Okay, I think I’ve figured it out: Ana Marie Cox is the female David Brooks. Actually, that’s not quite fair to David Brooks, who’s positively insightful by comparison. Reading Ana Marie’s review of Katha Pollitt’s new book is more like reading Britney Spears’ thoughts on Noam Chomsky. “Like, whut is he so uptight about?”
She lays her cards down on the table in her opening paragraph:
Strident feminism can seem out of place — even tacky — in a world where women have come so demonstrably far. With Katie Couric at the anchor desk, Condoleezza Rice leading the State Department and Hillary Clinton aiming for the top of the ticket, many of the young, educated and otherwise liberal women who might, in another era, have found themselves burning bras and raising their consciousness would rather be fitted for the right bra (like on “Oprah”) and raising their credit limit.
Strident feminists — they’re just so tacky! Today’s modern woman rolls her eyes at those ridiculous bra burners from the sixties (apparently unaware that they are almost certainly an urban legend, albeit a convenient one for lazy writers).
It gets better, by which I mean worse. Much, much worse:
Katha Pollitt is the skunk at this “Desperate Housewives” watching party. Her new collection of essays, “Virginity or Death!,” culled from her columns for The Nation over the past five years, shows her to be stubbornly unapologetic in championing access to abortion and fixated on the depressingly slow evolution of women’s rights in the Middle East. In the midst of our celebration of Katie’s last day, Pollitt is the one who would drown out the clinking of cosmo glasses with a loud condemnation of the surgery available to those women who would sacrifice their little toes the better to fit their Jimmy Choos.
I’ve called myself a feminist for years. I’ve elbowed my way into more boys’ clubs than I care to remember and I once participated in a piece of street theater in support of Anita Hill — something else I’d just as well forget, actually. But the first thing I thought when I read Pollitt deride the false consciousness of pink-ectomy patients (O.K., maybe not the first) was “Does it really work?” While I hesitate to consider myself representative (and no, I would never actually do it), the ability to hold a predilection for stilettos and support for abortion rights in one’s head simultaneously seems suggestive of today’s compromised, complicated feminist mind-set.
This isn’t very clear writing, so just in case you glossed over her point: silly strident Katha is the sort of feminist shrew who gets upset about women voluntarily amputating their little toes in order to more comfortably wear ill-fitting designer shoes. Fun-loving Ana Marie, by contrast, is intrigued by the possibility of self-mutilation in pursuit of a fashion ideal!
What a chucklehead.