"Joyce Maynard Adopted Two Girls from Ethiopia Then Gave Them Up."

You remember Joyce Maynard, don't you?

[J.D.] Salinger contacted her after Maynard, at age 18, appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine wearing jeans and red sneakers. Long straight hair and bangs, large eyes and lanky arms added to her waif-like appearance.

Maynard called her cover story "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back On Life." Some 25 years later, she published her memoir, At Home in the World, which explores the Salinger relationship in riveting detail.

Here's that old cover story, from 1972. Excerpt:

I had never taken Women's Liberation very seriously. Partly it was the looks of the movement that bothered me. I believed in all the right things, but just as my social conscience evaporated at the prospect of roughing it in some tiny village with the Peace Corps, so my feminist notions disappeared at the thought of giving up eye liner (just when I'd discovered it). Media-vulnerable, I wanted to be on the side of the beautiful, graceful people, and Women's Libbers seemed--except for Gloria Steinem, who was just emerging--plain and graceless. Women's Lib was still new and foreign, suggesting--to kids at an age of still-undefined sexuality--things like lesbianism and bisexuality. (We hadn't mastered one--how could we cope with the possibility of two?)

Besides, male chauvinism had no reality for me. In my family--two girls and two girl- loving parents--females occupied a privileged position. My mother and sister and I had no trouble getting equal status in our household. At school, too, girls seemed never to be discriminated against. (I wonder if I'd see things differently, going back there now.) Our class was run mostly by girls. The boys played soccer and sometimes held office on the student council--amiable figureheads--but it was the girls whose names filled the honor roll and the girls who ran class meetings. While I would never be Homecoming Sweetheart--I knew that--I had power in the school.

And here's what the cover looked like — what J.D. Salinger saw:

Wait. Why is this article in the "Fashion and Style" section?

In the NYT: "Where is the next Gloria Steinem, and why — decades after the media spotlight first focused on her — has no one emerged to take her place?"

I mean, I was going to say: After all these years and all of the accomplishments of the women's movement, why do we need another Gloria Steinem?

Then I saw that they put this article in the "Fashion and Style" section, and I was all... hmmmm.

Quite aside from all that, the notion that Steinem was the icon of feminism... that's not the way I experienced history. I remember when Ms. Magazine first came out: It was a glossy magazine aimed at middle-class women. And in the 1980s, the academic feminists I knew didn't think much of Gloria Steinem. But she's been around a long time as an important media figure, specializing in an area where a lot has happened. That's something. It's significant, but not crucial.

Demi Moore smokes something, and the real victim is Gloria Steinem.

I don't know exactly why Demi Moore was hospitalized.

Friends and family who were with Moore indicated she has smoked something “similar to incense” and was burning up, shaking and convulsing. They said it was not marijuana.

X17 reported doctors are speculating whether Moore smoked synthetic cannabis, which is also referred to as “K2,” “herbal incense” or “spice.” There are also reports Moore drank excessive amounts of Red Bull energy drinks.

Troubling. Sad, indeed. And there's also the divorce (from her 16-years-younger husband, the very cute Ashton Kutcher). But the person my heart goes out to is Gloria Steinem. Demi Moore has now had to pull out from the role of Gloria Steinem in a movie about Linda Lovelace, the star of the historic porn-flick "Deep Throat." Replacing her is Sarah Jessica Parker. Imagine, one day, one of the most beautiful Hollywood stars is playing the role of you in a movie. And the next day, they've recast the role with an actress who... is just not even very pretty at all.

What's Gloria Steinem doing in a biopic about Linda Lovelace? Here, read "Out of Bondage," by Linda Lovelace (with Mike McGrady), introduction by Gloria Steinem. From the 1986 Publisher's Weekly review at the link:

Steinem's introduction declares her belief in the integrity of the revelations that shocked the public when Lovelace's Ordeal appeared. 

Note: I've read "Ordeal." (And I've never seen "Deep Throat.")

With McGrady, Lovelace here writes a sequel, the story of her life after she escaped from the pimp she claimed forced her into prostitution and into filming "Deep Throat." Many of the hideous experiences detailed in the first book are repeated here, which readers will find hard to bear, unless they are intrigued by the brutalizing pornography that pays handsomely for everyone except its victims. Naming celebrities and mob figures, Lovelace makes a strong case against demeaned "entertainment." Now a wife and mother, the former "sexual zombie" is also an active supporter of human rights. She lectures at colleges on degradations suffered by women as sex objects.

So who's playing Linda Lovelace? I found an old news story that said Lindsay Lohan had the role. Ah, now, I see it's Amanda Seyfried... and that there's a second Linda Lovelace biopic in the works.

Competing films of the same variety sometimes meet poor ends, as studios start rushing to be the first to release their version, which can damage the quality of the end product.

If only they'd take their time! What a fulfillment we might achieve!

Gloria Steinem and the turtle.

#4 on Donna Brazile's rules to live by is "Ask the turtle":

I'm proud to call Gloria Steinem a friend, and this advice came from her. While on a field trip in college with her geology class, she discovered a giant snapping turtle that had climbed out of the river, up a dirt path, right to the edge of a road. Worried it would soon be run over, she wrestled the enormous reptile off the embankment and back down to the water.

At that moment, her professor walked up and asked what in the world she was doing. With some pride, she told him. He said that the turtle had probably spent a month crawling up that long dirt path to safely lay its eggs in the mud on the side of the road and that she had destroyed all that effort with her "rescue."

Gloria tells this story to illustrate the most important political lesson she ever learned: Always ask the turtle.

First, the turtle's message is obviously leave me alone. How am I supposed to believe that this is a message that liberals hold dear?

Second, like Jim Lindgren reading an essay by Michael Bellesiles, I'm getting twinges of doubt about this story. The characters are just too perfectly drawn, and the events unfold in a predictably tragic yet meaningful way.

Third, just try to picture of Gloria with an enormous snapping turtle. Possibly with zombie makeup.

"My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of Western civilization, to make it a feminist world."

Marilyn French. RIP.

Did you read "The Women's Room"?

Her first and best-known novel, “The Women’s Room,” released in 1977, traces a submissive housewife’s journey of self-discovery following her divorce in the 1950s, describing the lives of Mira Ward and her friends in graduate school at Harvard as they grow into independent women. The book was partly informed by her own experience of leaving an unhappy marriage and helping her daughter deal with the aftermath of being raped. Women all over the world seized on the book, which sold more than 20 million copies and was translated into 20 languages....

“It was about the lives of women who were supposed to live the lives of their husbands, supposed to marry an identity rather than become one themselves, to live secondary lives,” [said Gloria Steinem.] “It expressed the experience of a huge number of women and let them know that they were not alone and not crazy.”...

Critics accused her work of being anti-male, frequently citing a female character in “The Women’s Room” who declares, after her daughter has been raped: “All men are rapists, and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes.”

I didn't read this book, though I read a lot of books in 1977 (the year before I went to law school). I never read novels that weren't considered literary, and I shunned the mixture of art and politics. Nor could I identify with the troubles of submissive housewives and journeys of self-discovery following divorces. I might have read some nonfiction on the subject, but I didn't need an easy-reading novel to get me inside the feeling of a situation that didn't apply to me anyway.

Paglia on Palin: "a brand new style of muscular American feminism," "combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen."

Continuing with the Paglia article, let's look at the part about Sarah Palin:

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before...

As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing since my arrival on the scene nearly 20 years ago that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than taking women's studies courses, with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances....

I am still waiting for substantive evidence that Sarah Palin is a dangerous extremist. I am perfectly willing to be convinced, but right now, she seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan, someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it. I don't see her arrival as portending the end of civil liberties or life as we know it....

A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn't worth a warm bucket of spit....

Now that's the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism -- a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. Sarah Palin, if her reputation survives the punishing next two months, may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.

Exactly. This is the way I feel too. I may not agree with a lot of things Palin stands for, but I celebrate this advance in feminism.

This is great for women, and it's especially great that it is happening from the conservative side, because feminism is already well-entrenched among liberals. Let feminism spread amongst conservatives, in this new version that is purged of all the off-putting trappings of liberal attitudes and issues.

"I mean, hello? This is supposed to be a qualification to be president? I don’t think so."

Why is a 73-year-old woman — feminist "icon" Gloria Steinem — talking like a teenager and making a mindcrushingly stupid attack on John McCain for the respect we give him for his years as a prisoner of war?

You might think she's lost her mind, but in fact, she's just using an old feminist rhetorical device:

“Suppose John McCain had been Joan McCain and Joan McCain had got captured, shot down and been a POW for eight years. [The media would ask], ‘What did you do wrong to get captured? What terrible things did you do while you were there as a captive for eight years?’” Steinem said, to laughter from the audience.

The audience laughs because it's the ritual to laugh at this point. They take it on faith that men's accomplishments are valued more than women's. They may even recognize the device of naming the female version of the male hero. To ask us to visualize "Joan McCain" is to allude to Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own": "Let me imagine... what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say."

But Woolf's vivid device is horribly abused in Steinem's hands. Judith Shakespeare fell into oblivion because she was denied access to education and opportunity. Joan McCain actually becomes a pilot and suffers the same fate as John McCain, but people, looking on, deny her credit simply because she is a woman.

And yet the audience laughs.

***

By the way, I'm surprised the Wikipedia entry for "A Room of One's Own" is so skimpy. I guess feminists are underrepresented among Wikipedians. If it wasn't Wikipedia, you'd be able to argue that women's accomplishments are slighted by the bad people who put together encyclopedias. In fact, that this entry is little more than a stub is evidence of female underachievement.

Camille Paglia thinks Hillary Clinton has "a Nixonian reflex steeped in toxic gender bias."

Camille begins with a review of Hillary's family background. (You can bone up on the subject by reading Carl Bernstein's "A Woman in Charge.") Hillary had a "harsh, domineering father" who abused her "feckless, loutish brothers," and she became "the barracuda who fought for dominance at their expense." Replaying that "ruthless old family drama," "Hillary could barely conceal her sneers" at last Saturday's debate. The other candidates looked like "the wimpy, cringing brothers at the dinner table."

This is rich. Let's read on:

Hillary's willingness to tolerate Bill's compulsive philandering is a function of her general contempt for men. She distrusts them and feels morally superior to them. Following the pattern of her long-suffering mother, she thinks it is her mission to endure every insult and personal degradation for a higher cause -- which, unlike her self-sacrificing mother, she identifies with her near-messianic personal ambition.

It's no coincidence that Hillary's staff has always consisted mostly of adoring women, with nerdy or geeky guys forming an adjunct brain trust. Hillary's rumored hostility to uniformed military men and some Secret Service agents early in the first Clinton presidency probably belongs to this pattern. And let's not forget Hillary, the governor's wife, pulling out a book and rudely reading in the bleachers during University of Arkansas football games back in Little Rock.

Hillary's disdain for masculinity fits right into the classic feminazi package...

So.... you're going to use the word "feminazi"?

...which is why Hillary acts on Gloria Steinem like catnip. Steinem's fawning, gaseous New York Times op-ed about her pal Hillary this week speaks volumes about the snobby clubbiness and reactionary sentimentality of the fossilized feminist establishment, which has blessedly fallen off the cultural map in the 21st century.

Note: Camille does not like the official feminists.

History will judge Steinem and company very severely for their ethically obtuse indifference to the stream of working-class women and female subordinates whom Bill Clinton sexually harassed and abused, enabled by look-the-other-way and trash-the-victims Hillary.

I strongly agree with that.

How does all this affect the prospect of a Hillary presidency? With her eyes on the White House, Hillary as senator has made concerted and generally successful efforts to improve her knowledge of and relationship to the military -- crucial for any commander-in-chief but especially for the first female one. However, I remain concerned about her future conduct of high-level diplomacy. Contemptuous condescension seems to be Hillary's default mode with any male who criticizes her or stands in her way. It's a Nixonian reflex steeped in toxic gender bias. How will that play in the Muslim world?

Go read the whole thing, but let me cut to the bottom line.

Paglia supports Barack Obama "because he is a rational, centered personality who speaks the language of idealism and national unity." This is similar to what Andrew Sullivan said — and, frankly, similar to some things I find myself thinking from time to time... when I'm not talking back to myself about what a disastrous delusion that might be.

UPDATE: Rush Limbaugh is delighted by Paglia's attack on Clinton (member link):

Camille Paglia is one of the most brilliant arts professors. .... There's hardly a better writer out there, and her use of language, her turn of phrase... Her point here is that Hillary has no core values.... She stands for herself and whatever she has to do to get where she wants. It's just no more complicated than that....

This is Camille Paglia, a liberal, ladies and gentlemen, writing of Hillary Clinton, on Salon.com.

If Barack Obama were a woman, we wouldn't see her as presidential material.

Says Gloria Steinem in a NYT op-ed:

The woman in question became a lawyer after some years as a community organizer, married a corporate lawyer and is the mother of two little girls, ages 9 and 6. Herself the daughter of a white American mother and a black African father — in this race-conscious country, she is considered black — she served as a state legislator for eight years, and became an inspirational voice for national unity.

Be honest: Do you think this is the biography of someone who could be elected to the United States Senate? After less than one term there, do you believe she could be a viable candidate to head the most powerful nation on earth?

Vivid. But on paper, Barack Obama doesn't look like a viable candidate either.

Anyway, Steinem is supporting Hillary Clinton, because, she says, "she has community organizing experience, but she also has more years in the Senate, an unprecedented eight years of on-the-job training in the White House, no masculinity to prove, the potential to tap a huge reservoir of this country’s talent by her example, and now even the courage to break the no-tears rule."

An unprecedented eight years of on-the-job training in the White House? Ahem... Gloria? Can you say anything about the feminist issues entailed in a woman running for the presidency on her husband's accomplishments? If not, you're speaking as a Clinton partisan and not as someone who wants to seriously engage with feminism.

ADDED: Andrew Sullivan: "Clinton is comfortable aroound this kind of victimology. Obama transcends it."

AND: Ed Morrissey: "Steinem shows everything that's wrong with identity politics. It's crass, it's irrational, it assumes that people should get "turns", and in the end it's anti-democratic. Obama hasn't played that game like Hillary has — and that may be why Obama's beating Hillary like a bongo drum in Iowa and New Hampshire."

"New left-wing radio network that plans to appeal to women listeners and counter the dominance of conservative talk radio."

Dominance uncountered. GreenStone, the Gloria Steinem-Jane Fonda radio network folds after less than one year.

"Despite its pedigree, the programming remains anodyne and apolitical."

Writes Ginia Bellafante about that Gloria Steinem/Jane Fonda radio project (called GreenStone):

To listen to it in anything but thick wool socks and toasty pajamas seems a betrayal of its comforting purpose. Thus far all the hosts are genial female comics — Lisa Birnbach; Mauren Langan, Cory Kahaney and Nelsie Spencer, who make up “The Radio Ritas”; and Mo Gaffney and Shana Wride, who call themselves “Women Aloud.”

But a humor of complacency stands in for a language of subversion, and the extent to which you will find the shows funny seems dependent on how seriously you ever considered buying tickets to “Menopause: The Musical.”

Ooh, that's mean. Delightfully so.

... GreenStone too easily obliges the idea that debate is just a synonym for bad manners, and in doing so suggests that the only corrective to invidious discussion is no discussion at all — or, rather, lots of little discussions about hosiery and slumber parties....

At one point during “The Radio Ritas” last week, I found myself wondering if I were actually listening to Phyllis Schlafly radio. Ms. Spencer, talking about a study indicating that there were possibly negative effects to having children too young, remarked that maybe it was a good idea to wait after all.

Ms. Langan responded emphatically: “Let me tell you, it isn’t. Listen to Aunt Maureen, it isn’t. Get married at 30, have fun in your 20’s and have kids between 32 and 35. Don’t wait until your late 30’s or early 40’s, because you’re going to have somebody else’s egg, you’re going to have to get an Asian baby, which is fine,” she said before pausing. “I’m just saying there are different options.” It was at that moment that I recalled that Mrs. Schlafly had a daughter at 40.

GreenStone is not a renunciation of Ms. Steinem’s beliefs, as some will surely suggest, but an apt expression of the convalescent feminism she has advocated for nearly two decades: the idea that a better world can be achieved by feeling better. In her view epistemology is no substitute for emotion.

Ms. Steinem always disdained intellectualism, saying of academic feminists, in a 1995 interview with Mother Jones, that “nobody cares about them” and that their work was “gobbledygook.”

This rings true. The academic feminists I have known snorted in derision at the name of Gloria Steinem. She was just working on a women's magazine after all. I remember seeing the first issue of Ms. magazine, displayed by a not-too-hip girlfriend of a friend's father. After she left, we made fun of her for thinking some dorky women's magazine would mean anything to the new generation.

UPDATE: Here's the GreenStone website, where you can see what's on and also listen to the shows. For example, the Radio Ritas have these signature segments:

Trendspotting – Where they, get this, spot the trends!! So you can be … trendy!!!

Shallow Corner – Do you have too much self esteem to read those heinous women’s magazines? Have no fear the Radio Ritas are here and to catch every vain, vapid moment in the fashion and beauty.

Foodie at Large – The Ritas span the globe for the cheesiest news in the world of food.

Whad'ya Do??? Moral dilemmas, etiquette faux pas, or everyday advice...there is no need to look any further, The Ritas know what’s best for you.

What’s Up With Guys? The Ritas invite men to weigh in on what matters to them…sports, breasts, size and panties.

Hmmm.... don't get me started! Breasts are a big topic? Who could have imagined! Anyway, I love the idea that they have a special "shallow" segment as if it's in relief of... of what?

"If they want to be boys, they should go to a co-ed school."

What should be done at Smith, which has always been an all-female college, about students, born female, who take on a male, transgendered identity? The Financial Times has an interesting article.

”If they want to be boys, they should go to a co-ed school,” says one alumnus from the 1990s, who did not wish to be named for fear of being labelled intolerant. “Women go to Smith because they only want to learn with other women.”

For these students, who pay $37,000 a year in tuition fees, Smith is first and foremost for women. Women, they say, learn better without the distractions of male classmates, and if an all-women college accepts, teaches and graduates male students, it will go down the path of the other “seven sister” colleges and lose an invaluable part of its heritage. Women’s colleges are an endangered species - Sarah Lawrence and Vassar have gone co-ed and Radcliffe has been subsumed by its former brother school, Harvard.

But the traditionalists at Smith -- according to the article -- are not the dominant culture:

For those students from the progressive, feminist tradition of Steinem and Friedan, Smith’s transgender students fit naturally on a campus that has long been tolerant of sexual difference. Notably tolerant. When the widely read Princeton Review of US colleges is released each year, Smith is regularly rated one of the top 10 most “gay friendly” colleges in the country. Students joke that the college’s motto should be “Queer in a year or your money back”. The campus has long been home to organisations such as the Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Alliance’s Women of Colour Committee. The National Enquirer tabloid once dubbed Smith’s hometown of Northampton “Lesbianville USA” because of its visible population of gay women. (One Smith student told me it is the only place in the US where local 14-year-old boys are mistaken for university students.)

I can't improve on Wonkette's priceless wisecrack about this picture, but, oh, does this T-shirt irk me! What the hell kind of feminism is it that would gain power if the person asserting it is pretty? Especially if the person asserting it claimed her opinion was more valuable because she was pretty? Especially if the opinion is that feminism is an important and strong set of values. And I know Gloria Steinem famously said (when she turned 50), "This is what 50 looks like," but she was saying it to knock the person who told her she didn't look her age. It was a way of telling that person off for having a stereotype about 50 year olds rather than taking the bait and saying, "Yes, you're right I am prettier than other women." It was a sisterhood thing to say. The T-shirt person in the photograph is bringing up the subject herself, contrasting herself to plainer women that no one was even talking or thinking about at the time. That's the opposite of sisterhood.