Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Anne Kingston's ongong attack on men

Anne Kingston writes for Macleans magazine here in Canada. What stands out about her is her relentless attack on men in her writing. The latest example of this is a piece that is called "How to Stay Married" in the online version. The teaser on the cover, which I do not have in front of me, is something more along the lines of "The extraordinary things wives do to stay married".

What we read in the article is a series of anecdotes of things some women have done to put their marriages at risk. Here is the first example:
Cynthia is a 68-year-old woman in a 45-year “committed marriage” who has figured out how to keep it that way. Every other month or so she goes out to lunch with her college boyfriend Thomas, who is also married and has no intention of leaving his wife. Usually their outings end in a hot and heavy “petting session” in his Mercedes. Sometimes, he rubs Jean Naté lotion, the scent Cynthia wore in college, onto her legs and compliments her beautiful feet. They’ve never consummated their relationship, nor do they intend to. Being with Thomas is “like a balloon liftoff,” Cynthia reports, one that eases some of the tensions between her and her 74-year-old physics professor husband. “I’m a nicer, more tolerant person because of this affair,” she says.
Are you as happy as I am to see that Cynthia has concluded that she is a "nicer, more tolerant person" because she is cheating on her husband? Would you buy it if I told you that I regularly commit petty theft and that I was a better person because of it?

By the way, for the benefit of readers under the age of fifty, "heavy petting" is a term that people Cynthia's age use to use to mean touching, kissing and fondling so as to bring each other to orgasm. When Cynthia says the affair is "unconsummated" she most likely means that the only thing she hasn't let Thomas do is to penetrate her.

And do you think many women would accept this going the other way? Jim meets his old college girlfriend every month or so and they have a few drinks and then get into her car and make out, during which she licks his favourite flavour chip dip from college days off him. Actually, we know they wouldn't because any number of statistically valid polls have established have established that women have much stricter standards for what counts as cheating than men do.

Which brings me to the next point, the source of the "data" for Kingston's article. The occasion for the piece is a book by a journalist named Iris Krasnow called The Secret Lives of Wives: Women Share What It Really Takes to Stay Married.The problem with Krasnow's book, as is so often the case with "lifestyle journalism", is that its a just a collection of anecdotes masquerading as research.
Krasnow spoke with more than 200 women, married between 15 and 70 years ...
Well, I'm impressed. Actually, it's much worse than that. Let me give you the rest of the quote.
Krasnow spoke with more than 200 women, married between 15 and 70 years, who report taking separate holidays, embarking on new careers, establishing a tight circle of female friends, dabbling in Same Time, Next Year-style liaisons and adulterous affairs, and having “boyfriends with boundaries.” Yoga and white wine also feature predominately. 
Are you maybe getting a picture of the women involved?  "Yoga and white wine" featured prominently! There is a heavy hint of just how fraudulent the whole thing is later in the article when Kingston writes, "Many of the women Krasnow interviewed are like her—educated, smart, with enough disposable income to spend summers painting in Italy or travelling to ashrams." (Emphasis added) I'd love to see how Krasnow located these 200 women. I'm willing to bet they don't even come close to a representative sample of successfully married women.

The funny thing is that the over-all gist of Krasnow's book is morally conservative. She and Kingston come across as aging women trying desperately to avoid facing the fact that all the available data shows that what their generation considered liberation was a disaster for women:
“The real secret to staying married is not getting divorced,” Krasnow writes, in a tautology. Save abuse or serial adultery, every marriage is salvageable with a big caveat that there’s “trust, respect and intimacy, both emotional and physical.”
That's absolutely true as is another Krasnow observation that women (and men) who make successful marriages don't count on their spouse to make them happy. I'd go even further and say that it is a duty of marriage to be happy.

But all of it comes wrapped up in this weird double standard where it is suddenly not just okay but a good thing for wives to cheat. You may be wondering how what Cynthia does with her ex-boyfriend in the example above is squared with the need for “trust, respect and intimacy, both emotional and physical”? The lame excuse here is that women cheat for different, and better, reasons than men do:
Unlike husbands, wives are driven to extramarital affairs not as a way of exiting their marriage but remaining in them. One woman says her husband’s sexual unresponsiveness justified her cheating.
Come on, that wouldn't fly even for a second going the other way. It's also not true. Women in fact leave their husbands three times as often as the other way around and there is no end of evidence that most men who cheat are not looking for an exit from their marriage. (A generation ago, women like Kingston and Krasnow used to complain about the plight of the single woman having an affair with the man who would never leave his wife. See, for example, When Harry Met Sally.)

A final thought, notice how much that first paragraph reads like chick lit. What possible reason is there to identify the brand names of the ex-boyfriend's car and the lotion he rubs on her legs. Surely the salient fact is that her pants or pantyhose have to come off for this operation to take place. If you want to advertise yourself as a non-serious person, write the way Kingston does. (Funnily enough, when a female sex columnist at a guy website tackles the same subject going the other way, the result is far more serious and more fairly balanced than what you get from a woman writing for what is supposed to be a respectable magazine.)

No comments:

Post a Comment