Salon.com > Jessica Valenti

Do gay couples have happier kids?

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 01:00:00 +0000

When Rebekah Spicuglia got pregnant at seventeen, she says abortion wasn’t an option. “I was raised by a fanatically religious family. I probably considered adoption briefly.” Her boyfriend was a new one, and it was the first sexual relationship she had been involved in. So Spicuglia moved in with her boyfriend, and ten days after giving birth to her son, Oscar, they got married.

Spicuglia’s marriage didn’t last long; she says they were very different people. After he came back from a trip to Mexico, she says, there was a rift between them. So she moved from their home in Santa Maria, California, to go to college at the University of California at Berkeley. Up until then, their parenting responsibilities had been quite equal, she says. Oscar lived with her, but her ex was always involved and had even traveled for several months in Mexico with Oscar. So when she moved to Berkeley, it didn’t faze her to make a verbal agreement that Oscar would stay in Santa Maria with his father and his father’s family until Spicuglia secured family housing.

“Strident” and proud

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 11:45:00 +0000

Katha Pollitt's well-known wit and incisiveness run through all the pieces in "Virginity or Death!" -- a new collection of more than five years' worth of essays from her Subject to Debate column in the Nation. The essays cover a wide range of issues from the war in Iraq to healthcare, but unsurprisingly, the bulk covers feminist issues: abortion, child care and work, and the seemingly never-ending backlash against women's progress. In these meditations, Pollitt defies the stereotype of the finger-wagging, Mommy-knows-best feminist. She credits younger women with being "so much more confident and multicompetent" than she was at her age and lauds their accomplishments.

However, Pollitt definitely has strong opinions about women framing every decision they make as "empowering." She notes in "Sex and the Stepford Wife" that "women have become incredibly clever at explaining these [demeaning] choices in ways that barely mention social pressures or male desires." But, as harsh as Pollitt can sometimes be, there's always truth behind her observations.

No fear

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 10:37:00 +0000

I'm probably one of the only women I know who didn't read Erica Jong's groundbreaking novel "Fear of Flying." That is, until I found out I would be interviewing her. Chalk it up as a generational thing. So reading "Fear of Flying" and "Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life" back-to-back proved to be quite the Jong tutorial.

Jong describes "Seducing the Demon" as the story of how she survived the post-"Fear of Flying" craziness. If the idea of having to "survive" a book that has more than 18 million copies in print seems a little much, don't worry, Jong feels the same way: "Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included."

In "Seducing," Jong retells the story of her demons (men, addiction), her inspirations (family, exotic locales), and the writers that she admired along the way. It's witty, insightful and, above all, honest.