Newsletter
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Articles
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Love, Lives and Scare Tactics
18 Oct 2011 by Dalma / No Comments
A very long piece in The Atlantic this month has pointed out several things we’ve been talking about in my books and blogs for over a decade. Which only illustrates the extreme disconnect between what has been going on statistically in this country for years and what the culture wishes to deny. The author of this piece, “All The Single Ladies,” Kate Bolick, tells us many things, among which are that marriage has changed. That women, who are on the ascent in the workplace, no longer need men to put a roof over their heads, which frees them to choose men for emotional rather than strictly financial reasons. That many men, who are not on the ascent in the workplace and aren’t earning as much as they once did, are not as traditionally “eligible” as husband material of yore…which means choosing a husband for financial reasons isn’t a winning proposition. That traditional marriage was predicated on the men-as-provider; women-as-nurturer model, and if we still have a yearning for that model, we have a decidedly shrinking chance of getting it.
First, notice how The Atlantic entitled its two major articles this year regarding women’s ascent in the workplace and the shifts in the marriage landscape. The first was “The End of Men?”, and this one, “All The Single Ladies.” Both are Scare Titles, reminiscent of newspaper headlines in the 80s that sent those women hoping to find husbands OUT of the workplace and back into the home, while recapitulating the preposterous idea that if women do well, men plummet.
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Coming up Next!: The Weird Fun of Banned Books Week
20 Sep 2011 by Dalma / No Comments
It’s weirdly fun, on the cusp of Banned Books Week, to look at the titles of books that have been banned: Gone with the Wind; To Kill a Mockingbird; Beloved; The Great Gatsby; The Catcher in the Rye; and, of course, Ulysses. And the bylines: The authors of the aforementioned, along with Voltaire and Defoe, Chaucer and Aristophanes, Rousseau and Paine, Pascal and Steinbeck and Hemingway and Faulkner and Twain.
Okay, “fun” may not be quite the right word (although Brave New World was banned as recently as 1980 for making “promiscuous” sex “look like fun”). But can’t you just see censorship committee members, one more sanctimonious than the next, poring over page after page to find a “filthy” word or an “indecent” scene? Oh, the outrage these men must suffer in their noble venture! The vicious arguments they must have over the subtle differences between “lewd” and “obscene”; between “filthy” and “indecent”! What a responsibility! And all to protect us from…..from what? Alice Walker’s The Color Purple was banned for its “troubling ideas about race relations, man’s relationship to God, African history and sexual relations,” all of which troubling ideas are the reasons she wrote it.
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Who’s Sabotaging Teenage Girls?
14 Sep 2011 by Dalma / No Comments
In any story, whether we read it or see it on film or in a store window, we have to know who is speaking. Whose voice is telling us what story? Whose point of view is it? A great story at the moment, spoken by the Census, is about women’s increased power. Women are now the majority of the workforce; the majority of managers; the majority earners of undergraduate and graduate degrees; the majority owners of wealth.So, who is narrating the story of this photo in Victoria’s Secret window in Fairfield, Ct.? (We added the type to illustrate where it might have been more appropriately shown) Odd that the moment when women are powering ahead, storefronts and magazine covers feature skinny young girls not only made up to look like fashionable adults, but posing in a way that clearly suggests subjugation—as does the girl above. Whose viewpoint is this, do you think? Who’s telling girls about to inherit a legacy of unprecedented power that their REAL power lies not in their education and their upcoming careers, but rather, in looking like baby hookers, pouting and bruised and with their arms up in their air as if in chains? Are storeowners telling this story so they can sell underwear? Perhaps. Photographers, who want to make their mark? Maybe.
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Goodbye, Goddess!
07 Sep 2011 by Dalma / No Comments
A few years ago, I stuck my toe in the blogosphere by adopting an avatar: “The Love Goddess.” Using her name, I’d see if I liked blogging; plus, I’d be less radical and outspoken than I usually am, but still help women cope with bad men, weird in-laws, resentful stepchildren, creepy online dating issues, all those relationship troubles and self – diminishing problems that fill my books and my office. The Connecticut artist Miggs Burroughs, one of the producers of my television show, created the whimsical logo. Steve Leedom, the talented and patient design and marketing man, and now a friend, helped me create a gorgeous, gentle site that appealed to viewers who might not want to spend the money to go to a therapist, maybe, but who could instead have access to one—me. The Love Goddess offered “the best advice in the universe.” And soon I was asked to blog on other larger, more high-profile sites—Wowowow.com, More.com, Hitched.com., Intent.com, to name a few. and I did so mostly as The Love Goddess. Too, I started a weekly TV show about relationships, The Love Goddess Show, in Connecticut.
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Lucy Stone: A Place of Honor on National Women’s Equality Day
26 Aug 2011 by Dalma / No Comments
One day, when I was seventeen, I approached my father with questions about love, like Why should a woman marry? This confused him because he and my mother loved each other, their marriage was good, and their other daughter, my older sister, was already also happily married.
Nevertheless, I said.. Why? And what’s this “obey” business?
We exchanged ideas. He was patient. “So: you want a Lucy Stoner marriage, is that it?” he said. Thankfully, since I didn’t know what a “Lucy Stoner marriage” was, he went on to tell me about his early brief marriage to a writer named Hagar Wilde that ended on friendly terms. “We had a Lucy Stoner Marriage,” he confided. They had lived in Greenwich Village, he told me, but she had insisted on a separate studio, one outside their home, for her work. (Hagar, by the way, wrote the famous screwball comedy with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, “Bringing Up Baby,” which I later decided was successful because she had a place of her own.) I hadn’t heard about his first marriage, of Hagar, or of a “Lucy Stoner marriage,” whatever that was, until then. He also told me that he and my mother did not have a Lucy Stoner marriage.
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