The feminist who made me blush

Political columnist Katha Pollitt has been vilified for airing her romantic dirty laundry. What's wrong with serious women writers exposing their soft underbellies to the world?

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Sex, Memoirs, Feminism, Journalism, Rebecca Traister, Life

Sept. 26, 2007 | As a first-grader, I remember walking into a supermarket one night with my mother, and seeing my teacher manning the checkout line. I froze, red-faced with embarrassment. My embarrassment didn't stem from an understanding that Mrs. Briggs was working a second job at the supermarket because Palmer Elementary wasn't paying her enough to live on. I was way too young to get that. My horror was at the fact that she was my teacher, the official lady who had an official job teaching me how to read and recognize numbers and here she was in the supermarket where real life took place. She was dressed in different clothes and wearing an apron. She was a person! It was embarrassing! People have public lives and private lives. And when the twain meet, it makes you turn red.

That's probably why, a few years ago, when I read Katha Pollitt's New Yorker essays about learning to drive and web-stalking her ex-boyfriend in the wake of a brutal breakup, I was so taken aback: humiliated for her, embarrassed to have bumped into her this way, in different clothes and an apron! Pollitt and I are now professional acquaintances, but at the time, I had not met her. I knew her only as a columnist, having long loved her work as a political and feminist critic for the Nation. But I viscerally recoiled at these tales of her abandoning her pride, wallowing miserably and defensively as she compared herself to her ex's new girlfriend, admitting to her lack of self-sufficiency and confidence. The newspaper where I worked at the time ran pieces mocking both of her stories. I didn't write them, but I laughed at them.

Of course, I also read the essays with the engagement of a Talmudic scholar -- identifying with her in some places, happily and self-congratulatingly distancing myself from her shame in others, and appreciating her perhaps way-too-honest lyricism.

Now those two essays, in which she confessed to debasements like looking the other way after finding another woman's panties in the laundry, to not giving her boyfriend oral sex in the mornings, to the fact that he intellectually belittled her and that she -- the great feminist! -- stayed with him for seven years anyway, until he finally left her for someone else, are the centerpieces (and one of them the title) of "Learning to Drive," a new collection of Pollitt's writing.

Picking up these pieces again in book form, accompanied by other essays about Pollitt's daughter, the Marxist reading group she joined in part to impress her scoundrel boyfriend, and friendships with the women with whom her ex cheated on her, I have a much more intricate reaction than when I first read them. Instead of simply rearing back from them, I wonder: Is there ever a point at which it is a good idea for women, especially intellectual, politically engaged women, to strip off their clothes and caper naked as jaybirds in front of a line of would-be assassins?

Pollitt is used to her share of ad feminem hit jobs. The publication of a collection of her feminist essays last summer prompted Ana Marie Cox to snigger brattily in the New York Times Book Review about Pollitt's "preserved-in-amber" version of feminism. "Learning to Drive" has already earned Pollitt two scalding reviews of a different sort, one from the New York Times and one from the Los Angeles Times, and both written by women appalled at the sight of a political thinker they both respect in her public life unmasked as, yuck, a woman, in the privacy of her own confessional essays.

The L.A Times' Susan Salter Reynolds is unapologetic about the terms of her disgust, admitting that "watching a feminist I've admired my entire life dissolve into a whingeing puddle in her late 50s is painful," and calling the book "self-indulgent." The New York Times' Toni Bentley is slinkier in her evaluation of Pollitt's "brilliant commentary on welfare, abortion, surrogate motherhood, Iraq, gay marriage and health care" next to this collection in which she "gets personal, and shameless." Bentley, a former ballerina, knows from personal and shameless; her graphic 2004 memoir "The Surrender" explored her devotion to anal sex. In her review, she names other female writers like Laura Kipnis, Daphne Merkin and Maureen Dowd, who have excavated their personal lives (not to say their intestinal tracts) for material, cracking nonsensically that they represent a new breed of "enraged, educated woman (vagina dentata intellectualis)," and wonders whether Pollitt is "giving up her dignity in a generous motion of solidarity toward the rest of us who have already blown our cover?"

First of all, of course "Learning to Drive" is self-indulgent. Memoir is self-indulgent. This hasn't stopped generations of great, serious writers from mining their private existences for wisdom, beauty or humor. As it happens, a number of Pollitt's essays are wise and very funny, and if not altogether pretty in content, then at least fine-boned in style. And in addition to being blood-and-guts revelations about her private devastations, they offer a view of the ways in which her political ideologies -- the things we respect her for -- have been woven throughout her romantic, social and familial life.

In the book's title essay, Pollitt describes her ineptitude behind the wheel of a car, and the infinite patience of her Filipino driving instructor, who calls her "Kahta" and tells her that observation -- of the distance between car and curb, for example -- is her weakness. "Observation is my weakness," she writes. "I did not realize that my mother was a secret drinker. I did not realize that the man I lived with, my soul mate, made for me in Marxist heaven, was a dedicated philanderer ... I noticed that our apartment was becoming a grunge palace ... I observed -- very good, Kahta! -- that ... I had gained twenty five pounds in our seven years together and could not fit into many of my clothes. I realized it was not likely that the unfamiliar pink-and-black-striped bikini panties in the clean-clothes basket were the result, as he claimed, of a simple laundry room mix-up. But all this awareness was like the impending danger in one of those slow-motion dreams of paralysis, information that could not be processed. It was like seeing the man with the suitcase step off the curb and driving forward anyway."

Next page: Why do these essays make other smart, confident women so uncomfortable?