SALON

Rebecca Traister

Monday, Jan 31, 2005 9:24 PM UTC

Drinking: A young story

Twenty-four-year-old memoirist Koren Zailckas goes beyond blackouts and hangovers to examine the emotional costs of binge drinking for young women.

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“It’s hard to be a gal with a book in this town,” says first-time memoirist Koren Zailckas, smiling quickly before looking down at her tea latte with the intensity of someone divining her future in its frothy dregs. When I nudge her to expand on this claim, she blurts out, “No one gets their panties in a twist when Brad Land writes a memoir!”

Zailckas’ book, “Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood,” will not be published until Feb. 7. But already, she’s inhaled a strong whiff of schadenfreude. Twenty-four years old, Zailckas has been out of college for just two and a half years, and labored only briefly in the journalism salt mines — as an advertising assistant at Men’s Journal — before scoring a $150,000 contract from Viking to write about her life as a hard-drinking Massachusetts teenager and Syracuse University student.

The book is getting the hard sell from its publisher, with a six-city tour — extremely unusual for a first-time author — and a trip back to the presses even before publication. Zailckas’ editor, Molly Stern, says that Viking printed “hundreds” of extra galleys, sending them to journalists, clinicians, politicians and anyone else who might respond to the alarm she’s raising about the hard-partying ways of the nation’s young women.

After early starred reviews in Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly (and anticipated reviews in People and USA Today), reporters are eager to talk to this teeny-tiny girl, dressed today in a black T-shirt, sneakers and jeans with cuffs wet from walking through the post-blizzard slush from her nearby East Village apartment. But interest does not always equal adoration. There’s already been some sniffy commentary from New York media circles about Zailckas’ age. The genre of female memoir, according to a recent New York Post article, “is on the verge of being inundated with confessional memoirs by girls whose main qualification is merely their extreme youth.”

But, ironically, what may burn the throats of Zailckas’ peers most is the ordinariness of her tale. A reader could easily close the book and say, “That was her big drunken girlhood? I got drunker than her! Where’s my book deal?” Many of us have, in fact, been drunker than Zailckas, who quaffed her first tumbler of Southern Comfort with a bad-influence friend at 14. She also had her stomach pumped at 16, an admittedly dramatic turn of events, though not the result of a careening night of Hiltonesque table-dancing, but of naiveté about the time lapse between sip and buzz.

According to Zailckas, this memoir is not supposed to be one of those action-packed chronicles of dissipated wastrels and their coke-and-Prozac antics. “This is not the story of me being bad for badness’ sake,” she says. “I wanted to use my experience to make sense of the phenomenon of young girls pickling themselves.” Indeed, deploying a potent concoction of anger, research and energy for self-investigation, Zailckas’ aim is to answer the question of why many young women are unhappy. That answer, she feels, is The Drink.

In “Smashed,” Zailckas’ start-and-stop boozing from 14 to 22 binds her to other hard-partying women and then drives her away from them. It edges her closer to social ease and then leaves her humiliated. It brings fraternity boys into her life and then makes her hate them. The costs of her binge drinking include weight fluctuation, mistreatment at the hands of men, a feeling that something inside of her is broken, a lack of intellectual confidence, the loss of her place on the college cheerleading squad, a lot of ralphing in bushes, some epic hangovers, and a post-college New York morning on which she doesn’t know whose futon she’s awakened on.

The temptation while reading her book is to shrug and say, “Welcome to the world, honey.” Zailckas is up on me by one pumped stomach, but I think I can take her in the drunken felony department (pouring a bottle of Southern Comfort into the frozen yogurt machine at the ice-cream parlor where I worked in high school, and then serving it to kids). Neither of us has had any headline-news trauma: no death or grievous injury, no falls from buildings or car crashes.

Zailckas says she is not an alcoholic, she is an alcohol abuser. In other words: She’s inflicted lasting damage on herself by drinking, but she’s not an addict. She has not had a drink in a year and a half, and claims she’s not tempted to do so, though she admits that abstinence might not “make sense in 10 or 15 years.” In her time on the wagon, she says, she has begun to get over her shyness without the help of social lubricant. Her friendships are “more authentic now.” She has a more comfortable relationship with sex than she did in college, when, she writes, she didn’t trust men “at all.” Her current boyfriend Matt appears at the end of “Smashed,” though Zailckas worries that her literary portrayal of him is “too white knight-y.” “It wasn’t finding a good man that stopped my drinking,” she tells me emphatically. Zailckas is a feminist.

When I ask her what her current pleasurable indulgences are, Zailckas grins. She says she loves the Libertines and flew to see them perform at the Coachella music festival in California. She wears their pin on the outside of a black jacket on which she has spray-painted the words “Young and Angry” in red block letters. After thinking about her other nonalcoholic escapes for a few seconds, she offers up photography and reading. “Memoirs are like crack to me,” she says casually and rattles off her favorites (“Liars Club,” by her Syracuse mentor Mary Karr; “This Boy’s Life,” by Tobias Wolff; and “Speak, Memory,” by Vladimir Nabokov) before moving on to her beloved poets (Stephen Dunn, Sharon Olds, Pablo Neruda, Robert Hass).

She may be painfully shy and, these days, have a taste for nothing stronger than chocolate mint tea. She may be self-deprecating and proud to proclaim that she has written herself as “the biggest asshole” in “Smashed,” an assessment that is pretty fair. She may shyly prepare me for the fact that she is going to hug me at the end of our interview. But that “Young and Angry” jacket isn’t a joke. Bitty Koren Zailckas is full of rage, and it bites through her mild good-girl aesthetic. She describes her fury as a senior journalism major, when reporters from Time arrived on campus to report on binge drinking and interviewed some of her friends. Zailckas disagreed with the article, which suggested that her female peers were getting wasted in an empowered attempt to outdo men at their own gin-soaked game.

“I thought that was so stupid,” she says. She lowers her chin, twirls her straight curtain of brown hair into a rope. “I have been a ballerina, a cheerleader and a sorority girl,” she says. “I was the girliest girl alive. No way was I trying to compete with men.” But the Time story got her thinking about alcohol and her personal history. She moved to New York, landed at Men’s Journal, and continued post-college drinking for a while. Hanging out in dive bars where bartenders tried to sell her expensive cocktails with names like “the miscarriage,” she writes about an evening at an all-night diner when a manager taught her to say “I am a drunken little whore” in Portuguese. Upon waking up in a strange man’s apartment with a friend, Zailckas flipped. She cut back and eventually stopped drinking, and started focusing on her writing instead. She wrote a short story about having her stomach pumped as part of a proposal for a memoir about drinking. An agent and her Viking contract followed quickly.

She’s also angry as she girds herself for her debut effort’s reception. We talk about a journalist who suggested on his blog that young female confessional writers including Zailckas, Abigail Vona, Melissa Panarello and Amanda Marquit engage in a “‘Bad Girlz’ smackdown” in which they “fight to the death, covered in mud or jello (or maybe they could all just make out).” Zailckas snorts as we discuss whether the same language would be used for her male peers. “Yeah, let’s have Jonathan Safran Foer and Brad Land in boxer shorts. And they can all make out and have a big orgy,” she says. But Zailckas is also pretty ticked at female journalists, who she says have asked her point-blank whether she thinks she got her book deal because she is young and pretty. Her response to me, if not to them, is, “No, I think I got this book because it’s about an important issue and I’m a pretty good writer.” And if people say she’s too young to merit her own memoir? “I wrote it because I’m young. And it’s important to have a young perspective. So fuck them.”

Zailckas’ writing voice is very young. While some baby memoirists (Vona, Elizabeth Wurtzel) rely on the outsize details of their travails, rather than on literary style, to power readers through their tomes, Zailckas moves her “I was soooo drunk” narrative along with prose naked in its poetic ambition and unleavened by irony or distance. “I feel like one of those ratty childhood bears that smells of spit-up and has one eye popping up,” she writes. And then later, about a New York hangover, “Summer sun streams through my windows like light through a magnifying glass, and I toss and kick down the sheets, writhing like an ant doused in lighter fluid.” She is deft with metaphor and dramatic buildup; but she has also faithfully recorded the ponderous whine of teenage self-examination so earnest (or petulant) that it is often painful to read. “Most days, I wish Anne Sexton were my mother,” is the beginning of one chapter section. It’s funny, partly because it is so ludicrously morose and wrongheaded, but also because we all probably wished something equally inane when we were teenagers.

“Smashed” is both literary memoir and polemic on young women and binge drinking, a mix that at times reads like a well-crafted term paper. Zailckas obediently footnotes statistics about the percentage of eighth graders who have tried alcohol and the mean age for first drinks, but also dots her text with references to Rilke and Plath. By the time she begins a sentence “In her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Laura Mulvey suggests that films and the sexy starlets in them give our dirty thoughts free rein …” I have to put the book down, because I’m pretty sure that sometime not so long ago, I wrote exactly the same sentence.

When Zailckas writes about seeing girls with beers in Central Park, “I catch a glimpse of what I looked like ten years ago, and I have to look away,” she speaks directly to what was painful — and a little aggravating — about reading “Smashed.” Zailckas is using the matrix of binge drinking, her poetry, academics — Laura Mulvey! — to impose order on confusions and fears of young womanhood, and reading it is enough to make any of us who spent years trying to do exactly the same thing — or, honestly, still do — suddenly feel like we’ve taken off all our clothes. She reminds me so much of my younger self that I want to scream at her, and at College Me: It’s not just the booze, you silly girl! And it’s not just “the gaze”! Anger fades, irony sets in! Don’t be naive!

I ask Zailckas if — a year after finishing this manuscript — she is already dying to move on, whether she burns with shame when she thinks that part of the book’s conceit might already bear the stain of youthful thinking. But she stands by her convictions, which have clearly been preserved partly by her ire at the alcohol industry and university structures reluctant to deal with the dangers of bingeing. In response to a question about what makes her angriest, Zailckas sends me a post-interview e-mail (sweetly signed “Love, Koren Z.”) in which she writes, “It’s ignorance (more accurately indifference) in the face of obvious suffering.” Over tea, she spits out percentages about depression and date rape, about how booze is sold more aggressively to minors than to adults. She brims with fury about Samantha Spady, a drunken 19-year-old Colorado student stashed by her friends in a frat storage room and found there 13 hours later, dead. Five students, including Spady, died in September alone from alcohol-related injuries, she tells me. And a 20-year-old British woman recently became the youngest ever to receive a liver transplant, after years of teenage tippling led to cirrhosis.

Of course, “Smashed” doesn’t include transplants or death. But there are some seriously scary close calls: a bad night on the Jersey shore in high school when she loses her girlfriend and later finds her in a beach house with strange men, covered in vomit and dressed in an entirely new set of clothes. Or when Zailckas herself, who assiduously protects her virginity into her junior year, wakes up naked in a frat boy’s bed, with no idea of whether she has had sex for the first time or not. They’re not tales likely to send shivers of surprise down the spines of most college-aged Americans, though that in itself is perhaps troubling.

Zailckas admits that if booze hadn’t been her poison, she could well have whiled away her coltish years cutting or starving herself. She can’t put her finger on how hours spent rolling kegs into woods would have been put to better use had she been a teetotaler. But Zailckas still cleaves to the belief that had she not stepped from sobriety’s path so early, she would be a better-formed adult today.

She writes in her present, sober voice, “Nine years after I took my first drink, it occurs to me that I haven’t grown up … I should be able to hear my own unwavering voice rise in public without feeling my heart flutter like it’s trying to take flight … I should be able to stop self-censoring and smile when I feel like it. I should recognize happiness when I feel it expand in my gut.” About Matt, whom she dates long-distance for a year, she writes: “Another girl might have learned to do this in high school: roosting on the kitchen counter or the fire escape with the phone cradled against one shoulder, soaking up stories, and learning that not all silences are bad.”

Well, not necessarily. And if another girl had learned how to roost and cradle, she might not have learned how to write a delicate chronicle of her experiences. It is wishful thinking that one wrong turn or bad habit can keep us from being the self-confident, sexually mature, productive young women we believe we could have been. I don’t think that too many screwdrivers are too blame for Zailckas’ inability to maintain a steady voice or recognize her own happiness.

But in her tale there lies a larger pattern. Throughout “Smashed,” Zailckas periodically lays off the hooch, then starts drinking again. It’s a favorite syndrome for women. We quit eating, quit drinking, quit smoking. We quit talking to toxic friends, quit being sluts, quit being prudes. There is power in self-abnegation, deprivation, in foot-stamping “Nos!” But we’re always falling off our wagons: drinking too much and loving immoderately, handing control to people and substances that make us feel bad about ourselves, until once again, we clamp down and punish ourselves for having given in. It’s a cycle that marks and damages almost all of us, whatever our chosen poison.

Booze happens to be the skeleton on which Zailckas has hung her narrative. She insists it wasn’t just a convenient way to sell her book, and I believe her. But if you boiled the alcohol off of “Smashed,” you would have a story of a girl struggling with the fact that she feels terrible about herself and her place in the world. The oldest story there is.

Thursday, Apr 12, 2012 12:00 AM UTC

True, new female friendship

"Girls" breaks new TV ground in creating an identifiable portrayal of women's relationships

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True, new female friendshipThe casts of "Sex and the City" (top) and "Girls"

A young woman sleeps in her bed, in the embrace of someone who has a leg draped over her thigh and an arm comfortingly around her middle. When the alarm clock buzzes, jolting this spooning pair to consciousness, we realize that they’re not a romantic couple; they are best friends and roommates, Hannah and Marnie.

It’s an early, lovely moment in “Girls,” the new HBO series created, directed, written, produced and, really, detonated onto the pop landscape by 25-year-old Lena Dunham. Dunham stars as Hannah, who is joined in bed by Marnie because Marnie is avoiding having to be touched by her over-kind swain, and because both girls like to stay up late watching reruns of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

These details, along with the image of two friends snoozing happily entwined, make the moment emblematic of a dynamic central to “Girls’” appeal and its importance. Despite Dunham’s protestations about not wanting to be some symbolic emissary from the land of young ladies (Sorry, kid, you’re it!), this is what she’s telling us about Women Right Now: that the lives of contemporary Mary Richardses and Rhoda Morgensterns are not based on pursuit or enjoyment of hetero congress; rather, they are often most firmly and warmly wrapped around each other.

You have likely already read something about the sex on “Girls,” which in early episodes, at least, all takes place between straight, sort-of-realistically-bodied young people. What you’ve read is true: the show’s abundant sex – as experienced by its four female leads – is either boring and unsatisfying, porn-fantasy-driven and unsatisfying, nonexistent and unsatisfying, or performed as conquest (Jessa says after bagging an ex, “That was me showing that I cannot be smoted. I am unsmoteable”) and yet … unsatisfying. Sex for these young women is an awkward element in their lives, and whether you think that this characterization is hilariously awful, worryingly awful, or whether it prompts you to reflect, once again, on how everyone else but you is a prude, there is no question that “Girls” features some awful, awful sex.

But part of the point of “Girls” is that the sex, and the guys with whom the sex happens, are not the point. Instead, as titularly advertised, “Girls” is about girls, and the fact that they do make connections – emotional, intimate, irritating, satisfying, pleasurable, lasting. Just not, so far anyway, with men. The show, among many other things, is crucial and corrective testament to the ways in which women’s friendships with each other have flourished and changed during the same period in which their liberties and status have increased.

Minutes into the first episode, Hannah sits naked in a bathtub eating a cupcake, laughing pityingly with a betoweled Marnie about Marnie’s emasculated boyfriend. When the boyfriend accidentally comes into the room, it’s clear he has no place in this room of unclothed communion. A similarly awkward entrance occurs later, during one of several scenes in which one of the four lead characters sits on the toilet, making serious confessions (of pregnancy, for instance) to a girlfriend while peeing. The bodily closeness depicted on “Girls” makes flesh the role these women play in each other’s lives: They are the non-sexual lovers of each other.

It’s the girlfriends who provide the physical affirmations usually associated with boyfriends. “You are beautiful, shut up,” Marnie tells self-deprecating Hannah. “Your skin is, like, hauntingly beautiful,” Long Island girl Shoshanna says to her worldly cousin Jessa. “When I look at both of you, a Coldplay song plays in my heart,” Hannah tells Marnie and Jessa, kidding but serious. In one scene, having been meanly rejected by a boy because of her virginity, Shoshanna desperately asks her friends if they would have sex with a virgin, meaning her. “Oh Shosh,” Jessa says kindly, “if I had a cock, it’s all I’d do.” You get the feeling that she means it; if they could provide that kind of fulfillment for each other, they would.

This same-sex affinity feels extremely contemporary, part of what has prompted critics to write about the show as revolutionary. But noting female friendship as a (or the) primary source of emotional sustenance only feels strange in the context of relatively recent history; in fact it’s a dynamic that is very old.

For the many centuries during which marriage was regarded as an economic and a socially ratifying necessity, rather than as an institution from which women could reasonably hope to derive emotional or sexual pleasure, intense social and physical bonds between women were an accepted part of life. From Celia and Rosalind in “As You Like It” to Hermia and Helena in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” whom we’re told were as close as “two lovely berries, moulded on one stem,” Shakespeare regularly used the assumed closeness (and sometimes the bed-fellowship) of women as a plot device. Much of what we learn of the fate of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe is from letters to her best friend, Anna Howe. Then there’s Lucy Montgomery’s Anne Shirley, who meets her “bosom friend” and “kindred spirit” in Diana Barry.

The term “Boston marriage” was used during the late 19thcentury to describe unmarried women who lived together in long-term partnerships. In “Bachelor Girl,” a history of single female life in the United States, Betsy Israel writes that around the same period, near-romantic female bonds were encouraged by parents. Two girls, meeting perhaps in school, would be “‘smashed’ – think of best friends going steady – and once smashed, they’d learn trust, loyalty, tolerance, patience.” Of course, all that social growth was supposed to be in service of marriage. “Once they’d mastered these skills,” Israel writes, “they would be able … to transfer them onto a marital relationship. Even if those who wed never felt quite the same about their husbands.”  For a long time, there was no questioning the sexuality of women who held hands, slept side-by-side, confided in each other or wrote long love letters to one another.

It wasn’t until the early 20th century, as marriage came to be treated as a union based on love and sex, that same-sex friendships began to be seen as competitive to the closeness a woman was supposed to feel to her husband, and thus as sexually suspect. Marriage historian Stephanie Coontz has described how, by the end of the 1920s, American psychoanalyists “were warning that one of the most common ‘perversions of the libido’ was the tendency of teenage girls to fix their ‘affections on members of the same sex.’ Such perversions, they claimed, were a serious threat to normal development and to marriage.” The fix, Coontz writes, was to discourage social unions between women and encourage more early sexual experimentation between the sexes. Networks based on female camaraderie, trust and dependence began to break down.

These mid-20th-century decades are the ones on which most of us have drawn, until recently, our understanding of how a woman’s life is supposed to proceed. They were years in which women made stupendous social, economic and professional strides, yet during which they were still told to pursue, and mark their graduation to adulthood with a “traditional” marriage, in which a man is lover, confidant, provider, partner and companion. These were also years in which messages about women’s behavior toward women were nasty; girls were hair-pullers, back-stabbers and bitches, always after each other’s jobs, wardrobes and men.

Now, it seems, we are coming out on the other side of the looking glass. The median age of first marriage for women has been rising steadily since the late 1980s. Marriage – while still widely fetishized as some kind of goal – is no longer the only acceptable marker of maturity. The idea of young adult women living, working, earning, spending and having sex on their own, outside of marriage, is, in many parts of this nation, not aberrant, but an expected phase of life, a norm.

These are Dunham’s “Girls,” and while the privileged Oberlin grads depicted on the show are members of the demographic statistically most likely to eventually marry – and to enjoy successful companionate marriages – their walks down aisles might well not take place for a decade or more. During that period, the people with whom they are likely to form their most intense emotional partnerships are, like the smashes of old, other young women. Except now, the smashes are happening not in anticipation of unfulfilling marital futures, but in advance of potentially happy marriages; they’re not a reflection of the powerless quandary of women compelled to marry practical strangers for money and social acceptance, but rather of a generation of women who, even if they don’t yet have real power, experience historically unprecedented autonomy and freedom.

Yes, we’ve seen friends on television before.  From Mary and Rhoda to Laverne and Shirley to, yes, the show that must not be named but to which “Girls” is always compared. But Carrie and her brightly colored cadre made history in almost cartoonish fashion, in which material consumption was supposed to be symbolic of social liberty (until it just became material consumption), in which friendship was a public performance enacted in expansive shiny clubs over jewel-colored cocktails. Those flamboyantly drawn expressions have given way to Hannah and Marnie, who breakfast in their grim apartment kitchen, Marnie listening with irritation as Hannah slurps her cereal milk and talks with her mouth full, like regular best friends, not fabulously implausible best friends.

Their life is not one of aspirational adornment, but of the quotidian realities of (even privileged) young adult life, in which the people you trust and argue with and talk to at the end of the day about your job, whom you share beers and breakfasts with, are your girlfriends.

It’s hard to talk about the role of female friendships without making them sound like placeholders for marriage. But it sells female friendship very short to regard it as some kind of training ground for later, committed heterosexual (or homosexual) partnership. These relationships take place not in some liminal state, as women are waiting for “real” life to begin; marital partnership no longer defines “real” life. Young women, older women, unmarried women – they are simply living their actual lives, not dress rehearsals for them, and the bonds they form with each other are as real, as varied, as complex and often as long-lasting as the ones they may or may not form with romantic and sexual partners, and as fraught and as true as the love they may or may not feel for their kids.

These women are, make no mistake, partners, spouses, family to each other. They get mad at each other for being late for dinner, for sleeping with the wrong people. They are jealous, possessive, dismissive of and bored by each other, sometimes in the emotionally manipulative style associated with lovers. Fighting over that too-adoring boyfriend, Marnie tells Hannah that she can’t understand because “you’ve never been loved this much.” She pauses. “Except by me. I love you that much.” While Jessa at one point turns to Hannah and issues a line that could have been taken from either romantic comedy or drama: “I am not a character for one of your novels. Stop staring at my face so hard.”

The bad stuff – the fighting – is as much a part of adult connection as the good stuff, and the good stuff – the love – is there in abundance in “Girls.”

At the end of an early episode, Hannah, recovering from a series of life’s traumas, dances by herself in her bedroom to Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own.” Marnie arrives home; they laugh at the day’s indignities, and then, before you know it, they’re dancing – happily, freely, satisfyingly – together.

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Sunday, Feb 12, 2012 2:33 AM UTC

Didn’t she almost have it all?

Whitney Houston died Saturday at 48. As Salon wrote six years ago, it's a tragedy too many people saw coming

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Didn't she almost have it all?Singer Whitney Houston performs in concert at Wembley Stadium in London on May 5, 1988 (Credit: Reuters)
Editor's note: In 2006, Rebecca Traister tried to understand how one of the most popular and successful singers of all time fell into a tragic cycle of addiction. Houston died Saturday at 48, making this story even sadder. To remember Houston in happier times, check out our video tribute.

Two weeks ago, a story by Los Angeles celebrity journalist Nick Papps began, “It’s hard to believe that the drugged, dazed woman staring out from [an accompanying] picture was once one of the most popular singers in the world … But today that woman, Whitney Houston, 42, is just another crack head.”

The dim assessment came in response to tabloids that on March 29 printed photos of what is supposedly Houston’s Atlanta bathroom, littered with crack pipes, cocaine-coated spoons, cigarette butts, Budweiser cans and garbage. The photos were taken, and sold to the magazines, by Houston’s sister-in-law, who provided an accompanying tale of the singer’s cracked-out habits, from hallucinating violent demons, to biting and hitting herself, putting her hand through walls, and locking herself away to smoke rock cocaine and pleasure herself with an apparently prodigious collection of vibrators. Speaking about the mess on Fox’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” Billboard executive editor Tamara Conniff said, “I think that she was a really well-manicured diva star and she just turned a little ghetto.”

Whitney Houston has sold more than 120 million records. Her first album, “Whitney Houston,” sold 24 million copies in 1985, becoming the highest-selling debut for a female solo artist. She was the first American singer to have seven consecutive No. 1 hits. She won six Grammys and 21 American Music Awards; her 1992 cover of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” was the highest-selling single by a woman in pop music history. But her impact went deeper than that: Houston’s was one of the only black faces that white girls like me who grew up in the 1980s ever saw in magazines in our dentist’s office or in video rotation on early Af-Am-light MTV. For many black girls, she was the only young female role model presented in lily-white teen bibles or mainstream entertainment who looked anything like them.

But 20 years after her record-breaking debut, and a decade-long dominance of the pop charts, Whitney Houston has been reduced to this: “just another crack head,” “a really well-manicured diva” who “just turned a little ghetto.”

Hearing someone who mattered to me as a child, who was famous in a daily, first-name-only kind of way, whose voice and face were so very beautiful, get tossed away so unceremoniously was jarring to me. Yes, jarring, even after a decade spent watching her career circle the drain. Listening to the ugly overtones of her dismissal — “crackhead” just half an epithet away from “crack whore” — I found myself wanting to blame everything that’s wrong with American culture. I wanted to point out that successful black women get punished, that women’s entertainment careers get manipulated to conform to standards they can’t maintain, that Houston’s thunderous slide was surely precipitated by racism and sexism and a celebrity machine that chews people up and leaves them for dead. Literally. In 2001, the New York Post reported that MTV has collected B-roll for a Houston obit, an honor normally reserved for geriatrics.

So I called the kinds of people who could shed light on these possibilities. And they did. But in talking and thinking about Houston’s story, walking past newsstands where her shiny, bloated face stared up from the tabloid covers, I realized that part of what’s so sad about this particular pop culture tragedy is that racism and sexism and celebrity culture only went so far in destroying this woman; the rest she seems to have done herself.

“She couldn’t have been a bigger or more beloved star, and she was really the first black America’s sweetheart,” said Janice Min, editor of Us Weekly, about Houston’s mid-’80s profile. “Now she’s not even worthy of ‘The Surreal Life.’ She’s fallen below the entertainment C-list level. It’s almost too tragic to deal with.” Perhaps the surest sign that Houston has essentially ceased to matter is that Min’s magazine, whose pages burble and hiss with every plodding plot point in every celebrity soap opera, did not run a story on the Enquirer’s “Inside Whitney’s Crackden!” scoop.

“We kind of ignored it,” Min explained, adding that she decided against covering it only at the last minute. First of all, the story was one hell of a celebrity bummer. “It’s a little tawdry for an Us audience, where celebrities have a nice shiny veneer on them. This is a little hardcore,” said Min. “You turn to celebrities for escape and voyeurism. When their problems are worse than yours, then you don’t want to read about them.” And there’s no worse buzz kill than a predictable one. “The interesting thing was that when you saw the pictures, you almost wanted to be more surprised than you were,” Min continued. “There are a few celebrity stories that filter into the white noise category: Paris Hilton breaking up with a boyfriend, Nicole Richie looking stick thin, and on a much more tragic level, Whitney Houston using drugs. This has been an ongoing plotline for a long time.”

It certainly has. Houston has been missing concerts for years. She was booted from the Oscars in 2000 for blowing off rehearsal. When she does perform, she often sings badly and looks consumptive. She’s been in and out of rehab, was arrested for marijuana possession in 2002, and admitted to Diane Sawyer that same year that she “partied.” Her husband of 14 years, Bobby Brown, has spent time in jail for drunk driving, failure to pay child support, and breaking parole by assaulting his wife in 2003. Houston hasn’t released an album since 2003; the most exposure she’s had in recent years has been “Being Bobby Brown,” the train wreck of a reality show she and her husband headlined last year.

But all that doesn’t change who she used to be. It doesn’t change the fact that many women in their 30s and late 20s can still remember the 17-year-old fashion model as one of the first women of color to grace the cover of Seventeen in 1980. It wasn’t hard to suss out the ways that America’s historical anxiety about black femininity and sexuality was manifesting itself during the ’80s: These were the years when Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America, was dethroned for having been photographed naked, and when Lisa Bonet, aka Denise Huxtable, was savaged for costarring in the kinky movie “Angel Heart” with Mickey Rourke. If young black women were going to be in the public (white) eye, they had to be pure and unthreatening, especially sexually.

For a long time, Houston fit the bill. And while there’s lots to be said about the lengths she, or her P.R. people, may have gone to to make her a palatable crossover sensation, there was no question that her roots were deep in African-American musical tradition. Slick and overproduced though they may have been, Houston’s songs were soul and R&B ballads; her voice was huge, and straight out of her Newark, N.J., church choir. She was the product of music royalty, daughter of gospel star Cissy Houston, who sang backup for Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley. Franklin is Whitney’s godmother; Dionne Warwick is her cousin.

Houston’s run is often described in shorthand now: She sang “the ‘Bodyguard’ song” (“I Will Always Love You”) and “The Greatest Love of All,” a tune popular at sixth-grade graduations everywhere. But those are the tip of the iceberg; between 1985 and 1997, she slammed out hit after hit after hit, from peppy dance tunes to ocean-liner-size ballads: “All at Once,” “How Will I Know,” “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” “You Give Good Love,” “Saving All My Love,” “So Emotional,” “Where Do Broken Hearts Go,” “Didn’t We Almost Have It All,” “One Moment in Time,” “Run to You,” “I’m Every Woman.” Houston’s pipes could shake the stereo, make you shiver even when you knew the song was schmaltzy.

It’s hard to convey now, in a more diffuse media landscape, the intensity of radio and video play she got. I “grew out” of my Whitney fandom around puberty and haven’t sat down to listen to her in 15 years; while writing this, I downloaded some tunes and found that I still knew every word. That’s not just a mark of early devotion; it’s a sign of what was her inescapable ubiquity.

“Whitney Houston was probably the most important African-American singer between Aretha Franklin and Mary J. Blige. For a decade or so, she was probably the most important black female singer out there,” said Craig Werner, chairman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s African-American studies department and author of “A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America.” Werner also pointed me to the work of music journalist Danny Alexander, who has argued that the untold story of black music in the past two decades — lost amid the attention showered on rap and hip-hop — was the emergence of the black female vocalist as the most powerful force on pop charts.

In an e-mail, Alexander explained that while it wasn’t “all about” Houston, there was “a sea change that follows her initial success. Black women, in particular, [including] extraordinary vocal groups such as En Vogue, TLC, SWV … Destiny’s Child, but also Mariah Carey, Toni Braxton, Mary J. Blige and others in line for Whitney’s undisputed throne, played the largest role in chart history as talent to be reckoned with … it’s unlike anything that happened before.” According to Alexander, Houston and her peers, including Madonna, Janet Jackson and Tina Turner, “carved out a space for women to come close to dominating pop radio in the early ’90s — as not simply producers’ pawns … but serious artists demanding artistic control and respect and, in Whitney’s case in particular, with a vocal talent to rival anyone else on the radio.”

But if Houston was helping to spearhead a music industry revolution, that revolution was concurrent with tectonic shifts of another kind. Houston was a product — literally — of MTV. And that meant that she was packaged within an inch of her life — pinched and prodded and tweaked to look a certain way. Check out the cover of her first album. Houston was 21; her face looks about 14. But she’s done up like a piece of Grecian statuary, her hair pulled into a severe bun, a string of pearls around her neck. She looks unrealistically pristine.

“She was like the black Princess Di — always in a gown; beyond gorgeous,” said Danyel Smith, former editor in chief of Vibe who has profiled and spent time with Houston over the years. Smith observed that in the mainstream press, many female stars are motivated to present themselves — or others choose to represent them — as rebel bad girls who defy prudish expectation and wholesome good looks by staying out late, drinking too much and sneaking off to bathroom stalls with Wilmer Valderrama. Back in the mid-’80s, Houston was defying a different set of cultural expectations — the ones applied to black girls — to a much different effect. She was presented to us as youthful feminine perfection: all sugar and spice and poofy dresses, a solid rearing in the church, a close family. Her unraveling “is not the same thing as a bad girl getting worse,” said Smith. “It’s a good girl seemingly tumbling to the bottom of a ravine. We have to watch, but it’s really not pretty, and not entertaining.”

Houston was famously guarded about her private life. If there was the sense that everything we saw about her as a young performer — her family, her faith, her clothes — was what we were meant to see, then at the least that publicity lockdown presented her (or someone) as in control. After her marriage and the birth of daughter Bobbi Kristina in 1993, the media began to get glimpses, with the missed performances and weight loss, that something was amiss. There were rumors that she was doing drugs with her husband, who often was assumed to be the catalyst behind her self-destruction.

This loosening of her grip on her public presentation seemed a sign that Houston’s private life was in free fall. In the now-infamous 2002 interview with Diane Sawyer, Brown arrived uninvited, an irritating presence whose desire to control his wife, or to keep her from emerging from whatever private universe they inhabited, seemed to emanate from his pores. But Houston didn’t appear to mind. She came off as defensive and vaguely unpleasant as she crowed to Sawyer that she made “too much money to ever smoke crack.” “Crack is cheap,” she said. “Crack is whack.”

Her raucous denials served not only to make her sound like someone who might well have done crack, but also like someone who was drawing invisible and unattractive class and race lines around herself. No matter how strung-out she was willing to look on television, this was a message she seemed determined to control: I’m not that kind of drug user, she was saying. Not the kind who’s poor. And while it was clear that whatever kind of person she was in 2002, it bore little resemblance to the young woman on the cover of Seventeen; it was hard to tell whether her new, unlikable presentation was any more authentic than the clean-scrubbed package. “I watched with hope that I would see something in her face that was real,” said Smith of the interview. “But I don’t know what her real is. And I’ve spent time with her a couple of times over the years. Like the best and biggest pop stars, she is a very veiled persona.”

The veil dropped more dramatically last year, when Houston appeared on her husband’s Bravo reality series “Being Bobby Brown.” The show dealt intimately with the action taking place (and not taking place) in Houston’s lower intestine, and was peppered with lines from the former “black Princess Di” like, “I’ve got to poop a poop!” It was disgusting — not because of the scatological humor, which actually seemed refreshingly real — but because of the context in which that humor played to the scads of viewers who made the show one of Bravo’s biggest hits. Houston and Brown didn’t look right; they didn’t appear to be well, or particularly sane. And so it seemed that the message was not, “Look at the successful celebrities who, like real people, talk about farting,” but rather, “Laugh at these strung-out has-beens who can’t help but degrade what’s left of their image by talking about their bowel movements on camera.”

Smith was clear that she doesn’t know what to make of the story behind the current set of drug-den photographs: “If it’s old, if it’s new, if it’s Bobby Brown, if it’s drugs, if it’s fatigue, if it’s depression, if it’s freedom; we don’t know what it is at all.” But she also said that she could bring herself to watch only one episode of the reality show. “It seemed so tragic and broken that I just couldn’t take it.”

Perhaps the most surprising twist of “Being Bobby Brown” was that it turned a lot of assumptions about just what had happened to Houston on their ears. There had been a pretty simple imaginative narrative about the singer’s decade-long decline: that as a victim of her own early success, she had been pushed into a public marriage to an abusive man, perhaps been badly treated and forced to live a lie, and fallen into drug addiction and depression at his hands. Who knows — maybe there’s truth in that story arc. But what “Being Bobby Brown” made clear was that however the Houston-Brown marriage has developed over the years, it is now, if not blissful, then at the very least functionally codependent. And more than that, that Brown is not the only bully in the family.

“That was a show where you probably saw more pathology than you needed to,” said Us Weekly’s Min. “I think a lot of people stopped feeling sorry for Whitney Houston after that show. It looked like she had the upper hand in that relationship. Where people had probably assumed Bobby was the thug, I think they began to consider that maybe Whitney was the thug.” Houston was pushy and mean and dismissive, and she looked physically wrecked: from her waxy skin to straw-dry hair to her oddly protruding belly. “And,” Min paused before pointing out, “she looked like probably not the best mother in the world. In America you can be forgiven for a lot of things. But not being a fully engaged mother is a sin.” Here, she recalled a “Being Bobby Brown” episode in which Houston locked young Bobbi Kristina out of her bedroom so that she and Brown could have sex. “People were shocked by that,” said Min. “Especially coming from America’s former pop princess.”

But isn’t part of the demonization of black female sexuality about our attitudes and assumptions more than it is about reality? Houston’s meteoric rise, after all, had occurred during what Wisconsin professor Werner described as “an extremely chaotic period in African-American culture” during which the class-carving effects of Reaganomics dissolved black communities, the church lost its role as a centralizing organizing structure, and drug wars ripped through black neighborhoods. “The cultural moorings that had held black life together during all kinds of turmoil and suffering in some way fell apart,” said Werner. If Houston had become unmoored by her early success, he hypothesized, she might not have found the communal support she once would have. “Celebrity culture replaced the culture of community that had nurtured soul music and early rock ‘n’ roll,” he said. “It was a perfect storm of how to screw up somebody’s life.”

The circumstances of Houston’s trajectory were in some ways reassuringly stereotypical. “The media particularly likes this kind of story because it plays into stereotypes of black degradation,” said Werner. “The specific squalor of the Whitney Houston crack story, that part of it is racialized. There’s the idea that crack is a black drug. Which is horseshit. But look at how we love the stories of black people doing it: Remember Marion Barry in Washington? We like this because it’s a ghetto story. And it shows no matter how high they rise, this is how they all fall.”

But while Houston may have steered her way into a perfect storm of unjust racial expectation, she was still at the wheel. And she has had ample offers of rescue, including, by her own admission, family interventions. While writing this piece, I spoke to a friend who strenuously argued that Houston’s present circumstances have little to do with race. If distant engagement with celebrity life can be compared to friendship, she said, then Houston is the friend on whom we have finally been forced to give up. We did gasp with horror over her skeletal appearance, were saddened by her no-show concert appearances, shaken by tales of spousal abuse and drugging. But she has sworn she’d get help and then failed to do so too many times, returned again and again to the abusive boyfriend, gotten clean only to relapse, stolen money from our wallets — if minutes spent poring over dismaying People photo spreads count as currency — until we eventually told her never to call us again. Moreover, mentioning Robert Downey Jr. by way of comparison, my friend said that if Houston had been able to smoke crack and still produce compelling product — hit songs — we would have forgiven her anything, regardless of color.

Downey is a fair example of down-and-out celebrity (at least temporarily) redeemed. One that’s even more apt would be Mariah Carey, who went all-out bonkers and still managed a glorious return. Or Courtney Love, an addled and unwell figure who has been pilloried even more brutally than Houston, but who has managed to retain a claim on some fuzzy corner of our hearts. Houston has no such fuzzy place. At least in the mainstream (white) press.

But, Danyel Smith reminded me, that doesn’t mean that everyone’s given up on her. “When you say, ‘How did we discard her so quickly?’ ‘We’ is too big a word,” said Smith. “I don’t think the African-American community has discarded her. There is equal parts sadness and on some levels disgust, and I hesitate to speak for every African-American like we’re all joined hand-in-hand. But I do think that however misguided, there is a huge hope for her recovery. And there is still a deep and abiding love for the Whitney we knew on those first three or four albums.”

So maybe that’s all I want: for the mainstream press to save Whitney from the tabloid and reality-TV haze that seems to have enveloped and obscured everything about who she was before. The tragedy here — in addition to the loss of a talent and the apparent illness of a once-healthy woman — is the way that loss and illness have sucked dry our well of respect for someone who made an artistic and social impact. Maybe in an extremely twisted way, MTV’s obituary B-roll is the right idea. What we need to be doing is not laughing, or looking away. What we need to be doing is mourning.

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Saturday, Feb 4, 2012 12:00 AM UTC

Susan G. Komen’s priceless gift

A radical decision woke the country up to an alarming rightward drift, and gave new life to women’s health advocacy

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Susan G. Komen’s priceless giftMembers of Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America and more than 20 other organizations hold a "Stand Up for Women's Health" rally in Washington (Credit: Joshua Roberts / Reuters)

The startling intensity that we saw this week in response to Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s decision to pull its grants from Planned Parenthood — an intensity that prompted the Komen foundation to reverse its decision today — may be the best thing that’s happened to the conversation about reproductive rights in this country for decades. It certainly should be.

Practically since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, reproductive rights activists have been left to play stilted defense against ideological opponents who grabbed the language of morality, life, love and family as their own, always deploying it with reference to the fetus. The rhetoric around reproductive rights, which has more recently begun to creep into arguments over contraception, has become suffocating in its emotional self-righteousness, but too muscular, too ubiquitous to effectively combat.

But the overreach by the Komen foundation, while surely intended to strike yet another blow on the side of antiabortion activism, succeeded instead in waking a powerful constituency — armed with precisely the language and emotional heft they’ve been lacking for too long.

That this week’s blow against Planned Parenthood came not directly from John Boehner’s House of Representatives – which, ever since taking power a year ago promising to focus on jobs, has manfully focused on the single task of attacking women’s reproductive rights – but instead from a popular, officially nonpartisan organization dedicated wholly to women’s healthcare somehow brought this argument into the open.

The response to Komen was surely so tinderbox explosive because it had been building with every politically theatrical investigation launched by Cliff Stearns and every grisly abortion scene enacted on the House floor by U.S. Rep. Chris Smith. But it was not just Washington wonkery, and was not ginned up or amplified by professional political cranks. It was the reflexive kick of a shin hit just below the knee, and the visceral anger spilled everywhere, from a Planned Parenthood Saved Me tumblr and onto Facebook, where people posted images of Komen’s pink ribbon cut in half. It poured from bank accounts, including that of New York Mayor and former Republican Michael Bloomberg.

It came from often dispassionate media figures like Andrea Mitchell, was tweeted by novelists like Judy Blume, Terry McMillan and William Gibson, actors Ellen Barkin and Martha Plimpton, politicos like Donna Brazile, Reps. Gwen Moore and Jackie Speiers, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and from 22 senators including Frank Lautenberg, Al Franken and Kirsten Gillibrand, who signed a letter urging Komen to reverse its decision. It came from callers to radio programs, announcing their intentions to drop out of Komen races, and from the American Association of University Women, which canceled a scheduled service event with Komen. In the three days after Komen’s announcement of its Planned Parenthood break, Planned Parenthood received more than $3 million in donations, said PPFA president Cecile Richards in a press call on Friday.

More than that, though: The starkly observable attack against something as crucial and basic as breast exams for poor women, as well as the fact that so many divergent voices were pulled into it, meant that the conversation was not about partisan politics; it was about women. For the first time in what feels like forever, passion and fury were being loudly, proudly given in a full-throated voice, on behalf of women – women as moral actors; women as citizens with rights, health, bodies, freedoms; women as people with families and economic concerns.

Taken together, these factors mark this as a watershed moment in the contemporary conversation about reproductive rights. This is a story in which we see the possibility of a turned tide, a new way to gauge how the public actually feels about women’s rights and health, and a new way to talk about it, as well. Because what we saw this week was big. It was mass. It was emotional. This was so different from the various polls activists on both sides of the abortion question are always throwing around, polls that depend so much on how a question is asked; polls that offer far less clarity than head-banging confusion about where America stands on the issue of reproductive heath. This was not a poll. This was America announcing that it cared about women’s health, and more specifically, that it cared about Planned Parenthood.

In many ways, the activism that forced Komen to backtrack was ignited by Boehner’s House Republicans a year ago, when they voted to cut off all funding to Planned Parenthood because it provides abortion services. This despite the fact that since 1976’s Hyde Amendment, no federal money has been able to be used to provide abortion services. The organization Republicans want to squash provides more than 800,000 women a year with breast exams, more than 4 million Americans with testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and 2.5 million people with contraception, which prevents unintended pregnancy and thus abortion. But playing to what they must imagine is overriding public sentiment, Republicans have worked tirelessly to lodge the image of Planned Parenthood as an abortion factory deep in the American imagination.

A year ago, some of the anger at this strategy began to bubble over. In response to Smith’s description of a second trimester abortion, read on the House floor, Democratic U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier went to the House well and described her own painful second trimester abortion. “For you to stand on this floor and suggest that somehow this is a procedure that is either welcomed or done cavalierly or done without any thought, is preposterous,” Speier said, directing her comments at Smith. “Planned Parenthood has a right to operate. Planned Parenthood has a right to provide services for family planning. Planned Parenthood has a right to offer abortions. The last time I checked, abortions were legal in this country … I would suggest to you that it would serve us all very well if we moved on with this process and started focusing on creating jobs for the Americans who desperately want them.”

It was around this time that a viral “Thank You Planned Parenthood” meme cropped up online. With participants noting the instances in which they had relied on PPFA for birth control, breast exams, gynelogical care, and yes, abortions. Twitter, Facebook and blogs began to be dotted with “I stand with Planned Parenthood” emblems. Comedian Lizz Winstead kicked off a tour called “Planned Parenthood, I am here for you.”

But this recent wave of defense of Planned Parenthood has remained broad, ambient. The politics of the congressional witch hunt have been so labyrinthine, so convoluted, that it has been difficult to know how to effectively harness an angry response. When, last fall, Rep. Cliff Stearns launched an investigation into PPFA’s bookkeeping, the move was so needless, such a trumped-up piece of political stagecraft (since PPFA does receive federal funds, it must scrupulously account for every dime it spends, no special investigation required) that it was hard to even know how to make sense of it, let alone respond. This week, a caller to WNYC’s “Brian Lehrer Show” professed her belief that the Stearns investigation centered on whether Planned Parenthood was performing late-term abortions.

The demonization of Planned Parenthood should have awakened the country to the radicalism of the right, and how far it has pushed the political conversation. It’s been hard to measure the degree of the radicalism, so slowly and unceasingly has it crept across our consciousness and the political discourse. But it’s important to remember how mainstream Planned Parenthood used to be. It was the respectable, even Republican, advocate for women’s health, including reproductive services; the leaders of the National Abortion Rights Action League were the activist agitators. Sen. Prescott Bush, the father of President George H.W. Bush, served as treasurer of Planned Parenthood’s first national fundraising campaign. Richard Nixon signed the family planning legislation in 1970 that authorized its federal funding.

As a congressman, George Bush and his wife, Barbara, were reliable friends of the organization. Barry Goldwater’s wife, Betty, was a founding member of Arizona Planned Parenthood; President Gerald Ford’s wife, Betty, was a high-profile supporter of the group. More recently, Ann Romney, wife of the 2012 GOP presidential front-runner, donated $150 to Planned Parenthood in 1994. And when a Romney relative died of a botched abortion in 1963, the family asked that memorial donations go to Planned Parenthood.

But what happened this week was a clarifying moment. Right-wing extremism, coming this time not from the partisan mill but from a mainstream women’s organization, was put in a direct and unflattering spotlight. Suddenly, so much was clear, and finally, the response was unified and thunderous. Right-wing overreach — and the backlash it inspired — feels a lot like the way other radical GOP power grabs in the last year have galvanized the public to fight back. Attacks on collective bargaining, public workers and unions by Republican governors in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana have produced mass mobilization in those states, the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades. Public workers – cops, firefighters, nurses, teachers, paramedics, sanitation workers – once were the proud backbone of the middle class. Now they find themselves derided by the GOP as the new welfare queens who are taking more than their fair share. Ohio voters repealed a law that abolished collective bargaining in November, and pro-union organizers in Wisconsin have forced a recall election for Gov. Scott Walker.

Efforts to restrict voting rights are likewise waking up the citizenry; Maine repealed a law that banned same-day voting and registration in November, and Ohio blocked a voter photo ID bill. Even on the issue of reproductive rights, a draconian “personhood” amendment to the state constitution failed to pass in Mississippi, one of the reddest of the red states. Overreach by the right has re-inspired movements – unions, voting rights, women’s rights — that have too long been dormant and too easily dismissed by their ideological opponents as outside the mainstream of American values, when in fact, they used to represent the most American of values.

For defenders of Planned Parenthood, and more broadly for reproductive rights activists, this moment of repositioning is a valuable one. Until now, it has proven very difficult for advocates to resuscitate their side with language anywhere near as powerful as that used by antiabortion forces. Instead they have relied too heavily on the fungible, limp, endlessly open-ended language of “choice.” (Even among “pro-choice” advocates, the “I choose my choice!” joke from “Sex and the City” has become a ubiquitous critique.)

But what happened this week was powerful. It was mass. It was direct. It was emotional. And it restores women as the moral center of this conversation — which is where they belong.

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Thursday, Dec 8, 2011 9:58 PM UTC

Obama’s woman problem

The president shamefully uses his daughters to justify limiting the healthcare options of America's young women

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Obama's woman problem (Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster/Salon)

When will Barack Obama learn how to talk thoughtfully about women, women’s health and women’s rights?

Apparently, not today.

On Wednesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius unexpectedly overruled the Food and Drug Administration’s recommendation that emergency contraception be sold on drugstore shelves and made available without a prescription to women under the age of 17. The move came as a surprise blow to healthcare and women’s rights activists, the kinds of people regularly counted as supporters of the Obama administration.

Today, Obama doubled down on his disregard for the concerns of these groups, claiming that while Sebelius made her decision without his counsel, he agreed with it. Obama pooh-poohed the findings of the FDA, which had concluded that Plan B pills posed no medical hazard and supported Sebelius’ official argument, citing a lack of confidence that “a 10-year-old or 11-year-old going to a drugstore would be able to, alongside bubble gum or batteries, be able to buy a medication that potentially if not used properly can have an adverse effect.” The logic expressed today by the president, and yesterday by Sebelius, is ludicrous: Medicines like Tylenol – which have been proven to have adverse effects in high doses – are available by the truckload on drugstore shelves, at prices far cheaper than the $30 to $50 it would cost a preteen to purchase just one dose of Plan B, let alone go wild with it.

But part of what was most disturbing about Obama’s statement was his reliance on language that reveals his paternalistic approach to women and their health.

“As the father of two daughters,” Obama told reporters, “I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine.”

First of all, the president was not talking about “various rules.” He was supporting a very specific rule, one that prevents young women from easily obtaining a drug that can help them control their reproductive lives, at an age when their economic, educational, familial and professional futures are perhaps most at risk of being derailed by an unplanned pregnancy. “As the father of two daughters,” Obama might want to reconsider his position on preventing young women from being able to exercise this form of responsibility over their own bodies and lives.

But as an American, I think it is important for my president not to turn to paternalistic claptrap and enfeebling references to the imagined ineptitude and irresponsibility of his daughters – and young women around the country – to justify a curtailment of access to medically safe contraceptives. The notion that in aggressively conscribing women’s abilities to protect themselves against unplanned pregnancy Obama is just laying down some Olde Fashioned Dad Sense diminishes an issue of gender equality, sexual health and medical access. Recasting this debate as an episode of “Father Knows Best” reaffirms hoary attitudes about young women and sex that had their repressive heyday in the era whence that program sprang.

A question of who should be allowed access to a safe form of contraception is at its root a question of how badly we want to, or believe that we can, police young women’s sexuality. When Obama is talking about his daughters, we know he’s not really basing his opinion on an anxiety that they might suffer the adverse effects of drinking a whole jug of Pepto-Bismol or swallowing 50 Advil, things that any 11-year-old who walks into a CVS with a wad of cash could theoretically do. When he says that he wants to “apply common sense” to questions of young women’s access to emergency contraception, he is telegraphing his discomfort with the idea of young women’s sexual agency, or more simply, with the idea of them having sex lives at all. This discomfort might be  comprehensible from an emotional, parental point of view. But these are not familial discussions; this is a public-health policy debate, and at a time when “16 and Pregnant” airs on MTV, the fact that a daddy feels funny about his little girls becoming grown-ups has no place in a discussion of healthcare options for America’s young women. It is also nearly impossible to imagine a similar use of language or logic to justify a ban of condom sales.

Moreover, Obama’s invocation of his role as a father is an insult to the commitments and priorities of those on the other side of this issue. Are we to believe that those who support the increased availability of emergency contraception do not have daughters? That if they do, they care less about those daughters than Barack Obama does about his? And that if they do not, they cannot possibly know better than a father of daughters what is best for young women? Why should we be asked to believe that Obama’s paternity imbues him with more moral authority on the subject of women’s health and reproductive lives than the investments of doctors, researchers and advocates who – regardless of their parental status – have dedicated their lives to working on behalf of increased reproductive health options. This line of argument is no better than the Mama Grizzly argument developed by Sarah Palin during 2010′s midterm elections, in which she asserted that her band of super-conservative mothers were qualified for office because “moms just know when there’s something wrong.”

Barack Obama has long had a tin ear for language that has anything to do with women and even more specifically with women’s rights. While on the campaign trail for president in 2008, he waved off a female reporter who asked a question about the future of the auto industry, referring to her diminutively as “sweetie.” The same year, attempting to play both sides on the issue of reproductive freedom, he gave an interview with a religious magazine in which he asserted his support for states’ restrictions on late-term abortions as long as there was an exception for the health of the mother, but added that he didn’t “think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother.” Attempting to recover from that line and reassert his pro-choice bona fides, Obama later clarified that of course he believed in a medical exemption for “serious clinical mental health diseases,” just not when seeking a late-term abortion is “a matter of feeling blue,” perpetuating a wildly irresponsible vision of the rare and difficult late-term abortion as a moody impulse-buy.

Today also isn’t the first time he’s used references to members of his family to make a larger offensive point about women. Back in 2009, when charges that his officially female-friendly administration included some boys’ club tendencies hit the front of the New York Times, Obama dismissed the claims as “bunk.” Reporter Mark Leibovich noted at the time that the president “often points out that he is surrounded by strong females at home,” an argument that not only mimics an old saw about how being henpecked by women is equivalent to respecting them, but reflects a dynamic as old as patriarchal power itself and sidesteps the question of how strong females are treated at work. In 2010, while appearing on “The View,” Obama made a creaky Take-My-Wife-Please joke about how he wanted to appear on “a show that Michelle actually watched” as opposed to the news shows she usually flips past. The joke being that his missus, the one he met when she mentored him at a high-powered law firm, just doesn’t have a head for news delivered by anyone other than Elisabeth Hasselbeck.

It should no longer come as a surprise that the president of the United States is, on perhaps an unconscious level, an old-school patriarch. What’s startling is the degree to which Obama seems not to have learned from any of his past gaffes, how no one seems to have told him – or told him in a way that he’s absorbed – that the best way to address a question of women’s health and rights is probably not by making it about his role as a father.

This might be an especially valuable chat to have with the president as he moves into 2012 and toward an election in which he is going to be relying on the support of people he has just managed to anger, offend and speak down to — women. The least he could do is learn to address them with respect.

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Tuesday, Sep 27, 2011 4:01 PM UTC

Early signs of a “Bridesmaids” bump

A veteran producer sees not just success for Kristen Wiig's blockbuster, but signs of a lasting legacy

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Early signs of a Kristin Wiig in "Bridesmaids" and Viola Davis in "The Help"

Last week, the summer’s surprise blockbuster, “Bridesmaids,” was released on DVD, after a spectacular run both in the United States and abroad. The fortunes of the film, which starred a brace of funny women and dealt equally in fart jokes and friendship, were regarded as crucial to the future of women in entertainment.

Hollywood, perpetually on the verge of never making another movie for anyone but teenage boys, was in need of a slap in the face, reminding it that women buy tickets, fill theaters, tell friends they loved it — and know men who are occasionally eager to see the opposite sex portrayed compellingly on celluloid. “Bridesmaids” delivered a wallop, bringing in more than $280 million worldwide, and drawing an audience reported to be a third male, and largely over 30.

But has it actually whetted the film business’s appetite for more female-driven projects? Salon called Lynda Obst, producer of movies like “Sleepless in Seattle,” “Contact” and “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” the television show “Hot in Cleveland,” the author of “Hello, He Lied” and all-around movie sage, to see what, if anything, has changed in her town this summer.

Did the success of “Bridesmaids” make a difference to your business?

Yes. It had the biggest impact of any women’s movie that I can remember in my career.

In your whole career, which began with “Flashdance” in 1983?

Yeah. It came at a moment when any movies for women, women’s comedies — forget dramas, there are no dramas for anybody — but women’s comedies, women’s thrillers were going to get put by the wayside forever. Women’s projects were dying everywhere. That’s why the opening of “Bridesmaids” was so critical for every woman in features, why its success was attended with such profound interest by every woman writer, producer and director in town.

The second important factor was that there were no stars in the movie and it wasn’t tracking in advance.

And that matters because it means that it was the material, not a movie star, that drew people to theaters?

Yes. Its success wasn’t automatic. A star opens a movie. Sandra Bullock opens a movie. But there was nobody in this movie who had ever been in a movie before, so it’s the hardest kind of movie to open.

It means that its success was due to the fact that people enjoyed it, and gave it good word of mouth once the movie started screening. Which leads us to the gigantic thing, which was the revelation that women can open a movie, and also, that this [women's movie] crossed over. Men came. It drew women of all ages and it drew guys and was a major hit. And not just domestically, which is part two of this gigantic thing, because the movie business right now is being driven by international box office.

Comedy doesn’t usually travel well. Movies that travel are movies with very little dialogue, usually dependent on action or family content or big international stars. But “Bridesmaids” did very well internationally. The concept was easy to understand in all languages. It gave us a clue as to what movies will work internationally with women in them. So what we learned is: Broad comedies will sell abroad, even with broads.

What are the immediate effects of this?

There are suddenly projects for women! I’m pitching one right now that is a female-based comedy and people are really responsive to it. And then my directing debut, which was dead in the water at New Line, went from having no momentum to having momentum, the weekend right after “Bridesmaids” opened. “Bridesmaids” meant that the idea of being able to make a movie about women was resuscitated.

Well, for now. What if the next female comedy flops?

If the next one flops, who knows? Two action movies flop and it means nothing; one women’s movie flops and it’s the end. But “Bridesmaids” was followed immediately by the success of “The Help,” which was terrific because that was driven by women too.

So what we’re finding in the American market is that younger male eyeballs are disappearing in large numbers, going to video games, going to the Internet. But women are going to the movies, if you make movies for them.

Now, does this mean we will stop making movies for the younger male quadrant? No, because the young male quadrant likes the same movies as international audiences — action movies, man movies.

Man movies?

“Ironman,” “Spider-Man,” “Batman.” Man movies.

Are studios pursuing women’s projects or are people just feeling like they can pitch them again?

I think the latter. But I think studios were suddenly receptive to them.

This is not the first time in recent memory that a woman’s movie has done well and studios have failed to notice in any permanent way. “The Devil Wears Prada,” your movie “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” “Sex and the City” have all been big women-driven hits, and yet women’s movies were on the brink of extinction.

Studios have institutionally short memories when it comes to women’s movies. “Sex and the City II” did better internationally than it did domestically, which would have made you think that they would have noticed it. I mean, that’s what inclines Fox to make “Ice Ages”; sequels do so well internationally. But studios don’t seem to generalize by the same rules in women’s movies as they do for other movies.

Every time a woman’s movie does well, it’s a brand-new fact. Every time we rediscover the female audience, it’s astonishing.

So it’s possible that despite “Bridesmaids’” success, four years from now you and I will be having the same conversation about the death of women’s comedy?

Yes.

That’s depressing. But back to the success of “Bridesmaids.” There was a certain amount of social awareness around going to the movie. Because of the press it got, women seemed to be aware that going to see the movie was not just about enjoying it, but about sending a message to Hollywood. Do you think that had an impact on its box office?

Well, I know there was tremendous awareness in Los Angeles that we had to open this movie. I believe it happened in New York too, but I don’t know that that happened nationally.

What happened nationally was that there was a hunger for something for women to relate to, because there’s usually nothing out there for them. It’s what happens with an urban audience with Tyler Perry.

I had a sense from friends in other cities that they were going with their girlfriends and that they knew it was made for them.  It’s so rare that there’s a movie made for them. It generated such excitement.

You would think that that excitement alone would send a message that there is an eager audience out there for material about women.

Well, I think you can see a lot of that reaction on television. It is the year of women on television. Television is much more female-friendly than Hollywood. There are a tremendous number of female executives, and when they see something like “Bridesmaids,” it’s much easier to react fast to it, and there’s less institutional resistance. They love the zeitgeist.

But timing-wise, this season of television was already a done deal before “Bridesmaids” opened, so it can’t have been a reaction, can it?

Well, the [final] decisions about this current fall season were made at the upfronts, which roughly coincided [Editor's note: actually, directly coincided in mid-May] with the opening of “Bridesmaids,” so there actually could have been a connection.

But also, I have just been through the next season of creative development and let me tell you it’s just as female-friendly as the one that’s on air now. There are shows about women and girlfriends and not just couples. There is television about women, for women. Real women.

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Page 1 of 118 in Rebecca Traister

Rebecca Traister is a senior writer at Salon.com, where she has covered women in politics, media and entertainment since October of 2003. Prior to that, she was a reporter at the New York Observer, where she wrote about the film business. Traister has also written for Elle, the Nation, Vogue,

Glamour, New York Magazine, the New York Times, Nerve, and elsewhere. Her book about women and the 2008 elections, "Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women," will be published in September by Free Press."

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