Kate Harding

I knew how thrilling books could be, and I was appalled by the notion that the most ostensibly worthwhile reading — i.e., the kind we were assigned — should feel like eating my literary vegetables. So I ignored my homework and let myself be effortlessly absorbed by, for example, Tom Robbins’ twisted sense of humor; Stephen King’s evocative descriptions and zippy, foul-mouthed dialogue; J.D. Salinger’s angsty, gifted teens.

I wasn’t anti-assignment when the books on the syllabus felt relevant and vital to me. “Lord of the Flies” was exactly my speed at 13, when adolescents’ capacity for cruelty was of particular interest. I read “Ordinary People” — about a depressed kid in a wealthy Chicago suburb who couldn’t connect with his appearance-conscious mother, ahem — for my sophomore English class and a dozen times after. I often skipped our annual Shakespeare requirement, but junior year I devoured “Hamlet” in spite of myself. (Basically, if there was at least one young, messed-up guy at the center of a story, I was interested.)

And so I squeaked by. As long as I read just enough to get through a couple of papers and a final exam, I could bluff my way through class discussions and easily pull at least a B+. Sure, I probably could have been a straight A English student if I’d consistently read even, say, 50 percent of the assigned books, but I had a system that worked for me.

Unfortunately, Mr. White was wrong about one thing that my parents got absolutely right: My genuine love of learning — without a corresponding work ethic and tolerance for boredom — wouldn’t do a damned thing for me in college.

——-

In the summer of 1996, when international cellphone calls were still a spy movie fantasy for most of us, I stepped into an iconic red British phone booth to call my mother in Illinois and tell her I was still alive.

“Guess where I’m calling from!” I greeted her.

“Your report card just came,” she greeted me. “You’re on academic probation again.”

I’m not sure what she really said next, but here’s a fairly close approximation of what I heard: What the hell is wrong with you? How can you be so lazy? Do you want to flunk out? Do you think the world is going to hand you a job, no matter how badly you’ve screwed up? Do you think you’re better than everyone else, and the rules don’t apply to you? You are a bad person, and I don’t love you.

OK, she definitely didn’t say that last part, but that was the message that thundered in my head every time we discussed my academic shortcomings. “I’ll work really hard this year,” I told her, now crying in a phone booth in a (not terribly, but still) strange land. “I promise I’ll graduate.”

And so I did. The following May, bursting not so much with pride as relief, I knelt onstage in the University of Toronto’s grand Convocation Hall and placed my hands between the chancellor’s while some other robed stranger dropped a faux-ermine hood around my neck. The hood represented no particular honor, mind you; everybody gets one as part of the school’s marvelously campy, theoretically Oxford-based pomp and circumstance. (Seriously, among other things, a puffy-hatted beadle leads a procession of VIPs into the auditorium, wielding the gilted U. of T. mace like a scholarly majorette. It is fantastic.) After five years of competition and self-recrimination, I was suddenly indistinguishable from the diligent geeks and charming ass-kissers who’d made their parents proud all along. That day, in our identical black robes and slightly dingy hoods, we all became graduates of one of the finest universities in the world — and already, nobody much cared how we got there.

Good thing, since after five years and three schools, my cumulative GPA was 1.56. You needed a 1.5 to graduate. I was now the proud recipient of an English degree — and I had never read the classics.

My spectacular underachieving was a head-scratcher for all involved. I was never a party girl or even that much of a rebel. I despised my body too much to pursue self-destructive sexual encounters, or any other kind. I liked drinking all right but couldn’t buy my own for a long time, and I never enjoyed smoking pot enough to want to buy my own. Beyond that, my history of drug use begins and ends with a single failed attempt at dropping acid — during which I sat quietly in a bathroom corner with a pacifier in my mouth, nodded at my friends and had zero revelations, except that I actually didn’t mind spending a whole party like that.

Still, my aversion to the stereotypical troubled teen indicators notwithstanding, I struggled. In addition to the undiagnosed ADHD, there was the untreated depression and anxiety, the acute body shame, the general self-loathing. During my first week in college, I was raped, and I spent the rest of that year sharing a tiny, everyone-knows-everyone campus with my assailant while working toward a school-based hearing that would be equally humiliating and fruitless. So that was awesome. After that I transferred schools, twice, and spent my final year living on fewer than 1,000 calories a day, because I threw myself into dieting as obsessively as I did into reading for pleasure and daydreaming about becoming a famous literary novelist (I know, I know) whom no one would ever suspect of not having read Dickens or Faulkner.

In other words, with the combined benefits of therapy and hindsight, I can see plenty of logical reasons for my academic failures. At the time, though, all I knew was that I was broken somehow — whether the diagnosis was pathological laziness or plain old stupidity — and was thus swiftly embarrassed in any discussion of literature that went beyond the bullet points.

Fortunately, few did. I knew the names — Nick Carraway and Daisy Buchanan, Heathcliff and Cathy, the Bennets and the Joads and Humbert Humbert. I knew when Bloomsday was celebrated, and why Cordelia lost the kingdom to her bitchy sisters, and who the madwoman in the attic was. And let’s be honest: In most situations, that is plenty to pass as a person well-versed in the classics. I could have gone most of my life as a small-time fraud.

Instead, at the beginning of 2011, I embarked on a year-long classics-reading project, partly to atone for my wasted education and partly because, at 36 years old, I finally think that sounds like fun. It’s been fascinating to watch people respond to the admission that it’s not a rereading project. Usually, they chuckle politely and cop to some mild slacking themselves until, inevitably, I come to the literary oversight they find unforgivable. (Most often it’s Gatsby.) You’ve never read that? And you have an English degree? What the hell is wrong with you?

That probably wouldn’t bother me much, except that my long-standing secret fantasy — apart from being a famous literary novelist who gets seven figures per book and wins all the prizes — is that I will someday go back to school and be the kind of student my teachers and parents (one now 75, the other dead) always wanted me to be. In 2005, I graduated from a non-traditional MFA program I actually thrived in, which you’d think would have been enough of a happy ending for me. Advanced degree! Unimpeachable transcript! Boo-yah! But I still have this utterly irrational, yet no less ferocious desire to be a bona fide scholar — a stuffy, tweedy stereotype who’s read everything. Part of me can’t stop wanting to try for a Ph.D. in English lit just so I could hang that degree on my office wall like the head of a bear I done wrassled and kilt with my own two hands. I won, you bastard. Not you.

You could say a Ph.D. in English literature is my white whale, even.

And no, of course I haven’t read “Moby-Dick.”

Still, as the New York Times put it, “there is no public evidence to suggest a connection,” which some members of the public seem to find unbearably frustrating. With no specific target for their suspicions and no easy way to find one, folks all over the blogosphere have been settling for the next best thing: making light of the sexual assault charges and smearing one of the alleged victims.

By Sunday, when Keith Olbermann retweeted Bianca Jagger’s link to a post about the accuser’s supposed CIA ties — complete with scare quotes around the word “rape” — a narrative had clearly taken hold: Whatever Assange did, it sure wasn’t rape-rape. All he did was fail to wear a rubber! And one woman who claims he assaulted her has serious credibility issues anyway. She threw a party in his honor after the fact and tried to pull down the incriminating tweets. Isn’t that proof enough? The only reason the charges got traction is that, in the radical feminist utopia of Sweden under Queen Lisbeth Salander, if a woman doesn’t have multiple orgasms during hetero sex, the man can be charged with rape. You didn’t know?

As of today, even Naomi Wolf — Naomi Effin’ Wolf! — has taken a public swipe at Assange’s accusers, using her status as a “longtime feminist” to underscore the absurdity of “the alleged victims … using feminist-inspired rhetoric and law to assuage what appears to be personal injured feelings.”

Wow. Admittedly, I don’t have as much experience being a feminist as Wolf has, but when I see a swarm of people with exactly zero direct access to the facts of a rape case loudly insisting that the accusation has no merit, I usually start to wonder about their credibility. And their sources.

Wolf links to exactly one, an article in British tabloid the Daily Mail. “Using a number of sources including leaked police interviews,” writes Richard Pendlebury, “we can begin to piece together the sequence of events which led to Assange’s liberty being threatened by Stockholm police rather than Washington, where already one U.S. politician has called on him to executed for ‘spying’.” Well! A reasonable person might be skeptical of information coming from a single anonymous source via a publication known for highly sensationalized reporting, sure, but in this case, there are a number of them.

That Daily Mail article also helped to inspire a Dec. 3 Gizmodo post in which Jesus Diaz boldy asserted, “While you can say Assange is a douchebag for not putting a condom on and continuing after the woman requested he use a condom, there was no rape accusation in both cases.” The other source for that claim was an AOL News article that relied on (hey, look!) the same Daily Mail piece, a Swedish tabloid, and statements from Assange’s lawyers to cobble together a theory of what happened and why Assange was charged. Rock solid!

To Diaz and Gizmodo’s credit, they quickly posted an update upon learning that the Swedish prosecution office had “issued a notice saying that they are charging Assange with rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion.” Diaz added, “Obviously, this is now a completely different issue altogether. Rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion are extremely grave accusations. This is not the ‘sex by surprise’ accusation that was discussed before.” (I don’t know that I’d go as far as “a completely different issue altogether” — Feministe’s Jill Filipovic wrote a terrific explanation of why “sex by surprise” actually is a pretty big deal — but good on him for acknowledging that much.) Still, the notion that consensual, unprotected sex equals rape in Sweden (despite millions of Swedish fathers walking around free today) continues zipping around the Internet. One wonders if today’s statement from Swedish authorities, which elaborates that Assange is accused of “using his body weight to hold [a woman] down in a sexual manner” and having intercourse with a sleeping woman, among other things, will even slow them down.

OK, so maybe the charges really are for rape-rape, but still — the woman has CIA ties! I’ve read that on at least a dozen blogs! Keith Olbermann tweeted it and everything! That’s got to be coming from a highly credible source, right?

Actually, as far as I can tell, the only source for that claim is an August Counterpunch article by Assange fanboys (seriously, they recast him as Neo of “The Matrix”) Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett. Here’s the most damning evidence Shamir and Bennett have compiled against Assange’s accuser:

1) She’s published “anti-Castro diatribes” in a Swedish-language publication that, according to an Oslo professor, Michael Seltzer (who?), is “connected with Union Liberal Cubana led by Carlos Alberto Montaner,” who reportedly has CIA ties. Let me repeat that: She has been published in a journal that is connected with a group that is led by a guy with CIA ties. Says this one guy.

2) “In Cuba she interacted with the feminist anti-Castro group Las damas de blanco (the Ladies in White). This group receives US government funds and the convicted anti-communist terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is a friend and supporter.” That link goes to an English translation of a Spanish article noting that at a march last spring, Posada “wander[ed] unleashed and un-vaccinated along Calle Ocho in Miami, marching alongside” — wait for it — “Gloria Estefan in support of the so-called Ladies in White.” Apparently, it’s “an established fact” that Posada and the Ladies also share a shady benefactor, which means he should clearly be called a “friend” of the organization, and this is totally relevant to the rape charges against Julian Assange, because the accuser once interacted with them in some manner.

3) The accuser is a known feminist who once wrote a blog post about getting revenge on men, and “was involved in Gender Studies in Uppsala University, in charge of gender equality in the Students’ Union, a junior inquisitor of sorts.”

Are you kidding me? That’s what we’re basing the “CIA ties” meme on? An article that reads like a screenplay treatment by a college freshman who’s terrified of women? Actual quote: “[T]he Matrix plays dirty and lets loose a sex bomb upon our intrepid Neo. When you can’t contest the message, you smear the messenger. Sweden is tailor-made for sending a young man into a honey trap.”

Look, for all I know, Assange’s primary accuser does have CIA ties. Perhaps it was all a setup from the beginning. Perhaps she is lying through her teeth about the rape. Anything is possible. But in the absence of any real evidence one way or another, we’re choosing to believe these guys? Or at least this guy at Firedoglake, who says he’s “spent much of [his] professional life as a psychiatrist helping women (and men) who are survivors of sexual violence” — giving his post a shiny veneer of credibility, even though it’s a pure regurgitation of Shamir and Bennett’s — but segues from there into an indictment of the accuser’s post-rape behavior. She socialized with her attacker again! An expert like him can tell you that real victims never do that.

The fact is, we just don’t know anything right now. Assange may be a rapist, or he may not. His accuser may be a spy or a liar or the heir to Valerie Solanas, or she might be a sexual assault victim who now also gets to enjoy having her name dragged through the mud, or all of the above. The charges against Assange may be retaliation for Cablegate or (cough) they may not.

Public evidence, as the Times noted, is scarce. So, it’s heartening to see that in the absence of same, my fellow liberal bloggers are so eager to abandon any pretense of healthy skepticism and rush to discredit an alleged rape victim based on some tabloid articles and a feverish post by someone who is perhaps not the most trustworthy source. Well done, friends! What a fantastic show of research, critical thinking and, as always, respect for women.

Then, once we’d reached our cruising altitude and the captain had turned off all the relevant lights, I lit a cigarette. Of course. Finally. This anecdote should tell you at least two things about me: I’m a hopeless addict, and I’m not very young. I remember smoking on 
airplanes, for god’s sake. When I read articles that cast cigarette smokers as exotic, retro freaks or hear people refer to the constant smoking on “Mad Men” as some sort of historical curiosity, I have approximately the same reaction as I do when they talk that way about the show’s sexism and racism: Maybe you haven’t seen it out in the open recently, but that sure as hell doesn’t mean it’s gone — and for the record, it hasn’t been too terribly long since people didn’t even try to hide it, most places. I’m 35 years old, and I’ve legally smoked not only in airplanes but in hundreds of restaurants and bars, dozens of airports, indoor shopping malls and concert venues, theater lobbies, college professors’ offices, taxicabs, dorm rooms, hotel rooms and break rooms. Entirely “smoke-free” public places are really quite a recent development.

And as bad as it was to be sitting in a smoke-filled tube with an infected chest for several hours straight — feeling horrible about blackening a perfectly good pair of child-lungs just a few inches away from me, no less — the only thing worse would have been not smoking the whole time.

Did you think I was exaggerating when I said “hopeless addict”? I’m not, any more than scientists are when they say that for some people, cigarettes are harder to quit than heroin. While I can’t speak with 100 percent certainty on the matter, never having tried heroin myself, I’m pretty sure I’m one of those people — and believe me, I come by it honestly. The day my mother learned that her organs were shutting down and she would never leave the ICU, never again set foot outdoors where no one could stop her from lighting up, she sat up as straight as she could in bed and brought the pulse oximeter on her left middle finger to her mouth, inhaled deeply, formed an O with her lips and slowly exhaled. Then again. And again. She was smoking her last cigarette, goddammit. A nurse stood there openly gawking, and I couldn’t even be offended, because what else would you do?

A few days later, I slipped a cigarette in next to my mother’s body before the casket was closed and she was sent away to become smoke and ash herself. I believe she would have wanted that; I know I would have. That’s what I mean when I say “addict.”

Widespread disdain for smoking – and, inevitably, for smokers – has been around just long enough to seem like it’s always been there. There are full-grown adults who can’t conceive of a time when cigarettes weren’t almost universally regarded as disgusting, let alone dangerous. Even I only became a hopeless addict after surgeon general’s warnings and “Thank you for not smoking” signs were ubiquitous, and the dangers of secondhand smoke had been discovered (and given the prissy scolds of the world carte blanche to berate perfect strangers). Contrast that with my mother, who became a hopeless addict during an era when cigarettes still implied glamour and elegance, when you could count the number of nonsmoking public spaces on one hand, when presidents smoked openly instead of shamefully admitting that they can’t quite quit, and nonsmoking hosts thought it only polite to offer ashtrays to guests. As the number of places where she was permitted to smoke steadily dwindled, and the naked disdain for her addiction increased, my mother must have felt like society was turning on her just for being who she’d always been.

I never felt that. I knew from my first drag that if I got hooked, I’d be saddled with a habit that would destroy my body and alienate other people; I just thought I wouldn’t get hooked. After I did, I never denied it, never told myself or anyone else I was anything but a hopeless addict. And as the number of places where I was permitted to smoke steadily dwindled, and the naked disdain for my addiction increased, a funny thing happened: For the first time since I was a teenager, I sincerely wanted to be a nonsmoker.

I’d wanted to quit before, mind you (and I had, twice). Every day of my life, I’d wanted to be free of the health risks, the expense and the disapproval of friends and strangers alike. But despite all the excellent reasons to give it up — heart disease, cancer, emphysema, the monkey on my back, the reeking clothes and breath, the unsettling combination of pity and revulsion on my loved ones’ faces, blah blah blah — I could never honestly say that I didn’t want to smoke. There was the rub.

It took 18 years as a pack-a-day smoker (save a couple of short-lived quits) to get to the point where I truly did not want to be one, and when I quit for good on June 1 of this year, it was mostly because smoking had become an unsustainably huge logistical pain. To get through the most excruciating days and weeks of withdrawal, I didn’t visualize healthy pink lungs or imagine what I’d buy with all the money I saved or how I’d spend the extra years of my life. I fantasized about sitting through an entire meal with my husband and friends, never feeling an uncontrollable urge to excuse myself and stand outside in the rain for a few minutes. I fantasized about spending a whole afternoon reading in the library or wandering through a museum or lying on the beach. I fantasized about getting to the airport two hours early, dealing with the inevitable delays, taking a long plane ride, and only being as miserable as a normal person through it all, instead of battling rising panic and the constant sensation that my skin was too tight.

So far, it’s worked. I am a hopeless addict, of course, so ask me again in a year, but right now, I’m optimistic that I’ll never start again, just because it would be too much goddamn trouble. So I offer my begrudging but sincere thanks to the anti-smoking crusaders who have worked tirelessly to shove people like me farther and farther toward the margins of society. Hats off to the prissy scolds of the world, really; I still can’t stand you, but you’ve done a good thing here.

It’s just, if I can be big enough to admit that, could you maybe spare a thought for someone like my mom, who was in the grip of addiction long before society made it humiliating and terribly inconvenient to smoke? Could you pause to consider that today, smoking is more common among working-class and unemployed people, and the disgust displayed toward smokers is doubtless a handy veil for some folks’ feelings about those people? Could you think about the fact that around 20 percent of the adult population still smokes, so when you scoff that “Nobody smokes anymore,” you are dismissing a whole lot of people as “nobody”?

I’m not asking you to hold anybody’s hand or stand near them while they smoke; I’m just asking you to remember that smokers are and were real human beings, not statistics or historical curiosities or faceless, reeking beasts wantonly polluting the good folks’ air. Disgust is a powerful agent of social change, to be sure, but we shouldn’t forget that the effects of marginalizing, dehumanizing and erasing entire groups of people are never 100 percent positive. A few people on a sidewalk are not the “last smokers in New York”; they’re just the only ones a certain class of people will ever see. There’s a big difference.

Granted, that one woman represents a third of all women who have ever served on the court, which is considerably higher than the number (about 20 percent) of all American women who come to the end of their fertile years without having kids. But Supreme Court justices are not average women; they are, in fact, extraordinarily high-achieving women — as evidenced by the fact that there have been three of them, vs. 108 men, in all of American history. And if I’ve learned anything from the panic about career women failing to reproduce that’s been going on at least since 2002, when Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s “Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children” was released, it’s that “ultra achievers” are way less likely to have kids.

According to a 2008 Census Bureau report, 27 percent of women aged 40 to 44 who have advanced degrees are not mothers. And among the professional women Hewlett surveyed, only about half of those making more than $100,000 a year had children. So, given that we’re talking about highly educated, high-earning women here, the current distribution of women on the Supreme Court — one mom and one non-mom — seems to be right on target. The appointment of either Wood (mom) or Kagan (non-mom) would mess up that balance, but since Beinart’s comparing women who have reached the pinnacle of a traditionally male profession to their entire gender — including stay-at-home moms, part-time employees, and those who take care of ultra-achievers’ kids for a living, among others — he thinks adding one more childless woman would paint an unfairly dispiriting picture of women’s ability to achieve dreams of both motherhood and professional success.

Which brings us to the first sentence of the teaser I mentioned: “A surprising percentage of women nominated to top government jobs have no children.” Surprising? Really? I’m sorry, but anyone who’s surprised that relatively few women can balance child rearing and the level of effort it takes to reach the top of their field — especially women who came of age in the 1970s and ’80s — must be living in a different America than mine.

“Just as Barack Obama empowers African-American kids to believe that there are no limits to what they can achieve,” writes Beinart, “female Supreme Court justices send the same message to young women. As anyone who has ever watched their daughter eye a Barbie Doll can attest, role models matter. And that’s why it’s important not just to have lots of women in positions of political power, but to have lots of women with kids. It’s important because otherwise, the message you’re sending young women is that they can achieve professionally, or they can have a family, but they can’t do both. And without quite realizing it, that is the message our government has been sending.”

Ah, yes, the impression that motherhood and extraordinary professional achievement are contraindicated is all just a big mix-up, an unfortunate message sent by a government that just wasn’t paying enough attention to subtleties. The problem here is not that American women still get stuck with a far greater share of the housework and childcare responsibilities than men, or that high-end professional success usually requires long hours and single-minded devotion to one’s career, or that many couples decide there’s no point in both of them working if one partner’s income isn’t much greater than the cost of daycare (and guess which partner that usually is), or that employers still assume mothers will be too distracted to work hard, or that any mother who admits to wanting to dedicate a substantial portion of her life to furthering her own career goals at the possible expense of little Henry and Eleanor’s uninterrupted happiness is cast as selfish and unfeminine, or that people like Sylvia Ann Hewlett are constantly telling women not to risk our fertility by focusing too long on other ambitions. It’s that little girls just haven’t seen enough Working Mom Barbies in positions of power — and if they did, they’d understand that they really can have it all! Just like little African-American boys can all see a bright future for themselves now that an extremely privileged biracial man is president.

Hang on, it gets even funnier. “Critics might argue that even publicly discussing whether a female Supreme Court contender has kids represents a sexist double standard: another example of the disproportionate personal scrutiny that women in public life must endure. But there’s a reason for that disproportionate scrutiny: Men with children don’t have a role-model problem.” Oh, is that the reason? “After all, every one of the male Supremes has kids.”

And in a completely unrelated story, every one of the male Supremes also has a wife. Oh, wait. Shall we go over the point about women still being expected to be the primary caregivers in heterosexual parenting partnerships once more? Do you suppose there might be a connection there? If you’re still confused, you need only look to a “syrupy” USA Today feature Beinart mentions, which examined John Roberts’ efforts to balance being chief justice and a dad. Short version: He shows up for stuff! He breaks up fights! He “helps put them to bed” — just as he undoubtedly, like many married men, “helps” his wife with all manner of tedious tasks that are still understood to be her purview, as opposed to a shared responsibility. What a guy! Then contrast that, as Beinart (to his credit) does, with Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell’s remarks about Janet Napolitano being ideal for a demanding job like secretary of Homeland Security because she has no kids and therefore “no life.” Writes Beinart: “Message to little Johnnies everywhere: You can have a great job and a great life all at the same time … Message to little Janets: Go ahead, shoot for the stars. Just be prepared for a life devoid of anything but work.”

Beinart certainly means well, and he’s on the right track here, except the problem is not the “message” but the reality. A woman who doesn’t have children is seen as having “no life,” but is also seen as unusually well-suited to a job that demands, as Rendell put it, devoting “literally, 19 to 20 hours a day to it.” Much like becoming partner in a major law firm, a U.S. attorney and the attorney general of Arizona — that’s how Napolitano spent the traditional childbearing years — and doing all of it well enough to subsequently be elected governor, demands a similar commitment. But imagine if Napolitano had had a kid or two somewhere in there. Imagine she even had a partner who stayed home, or at least a top-notch outside childcare arrangement. Technically, she might have been able to accomplish all the same things; a man in that situation certainly could. But in addition to doing most of the housework and hands-on childcare while not at work, trying to stay sharp while surrendering sleep to a child who’s breast-feeding or sick or freaked out by the monsters in his closet, working twice as hard to convince her employers that she was as devoted to the job as ever, and having practically no free time to decompress from either of her occupations or maintain her relationship, once she moved on to campaigning for elected office, she would have had to convince her constituents that she wasn’t some kind of heartless monster for being willing to take on such important responsibilities while she still had children at home who needed their mother.

Think I’m exaggerating? You might recall that alongside all the well-deserved criticism Sarah Palin took in 2008, there was also a whole bunch of bullshit hand-wringing about her poor young children and what would happen to them if Mommy became vice-president. And you might also recall that not a soul was worried about John Edwards failing his two little kids when he ran for the same office in 2004. And you might think, if you are the slightest bit intellectually honest, “Hey, that looks like kind of a nasty double standard.”

While we’re at it, you might also look at the folks who hold positions of political power and notice that, despite some notable exceptions, the vast majority are still wealthy, white, heterosexual men with no visible disabilities. And you might conclude from this that getting very far in politics usually requires not only hard work and determination but a hell of a lot of money, support and social advantages. One of those advantages, if you haven’t worked it out yet, is being able to have children and still be permitted — indeed, expected — to prioritize your career above them.

Michelle and Barack Obama, for example, started out as equally well-educated and promising young lawyers, but then one of them went on the road so often trying to advance a political career that the couple didn’t spend seven days in a row under the same roof for over a decade, while the other functioned as a single parent much of the time. One of them surrendered more and more to the other’s ambition over the years until “high-profile spouse” was the only career option available. Because the man’s ambition took him all the way to the presidency and the woman’s support of him took her all the way to “mom-in-chief,” nobody bats an eye. But you try and tell me with a straight face that a woman with young children could leave them at home with Dad while she pursued a political career, expect Dad to eventually give up his career to support hers, get elected president (in part because her devoted spouse got out there and presented a non-threatening, homey image), and then take on that job without anyone ever saying, “What about the kids? Shouldn’t she be worried about raising them instead of running the country? And by the way, who is this pansy who gave up his entire life to help his wife follow her dream? What kind of role model is he for young men? And what kind of ball-busting bitch must she be to have convinced him to do it? Do we really want people like that in the White House?”

Look, I’m all for seeing more mothers in positions of power, and I think Diane Wood would be a fine choice for the Supreme Court. But the problem here is not a lack of role models. It’s an overwhelming lack of support for working mothers and respect for female ambition. And the idea that the success of childless women is somehow sending the wrong message to little girls — who are still, after all, growing up in a society where 80 percent of women eventually have children (and among the other 20 percent are women who were infertile, who were prevented from adopting for one reason or another, who never found the right partner and weren’t up to the challenge of single motherhood, etc., not just women who chose to be child-free, as Beinart claims) — is absurd. In fact, it’s sending a very honest message: That the expectations placed on mothers and on highly ambitious professionals are both so demanding that it is actually incredibly difficult for women to “have it all.” A job and a kid, sure, that’s possible. But kids and a Supreme Court appointment? Well, two women have already pulled it off against all odds, but the odds still suck. Seeing Wood on the court would not change that.

Consider: In addition to Bullock and Winslet, Jane Wyman, Reese Witherspoon, Halle Berry, Hilary Swank and Helen Hunt all got divorced within a couple years of winning Academy Awards — and Julia Roberts broke up with Benjamin Bratt not long after she did. (Also, although Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick have been married for over a decade, and she’s never been nominated for an Oscar, LaPorte would like you to know that Broderick was “glumly trailing his wife” on the red carpet this year, as she “was fawned over by the paparazzi and fashion police.” Beverly Hills psychiatrist Carole Lieberman agrees that “He was looking miserable the whole time” and her success “may well doom that marriage.” So there’s that.) Since at least three of these break-ups famously involved the male partners cheating — and we all know that never happens unless a guy is feeling threatened by a woman’s success — what more evidence do we need that the fundamental problem in each relationship was men suffering “the ultimate castration”? (Aside from, you know, actual castration, which I imagine would feel somewhat more definitive to the man experiencing it.)

But just to be sure, maybe we should compare this data to what we know about Best Actor winners. Writes Jessica Grose at Double X, “The implicit (sexist) idea behind the ‘curse’ is that men are so uncomfortable with their wives and girlfriends’ mega-success, they are driven to cheat or flee.” She’s referring only to the first “curse” article, by the way; the Daily Beast piece makes that quite explicit. “But if you take one look at the list of best actor nominees and winners, you’ll see that their relationship track-records are not much better: 2008 winner Sean Penn’s relationship with Robin Wright broke up about seven times; when Russell Crowe won in 2000, he was busy breaking up Meg Ryan’s marriage to Dennis Quaid.”

Grose also mentions nominees George Clooney, Bill Murray and Mickey Rourke — but wait, there’s still a lot of ground left to cover just among Best Actor winners! For starters, let’s not forget Penn’s first win, in 2004 — Wright filed for divorce between the two and after the second. (Contrast this with Hilary Swank, whose marriage to Chad Lowe lasted six years after her first Best Actress Oscar, but who landed on the Daily Beast’s “ultimate castration” list because they divorced after her second. And that was the one she thanked him for!) Also, not long after Crowe won, Meg Ryan was busy breaking up with him. William Hurt and Marlee Matlin called it quits somewhere around the time of his win for “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” and Dustin Hoffman was both divorced and married in 1980, the same year he won for “Kramer vs. Kramer.” Because I have access to a top secret journalistic database known as “Wikipedia,” I can tell you that men who were divorced within two years of winning a Best Actor Oscar also include: Clark Gable, Jose Ferrer, Ernest Borgnine, Yul Brynner, Sidney Poitier, Lee Marvin, Rod Steiger, George C. Scott, Art Carney and Robert Duvall. If we expand our parameters to include divorces within six years of an Oscar — and if Swank counts, I don’t see why we shouldn’t — we can throw in Marlon Brando, and I think a couple more I didn’t write down. If I had the patience to dig into the romantic histories of Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Jamie Foxx, Adrien Brody, etc., the list might grow longer.

That’s fifteen confirmed Best Actor winners who were splitsville not too long after taking home their awards — one of them twice — versus eight Best Actress winners making LaPorte’s case for a curse. That is, in fact, double the break-ups attributed to Best Actress Oscars. So why aren’t we more worried about the poor men? Jeff Bridges may have been married to the same woman for over 30 years, but you’ll also note that he never won a Best Actor Oscar before this year. Given the bleak history associated with that award, who knows what could happen now? Poor Jeff Bridges.

On the other hand, despite the well-documented presence of a Best Actress curse, Helen Mirren’s been with Taylor Hackford since 1986 — even though she’s been nominated twice, won once, and racked up four Emmys along the way; Frances McDormand’s been married to the same guy since 1984, Jessica Lange since 1982; Susan Sarandon stayed with Tim Robbins for more than ten years after “Dead Man Walking”; and curse victims Helen Hunt and Julia Roberts have been hitched to new guys for most of the last decade — all indications that there are, in fact, men who do not view their partners’ possession of a gold statuette as symbolic castration! Hell, Marion Cotillard got married just before she won, even, and there’s so far no news of a split! So perhaps it’s possible that some of these women who won Oscars but lost loves were just, I don’t know, with the wrong people at the time? Kind of like all those men presumably were?

I mean, for all I know, maybe every last one of those guys really did flip out at such an unequivocal symbol of their wives’ success, scream, “Ow, my balls!” and hit the road. But given the number of Best Actress honorees whose marriages didn’t founder immediately after their wins, and the number of much less successful people who end relationships every day, I’d be wary of reading too much into it even then. Especially since such interpretations always seem to be framed as as cautionary tales for high-achieving women, rather than exhortations to men to suck it up and support their partners’ ambition. Do you see what happened to Sandy, gals? You’ve got to ask yourself: Do you want to be at the top of your field, or do you want to be loved? Put your career ahead of your man’s ego, and he’ll be banging a neo-Nazi tattoo model before you know it. Don’t say we didn’t warn you. (And psst, Sarah Jessica, we know you’ve worked really hard to earn so much attention, but oh my god, look behind you!)

When a supposed trend is used to send yet another message that women had best put relationships before careers — by the way, have you given any thought today to how many eggs you have left, missy? — I’m always skeptical. But this one is even more ridiculous than most. Grose already made the point a lot more efficiently than I have here: “Needless to say, the notion of a such a curse is a load of bull.”

Personal note: This will be my last post as a regular Broadsheet contributor. I’ll still be around doing occasional features, but I’m giving up the daily ladyblogging grind for the forseeable future so I’ll have more time to work on other projects. I have no doubt that some commenters will be busting out the champagne over that news, but to those of you who have been reading and sending positive feedback over the two years I’ve been here, thanks so much.

As an avid reader of fiction by and for women, I’m at least partly with both of them. I’m also with Salon book critic Laura Miller, who recently wrote, “American writers in particular are often anxious to be perceived as ‘serious,’ which they tend to equate with a mournful solemnity. Like most attempts to appear grown-up, it just makes you look childish. Comedy is as essential a lens on the human experience as tragedy, and furthermore it is an excellent ward against pretension.” Miller, by the way, was speaking without regard to gender; the tendency to go full-tilt humorless to bolster one’s Serious Writer cred is by no means restricted to women. But I think Duchen’s absolutely right that the popularity of “chick lit” — as both a genre and a remarkably tenacious catchphrase — gives some female writers a special motivation to shroud their stories in unrelenting misery. Let one character crack a joke, and you risk inviting a candy-colored cover and all of the attendant derision.

But then, that derision isn’t reserved exclusively for the specific genre known as “chick lit.” As Rebecca Traister wrote in 2005, “Beating on ‘women’s’ fiction — and dismissing certain literary trends as feminine rubbish — has a history as long as the popular fiction itself.” Traister thoroughly documents the charges against chick lit — including the complaint of a 1999 Orange Prize judge that she had to read entirely too much of it — but situates them in a long line of rants about the supposed frivolity, excessive sentiment and limited scope of novels written by women. It almost sounds like people’s impressions of women’s writing are influenced by some long-standing, widespread attitude that women’s interests aren’t as serious or important as men’s — you think? As for more recent complaints, Goodwin is hardly the first to slam what she calls “misery lit.” Have we already forgotten Oprah’s original book club, or how her preference for stories about women living through horrific situations contributed to the perception that her taste ran strictly to middlebrow gloom and doom — and thus, given the club’s popularity, so did the average American woman’s?

Perhaps that trend is just coming late to the U.K., but here, overwhelmingly grim stories about rape, abuse, lost children and all manner of emotional explosives took off at the same time chick lit did; in the late ’90s and early ’00s, getting Oprah’s imprimatur was the ultimate jackpot for an unknown author and her publisher, but getting a chunk of the Bridget Jones audience was still a pretty big win. So of course everyone and her sister scrambled to produce work that might fall into either category. A decade later, a lot of people are sick of both (as one literary agent puts it, although the genre still does all right, “the term chick lit is taboo and not to be spoken of ever again”), but no other runaway trend has emerged, so here we are still talking about misery lit and chick lit as the defining subgenres of women’s fiction — ignoring everything else women read and write. Which is … everything else.

Female writers hold the top three spots on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list at this writing. The first, by Jodi Picoult, one of the most successful authors of “women’s fiction” going, is about an autistic teenager accused of murder. The second, by first-time novelist Kathryn Stockett, also falls under the “women’s fiction” umbrella. It’s about the relationships between white families and their black servants in Mississippi in the early 1960s. The third is the 31st book in a crime series by J.D. Robb, aka Nora Roberts, who also churns out romance bestsellers by the dozen. Despite her female protagonists and massive female audience, Roberts writes “genre fiction,” not “women’s fiction,” so she doesn’t really count. Nicholas Sparks, on the other hand — who currently holds three spots on the two paperback bestseller lists — does count, because his market is primarily women, and his lightweight love stories are not technically romance novels.

Are you seeing the obvious commonalities among Sparks’, Picoult’s and Stockett’s books? Me neither. And are you seeing why Nora Roberts doesn’t count as an author of “women’s fiction,” despite the fact that her audience contains just as many vaginas? Me neither. (Note: Yes, I understand why different categories exist within the publishing industry. What I don’t understand is why those distinctions carry over into discussions of “women’s fiction” among laypeople.) Chris Cleave’s “Little Bee,” Robert Goolrick’s “A Reliable Wife” and Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” are all surely on the trade paperback bestseller list thanks to enormous numbers of female readers — and if Cleave and Goolrick were women, their books might well be called “women’s fiction.” It’s a term that actually comes in handy when a book defies classification as strictly “literary” or “commercial.” But of course one is reluctant to saddle a man with it, unless he’s a hearts-and-flowers sap like Sparks.

Now, what if I told you that on the whole, women buy a lot more fiction than men, period? In light of that and all of the above, wouldn’t it make sense to consider women the default buyers of fiction, and men the picky niche market? And yet. As with film, the prevailing wisdom is that women like men’s stories, but men don’t like women’s, so dude stuff is universal and chick stuff has a more limited, specific appeal. But a Barnes and Noble bookseller and blogger highlights the problem with trying to define a genre by gender: “Obviously, ‘women’s fiction’ in the broadest sense would be any fictional piece written by a woman or for women. This is too broad a definition for me to adequately wrap my reading and writing around.” Me too, honey. Even more to the point: “It’s hard to define ‘women’s fiction’, particularly since we don’t define ‘men’s fiction’, without sounding like an egotistical, sexist snob.”

So. Because “women’s fiction” is a category with no clear definition and few recent breakout trends — but everyone remains convinced it must be a meaningful category — we’re stuck still talking about the phenomenal female-driven success stories of a decade ago as if they’re the beginning and end of women’s literary tastes. Sure, women are still writing — and buying — both “misery lit” and “chick lit,” just as men are still writing and buying fiction about war and spies and politics. (As are women.) But suggesting that’s all women are writing and reading — that if the genre of “women’s fiction” isn’t wholly defined by one or the other, we must be “torn between the two” — is ridiculous and insulting. Worse, it perpetuates the attitude Traister follows back at least a couple hundred years, that female novelists and their audiences are essentially unserious, that we’re primarily drawn to escapist fluff, small-scale relationship dramas, or anything that elicits a good cry, no matter how cheaply. And it’s exactly that kind of thinking that makes authors like Duchen go out of their way to “be taken bloody seriously for once” — only to find that, oops, they’re still women writers. So even if they escape the high heels and martini cover trap, they’ll get slammed for being too bleak and weepy, too “issue”-oriented, for making the reader feel, in Goodwin’s words, “like a social worker by the end of it.”

That’s not to say Goodwin’s wrong to complain about tedious, preachy drama, or that Duchen’s wrong to complain about the “miserable sexist assumption that women writers only write fluff, and that that is all women readers want to read.” Like I said, to a large extent, I’m with both of them. But the reason I can agree with both is that I don’t believe “women’s fiction” is essentially about one or the other, nor do I believe either category is all bad. I think there are some real gems among “chick lit,” “misery lit,” mysteries, thrillers, sci fi, historical fiction — probably every identifiable genre in existence — but in each one, there are a lot more forgettable stories and characters than outstanding ones. The problem is, when men publish mediocre books, they’re just mediocre books, but when women do the same, they’re “what’s wrong with women’s fiction.” Even if nobody has a clue what that term really means, and the only answer to “What kind of fiction do women read?” is “All kinds. And usually in larger numbers than men.”