"At her most radical, [Helen Gurley] Brown was a subversive rather than a revolutionary..."

"... a sexual libertarian rather than a liberator; and an unapologetic partisan of free enterprise." 

(She once called Margaret Thatcher a “Cosmo Girl.”) “How could any woman not be a feminist?” she wondered, in 1985, in an interview on her twentieth anniversary at Cosmopolitan. “The girl I’m editing for wants to be known for herself. If that’s not a feminist message, I don’t know what is.”

Feminists come in every bra size, and what feminist would deny or belittle Brown’s achievements? But, whoever her reader was, the dewy model or celebrity who appeared on the cover of her magazine every month for thirty-two years never resembled Mrs. Thatcher, and, indeed, looked suspiciously like a bimbo to the older generation of militants for women’s rights....

Via the Metafilter discussion of Brown's death.

"Look how Sarah Palin is dressing these day!"

I say, when I see this.

Meade gives 2 responses, in quick succession:

1. "Todd digs that."

2. "It's not very Margaret Thatcher-looking."

"Capitalism pays for socialism."

Says Alderman Mark Clear at the Madison City Council meeting last night, which denied Occupy Madison an extension of its permit to maintain an encampment on a city block which is slated for development. Full context at the end of this post.

ADDED: This seems like a good place to repeat that old Margaret Thatcher adage: "The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."

Women "in a room... tend to be a little more reasonable" than men.

Brown professor Wendy Schiller, spouts blatant nonsense, but obviously believes herself to be reasonable. Then Andrew Sullivan lambastes Hillary Clinton. It's all good fun. Check it out.

"He would rather have the poor poorer, provided that the rich were less rich. That is the Liberal policy."

We were talking about income disparity and income mobility yesterday, and somebody remembered this memorable clip. I want you to have it in your memory bank too.

"'The Iron Lady' locates class as an important and largely ignored element of Mrs. Thatcher's struggle."

Writes Peggy Noonan:

The leftist intelligentsia of her day, which claimed loyalty to and identification with the poor and marginalized, was shot through with snobs and snobbery. Underneath their egalitarian chatter was (and to some degree still is) a hidden, hungry admiration for and desire to be associated with the well-named and well-connected. The top of the right, the Tories, who said they stood for tradition, the rights of the oppressed middle and the greatness of England, was heavily populated by a more familiar kind of snob, those who took more overt pleasure in their titles and pedigree, and wealth. They were not eager for change.

Both left and right looked down on women, especially style-less grinds and grocers' daughters who thought they were the equal of the boys. The movie suggests Mrs. Thatcher's defiance of the snobs while depicting her defeat of the snobs.

Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin.

Not quite Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher... but still....

Streep as Thatcher.

The new trailer:

Don't cry for me Qaddafi/Obama...

Look at what Drudge has going on right now.

First you've got the 2 leaders — Qaddafi and Obama — both frowning.



Qaddafi says "No surrender!" And Obama says — Drudge is paraphrasing — "OK, let's do it before the game." That is, he's surrendering to pressure and doing his speech before the Packers/Saints game.

Next, we get a symphony of hands: the painting behind Berlusconi (who's got a good rhyme for Italy — in English, anyway), Madonna (whose movie about the wife of a former king of England is apparently shitty), Hillary (who's happy in Paris), Margaret Thatcher (presumably in England), Venus Williams (like Thatcher, she's ill), and Cher (gripping the shoulder of her soon-to-be-dancing, former-daughter Chaz):



Now let's interpret this symphony. One clue is the link under Madonna, after the reference to "Death in Venice": "BOOK SHOCK: Evita 'kept Nazi treasure taken from Jews'...." Of course, Madonna played Evita in the movie "Evita," and if there's one thing we think about when we think about the musical "Evita," it's the hands in the air gesture that goes with the song "Don't Cry for Me Argentina."

Evita, of course, was the wife of President, and, of course, so was Hillary. Now, clearly, Drudge is picturing Hillary that way for a reason.

The hands make a graceful composition, guiding our eyes from left to right. The woman in the painting appears to hold a glowing globe in her hand. Madonna, her hand in a similar upcurved position, blows the kiss that symbolically had been place on her fingertips, and Hillary opens her arms to receive, receive, receive.

A step down, we see the elderly, elegant Thatcher reaching out, palm toward us, grasping nothing, and perhaps there is nothing left in her head as she drifts into oblivion. She is dappled with jewelry: earrings, necklace, brooch. The missing item of jewelry is a ring, and we shift our eyes slightly to right and see a ring. It's on the hand of Venus Williams, whose fingers are curved inward, grasping not a glowing globe, but a neon-colored ball. Venus is sick! She has Sjögren's syndrome. Take one more step and it's Cher, her fingers delicately curved over the shoulder of the offspring she's fiercely defending with Tweets.

"The pearls are absolutely non-negotiable."

Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher.

"I am trying to approach the role with as much zeal, fervour and attention to detail as the real Lady Thatcher possesses - I can only hope my stamina will begin to approach her own.”

Beautiful!

"Joe Meek ... the most important British musician of the Sixties."

"[H]e was a backroom boffin who revolutionized sound, devising new recording techniques and crafting an endless flow of gloriously deranged experimental pop that gave him the right to regard himself as the true creator of the records he worked on. Telstar, by The Tornadoes, is still Meek's best-known single. It was the first record by a British act to reach the top of the American pop charts and, rather unexpectedly, was chosen by Margaret Thatcher as one of her Desert Island Discs. An ode to the dawn of the space age and to what Harold Wilson later called the 'white heat of technology', it's a dizzyingly exciting instrumental full of strange, unclassifiable effects: the rocket-launch sound at the beginning is said to be a toilet flushing in reverse; the sounds evoking radio signals were apparently produced by running a pencil around the rim of an ashtray."

Fascist cars?

Why aren't we more hostile to cars? Are we deluded about what they are doing to us? Jon Garvie is reviewing a couple books. Here's a challenging excerpt:

Nineteenth-century English conservatives detested the car, believing that it would destroy the looks and manners of the countryside. Italian Futurists exalted “the beauty of speed” in the 1920s, hoping that it would usher in a new violent age, shorn of “emasculating tendencies” like democracy. Mussolini and Hitler followed through such ideas, the latter bequeathing the autobahns and the Volkswagen to subsequent road enthusiasts. [Brian] Ladd's explicitly anti-car study ["Autophobia"] questions why machines associated with individual freedom have appealed so greatly to fascists of all stripes (Russian and Chinese central planners were both great admirers of Henry Ford).

Opponents of cars have laboured the same points for more than a century: damage to the environment, social atomization and, of course, a high risk of accident and death. In opposition, the pro-car lobby requires abstract arguments which refuse to address the same set of “facts” and foreground ideology instead. From Hitler to Margaret Thatcher, car advocates have seen them as literal engines of change; vehicles by which to remake society, whether on the basis of individualism or collectivism.

"This is the paradox of Dave: The closer you get, the darker the picture, but the more genuinely lovable he was."

"It was only when you knew him better that you had a true appreciation of what a heroic struggle it was for him not merely to get along in the world, but to produce wonderful writing."

Jonathan Franzen, from a long Rolling Stone article called "The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace."

"David began to have anxiety attacks in high school," his father recalls. "I noticed the symptoms, but I was just so unsophisticated about these matters. The depression seemed to take the form of an evil spirit that just haunted David." [His mother] Sally came to call it the "black hole with teeth." David withdrew. "He spent a lot of time throwing up junior year," his sister remembers. One wall of his bedroom was lined with cork, for magazine photos of tennis stars. David pinned an article about Kafka to the wall, with the headline THE DISEASE WAS LIFE ITSELF....

[After he dropped out of college,] Wallace would visit his dad's philosophy classes. "The classes would turn into a dialogue between David and me," his father remembers. "The students would just sit looking around, 'Who is this guy?' " Wallace devoured novels — "pretty much everything I've read was read during that year." He also told his parents how he'd felt at school. "He would talk about just being very sad, and lonely," Sally says. "It didn't have anything to do with being loved. He just was very lonely inside himself."

Here's a passage from a story about how bad he felt on anti-anxiety medication:

You are the sickness yourself.... You realize all this...when you look at the black hole and it's wearing your face. That's when the Bad Thing just absolutely eats you up, or rather when you just eat yourself up. When you kill yourself. All this business about people committing suicide when they're "severely depressed;" we say, "Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!" That's wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts.... When they "commit suicide," they're just being orderly.

I liked this description of his living conditions at one point:

Wallace spent a year writing in Syracuse. "I lived in an apartment that was seriously the size of the foyer of an average house. I really liked it. There were so many books, you couldn't move around. When I'd want to write, I'd have to put all the stuff from the desk on the bed, and when I'd want to sleep, I would have to put all the stuff on the desk."

Wallace worked longhand, pages piling up. "You look at the clock and seven hours have passed and your hand is cramped," Wallace said. He'd have pens he considered hot — cheap Bic ballpoints, like batters have bats that are hot. A pen that was hot he called the orgasm pen.

And let me highlight this;

Wallace was always dating somebody. "There were a lot of relationships," Amy says. He dated in his imaginative life too: When I visited him, one wall was taped with a giant Alanis Morissette poster. "The Alanis Morissette obsession followed the Melanie Griffith obsession — a six-year obsession," he said. "It was preceded by something that I will tell you I got teased a lot for, which was a terrible Margaret Thatcher obsession. All through college: posters of Margaret Thatcher, and ruminations on Margaret Thatcher. Having her really enjoy something I said, leaning forward and covering my hand with hers."

He tended to date high-strung women — another symptom of his shyness. "Say what you want about them, psychotics tend to make the first move." Owning dogs was less complicated: "You don't get the feeling you're hurting their feelings all the time."

There's much more at the link, and I won't attempt to summarize it. But if you were wondering why this brilliant man killed himself, you will have your explanation.

"The usual Althousian misogynistic exceptionalism."

Ann Bartow agrees with something I said -- and quotes it in full -- after "extracting" it from this "much longer" post supposedly "larded with the usual Althousian misogynistic exceptionalism." She offers no reasons for why that description applies to the rest of my post. She just hurls the insult. So, to respond in kind, let me say: Lame! Pathetic! Unscrupulous!

IN THE COMMENTS: Some object to the insult to me, but Electric Citizen objects to the insult to lard:

Lard o'mercy.

Every baker knows that despite lard's heavy reputation (it is pig fat, after all), nothing makes a flakier or better-tasting pie crust. Lard also makes the lightest and tastiest fried chicken: buttermilk, secret spices and ancient cast-iron skillets are all well and good, but the key to fried chicken greatness is lard.

Michael H. is all:

Electric Citizen - One of my earliest childhood memories was of my father's mother, a German immigrant, making doughnuts in her kitchen. She would make the dough, let it rise, roll it out, and use two glasses to punch out doughnut shapes (one for the doughnut, a smaller on for the hole).

She'd drop the doughnuts into a vat of hot lard atop her old gas stove. After a few moments, she'd turn the half-cooked doughnuts over with wooden dowels, then a minute later spear the hot doughnuts and drop them onto a plate. She'd sprinkle them with sugar, and as soon as they had cooled just enough to be picked up by small fingers, my cousins and I would each grab one and run to the porch.

The aroma of the doughnuts cooking in hot lard, and the melt-in-my-mouth sweetness of the fresh doughnuts has been so indelible imprinted that I cannot to this day, some 60 years later, smell doughnuts without recalling fond memories of my grandmother.

(Of course, she couldn't blog, so she never realized her full potential as a woman).

And suddenly, everyone is reminiscing about grandmas and cooking with lard.

Well, not everyone. Plenty are still going after Bartow. (And -- how unfair! -- there are zero comments chez Bartow.)

Ruth Anne says Bartow has used the old device of "insulting upward," which will get you traffic, but -- boo hoo! -- still no comments. I wonder why.

Henry said:

Can we assume from Ann Bartow's statement that what she doesn't quote she finds offensive? If so, here's what offends her (all quotes and emphasis from Ann's original post):

1. "It's unlikely that female lawprofs have a special disadvantage."

2. "You have 'disproportionate child care responsibilities' and you're a law professor and that's not your choice? Do something about it!"

3. Agreement! At least until Ann writes: "Stop whining, blaming others, looking for protectors, and blog... if you want to."

The inverse of these comments is that female law professors are at a special disadvantage, they're stuck with the kids, and they can't do anything about it.

In short, fish really do need bicycles and society is to blame.

Jdeeripper said:

Bartow also failed to explain what the hell "misogynistic exceptionalism" means.

Althouse is as exceptionally misogynistic?

Althouse thinks she is an exceptional woman and not like the other inferior women?

Althouse thinks she is so exceptional that only other people can be misogynistic not her?

I think she made the comment because 1. she didn't read the post in full and 2. she is winking to the other feminists that she knows Althouse is a traitor but she still wants to link to a post she partly agrees with.

Lurker80 said:

I find it interesting that Bartow linked to the whole Feministing scandal from 2006 as evidence that you are in part responsible for attacks against feminists. Amazing. As if feminists are not allowed to criticize each other. (Unless it's about Palin, because of course she's not a "real" feminist.)

Her link does bring back memories, though. I first learned of your blog through the Feministing controversy back when I was trying to determine whether I was a feminist at all. I'm so grateful that I stumbled upon this blog and learned that feminism is a broader category than Feministing and BitchPhD would have you believe.

Wurly said:

Margaret Thatcher? Misogynistic exceptionalism.

Jeanne Kirkpatrick? Misogynistic exceptionalism.

Sarah Palin? Misogynistic exceptionalism.

Basically, its a woman who succeeds on a foundation other than victimhood. That, in modern feminism's mind is "exceptional". The example that the "exceptional" woman sets--that you can succeed on your own terms without claiming the identity of a victim--sets back the cause of feminism, and is therefore misogynistic, because only modern feminism can speak for women. That's why Ann fits the category. Watch out Ann, I hear next week's Newsweek has a column explaining why you aren't really a woman.

Joan said:

I think Bartow thinks it's fair to call Ann misogynistic (anti-women) because as so many have noted already, Ann doesn't play along with the women-as-victim story.

I confess, I had to look up exceptionalism, and now I'm really stumped as to what Bartow means, because exceptionalism means (if I'm getting this right) that normal rules don't apply because you're special, that is, exceptional.

I think it is grammatically incorrect to use a negative modifier like "misogynistic" with "exceptionalism", which implies special treatment due to superiority. It's a contradiction in terms, unless Bartow means to say that it is Ann herself who wields her exceptionalism to further her misogynistic goals.

I've been reading here since the early days, and have never found Ann misogynistic although she does occasionally over-react to blogospheric slights. Labeling her with exceptionalism is a gross exaggeration, if that was Bartow's intention.

Does that represent Bartow's best work? That alone could explain why there are few prominent women law prof bloggers. If you came across Bartow first, you'd think, "Ick, who wants to read this?" and never click on her blog again. To be a successful blogger, it's not enough to have opinions, you have to express them clearly and support them as well. It also helps a lot if you don't whine.

Pogo said...

Misogynistic exceptionalism expialidocious!

Even though the sound of it
Is something quite atrocious
If you don't whine loud enough
You'll be called ferocious
Misogynistic exceptionalism expialidocious!!

Um diddle diddle diddle um diddle ay
Um diddle diddle diddle um diddle ay

Because I was afraid to speak
When I was just a lass
My mother said I was too weak
And the ceiling it was glass
But then one day I learned a word
That saved my pretty ass
The biggest word I ever heard
And I stuff it in my bra:

Oooohhhh, Misogynistic exceptionalism expialidocious!!

UPDATE: Bartow finally got a comment, savaging me for writing "Women are ... prone to"... but oops... I didn't write that. Bartow omitted quotation marks or indenting to show that I quoted a phrase from the article I was writing about. Let's see if Bartow takes the trouble to correct her lone commenter. If not... pathetic, lame, unscrupulous.... And I want an apology for making it look like I wrote something I didn't write. And the person I was quoting was only laying down the conventional argument. Sigh.

Sarah Palin is great for feminism.

Cathy Young has a nice op-ed in the WSJ, "Why feminists hate Sarah Palin." Excerpt:

Left-wing feminists have a hard time dealing with strong, successful conservative women in politics such as Margaret Thatcher. Sarah Palin seems to have truly unhinged more than a few, eliciting a stream of vicious, often misogynist invective....

I disagree with Sarah Palin on a number of issues, including abortion rights. But when the feminist establishment treats not only pro-life feminism but small-government, individualist feminism as heresy, it writes off multitudes of women.

I wouldn't have titled this piece "Why feminists hate Sarah Palin." Young never concedes that the feminism that liberals say is the only feminism is, in fact, the only feminism. Nor would I.

There was a time -- I was there -- back in the 80s and early 90s, when feminists would speak of "feminisms" and were always promoting some new version of feminism that, we'd argue, was better than the last. We were way out in front of the liberal feminists. So it seemed, and we duly disparaged them -- from the left.

Those were heady times. But in recent years, feminism has been dominated by Democratic Party devotees who act like they own feminism, as if theirs was the only feminism -- as if they could dictate that all women should vote Democratic.

Perversely, this conventional Democratic Party feminism took over after Bill Clinton made it rather obvious that within the Democratic Party, the party's interests would necessarily supervene women's interests. The feminism of the last dozen years has been a dull, uninspired argument for keeping Democratic politicians in power.

But feminism is something that transcends party politics. Women have interests that the parties should have to compete for. I want a vivid debate about what is good for women. Sarah Palin represents one argument, and her feminism will require Democrats to improve their argument and not take women for granted. Sarah Palin brings feminism to a lot of people who've been scorning feminism -- because feminism has seemed like a strand of Democratic party politics.

This is great for feminism.

Time on Hillary.

Time has a huge article on Hillary Clinton and the hot news that she wants to be President. I thought this paragraph was interesting:

[S]he is not as insulated as she once was on the left, which is far angrier than it used to be. Some liberals say they will not forgive her support for the Iraq invasion or, even worse, her refusal to recant that vote. When Hillary addressed the liberal group Campaign for America's Future in June, she was booed. And everyone there knew whom Kerry meant when he said, at the same conference, "It's not enough to argue with the logistics or to argue about the details. It is essential to acknowledge that the war itself was a mistake." Hillary of late has made a point of stepping up her criticism of the Bush Administration, to the point of calling for the ouster of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And in a neat bit of Clintonian triangulation, she distanced herself from pro-war Senator Joe Lieberman even as her husband campaigned for him. But the hard truth is, she doesn't have much wiggle room. National security is the toughest test for a Democrat, particularly for a woman and especially for a woman so associated with feminine causes like child care and education. Her chief strategist has a grim assessment of what Hillary is up against on that front. The country may be ready for a woman President, Bill has privately told friends, but the first one to make it is more likely to be a Republican in the Margaret Thatcher mold.

Or one that Hillary could have been if she hadn't tried to shake off the hawkish image she'd been working on most of the time she's been in the Senate.

And check out how much of the article is about Bill Clinton. His name is mentioned more than 25 times! When Hillary runs, we'll be endlessly talking about Bill, comparing her to Bill, wondering what Bill thinks of her, how much Bill would sort of be President again, etc.

What's next for Oliver Stone?

Page Six has this:

OLIVER Stone plans to explore the possibility of an affair between former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan in his next movie. Stone has apparently always been enamored of Baroness Thatcher, now 79, and wants to cast Meryl Streep ...

I think it would be great fun to see Streep play Thatcher. I don't know about the affair part, and I can't say I trust Oliver Stone to do anything right at this point, but Stone might actually do better portraying people whose politics he deplores. I remember the Nixon movie being fairly good and suprisingly sympathetic to Nixon.

Graphing politics.

Professor Bainbridge recommends Chris Lightfoot's political survey (which he especially likes because it aligns him with Margaret Thatcher). If you're ready to slog through 75 questions, take the survey. Here are my results:







Surprised?



UPDATE: Email exchange with a person who read my question and answer page:

QUESTION: You disagree that "Aggressive foreign policies can put a stop to international terrorism"?!!



MY ANSWER: I took the word "stop" literally!

This goes to show that there is a lot happening at the level of question interpretation. In fact, I picked the "no opinion" answer to many questions, because I did not think the question could be answered without more information or a clarification, which I'm sure dragged me toward dead center (where I would have been happy to have ended up!).



FURTHER UPDATE: I want to abandon the notion that the center of this graph represents moderation. Just look at where Stalin appears on that graph. How did that happen? Someone with a particularly toxic mix of right and left ideas and of idealism and pragmatism, quite extreme ideas in all four categories, could average his way into the center. That's a huge problem with visualizing political ideas spatially!

"A Matronly Aesthetic With a Subversive Twist." That's the headline from a fashion article in the NYT written by Cathy Horyn. Here are some random phrases from the article:

a vision in crepey Wheatena lace with a lynx cape thrown over her shoulders and a red velvet ribbon sagging gloriously at her bosom

the revelation in Helmut Newton's memoir that even a woman of Margaret Thatcher's girth and rectitude could be a turn-on

no distinction, morally or philosophically, between Lady Thatcher and Pamela Anderson

a subversive treat lurking in the Iron Lady's silk blouses

the disarming simplicity of a wrap dress in mushroom-brown jersey with floppy mink hat and soft ringlet curls

Fashion is a bit insane.