interview questions said more about her than I think she intended:

"I see what a cliché I've become, you know, when I come in the house with my hard shoes and dark clothes and I'm hugging my kid with one hand and working the BlackBerry with the other. You see yourself like that and it's awful; you're exactly the person you have long decried or felt superior to. A nanny can give you a really clear perspective on what it looks like to them...

...[My nanny Hy] is very frank, and if she thinks something's wrong she'll say it. And there was this one day when my husband and I were being so harried, doing that "two ships passing in the morning" thing, and she literally gave me a command: She said, "Kiss your husband." I was about to run out the door without doing so. And I thought it was great because she has a really macro sense of our operation. It's not just "I've got to make the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches this afternoon and make sure they have their bath by 6." She really cares about the health of the whole family. She cares about people getting kissed before they go out the door. She knows that it matters. And God bless her, it does matter."

Thank goodness Kaylin's nanny can function as her therapist and personal assistant, in addition to taking care of her kids. I wonder how her husband fits into the "operation." I'm not sure. In response to the question, "How do fathers feel about nannies?", Kaylin stated:

You'd think in this day and age that fathers would be as affected by the presence of a nanny as we are, that they would be as involved as we are in child rearing -- since we do have these great, well-adjusted feminist dads these days, wearing Snuglis and going to play dates -- but the reality is, the brunt of the childcare still falls to the mother. If something goes wrong with the kid, [people] are going to look to the choices the mother made to see what went wrong. And there's just no sense in which a father is hiring someone to be his proxy when he brings a nanny into the home. The nanny is a mother figure. So as a result, it's the mother who's overseeing the relationship and managing it.

Did Kaylin consult any fathers who may actually be the primary caregivers in their homes? Did she even ask her own husband how he felt about the nanny in their own home? Nope, she made a sweeping generalization without referring to any research at all.


My favorite part of the article was the comments. Some people were ticked off. An excerpt:

Add me to the "Who Fucking Cares?" Camp

I can't believe that there is an entire book industry dedicated to the minutia of motherhood. Every little aspect of being a mother/working mother/stay at home mother has been fetishized to a point beyond ridiculous. So now there is a book that dedicates at least 100 pages to dissecting how upper-middle class mothers FEEL about their nannies?

I don't care how these women, who have all the choices in the world, feel. What interests me more is how the illegal Mexican nanny who has had to leave her own children behind feels about being paid subsistence wages? Or how the working-poor mother feels about not being able to work at all because of the lack of daycare, period. Or how another working-poor mother feels about having to work nights at a corner store while her husband works days, and then having to haul yourself around all day after not sleeping. So to complain that you feel JEALOUS of your Nanny is whiny and self-indulgent.

Incidentally, I am working-mother who has more choices available to her than almost 90% of working Moms. I pay 45% of my take-home for childcare costs. I pay my childcare provider 25% more than the going rate to insure that she'll stick around, and because I really believe that my commitment to feminism and social and economic equality starts with me and my bank account. The endless navel gazing of upper-class women does little to alert our consciousness to the class implications of hiring other women to mind your children for subsistence wages.

Your thoughts?

His Girl, Freaky, Night Lights, After Next.

Stories I liked today:

From WireTap Magazine, A Big Tent With No One in It, by Ally Klimkoski:

In November of 2004 there was one age group that voted for John Kerry. Only one. One group decided that George Bush was an unequivocal moron and should not return to the White House. Only one. What we've now learned is that it's not only the standard to believe the president is a complete moron, it's actually quite fashionable.

What is surprising is that this same age group is the one age group that is most often ignored by the Democratic Party, Democratic candidates and most political organizations.

That's right -- it's us. It's the 18- to 30-year-olds.

My favorite part of the article, under what the DNC can learn from the Calvin Klein IN2U campaign, targeted at the 18-30 demographic:

5. Listen -- don't lecture...I am holding out for the day I see a candidate begin a college lecture by walking up to the podium, grabbing the mic and saying "You know, I'm not going to sit here and lecture at you. You get that all day long. I'm curious in what you think and what you want out of me. And before I leave this lecture, I want to come out with some reasonable action items that I can work with you on."...

...7. Age doesn't equal issue. 23 isn't 18, and it's not 25, and it's not 28 and it's not 30. There is more diversion between the 18-30 age group than any other group because so many things change between those times. A new college freshman is nothing like a 21-year-old; being 21 is not the same as someone who has just graduated at 23; and someone who graduated at 23 is nothing like someone who's 25 or pushing 30. They each have different issues that concern them. Student loans will appeal more to the 23+ crowd, but kids who aren't paying them off yet aren't thinking about that yet.

8. Students are not the same as nonstudents. Targeting college students who are 18-25 is nowhere close to targeting working 18- to 25-year-olds. The issues are different; a few people target them differently. Similarly, the working college students who attend tech schools, community colleges or night four-year schools are also different than the regular 18- to 25-year-olds at regular four-year schools. Similarly, those who attended colleges are different than those who didn't yet fall in that demographic, and their issues aren't the same.

From WireTap Magazine, via Feministing, U.S., Denial and the Culture of Violence, by Samhita Mukhopadhyay.

What some are calling the worst shooting in United States history, the death of 32 Virginia Tech students was indeed deplorable. The media circus that followed was also deplorable. Shouldn't the families and victims be given some privacy to deal with the tragedy?

But also what is it about these isolated incidents that capture the national imagination? As other bloggers have noted, last weekend 65 Iraqis died and just yesterday another 183 in Baghdad alone. Why the hypocrisy? So far in 2007 there have been 27 deaths in Oakland County alone. Why have none of those deaths made headline news? Why does America only care about certain people's death? Do some people just deserve to die?

I also liked this article linked inside the previous one: "It's like when 9/11 happened", by Joe Eaton, on Salon.com...

Ko, a senior accounting major, said he and other South Korean students are afraid to stay on campus. Ko said many of their friends in a Korean Christian group were also planning to leave Blacksburg for Northern Virginia.

"It's like when 9/11 happened," Ko said. "Arab people are victims even though they didn't do anything wrong. It's just the same to me." Ko said Korean students have been e-mailing and calling each other since the release of Cho's name this morning. He said he wanted to attend today's convocation at 2 p.m., where President Bush was scheduled to speak, but friends warned him against it. "People said don't attend because it could be a bad situation," he said.

...as well as this student at Virginia Tech writing in his livejournal in real time about the event. It's a sensitive, human account of the tragedy, more so than the breaking stories from NBC and the other American "news" outlets, who have been plastering the killer's mugshot and gun porn photo on every show and website they own.

All of the above reminded me of this exchange featured in Bowling for Columbine:

Michael Moore: If you were to talk directly to the kids at Columbine or the people in that community, what would you say to them if they were here right now?

Marilyn Manson: I wouldn't say a single word to them, I would listen to what they have to say and that's what no one did.

Here's the article from Reuters that gave me a sardonic giggle: Catholic Church buries limbo after centuries. Sucks to be those people who believed in limbo for hundreds years. I wonder what will happen when the next Popes declare that gays are A-OK, women can join the priesthood, and contraception might be a good idea?

Even though I enjoyed the rerun of The Office last night, I would have appreciated a new episode. I totally related to 30 Rock, though. I don't think Bill Cosby and Oprah are coming after me, but I can understand feeling like a supermodel in Cleveland. "Well played, Garkel."

Though I don't see how Jack Donaghy can talk himself out of this one: Alec Baldwin calls Dora the Explorer.

Hey there, buddy. I love Dora the Explorer! All she said was, "Hola." There was no need to call her a "rude, thoughtless little pig." I guess once Mr. Baldwin's book is published, I will understand "the incredible strains created by parental alienation."

BTW, Jack's assistant Jonathan is my new TV crush. Move over Psych guys.