Item: 1 file folder of pay stubs
I'm always interested in Rebecca Traister's articles on Salon, partly for the subject matter and definitely for the reactions her articles tend to provoke. She had a piece last week discussing an article in Forbes about why 'career girls' make bad wives - a career girl being one who has "a university-level (or higher) education, works more than 35 hours a week outside the home and makes more than $30,000 per year."
She's done a story on He's Just Not That into You, an interview with Benjamin Kunkel on Indecision, an interview with Neil Clark Warren of eHarmony. In short, she writes a lot about being a woman (of the type mentioned above) trying to figure out how to relate to men in this time of ambiguous roles. So although I find a lot of the conclusions predictably political and sometimes question the logic of her perspectives, I really admire what she chooses to write about. Nobody else writes about this stuff.
I especially like the letters that pour in after one of her articles. Sometimes they're filled with venom, both from men resentful of the political correctness that assumes they're the problem, and from vehement feminists with tales to tell. But mostly it's like sitting in a room of your friends and watching the potshots fly back and forth between the men and the women. Nobody is trying to actually hurt anybody else, they're just trying to make a point.
There was one letter I remember distinctly (and have finally found in the archives after long searching), that said this: "There are times in every man's life when trying to pursue a relationship with a woman is terrifying, and the more you care, the more terrifying it becomes." I don't know why, but reading that gave me chills. It was the human root of the whole debate.
There's a Marie Howe poem that I love called "The Fort" where the narrator remembers being a child and secretly watching her brother and his friends hang out in a fort they had made, where girls weren't allowed. The thing is, you want to know what the other half is like, not only when they're with you, but what happens the rest of the time. It seems so often like men and women are peering at each other, freaked out, from behind a board fence. Sometimes we forget that there are other ways to learn about each other.
Unrelated to any of this but crucial nonetheless, Happy Birthday to my mom!
She's done a story on He's Just Not That into You, an interview with Benjamin Kunkel on Indecision, an interview with Neil Clark Warren of eHarmony. In short, she writes a lot about being a woman (of the type mentioned above) trying to figure out how to relate to men in this time of ambiguous roles. So although I find a lot of the conclusions predictably political and sometimes question the logic of her perspectives, I really admire what she chooses to write about. Nobody else writes about this stuff.
I especially like the letters that pour in after one of her articles. Sometimes they're filled with venom, both from men resentful of the political correctness that assumes they're the problem, and from vehement feminists with tales to tell. But mostly it's like sitting in a room of your friends and watching the potshots fly back and forth between the men and the women. Nobody is trying to actually hurt anybody else, they're just trying to make a point.
There was one letter I remember distinctly (and have finally found in the archives after long searching), that said this: "There are times in every man's life when trying to pursue a relationship with a woman is terrifying, and the more you care, the more terrifying it becomes." I don't know why, but reading that gave me chills. It was the human root of the whole debate.
There's a Marie Howe poem that I love called "The Fort" where the narrator remembers being a child and secretly watching her brother and his friends hang out in a fort they had made, where girls weren't allowed. The thing is, you want to know what the other half is like, not only when they're with you, but what happens the rest of the time. It seems so often like men and women are peering at each other, freaked out, from behind a board fence. Sometimes we forget that there are other ways to learn about each other.
Unrelated to any of this but crucial nonetheless, Happy Birthday to my mom!
posted by Karen at 9:00 PM
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