Shocked & Appalled

Random rants

10/30/2003

Apparently, I write like a guy. OUt of five samples of my writing, the Gender Genie guessed that four were written by a male.

10/29/2003

Joan Walsh has an excellent review of a recent New York Times piece on women who quit work to say home with the kids. The Times piece, which focused on a group of Princeton graduates who appear to have no more pressing needs than whether to go to Starbucks or Peet's for their morning lattes, just flitted from topic to topic, barely brushing by what I assume was its underlying premise: "Why don't women run the world? Maybe it's because they don't want to."


Walsh writes:

"Belkin [the Times author] is smart and honest enough to layer in her disclaimers, which read like those annoying all-caps pop-up windows you see when you're downloading software: "I say this with the full understanding that there are ambitious women out there who are the emotional and professional equals of any man, and that there are women who stayed the course ..." yada yada yada, yawn. Also this: "I am very aware that, for the moment, this is true mostly of elite successful women who can afford real choice," more yada yada, don't read me, because my point is really elsewhere but my editor made me put this stuff here so I wouldn't look like a smug white Ivy League elitist. Because, honestly, if you take those disclaimers seriously, you'll think -- correctly -- that Belkin's piece is a real-time snapshot of a small cohort of privileged 30-something white women who are likely to think something entirely different in 10 years. Next story."

Exactly. At one point Belkin writes that fresh out of college "I set my sights on the highest goal I could think of -- becoming editor of this newspaper, perhaps, or at least editor of this magazine," but now realizes that "I will never run this paper. But I will write for it, into old age, I hope, and that piece of the work is enough for me."

Honey, I have a feeling that the reason you're never going to run the New York Times might have something to do with the fact that you seem to have difficulty writing an organized, coherent story that's backed up by more than anecdotal evidence of a muddy point.