Mirabella was the most intelligent of the women’s magazines, and I once wrote a book review for it. But the news of its demise makes me rejoice. It would be a good thing for everyone except those who earn their livings from the women’s mags if they all disappeared.
No, this isn’t another diatribe about anorexia. The women’s magazines’ worst sin isn’t their promotion of an “unrealistic body image” or excessive thinness. (Frankly, given the ballooning of the average American, male and female, the problem is in the opposite direction.) Their sin isn’t even the promotion of consumerism as a substitute for real experience, or the insipid hedonism they purvey (we’ll get to that later).
The problem is that women’s magazines depend on the notion that the major signifier of identity is gender, and this is less and less true. Gender roles just aren’t as important in daily life anymore, and the work world is readier to ignore sex than most of us are. Mirabella’s demise may be a leading indicator of this new, de-girlified reality of women’s lives.
The magazine had its own internal problems — it was bought and sold and went through several editors in its decade-and-a-half lifespan — but the fact that its educated and affluent women readers were abandoned may herald further changes down the demographic ladder.
Then there is the psychological impact of the recent changes in our increasingly sex-neutral material world. The predominance of media that produce less tangible artifacts — from CDs to digital cameras to VCRs to the Web — also reduces the attention we pay to our necessarily gendered bodies. As more of our lives are conducted using digital rather than analog technologies, the role of touch diminishes, and the sensuality of life with it. This would seem to be both a good thing and a bad thing, and the consequences are still difficult to see.
Gender as the primary identifier was true for only a pretty brief period in human history, maybe 1860 to 1960. Before that, class and religion were equally basic to the way people thought about themselves; in developing countries they still are. In our Bible Belt, obviously, religion never went away as a principal component of identity. I’ll bet you that Christian, Muslim or Jew have a greater resonance for many people in this country than male or female do. And while the paraphernalia of upper-class life are available to anyone with the money to buy it, those born into old money still see their class status as a fundamental aspect of their identity.
After the 1960s, age became another major way of identifying yourself, though oddly that’s fading now that everyone wants to be, and to some extent thinks of herself as, young. As my 73-year-old mother says, “80, that’s old.”
What we’re left with now is, well, interests. Narrow-casting. You’re a 26-year-old female gay Chinese-American webmistress in San Francisco and you mountain-bike to work and collect vintage handbags and rock-climb on weekends. You’re a 47-year-old white male lawyer in Manhattan, divorced with twin boys, and you play club tennis and serve on the board of a small theater company and collect Italian mid-century furniture.
Maybe both of these people would enjoy reading some of the same articles and you could probably sell them some of the same products, but is their gender really the key to reaching them?
The recent fate of several men’s magazines — Details, Bikini, Icon Thoughtstyle, POV have all folded — suggests that it isn’t. Young men, it seems, would rather be addressed through their particular interests — music or extreme sports or business or pictures of naked women or literature — than as “young men.”
In fact, the American men’s magazines that have targeted the “laddie” sensibility most strenuously have gone out of business the fastest, while those like GQ and Esquire that address a broader range of interests and pride themselves on the quality of their writing have flourished.
My hunch is that Mirabella’s demise foreshadows the end of service-oriented women’s magazines. Part of this has to do with big social trends like the rise of women in the workplace, and part of it has to do with the increased use of the Internet.
What Web browsing suggests is that narrow-casting is the best way to reach most people. Tap into the niches out of which they forge a self. Advertisers are starting to get it. But as a quick glance at the current crop of women’s mags shows, they don’t yet see that gender isn’t the best basis for narrow-casting. For one thing, it ain’t that narrow. For another, it’s not related to enough economic activity. Only a small percentage of purchase decisions are directly gender-linked, mainly clothing and personal-care products. And how many of these can you buy?
I have always felt vaguely insulted by how little women’s magazines deemed to sell me. Women’s mags assume I never buy furniture or wine or tennis rackets or cars or in fact anything other than clothes and makeup. I guess the premise is that I will page through Tennis magazine if I am in the market for a racket and Gourmet if I want cooking equipment and Wallpaper for lamps. But the Web should have taught them, and us, that reality doesn’t line up that way.
One of the corollaries of the fact that we now have everything available to us all of the time is that we are ourselves available to everyone all of the time. You can reach me reading a trade publication online and convince me to look at some sporting equipment that’s on sale, or catch me on eBay trolling for art pottery and suggest a new book.
What you are less and less able to do is convince me or, especially, people under 30, to sit still for 400 pages of one thing, whether it’s fashion or politics.
Then there’s the issue of timeliness. When any of us can assemble a more or less ideal “magazine” from material available for free on the Web, why should we be expected to pay for a less well-selected, out-of-date version? After all, the monthly women’s magazines’ notion of what’s new is selected, necessarily, with a three-month lead time. Even from the standpoint of beauty-product information, they are out of date compared with material easily available on the Web. Tear up that Allure, and make up your own damn magazine as you scroll.
The other problem with the gender-casting that drives women’s magazines is a social ill: the reduction of gender identity to its lowest common denominator, personal appearance. This happened because somewhere along the line, some marketing genius figured out that all women wear some women’s clothes and most of them wear some makeup.
All of us, male and female, are ill served by this trivialization of femininity, this equation of womanhood with the application of cosmetics and personal care.
It was not always thus. Even in the most repressive Victorian circumstances, women were granted the dignity of being esteemed for their character, and the tasks they were supposed to be good at, while no matter of choice, were not all ridiculous.
Is it more prestigious to be renowned for your bread-making or for your mascara application? For your church attendance or your knowledge of where to get a great facial? Yes, femininity is always going to be a social construct, but the version the women’s mags market is a particularly mediocre one.
Moving back further in time, think about how rarely Jane Austen speaks of the appearances of her heroines, or for that matter of their clothes. Certainly these ladies lived in relatively oppressive circumstances. We would not trade places.
But they had the dignity, charm and allure of human beings whose identities were based on their character rather than their superficies. They spent their leisure hours riding or walking in the country rather than shopping for nail polish or conditioner. They danced at balls, not in classes at gyms.
Today’s women’s magazines are 19th century in their insistence on the indoors as woman’s sphere. The world of the women’s magazines is an indoor world, one of trying on clothes, of shopping for makeup and applying it. Even the exercise recommended is of the indoor variety — aerobics, exercise classes, yoga. The emphasis in fitness is on “toning” rather than strength, on avoiding risk rather than finding pleasure in it. For every one article on some very mild adventure travel there are 10 on spas.
I know these magazines are supposed to be fun, to allow women the playfulness of experimenting with self-image and ornamentation. Of course those can be good things, in their place. But most of the women’s magazines offer their readers the merest shadow of real, spine-tingling, breath-catching fun.
Most of the magazines offer a scaredy-cat hedonism of puerile pleasures like baths and massages, with a childishly erotic undercurrent. Maybe this diffuse eroticism is meant to appeal to women who want to avoid genital sexuality. And despite the celebrated emphasis of Cosmopolitan and its imitators on sex, their typical sex technique piece has all the erotic charge of an aerobics manual.
Young readers don’t realize that the content is driven not by some definitive vision of what a woman is, but only by outdated visions of what women will buy. The magazines themselves have become institutions, part of our culture’s definition of femininity, but we forget that their version of womanhood is but a blip in the great screen of time.
Capitalism may have created this monster, but even more capitalism is bringing it to an end. That is what is wonderful about the time we live in, and why I love capitalism: Greater efficiency and lower search costs in the exchange of information and goods do lead to greater freedom in the ways we invent ourselves.
We owe a lot of this freedom to the commercial exploitation of the Internet, and to the libertarian culture it brews. I am sympathetic to some of the observations and arguments of writers like Paulina Borsook about the shallowness of e-commerce culture. But I am overwhelmingly grateful to everyone who made it possible. Never have so many holes been dented so quickly in what looked like a monolithic culture.
At 41, I remember well what it was like to grow up in the ’60s, when intelligence and interest in the sciences marked you as a weirdo in school, when half of one’s questions were answered, “That’s just the way it is,” when women and blacks and Jews all knew their places. How good it is that we are no longer there.
I am always amazed to read that women aren’t supposed to be quite comfortable online, or that we need special (third rate) Web sites of our own. Hello? The Web has given women (and people of color) a splendid new chance to defy those who would stereotype us. The only question is whether we have the courage to seize these opportunities, or whether we will continue to be the prisoners of gender — this time in cells we build for ourselves.
Unless you are one of those intrepid Japanese who turn up occasionally here as in the remotest of places, chances are that you’re not visiting Afghanistan as a tourist. There hasn’t been much of that since the early ’70s, when shaggy young Westerners made their way through Afghanistan en route to India, smoking hash and buying those bulky embroidered sheepskin coats that still lurk in vintage stores back home.
Today most foreign visitors either have a job to do or are visiting expat friends. And it may feel self-indulgent to travel for pleasure in Afghanistan now — why aren’t you helping the poor or starting a business and working six days a week like the other internationals?
It shouldn’t. The country badly needs tourism to bring cash to the provinces, especially isolated, mountainous areas unlikely ever to develop other legitimate sources of income. While many visitors are under the impression that Kabul is safer than the outlying provinces, the reverse is usually the case. Common sense would dictate staying out of actual war zones — these days, that’s Helmand and Kandahar provinces — but after six trips to Afghanistan and visits to 42 other countries, I’d say that the 10 Afghan provinces I’ve visited are no more dangerous than rural South America or Africa, places that routinely attract determined visitors.
These journeys, challenging for me, were nothing special by the intrepid standards of the ’70s, the era of the last traditional travel books about Afghanistan — or perhaps the last era when one could write a travel book about Afghanistan that doesn’t reflect the sadness of the decades of war. (Rory Stewart’s much-acclaimed “The Places in Between” is a travel book with the innocence and much of the joy removed, as befits the grim winter of its 2002 setting.) My two favorites from this period, Peter Levi’s 1972 “The Light Garden of the Angel King” and David Chaffetz’s “A Journey Through Afghanistan: A Memorial” (1981), recount long journeys by horseback, foot, car, bus and small plane across parts of Afghanistan rarely traversed by foreigners today. They also illuminate the last days of a medieval rural society before war and television opened it to the outside world.
Levi, then a 40-year-old Oxford scholar and a converted Roman Catholic ordained as a Jesuit priest, went to Afghanistan in search of Hellenistic ruins. His travel companion, the late Bruce Chatwin, became much better known, but Levi went on to hold an Oxford Chair in Poetry in the 1980s and published three books of poems as well as works of classical scholarship.
The donnish Levi is predictably disdainful of the hash trade: “Every kind of smuggling device was for sale, strings of hash beads, hash belts, hash-heeled shoes and for all I know hash codpieces.” But he reveled in every possible Afghan pleasure besides sex and drugs, from the varieties of apricots and birds to the Greek-influenced pillars of Kushan architecture.
Easily the equal of the better-known Robert Byron as a stylist, Levi shares the same British bite and aesthetic passion. Here is an observation on the several-days-long horseback trip from Chaghcharan to the circa A.D. 1200 minaret of Jam, the second highest in the world at 213 feet: “We were facing a composition of rock, waterfall and tree like a Chinese drawing, and when we climbed above it we saw a series of fine, fresh-looking goat drawings on the rock face. Whoever was responsible, these were crisp, formal, observant drawings and there is no age of history or of prehistory they would have disgraced.”
David Chaffetz echoes Levi’s aestheticism, but he was just out of Harvard (class of ’76) when he made his trip, with a young man’s urge to prove himself and a certain relish in physical hardship. His broad acquaintance with Farsi and the Quran enriches both his account and his relationships with the Afghans he meets, which go much deeper than Levi’s. (Levi admits to little Farsi.)
He and his companion, Willard Wood, a French language translator in later life, bought horses and went to the ruined caravanserais and mosques that are so far off the road the rest of us only hear of them in rumors. I’ve never heard of any other Westerners who spent so much time in the high mountains and dasht, or plains, of eastern Herat province, in Farah, Baghdis, Maimana — ancient areas rich in history and ruins. Someday I mean to follow in their footsteps on a wonderfully described horse- or foot-only path up from Obeh — no metropolis itself — to visit a splendid ruin called Shah-i-Mashhad in Baghdis province of which Chaffetz says, “The love of the workman himself is as fresh as though the stucco were unset still.”
Chaffetz echoes Levi’s high British flourish and caustic epigrams. He’s a particularly keen observer of people’s behavior: “Waiting in line was a skill; the Heratis knew how to look as though they had been waiting in line for hours, when in fact they had just taken a seat … The louder a Herati complained, the less one should have believed him.” Or, “For his past absence, he excused himself on account of a sick relative — which meant that I shouldn’t ask any further. Oh, the convenient sick relatives of the Afghans.”
There is no recent (post-jihad period) general history of Afghanistan in English by a Farsi speaker, beginning with prehistory and continuing to the present. For this, consult the painless summary in the Nancy Hatch Dupree guidebook “Afghanistan” (widely available in original and pirated editions in Kabul).
Recent events are covered by all too many books, but most of them are potted summaries of others’ works and are filled with errors. Imagine setting oneself up as an expert on French history or politics without being able to read a French newspaper or talk to a Frenchman — well, there is a small shelf of works about Afghanistan’s recent history by people who do not speak either Farsi or Pashto and somehow don’t see this as a problem.
I can recommend one book by an Afghan, Amin Saikal, “Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival” (2004), covering the period beginning with the Durrani dynasty’s coming to power in 1747. Saikal, an academic in Australia, writes with great authority about the structural factors in Afghan society that he believes have led to its many problems. Unlike the Western experts who focus on “visible sociological and geo-strategic factors,” Saikal looks at “relationships between elite behavior and outside power rivalry.” “In a nutshell,” Saikal says, “polygamic rivalries within the successive royal families from the end of the eighteenth century to the pro-Soviet communist coup of April 1978″ derailed Afghan efforts to found a stable state. Disgruntled royal relatives called in outside aid to depose their kinsman the king, which resulted in Afghan governments requiring foreign support to stay in power.
I don’t buy Saikal’s analysis entirely — and I am suspicious of the Afghan tendency it exemplifies to blame outside powers rather than Afghan society itself for the country’s turbulent history. But he has an enviable command of the historical material, especially before the early 1980s when he fled Afghanistan. And while it’s clear here and there that Saikal’s first language is not English, his intelligence and analytical ability transcend the sometimes stodgy prose. The book is available now only as a pricey hardcover, but a paperback edition is coming out in December.
After this heavy lifting you may be in the mood for more travel, this time with the youthful hero of James Michener’s 1963 “Caravans,” set in Afghanistan in 1946. I’d avoided reading this early Michener novel for years for stupid snobbish reasons, and when I picked it up this spring, I found that some of the scenes were set in the very province I was going to visit, Nimroz, which Michener traveled through in a long trip to Afghanistan in 1955.
“Caravans” isn’t the packaged late-Michener multigenerational saga, but a surprisingly nuanced and unpredictable thriller that morphs, awkwardly, into a love story. But in addition to the evocative descriptions of large swaths of Afghanistan, Michener offers fascinating cameos of Afghans in the first generation of modernity. Unlike Levi and Chaffetz, whose encounters tend to be either with the working class or with officialdom, Michener introduces his hero to Afghan professionals and aristocrats.
The hero, Mark Miller, is employed in the American Embassy in Kabul, which allows Michener some set pieces about diplomatic life, but the book gains momentum when Miller makes his way to Kandahar, Zaranj and back up through the central mountains of Afghanistan. At the start he’s on an official mission to track down missing American beauty Ellen Jasper, and later, he’s part of a nomad caravan crossing Afghanistan’s central massif.
What separates “Caravans” from the rest of my long shelf of books on Afghanistan is sex. There’s almost no inkling in most of those books that this activity exists, though the family sizes in Afghanistan argue otherwise. And in an instance where the ’50s seem surprisingly liberal, not only is the missing American woman married to a progressive Afghan, in fact an Afghan too progressive for her, but Miller has a sweet affair with the teenage daughter of the nomad chief. (This being 1963, it’s his first sexual experience, too.)
Michener covers almost as much ground as Levi and Chaffetz, also on foot or horseback, with much of the action set in the now-embattled south. Miller’s trip across the desert from Kandahar through Helmand province — a very dangerous place that produces a third of the world’s heroin — to Zaranj is not on the tourist route today. (I flew into Zaranj from Kabul.) But “Caravans” also features mullahs who attack and spit on unveiled women in the street and a public execution, thankfully no longer a part of Afghan life. Partly through his encounters with these experiences, Miller changes and grows up in Afghanistan. Like Levi and Chaffetz, the young Michener suggests that Afghanistan is not merely a good place to get lost.
There’s a newish genre of books that aim to position a big, common, ancient human problem — how to love or eat or invest or run a business wisely — as specific to women, and then tell women how to solve it. Some of these books are transparently commercial. And why not? It’s a no-brainer to target female readers. That’s why we don’t have gender-inspecific titles like “The French Don’t Get Fat” and “Your Lover Just Isn’t That Into You.” The more interesting of the group are sincere, motivated by passion of one kind or another, but so obsessed with the idea that the problem in question is a female problem that they ignore the very facts that could help everyone solve it.
Journalist Liz Perle’s “Money, a Memoir” is a case in point. The crucial error occurs very early in the book. After recounting the end of her first marriage, she describes her long-delayed “examination of my convoluted relationship with money” at the age of 42. “[That examination] ultimately lead[s] to my conversations with hundreds of other women,” she continues. “When it comes to money, women everywhere have so many fears and fantasies in common.” Huh? How did we go from Perle’s anxieties and issues to surveys of hundreds of women? In the next 240 pages, she never convinced me that women have any more convoluted relationships with money than men do, or even that her relationship with money has much to do with her being female. Don’t people everywhere have fears and fantasies in common having to do with money? But that observation wouldn’t necessarily sell books.
What if on Page 10 Perle had written, “Jews everywhere have so many fears and fantasies in common,” or “Writers have so many fears and fantasies in common”? Doubtless true, but the reader would impatiently object, why explain your convoluted relationship with money by your Jewishness or your being a writer? For reasons that are tiresomely obvious, if someone claims that her neurosis derives from being a woman, she has the benefit of the doubt.
Perle calls for the need to get “beyond an emotional relationship with money” and especially beyond the taboos against discussing it. She argues that a lot of materialism stems from the wish to locate ourselves in an “emotional middle class” of security and tranquility. And to achieve this, according to Perle, “we will go into debt, spend on impulse … save too little … We spend on luxuries we can’t afford and simultaneously deprive ourselves of real necessities.”
The “we” she has in mind is female, and her book has an archaic flavor, echoing nothing so much as the late Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” a vastly superior work. It’s full of women sliding “into true poverty” because they aren’t able to charge enough for their work, and stay-at-home wives stealing from their husbands’ wallets to establish a separate, secret bank account for emergencies. Turns out Perle did the same thing in her own marriage in 1994. When her husband sends her and their 4-year-old son back to the U.S. from Singapore with $1,500, she admits to having recourse to “a bank account my husband knew nothing about.”
Yet Perle has little evidence to support the idea that women are more irrational about money than men, or that the differences in their neuroses are so large. (I’ve known men who had bank accounts that were secret from their wives, too.) Women may be more prone to shopping sprees — and even, lately, to declaring personal bankrupcy — but men have their own ways of wasting money. They may buy a new car and immediately crash it, or spend it self-destructively on cocaine, or, on the tamer side, pursue a “sure-fire” investment strategy into ruin. (And some of Perle’s argument is pretty class-bound; working-class men in many cultures turn their paychecks over to their wives.)
In fact, on detailed inspection, Perle’s urgency seems misplaced. Perle takes a certain relish in reminding her readers how improvident and ill-prepared for old age women are. “More than 48 percent of female baby boomers have saved less than $10,000 in a pension or 401(k) plan. Between one-third and two-thirds of women now thirty-five to fifty-five years old will be impoverished by age seventy.” Sounds pretty serious.
But then, distracting myself from these grim facts with the cover story on the trendy field of “behavioral economics” in the current Harvard Magazine, I read that “about half ” of American workers over age 59 = don’t even contribute to a 401K plan. A Harvard professor who “may be the world’s foremost authority on enrollment in such plans” has concluded that “People want to be prudent, they just don’t want to do it right now.” And doing a little digging on the Web, it seems that 401K behavior has more to do with age, income and employer policies than gender. One 1998 study by AARP of 2.3 million federal employees concluded, “There is only a small difference between the average overall participation rates for men and women — 84 percent and 82 percent respectively. It is worth noting that when the participation rates were adjusted for salary difference between men and women, participation rates for women were slightly higher than for men.”
“Money, a Memoir: Women, Emotions, and Cash”
By Liz Perle
Henry Holt
288 pages
Nonfiction
“Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping”
By Judith Levine
Free Press
288 pages
Nonfiction
Although Perle’s hope is to demystify money so that women do not continue to live without control over their finances, I can only describe Perle as hystericizing the subject. She admits that there are many reasons why “women still earn only 78 percent of what men do” but emphasizes, “We simply don’t ask to be paid what we’re worth.” This line of reasoning may be emotionally gratifying to some women, but as I discovered while researching this terrain a half dozen years ago, it just isn’t true.
The 78 percent number includes both women with children and those without, and it includes women born in the 1930s and ’40s, when far fewer women attended college or prepared for a professional job. Denise Venable, a researcher with the National Society of Policy Analysis, notes that “June O’Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, found that among people ages 27 to 33 who have never had a child, women’s earnings approach 98% of men’s.”
A host of National Bureau of Economic Research studies that are shorter and infinitely more interesting than Perle’s book have investigated the “gender gap” and found that it is really a child-care gap. Claudia Goldin, a Harvard and National Bureau of Economic Research economist who is one of the leading lights in this field, concludes, “Whether or not the gap will continue to narrow and eventually disappear is uncertain, and probably depends on the gender gap in time spent in child care and in the home.” The problem is in how to reconcile careers and family life, not a problem of women’s failure to ask for or be paid proper wages — but that is a lot less sexy.
There’s another popular genre in which the author undertakes a prolonged, often yearlong ordeal in order to write about it, usually with the aim of bringing the reader over to the ideological or political point of view the author already holds. For instance, “Nickel and Dimed,” “Black Like Me,” or the recent “Self-Made Man.” To my knowledge, no writer emerges from these tribulations having reversed his or her initial opinion. (“Wait! The working poor have it pretty good here!”) The reader is supposed to relish the gory details he doesn’t have to suffer through, and finish with the same burning indignation the author began with.
At the start of 2004, Judith Levine, a writer in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Vermont, and her live-in boyfriend, Paul, a consultant, decided to “purchase only necessities for sustenance, health, and business.” A self-described “red diaper baby” in her mid-50s, Levine is motivated by her awareness of the environmental cost of consumerism, but also wants to discover if she can have “a connection to the culture, an identity, even a self outside the realm of purchased things and experiences.” And presumably, she wants to get a book contract.
Five months and 84 pages later, on a quiet May night she is spending without Paul, Levine is complaining of “a feeling of scarcity.” Having sworn off movies, concerts and theater, unless they are free, she is bored. “I could take a bike ride, I could read, I could learn to knit or start on ancient Greek … [but] the idea of one more homemade, edifying pastime makes me yawn.”
The night she complains about is pretty much the way everyone lived before the 17th century, if they were lucky enough to have leisure time. Some of us aspire to it today, but to Levine, it’s dull. Fair enough; tastes differ. But one of the major problems with Levine’s book surfaces here. How does she intend to use the time she wants to reclaim from consumerism? What does she want from life? Levine diagnoses her malady as boredom and immediately offers, “Shopping defeats, or at least circumvents, boredom.” This misses the point. Not everything in life revolves around shopping or its absence. “Not once since the year began have I experienced a surfeit of desire,” Levine says. This is a problem that goes beyond limiting consumption, and likely has more to do with other issues in Levine’s life than with whether or not she shops.
Another big problem with “Not Buying It” is that Levine spends almost no time deciding or discussing what she thinks a necessity is. That’s a pity, since it’s an interesting question, and one she needs a clear stance on to make her choices understandable to the reader.
For instance, Levine decided that a $65 meal for her journalism school’s 25th reunion is presumptuously expensive while taking a $55 bus ride to a demonstration in Washington was a necessity. But that $65 meal is prepared by people who make a living exercising their high-level culinary skills; if everyone acted like Levine, those workers would be out of a job. What would Levine have them do for a living? And would the world be better without fine dining?
If she buys Ivory soap rather than something more esoteric, is she really helping the environment? And if buying alcohol is a luxury (Paul ends up brewing his own), why not make your own soap? Is either home brewing or home soap-making environmentally efficient? I don’t know. Reading that Levine rushes home to watch her favorite TV shows I wondered why she considers TV to be a necessity — or why she finds it fun to watch. (I haven’t turned mine on since New Year’s Eve.)
Each of us will answer these questions somewhat differently. There are several issues that I wanted Levine to parse out — how to live in a low-impact way, practically speaking, which is somewhat quantifiable; how to live in a beautiful/moral way, which is subjective; and how to live efficiently, spending as little time and head space on buying as possible. There is no answer to these questions, but there are more and less eloquent, persuasive and original responses. “Walden,” which Levine references more than once, is perhaps the best American take on the subject. But Levine is far more interested in seizing any opportunity to bash Bush or the many Americans to her right than in engaging in the hard work of philosophy.
Instead of analyzing her need for paid entertainment, or for television, or pointing out how they do or don’t enter into her idea of the good life, Levine takes constant potshots at red-staters. For example, Levine tells us on Page 1 that “the coffins are returning from Iraq”; later, she wonders if “my lack of a hedge trimmer or a microwave oven may qualify me as an enemy combatant in George W. Bush’s book.” After the 2004 election, she insists that Bush will “hand what’s left of the meat to a snarling pack of private corporations.” In between, she reminds us that “images of naked prisoners … are impeding the Bush Administration’s efforts at convincing the Iraqis that we wish them well.”
“Money, a Memoir: Women, Emotions, and Cash”
By Liz Perle
Henry Holt
288 pages
Nonfiction
“Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping”
By Judith Levine
Free Press
288 pages
Nonfiction
These asides not only date and trivialize her book; they reflect conceptual confusion. Almost certainly, at least as many, if not more, red-state types than blue make their own jam, cheese, beer and sausage, hunt their own meat, fish their own fish. Going further out, plenty of people in the developing world grow all of their own food and produce next to no garbage and yet hold political beliefs that would horrify Levine. How much or how little virtue accrues to these choices? And does living a low-impact, environmentally sound life translate into happiness? Levine can’t resist another lefty clichi, that things are better in welfare-state Europe. But if, as she says, Europeans’ “life satisfaction is higher,” why are non-immigrant Europeans not even reproducing at replacement level?
Levine forgets that you don’t have to be a leftie to be concerned about or simply repulsed by overconsumption. What about right-wing aesthetes — and I’m not the only one — who would not be caught dead buying Wonder Bread or Skippy or air freshener, simply because we find them disgusting, or right-wing ideologues, who hate consumerism for its lack of values? A new book by Rod Dreher, “Crunchy Cons,” suggests a “sacramental” sense of life, including organic food, smaller houses, and home-schooling. If I bike to the pro-war demo with a homemade organic snack, where do I fall in Levine’s virtue-o-meter? She says that in her year without shopping, “Paul and I had extra time, energy and money to act as citizens.” But whether or not she, or I, likes it, the right-wingers who are antiabortion activists or (oy vey!) campaigning against teaching evolution in the schools, are also acting as citizens. If Levine’s cartoon red-stater comes down from his snowmobile and stays out of the mall, he might not use his extra time as she imagines. But he might use it more passionately and originally than Levine seems to use hers. Like Perle, Levine offers banal solutions in search of a problem, while leaving the real problems for others to investigate.
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Monday, Jan 30, 2006 11:32 AM UTC
In an excerpt from her new memoir, Ann Marlowe ponders why she has been drawn to romances with much older -- and younger -- men.
By Ann Marlowe
When I daydreamed that winter about a future with Amir, our difference in age loomed far more ominously for me than our difference in background. It wasn’t just the fact that I had to have a child soon or not at all, while in my view, Amir wasn’t anywhere close to ready for fatherhood. It was in a lot of little things, like the way he was still surrounded by his Princeton crowd, the way he spoke about the joys of “partying,” the many experiences he hadn’t had that were already old for me. But at the same time, our ten-year gap in age went some way toward making our romance possible.
It was a tremendous thrill knowing that Amir, at thirty four, was as crazy about me physically as I was about him. At forty four I could see signs of decay in my body even if he could not, even if those who saw us together could not. But most of what I’ve loved about being with younger men, including him, hasn’t been reassurance about my looks. The real joy is in being able to be more emotionally generous. Because it is not so deadly serious, because I don’t think in terms of marrying these men, because I am not trying so hard, I can be the flexible, reasonable and solicitious woman that I wish I were all the time.
When I was in my twenties I mainly dated older men, men in their thirties or early forties; I don’t think one was as old as I am now. Sometime in my early thirties I crossed over to dating younger men. The first was Dave, eight years my junior. And as I reached my forties, I realized that I’d been dating younger men for almost a decade.
These romances across the years were an ongoing topic for banter not only with many of my male friends but with my women friends too. And I’d come to see some commonalities among us. Many of my friends who date much younger people have never married, or married very briefly, and have no children. It’s obvious even to us that we have our issues, both with our parents and our own generation. We older partners may be able to be kinder, wiser, or more seductive when it isn’t serious, or we think it isn’t, as it allows us to relax long enough to let the relationship happen. With younger partners, we’re able to be more tolerant. It’s easier to excuse someone who’s nearly young enough to be your child for behaving like a kid; it’s easier not to take acting out personally when it’s sketched in such broad strokes. And we may be more willing to forgive as we realize how many of our trespasses were forgiven when we were young.
To take off on the famous one-liner about Jews, love between people far apart in years is just like other kinds of love, only more so. It lends itself to dramatizing our confusions about family, both the family in which we were raised and any family we might wish to create. There’s an Oedipal element in these affairs, as in all love. But much of what we seek in them isn’t that simple. In fact, they’re more meaningful and more appealling as conventional family structure dissolves.
It used to be that affairs with partners much younger or older paid tribute to generally acknowledged notions of appropriate couplings by flouting them. Their frisson came from their forbidden quality and the eroticism of differences. But now American and European families are slipping out of their patriarchal moorings. Gender roles and the meaning of adulthood are both blurring. Gay marriage is under debate, half of all marriages end in divorce, 20% of American children are born out of wedlock. In this new context, making love across the generations — are the parameters ten years, fifteen, twenty? — becomes a way of exploring what we want from family and community rather than a way of defying them, a search for connection and meaning rather than a relief from them.
Some of what we’re increasingly looking for in all of our romances, no matter the age of the partners, is the traditional, intact society Peter Laslett poetically termed ‘the world we have lost.’ I am not the only one to long for the tenderness and natural pleasure in domestic life that still echoes here and there in the stories told by our immigrant grandparents or great-grand-parents. We miss the firm grounding in our age group and the bond of tenderness across the generations that arises naturally in traditional societies, where marriage and child-rearing are nearly universal, age and gender roles are well-defined, and children and parents of whatever ages live together — often literally — in relative harmony. We miss it as much as we dread it.
Affairs between people far apart in age are among other things a way to recover this tenderness and heal the wounds inflicted by our birth families. Most of the younger men I’ve been with, and many of the younger women or men dating my friends, have had difficult or unusual relationships with their families. Many lost parents early in life, were raised by single mothers, or left home in their mid-teens. One man I used to date, Dave, is at the other extreme, still living with his parents in his late thirties though he can well afford not to. More are like Amir. They haven’t seen their parents in years, or pay duty visits a couple of times a year. I can think offhand of a half dozen men who’ve dated older women — my exes, friends’ boyfriends — who only call their parents every few months, and see them less frequently than that.
Mortality enters into every love, but it’s sharper when there’s a big difference in age. Some of my tenderness to my older lovers’ bodies came from knowing their fragility. I knew it more strongly when I was with an older man. I couldn’t stop thinking, He’ll die before me. It seemed a steep price to pay for the wisdom and sophistication and money and power he had over me. I would pity him for his mortality if nothing else, pity him even if he had no pity for me.
It’s a shock to realize that some of these men are in their sixties now. By chance I saw the picture of one of those old lovers recently in a business publication; he looked like a grandfather, white beard and genial smile. Yet in my mind he’s still thirty seven to my twenty two and tells me to read the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times cover to cover every single day, even if I have to go save them til the weekend. How tall would the pile of those newspapers stand now, twenty three years later.
Affairs between younger and older partners are innately risky, insisting on chemistry rather than logic, the moment rather than the long run, difference rather than similarity, the erotic rather than the practical. The attempt to reach across the most intractable of barriers humans face — time — intensifies the emotional bond. These affairs can be what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “deep play,” theaters in which we act out the dramas most crucial for us. And the first and most emotional is the attempt to come to terms with the notion of family itself, with taking our place in the roster of generations.
Some of the emotional generosity I tried to give to Amir might have gone, if my life had taken different turns, to a son instead. And some of what he took from me, I’d grown to suspect, was what he felt had been denied him by his parents and the cruelties of politics and history. This displacement of family feelings may have something to do with the tendency of some older women to date younger men they have to take care of emotionally or even financially, men who cannot in return take care of them. Love across the generations always carries a whiff of the unnatural, but it also can heal the injuries of time and restore us the tenderness we believe is our due.
Excerpted from “The Book of Trouble: A Romance” (c) copyright 2006 by Ann Marlowe. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Inc.
Tuesday, Sep 6, 2005 5:52 PM UTC
The women in Candace Bushnell's new novel are rich, smart, hardworking lovelies. So why do they need men to dominate them?
By Ann Marlowe
“What is it with S/M? Since I got divorced, every woman I’ve dated has wanted me to tie her up or spank her. Is it something about me or is this what women want these days?” My friend Bill is a cultivated, mild-mannered blazer and khaki pants kind of guy in his late 40s, and his girlfriends tend to be 30-ish bankers or lawyers as buttoned-down and Upper East Side-looking as he is. I understood Bill’s confusion, but I tried to explain.
Almost any woman Bill would date in New York would be up for some highly stylized submission. These women are tired of androgyny, sick of men who treat them like pals. And they want to feel the boot occasionally. The wish to be dominated doesn’t extend to important stuff, however, like choosing restaurants and movies. As my friend John says, American women want to be “forced” to do the things they already want to do. It’s sexy to be tied up and kissed, but boring to be dragged along for an afternoon of auto parts shopping.
In the absence of most other symbols of femininity and masculinity, and the disappearance of most of the rituals of courtship, S/M reintroduces the powerfully erotic idea of gender difference. And of course it’s the most successful women who are into it. It’s the successful men who hire dominatrixes, too. But if women are now able to embrace symbolic submissiveness, it’s because they are starting to have a choice, and because they’re nostalgic — not for a submissive role, but for a world with any roles and rules at all.
Candace Bushnell’s new novel, “Lipstick Jungle,” is set in this landscape of female progress and disillusionment, where the question of the moment is how a woman can feel sexy even if she far out-earns her husband. After all, in a culture where masculine sex appeal is equated with high earnings, a woman who is more successful than almost all men is desexed. For Victory, the one single character, this pretzels into a question of ego when she dates a man whose wealth dwarfs hers: “How can I be a successful woman when I’m with an even more successful man?” And so, because Bushnell’s three fortysomething heroines are the sort of Manhattanites who haven’t been in the subway in years, buy private jet shares, and lunch at Michaels, they’re also the sort who want to be dominated in bed. “All she could think about was Kirby and that glorious feeling of being overcome,” Nico O’Reilly muses in the opening scene of “Lipstick Jungle.” Nico (supposedly modeled on Anna Wintour) has an even-keeled, practical partnership with her banker-turned-househusband Seymour. She loves him and their daughter and prizes their smooth life together, but at 42 she hasn’t had sex with Seymour for three years.
For Seymour — as for the stereotypical corporate wife he’s modeled on, down to his expertise on early American antiques and interest in showing purebred dogs — sex is far down on the list of enjoyable activities. So Nico falls into the arms of pantyhose-cutting Kirby Atwood, a verbally challenged underwear model with nothing to do all day but make love. (If I wore pantyhose, maybe I’d think a guy named Kirby sounded hot, but to a downtown gal like me, “Kirby” is a nice name for a cat.)
Nico’s pal Wendy Healy, 44, is a high-earning film producer who has supported her shiftless, vain wannabe director husband Shane for all of their marriage. Eventually Shane asks for a divorce and tries to milk Wendy for all she’s worth — and get custody of the kids. Not that they’re any prize; rarely has fiction shown us such authentically charmless upper-caste Manhattan children. I like to imagine that Bushnell, who is childless, took some pleasure in crafting the scene where Wendy’s 6-year-old son punches her in the face. And in this novel of role reversals, of course Wendy wouldn’t dream of spanking him.
Eventually Wendy finds happiness in the arms of her erstwhile competitor Selden Rose, who appeared in Bushnell’s last novel,”Trading Up,” as the exploited husband of Bushnell’s main character Janey (herself first introduced in Bushnell’s “Four Blondes”) and is a lonely divorced guy in “Lipstick Jungle.” (Since I reviewed “Four Blondes” and came to the conclusion that Candace Bushnell is not Jane Austen, I didn’t feel obligated to read “Trading Up,” so I cribbed that detail from Amazon.) The details of Selden and Wendy’s sex life is left to the imagination, but perhaps their clothes enact a drama of submission and dominance, for we’re told that Selden’s “tailored navy suit, worn with an open, white dress shirt, screamed casual power.”
The third relationship option Bushnell portrays is the one we’re meant to root for. Plucky, outspoken and refreshingly reckless fashion designer Victory Ford ends up with a strapping, hypercompetitive, just this side of manic billionaire named Lyne Bennett. He’s the only manly man in the book, despite his epicene name. (And what about “Selden Rose”? What’s up with Bushnell’s penchant for naming her male characters like law firms? Law firms without any Jews, too. Then again, Lyne’s surname might be a gender-bending allusion to “Pride and Prejudice’s” heroine Elizabeth Bennett.)
Bushnell is also discreet about Lyne’s sexual prowess; when she discusses men with big jobs like Bennett and Rose, she’s bashful, almost as though she were forgetting that they’re all fictional characters and aren’t going to use their influence to get back at her! But Lyne has the potential for domination, as Victory realizes: “Even in her heels, he was at least six inches taller than she was, so she couldn’t exactly protest physically.” Lyne is only pulling Victory into the Whitney Biennial opening, but you get the idea.
If I had a daughter (the kind who wouldn’t punch me in the face) I wouldn’t want her taking Candace Bushnell characters as role models. The women of “Lipstick Jungle” are much smarter and more appealing than the women of “Four Blondes” — they love their work and not only the rewards of it — but they are still too one-dimensional. They’re the kind of girls who don’t have interests, only goals.
But better them than the hapless, passive heroines of more skilled writers like Ann Beattie, Tama Janowitz and Melissa Bank, characters who depend on men not only for their emotional well-being but for their jobs and their rent. “It’s so easy to solve your problems when you’re a successful woman and you have your own money,” Wendy tells Nico near the end of the book, and she’s right, at least about many of the problems female characters face in chick lit. And I was ready to forgive Bushnell her tin ear when she has Victory Ford pick up the $1,000 check for her first date with Lyne at Cipriani, just to show him that she’s not interested in him for his money. It might be the first time I’ve read such a scene in a novel: I only wish it would happen more in real life. And I liked it even better when Lyne responds to Victory’s accusation that “the person who has the most money in the relationship has the control,” with, “That may be, but if they’re a decent person, they never let the other person know.”
A few pages later maturity rears its head again: Wendy and Selden — whose workplace rivalry has been gradually softening into friendship, at Selden’s initiative — run into each other at the Mercer Hotel at 9 a.m. on a Sunday. She admits that she’s had to move out of her loft due to her divorce, and he makes a startling admission. His second marriage, to a supermodel (Janey from “Four Blondes”), failed because “I let my ego overrule my common sense.” Wendy wonders if Selden is “really that decent.” There’s that word “decent” again — could Bushnell be mellowing in her middle age? (And would any man ever admit that his ego had overruled his common sense?)
[Note: If you don't want to know how things turn out for the characters in "Lipstick Jungle," stop reading now.]
By the end of “Lipstick Jungle,” decency and maturity are epidemic. (A lucky thing too, because after almost 400 pages the reader will have tired of Bushnell’s leaden, clumsy prose and malapropisms. “Four Blondes” had a certain brisk facility, but the editing here is much worse.) Nico has decided that the fact that “she and Seymour really, really liked each other and always had” is “a lot more important than lust.” She lets Kirby down gently, with a $5,000 check that breaks a bigger taboo than Victory’s picking up the tab at Cipriani. Wendy goes through an amicable divorce and Selden is about to move in with her. She resolves to treat Shane well, after hearing him explode that “when a woman gives up her career to take care of her kids, she’s a hero, and when a man does it, all you women think there’s something wrong with him.” “She was so much more powerful than he was … She must be benign.” And Victory is finally able to be vulnerable after the biggest, and self-administered, setback of her business career. She and Lyne Bennett go off shopping into the sunset together.
At the novel’s close, Bushnell’s clever but diagrammatic gender role reversals have finally brought her and her characters to a plane of real feeling and humanity never glimpsed in her earlier writing, a place beyond the power dynamics of S/M and gold digging alike. Somehow her three women have moved past the dilemma posed by Wendy early in the book, when she contemplates the myth she purveys in her romantic films:
“The rules were rigid: a high-status man falls in love with a lower-status, but worthy and deserving, woman. Fifty years of feminism and education and success had done little to eradicate the power of this myth, and there were times when the fact that she was selling this bullshit to women made Wendy feel uneasy. But what choice did she have? … How many women would eagerly sign up for the opposite: high status woman … falls in love with lower-status male … and ends up taking care of him?”
Bushnell is an intuitive rather than an analytical writer, and it isn’t clear how she thinks the issue can be resolved, how powerful women can find beta males sexy. The mood of the ending is better than the circumstances might suggest: Nico gives up on eroticism for companionship, and Wendy finds a nicer and less superficial version of Shane in Selden. In the closing scenes, Wendy has announced that she’s pregnant with Selden’s baby, and Nico hopes that Selden will continue working even after the child is born, “at least for a little while. Imagine having to support two men and four children!” The only duo where the sex seems hot is the most conventional partnership, tall, rich Lyne and madcap Victory.
But you don’t pick up a Candace Bushnell novel for the logic. What Bushnell does so well is to get just the slightest bit ahead of the curve. Just as her “Sex and the City” girls are more common now than they were in the days of her New York Observer columns, so the coarse, energetic woman tycoons of “Lipstick Jungle” might be signposts for the years ahead. I’d welcome the change. And men who date ambitious women might have to resign themselves to a more strenuous sex life — or at least to clothes that “scream casual power.”
Saturday, Feb 5, 2005 2:00 AM UTC
"The Neocon Reader" is must reading for liberal losers who want to get their mojo back.
By Ann Marlowe
Why should liberal readers dip into this sampling of the other side’s ideology? To save themselves. Earnestly, to remind themselves of what it might be like to offer a coherent program again. Cynically, to figure out how the other guys did it. I’m more or less a neocon myself (more libertarian on economic and drug issues, more conservative on some cultural issues) so I find both the substance and the rhetoric of many of the articles here inspiring. But even those who don’t might admire the imagination, forthrightness and clarity of most of the contributors.
If you’re old enough to have followed politics in the ’70s, you’ll remember that liberals used to be the exciting ones. They were more open-minded, more imaginative and, well, sexier than conservatives. And one big reason Bush won in 2004 was that many of us who were ambivalent about the man and his politics — I voted for Gore in 2000 — found the Democrats and their candidate smugly self-righteous, prissy and joyless. Sure, red-staters can be smug, too, but it’s as incongruous in liberals as it is in garage bands. My liberal friends asked how I could support the candidate of the Christian right, but Kerry came off as so plastic and corporate, so backpedaling and two-faced, that by election night I felt that wearing a Bush button was a punk rock gesture.
If not for Christian fundamentalists, after all, we probably wouldn’t have punk rock. Or rap, Goth fashion, skateboarding and lots of recent art. Strong art comes from cultural ferment, from the clash of ideas, not from homogeneity. Liberals have failed to recognize that the “diversity” they so celebrate includes people who disagree with them — churchgoers and mosque-goers, pro-lifers and hunters. And the life has gone out of liberalism as a result. One of the less well-known contributors to “The Neocon Reader,” the Portuguese political theorist Joco Carlos Espada, notes that the most successful liberal regimes resulted from “a combination of and a tension between religion and philosophy.” “A liberal order,” Espada sagely notes, “will be the more successful the less it aims at total supremacy.” Those who inveigh against “the religious right” don’t consider how dull a country we would have if everyone actually did think like them. A purely blue-stated America would be kind of like Europe (but, alas, without the great food and shoes).
Which brings us to the annoying cult of the Continent. “Europe doesn’t have Christian fundamentalists,” my liberal friends sneer, but then Europe doesn’t have much in the way of a living popular culture either. They import their music, fashion and dance forms either from us or various countries of color, oppression and religiosity. They imitate our streetwear, our body language and our movies, and they’d hardly have any artists at all if they didn’t subsidize them. Take Berlin, vaunted as a new boho art capital. The whole city has about the same volume of cultural ferment and creativity as one square block of the East Village in the ’80s. It’s hard to even find a cool T-shirt there. I had no trouble at all, however, finding young people who were upset that the death penalty was applied in the Nuremberg trials. Not because they were Nazi sympathizers, but because they thought capital punishment was barbaric. And here I’d spent decades believing that the only problem with Nuremberg was that they didn’t apply the death sentence to enough of the Nazis.
But this Rumsfeldian moral clarity is exactly what the left now hates and eschews, to the point where no one could figure out what Kerry’s policy was on much of anything except getting elected. And when the left becomes mealy-mouthed, trimming its sails to catch the faintest hint of an electoral breeze, it loses its vaunted moral superiority. Listen to Irving Kristol, the former publisher of the National Interest and the Public Interest, supporting Social Security in 1993: “The conservative hostility to social security, derived from a traditional conservative fiscal monomania, leads to political impotence and a bankrupt social policy … If the American people want to be generous to their elderly, even to the point of some extravagance, I think it is very nice of them … [The elderly] do not have illegitimate children, they do not commit crimes, they do not riot in the streets.” You may disagree with Kristol, but you know where the hell he stands and that he’s sincere. A quote beloved of Christian fundamentalists comes to mind, the one from Revelations about God spewing those who are lukewarm out of his mouth. There is nothing lukewarm about neoconservatives, and this makes the Democrats hate them even more.
In fact, the main reason that neocons inspire so much venom, as British journalist Michael Gove explains in his contribution, is that they’ve stolen the left’s thunder. “Because neoconservatism places human rights, democracy, and liberal principles at the heart of its foreign-policy vision, the left have become angered that they no longer have a monopoly on the rhetoric of values. The left cannot abide the twin reverses of losing sole possession of the moral high ground and being proved wrong in the realm of action.” What is a liberal to do when a Republican president says, as ours did last week, “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world?” (And what are liberals left to say when 8 million Iraqis risk their lives to show that they love liberty every bit as much as Americans?)
Well, if you’re desperate to differentiate your position, you can try to paint reality so that tyranny looks a little better and democracy looks a little worse. In my view, this has been the strategy of the mainstream American press ever since 9/11. Does anyone else remember how in the fall of 2001 numerous mainstream papers, most notably the New York Times and Washington Post, were anxious to bring the hardships of Taliban sympathizers and jihadi prisoners to readers’ attention? The lefty pundits hadn’t been able to stop the war, and their early predictions of a quagmire and heavy American losses were quickly proven ludicrous. So they switched to looking for “human rights violations” under every rock in Afghanistan.
Which brings us to Iraq. Note that “The Neocon Reader” does not focus on Iraq. But those who oppose the war might profit by tracing its intellectual antecedents in this volume, as far back as Margaret Thatcher’s 1996 speech proclaiming “the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction” to be “the single most awesome threat of modern times.” Her examples of countries that have acquired them? “Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Syria.” But Thatcher did not imagine the extent of neocon dominance just seven years later: “Given the intellectual climate in the West today, it is probably unrealistic to expect military intervention to remove the source of the threat, as for example against North Korea — except perhaps when the offender invites us to do so by invading a small neighboring country. Even then, as we now know, our success in destroying Saddam’s nuclear and chemical weapons capability was limited.” Add to that Condoleezza Rice’s October 2002 Manhattan Institute speech (notably blander and flabbier than Thatcher’s), Tony Blair’s April 1999 speech (“Many of our problems have been caused by two dangerous and ruthless men — Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic”) and you have some of the key actors’ thoughts. A war for oil? Readers can draw their own conclusions. And although no WMD have been found, politicians and pundits alike have to make choices under imperfect information. The neocons did the best they could with what they had.
In part because politics post-9/11 has mainly meant international politics, neoconservativism is largely perceived as a foreign policy doctrine. This was not always the case, and getting the full flavor of the movement requires understanding that it was born as much in the effort to make sense of the collapse of the inner cities in the ’70s and ’80s and in the original culture wars of the ’60s. The two earliest articles in this anthology are about domestic policy: Irving Kristol’s 1971 New York Times Magazine defense of censorship of pornography, and James Q. Wilson’s now-legendary 1982 Atlantic Monthly essay on urban decay, “Broken Windows.”
This last might be the exemplary piece here, both for its intellectual virtues and for its influence on government policy. Wilson’s title refers to a theory that if a window in a building is broken and left unrepaired, all the windows in the building will soon be smashed, and his article is frequently credited with sparking the new approaches to urban order that led to the revival of New York under Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
What is not so often recalled from Wilson’s article is that the novel idea of placing officers on foot patrol did not actually reduce the crime rate; it only reduced citizens’ perception of the crime rate. But that was enough. That turned out to be what urban vitality was about. Wilson pointed out that in the mid-20th century, the public began to view the police not as the maintainers of public order they had historically been, but as crime fighters. The problem was that they weren’t nearly as good at actually apprehending criminals as they had been, in earlier times, at creating the feeling of public safety that allowed neighborhoods of poor and working-class people to flourish. The two police functions were linked, just not in the way people now thought. It wasn’t that fingerprinting more and more burglars reduced burglary; it was that “serious street crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly behavior goes unchecked.” But the police had more or less stopped trying to punish or prevent such behavior; doing so was now suspected as unfair, racist, judgmental and so on. And the wish to prevent this, and to decriminalize “victimless crimes” (when was the last time you saw that phrase?), led to the collapse of whole neighborhoods.
Wilson’s essay represents neocon thinking at its best — not only innovative, but honest and practical. Wilson raises the inherent conflict between the desire to live in a place perceived as safe with the equally strong desire for fairness. How can we be sure that “the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry”? He admits that he is “not confident that there is a satisfactory answer.” He further suggests that the precise balance between individual rights and community strength can only emerge empirically and on a case-by-case basis. This is the second point: practicality. If something doesn’t work, neocons think, try something else. (Old-line conservatives are sometimes inclined to go down in noble defeat instead.) If something works, continue doing it. And don’t pretend you know more than that, if you don’t.
“Broken Windows” is exemplary of neocon thought in another way, one honored recently as often as it is breached. That is the importance of perceptions. Here the Bush administration has fallen down badly. It doesn’t matter if Iraqis are freer than they were under Saddam if they don’t feel that way. It doesn’t matter if the U.S. has upgraded a lot of the crumbling Iraqi infrastructure if the water and power still don’t work well. The Bush administration has often been its own worst enemy in the matter of perceptions, even at the start of the war when Cheney could easily have avoided not only evil but also the appearance of evil, in the form of cronyism. Not to mention the inept handling of Abu Ghraib. Part of having respect for the electorate is having respect for perceptions and sensibilities. While I hope that Democrats will learn from neocons, and some day give us a presidential candidate so interesting and outspoken and creative that even I will think about voting for him, I hope still more strongly that Republicans won’t forget why they’re winning these days.
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Ann Marlowe
