Posted on 02/12/2008 10:39:34 AM PST by forkinsocket
Hillary Clinton isn’t the only woman struggling to find an ideal mix of feminism and femininity, one that allows a woman to behave both like and unlike a man without being penalized either way. Mothers of daughters, even if they don’t support the former first lady, feel, if not her pain, at least her conflict. You need only look at the staggering success, in a publishing industry gone soft, of two advice manuals for young women, “The Daring Book for Girls” and “The Girls’ Book: How to Be the Best at Everything.”
Those volumes were inspired by “The Dangerous Book for Boys,” a gilt-embossed paean to old-school adventure that has nearly two million copies in print and caused a furor among the mothers of daughters who resented the implicit “Girls Keep Out” sign nailed to its cover. Aren’t today’s young women as eager — and as able — as boys to build a treehouse or shoot marbles?
They missed the point. The tantalizing chapters on building a go-cart and making secret ink from (presumably your own) pee were designed not so much for boys themselves but to induce nostalgia among fathers — who are typically the ones purchasing the book — for their own Huckleberry childhoods, those halcyon days before cable, Wii, Facebook and cellphones.
The girls’ books, which have a combined 1.6 million in print, do something entirely different: rather than hark back to — heaven forbid! — bygone days, they evoke nostalgia for a time that has yet to be: a girlhood that we mothers may wish we’d had but didn’t, one that we hope will prepare our daughters to be the kind of women we’re not sure we were fully able to become.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Hillary has no balance between feminism and femininity. She has no feminine site; only a Maoist Side and a Stalinist Side.
All of this is just so much psychobabble, I can barely stand it.
That’s funny.
I bought “The dangerous book for boys” for my daughters.
Then I bought The Daring Book for Girls for them.
The latter was 20 cents cheaper... :)
and Sistahs will be Sistahs. Checkmate, Hillary.
Forget HRC for a moment.
Does anyone else realize how absurd this sounds?
[rubbing eyes]
Moist side vs. Stale side...so that’s why they say she’s ‘toast!’
I suppose it would be mean-spirited to ask if there exists any proof for this assertion. I'm guessing that it represents a sample population of size N = 1, where that one is a person named Peggy Orenstein.
There are lots of things in life where the characteristic is desirable, but the “ism” of that characteristic is not only undesirable, it is detrimental.
Piety - good
Pietism - very bad
Feminine - very good
Feminism - very damaging to society
I bought the Daring book for my 11 year old daughter. I looked through it for any aggregious sexual or feminist nonsense and it passed.
Perhaps because I’m her dad, I have a relationship with her that encourages her to be more daring than my wife would promote. She’s my beautiful, tall, sports playing, fun-loving, video game playing (with her dad), celebrity distaining, fashion naïve little girl.
When the boy interest kicks in I’m going to be more upset than when she told me she didn’t like Pokemon anymore!
Yes, it's absolutely stupid. Women should just be who they are, and they should just let men be who they are. The vast majority of men are not out to oppress women. They just want to 'live and let live'.
My daughter cleans my clock at Guitar Hero III. That’s the thanks I get for letting her take all those easy lay-ups in basketball.
Orenstein has served as Managing Editor of Mother Jones magazine, and was a founding senior editor of 7 Days, a weekly magazine on New York City politics, arts and style. She was also an associate editor of Manhattan, inc. magazine and an assistant editor at Esquire. She has sat on the advisory boards of Oxygen Media's "Pulse Initiative"; the Smithsonian exhibition, "Game Face" on the history of women's athletics; Farallon Films; and "Kolot" the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College project on Jewish spirituality among adolescent girls. She has received awards from the Council on Contemporary Families, the Commonwealth Club of California, the National Women's Political Caucus of California, and Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Orenstein has been a San Francisco Public Library Laureate and was a United States-Japan Foundation Media Fellow as well as a recipient of the Asian Cultural Council's Arts in Japan fellowship. Her film work includes executive producing the Oscar-nominated documentary The Mushroom Club, producing and narrating a segment on the Minnesota State Fair for PBS's Life 360 series, consulting on the HBO documentaries Black Tar Heroin and Rehab, and appearing as an on-camera interviewer in the documentary Crumb. She has also been featured in the PBS documentaries, Digital Divide and Searching for Asian America.
Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Orenstein is a graduate of Oberlin College and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, filmmaker Steven Okazaki, and their daughter, Daisy Tomoko.
Well, #4 just turned 18, and is going off to college in the fall. At some point, I'll work again, if we need my income, but I'm not stressing about it. I've never let outside forces like what job I did decide my 'worth' so it frankly doesn't matter one way or the other.
Kudos...
In making the choices necessary for you, not a daycare worker, to raise your children, you’ve contributed more to society than anyone can possibly understand.
LOL. Having driven around Irving High School and seen what some of those “girls” think is an appropriate outfit for school, I highly suspect the average 14 year old girl is engaged in a “girlhood” that mommy hasn’t yet participated in at 40-whatever.
I was at Ralph’s one day and a lady had her kid with her. Kid was young – I’d say maybe 13-ish. Young and at the “lanky” stage. She was wearing flip-flops that were the kind that are about 4” tall. She was wearing shorts that were entirely too small – probably 3 sizes too small and “painted on.” They said “JUICY” across the butt. Her two-sizes-too-small tank top was printed with a line across her budding (and braless) chest and underneath was written “must be this tall to ride.”
LOL. I was seriously thinking about making an inappropriate (but entertaining) comment but realized that as a fugly old man I’d probably just end up getting punched in the nuts and spending time in the custody of Irvine’s Finest.
It’s honestly too bad I wasn’t born (mumble mumble) years later than I was because there are more sluts-in-training than you can shake a stick at today.
Is it age or is it education that determines who?
Over Thanksgiving when the relatives gathered, there was a huge argument between a college age girl and a 40+ lady. The older gal was all for Hillary, the younger wouldn’t vote for Hillary if she was the only one running. The older gal could think of no reason to support Hillary other than she was a woman. The younger girl was able to go on and on with reasons. So is the dividing line age or education for the females?
When the argument was all over, they hugged but no minds were changed.
A woman will state a problem to a man not because she is seeking a solution, but just because she wants to be heard. This drives a man insane because he his hard-wired to take charge and fix things. "Why the hell are you telling me this if you don't really want a solution?" Men are entirely baffled by women's hard-wired need to constantly talk about everything under the sun, even when that constant verbal barrage does apparently absolutely nothing towards resolving the problem at hand.
A man will internalize a problem, physical or emotional, because he is containing it, evaluating it, and mastering it. This drives a woman insane because she thinks that if he is not gushing every thought, every feeling, every idea all over her, he doesn't really care about her. "What are you feeling right now?" ("Annoyed at you for assuming you need to know every damn thing that goes on in my brain.") To a man, he should be able on his own to solve a problem of any kind. Until he decides he needs outside input to achive his goals, constant female attempts to "help" him are a branding iron that the woman whose respect he seeks thinks he can't do it. Women are entirely baffled at how a man can exist without bleeding words all over everyone, and assume that if you aren't talking, something is wrong (usually with some indefinable thing called "the relationship".)
My father is a MOFW (Man of Few Words). My Father-in-Law was a MOFW, as well.
It was fun to go fishing with them. Could spend an entire day on the lake and hear nothing more than "Nice Bass" or "Pass me another beer, please." I'm sure that all of the lovely silence would have driven the girls crazy.
For my birthday present this year, I asked Mrs. WBill to take the kids to her Mom's for a Saturday Morning (any Saturday is fine by me....). That's all. I might sleep in. OR, I might just sit in the living room all by myself and revel in the silence. I haven't decided yet. :-)
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