Ann Marlowe

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.

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.”

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.