Domestic Disturbances: a blog at the NY Times by Judith Warner

September 13, 2007, 6:40 pm

Horned and Scorned

Tags: cuckolds, the clintons, the sarkozys

“A prudent cuckold (and there are many such at Paris), pockets his horns, when he cannot gore with them; and will not add to the triumph of his maker by only butting with them ineffectually.”
– Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, “Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman, 1753-54 ”

One last, lingering thought on France:

It was fascinating to be on the other side of the Atlantic this summer while Americans were chewing over our latest rounds of slimy political sex scandals.

It wasn’t that the sinning, maneuvering and marital posturing of the Larry Craigs and David Vitters received so very much attention. It was, rather, that their stories seemed so dreary, so tawdry and so second-rate compared with the much more dignified and attractive tableau vivant of family disorder exhibited by France’s new president, Nicholas Sarkozy, and first lady, Cécilia.

In case you missed it, Sarkozy last year greatly entertained France by running a campaign in which his wife was almost entirely absent. Cécilia, a former model whom Nicholas first eyed, in his previous incarnation as mayor of the city of Neuilly, while administering the vows that consecrated her last marriage, left him in 2005, eventually showing up – and being photographed – with her lover in New York City.

The Sarkozys ultimately reunited. But life together remained rocky. Cécilia made major headlines once again last May when she pulled a no-show on the night of her husband’s final run-off race against his Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal.

She was rumored not to have voted at all.

Yet by summer, in the press at least, all was forgotten. When I was there, every major magazine featured glowing profiles of the new first lady. They praised her charm, her fashion sense, her break-the-mold modernity.

Could such public forgiving and forgetting of a wanton political wife ever have happened here? And could Americans, like the French, ever elect a cuckold to the presidency?

The question is more relevant than it seems.

I’m thinking, of course — aren’t I always? — of Hillary Clinton.

I spent the end of the summer thinking how remarkable it was that Cécilia’s affair hadn’t sunk Nicholas Sarkozy’s presidential prospects. After all, throughout history, the “cuckold” has typically been viewed as a fool, lacking in wit, power and general masculine wherewithal. It’s believed that the image of a cuckold as horned fool dates back to a legend of European villagers donning horns and parading around to humiliate betrayed husbands.

Although a female version of the word cuckold exists (it’s cuckquean), it’s little used, probably because, as far as the larger sense of the word’s meaning is concerned, there has been no female equivalent of the cuckold. Wronged wives typically have been figures of sympathy, not jest. The difference has stemmed, I think, from the fact that, throughout history, a wife’s infidelity meant that male power and privilege was upended. The natural order of things was usurped.

At least, that’s the way it’s traditionally been.

Sarkozy has made a lot of bold and defiant gestures since winning the election – appointing Socialists to key government posts, vacationing in America – but perhaps one of his boldest, cleverest and most successful has been the fact that, by keeping his head high, standing by his woman and steadfastly, defiantly, professing his love and desire (she is “the only non-negotiable part” of his career, he has said), he has transcended the old role of cuckold. He has instead been something more like a political wife.

As for Hillary – contemplating the Sarkozys this summer drove home to me the gender-bending aspect of her own unfortunate personal history. A formidable woman of real power and prestige, she emerged from the Monica affair much more cuckold than cuckquean. Her husband’s perfidy did, in a sense, disturb the natural order of things; in the post-feminist age, women like Hillary are not supposed to be subject to such indignities.

Hillary has never been, as she herself once put it, “some little woman standing by my man.” Perhaps that’s what made the spectacle of her public humiliation so unique and so unsettling and, ultimately, so unforgivable for the many women who came away from it all despising her.

I think I now understand that particular aspect of the Clinton conundrum in a way I never did before. It comes down to this: nobody likes a cuckold.

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Domestic Disturbances: A blog at the NY Times by Judith Warner

July 12, 2007, 6:59 pm

Visiting Day

Tags: parental guilt, showing up, working parents

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I went to Visiting Day at my daughters’ day camp this week.

I had a lovely time.

I used some of the mindfulness meditation techniques that I’d learned recently in Yoga Nidra to keep out of my mind thoughts of the two-foot-high stack of papers I was scheduled to go through that day, which was one of exactly nine days I’d set aside for working on my now-two-years-overdue book.

The techniques worked very well. I was present to myself and my daughters, relished the feeling of the cold pool water on my skin, sang along heartily with the camp songs and, when asked to participate in gymnastics, connected so well to my long-betrayed inner child that I found myself cowering behind my daughter Emilie’s back, hoping that, if I dropped my eyes to the floor, I’d become fully invisible.

(As a teenager, I applied for a job as a camp counselor once. Under skills, I put “typing.” Not much has changed.)

I am fortunate to have a profession that, on non-deadline days, doesn’t require me to be in any particular place producing work at any particular time. If I miss a couple of hours of work or even an entire day no one necessarily notices – though my anxiety level is sure to rise and my bank account, if the situation drags on, is sure to dip.

Other people – most people – don’t live their work lives that way.

“My dad promised he’d come,” one of the 7-year-old girls complained, as we crowded together on Emilie’s towel, sharing cookies and Ritz Bits and sandwiches — in that order, unfortunately — at lunchtime. “He always breaks his promises.”

“My parents always break their promises, too,” another lunch companion chimed in.

Their eyes fell on Emilie.

“You know how it feels, Em,” said the first. “Your dad isn’t here, either.”

Indeed, he wasn’t. He couldn’t be. Max had a story closing that day and was chained to his desk.
“What’s more important to him – work or us?” 10-year-old Julia had cried when I’d told her, the week before, that he wasn’t going to be able to attend.

We were in the car. It was the post-camp-bus-pickup cranky hour, and we were all a bit testy. It was also the end of a work period for me in which I’d been reading a whole lot about family leave – about the 40 percent of Americans who have none; the 50 percent who have no right to sick days; the 25 percent who get no vacation. I let Julia have it.

Don’t you think that Daddy would rather be running around with you in the woods than sitting at his desk in front of a computer screen? I snapped.

I lectured her on the unfairness of judging parents for things that were beyond their control. I lectured her on the injustice of presenting parents with demands that they can’t meet. I peppered her with rhetorical questions: Does the fact that I, with my flexible schedule, can manage to take a day off from work make me a “better” mother than another woman who can’t?

“Okay, okay,” Julia said, staring glumly out the window. “I get it.”

“Can we pause this now?” Emilie chimed in. “Can we listen to ‘Harry Potter’?”

Conversations about parents who break promises or let their kids down or generally make them feel less important than work shouldn’t be common. But they are. I hear snippets of them every time I attend a school event during the workday. And I’m fed up. I’ve just about had it.

But not with the ill-accused parents.

I’ve had it with a culture that willfully refuses to face up to the fact that almost 80 percent of mothers with children beyond pre-school age – and, of course, a much greater percentage of fathers – work. This refusal to face facts, coupled with the ideology of “parental involvement” as a panacea for all social ills, has created a situation in which not only guilt-ridden parents, but children are needlessly suffering.

It doesn’t need to be this way. It only takes a quick look across the Atlantic to see that many other countries have done what’s necessary to grow up and embrace the 21st century. They provide kids with a longer school year, a longer school day and subsidized summer activities. And they consider that a parent’s place is in the home – not in the classroom.

Parental involvement is key for school and life success and truly does need to be encouraged in struggling communities where parents aren’t able to be hands-on enough in their kids’ lives. But that’s simply not an issue for most middle- and upper-middle-class people.

Whatever need these parents have to “be there” for their kids 24/7 (and no one is more guilty of such neediness than me), we’ve got, for the greater good, to counterbalance it against the realization that meeting these needs – constantly – is creating an unfair situation in which some kids are left feeling like second-class citizens. (And if you think that young kids whose parents don’t show up for daytime events don’t feel – at least briefly – like second-class citizens, you’re wrong. They do.)

We need to push back against the trend toward excessive and inappropriate parental involvement that weighs so heavily upon families in certain communities. We should start by requesting – ever so politely – that school events requiring parental participation be scheduled in the evening. Or on weekends. And not too often at that.

Let’s get parents out of their school-aged kids’ 9-to-3 lives. It’s a cost-free solution to one of the major sources of family angst today. And, more globally, let’s grow up as a culture and face reality – so that our kids can grow up less stressfully.

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Domestic Disturbances:

June 14, 2007, 10:53 pm

Who’s for Hillary. And Who Isn’t.

Tags: authenticity, Hillary Clinton, the election

According to a Washington Post – ABC News poll published earlier this week, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s most consistent and enthusiastic female support is now coming from high school graduates with incomes of less than $50,000 a year. Young women like her best. Over age 45, college-educated, higher-earning women like her least. In fact, asked who they found most “honest,” “trustworthy” and “inspiring,” these women – Clinton’s peers – expressed more of a kinship with Barack Obama.

In a sense, none of this should really come as a surprise. Back in 2000, Clinton bonded like glue with middle class women in upstate New York – they liked the way she came to speak with them and learned about their lives – but was a hard sell in the wealthy suburbs downstate.

“Non-college-educated women really like that she’s smart, that she’s a woman who has worked for what she has, supported her family, kept her family life private and handled her marriage the way that she has; they’ve often made similar choices in their own lives,” says Celinda Lake, who has done extensive polling on women’s attitudes toward Clinton since the time of Hillary’s first Senate race. “Upper-middle-class women are more judgmental. They see her as polarizing; they second-guess how she handled her personal issues. Non-college women react to this argument with: ‘They always say this about women. They always try to drag the woman down.’”

Melinda Henneberger, political editor of the Huffington Post, found similar Hillary-hostility among the senator’s best-educated and most successful peers around the country as she traveled, talking to women about politics, before and after the publication of her recent book, “If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians to Hear.”

“She rubs a lot of women who are like her the wrong way,” Henneberger says. “There’s a feeling that she’s too poll-tested; that she’s too willing to say what’s required. Obama, Hennebeger says, strikes these women as “authentic.” Hillary does not.

All of this isn’t overly disturbing to the Hillary for President campaign. After all, Clinton is the undeniable Democratic front-runner with overwhelming support from women. (Fifty-one percent of women in the Washington Post – ABC poll said they’d give her their vote in the Democratic primaries, and women at all income levels chose her as the candidate they would “trust most to handle a major crisis”).

And it goes without saying that there are a lot more women who aren’t just like her – upper-middle-class by birth, Yale-law-school-educated, a multimillionaire – than who are, although the latter group consistently receives disproportionate attention in the media. Ann Lewis, senior advisor to the campaign, sighed yesterday as she recalled to me the multitude of “I hate Hillary” press coverage that preceded Clinton’s landslide victory in the 2000 Senate campaign, when she ended up garnering the support of 60 percent of female voters. “We’ve been through all this before,” she said.

Whether or not upper-middle-class female discontent ends up being an important force in the Democratic primaries (and if the past is any guide, it won’t), the disconnect between the senator and the women who should, on the face of things, be her most natural supporters is troublesome. Not, to my mind, for what it does or doesn’t say about Hillary; but rather for what it conveys about the women ostensibly most like her.

I wonder if it’s precisely the things that make non-college-educated women feel an affinity with Hillary – her toughness, her independence and her sometime status as an underdog – that alienate the elite. I worry that there may be among some elite women a certain disregard for, even a certain distaste for, the bread and butter middle class family issues that Hillary has placed front and center.

Take her “It Takes a Village” mentality: the idea that as mothers we’re all interrelated and need a helping hand (from government, among others) to keep our boats afloat. This resonates among women who struggle to pay for health care, who labor to find safe and affordable child care, who have to fight for sick days and for time off for school visits – who struggle to make ends meet, generally, as most people do.

But I’ve repeatedly found that better-off women, who have decent health care, child care, education and, to a greater degree, job flexibility, tend to often be hostile to this sort of communitarian notion of shared responsibility. (“Do you want the government raising your children?” is the frequent riposte.) They’re big believers in the American ethos of individual “choice” and “personal responsibility”; after all, being the winners in our society, it has worked out well for them. And they – rightly – perceive that they’re bound to be the losers, tax-wise, if their own gated community of family comfort is opened up to the larger village.

But that’s political. What rankles about Hillary – so uniquely – among better-off women is much more personal at base. Is it possible, now that stay-at-home momdom has become a fixture of the suburbs and when wealthy women have bailed out of the workforce in the face of family pressures, that the image of one who toughed it out – uninterruptedly, and with little or no publicly expressed angst – is less than welcome? (Michelle Obama, Barack made sure to share at a Momsrising.org advocacy event last fall, scaled back her career for a while to accommodate his, and still struggles, “juggling big things … juggling small things and everything in between.”)

Could Hillary, the first woman to make partner at an old boy Southern law firm, a working mother who kept it all together – with a lot of household help – feel like a reproach to those who just couldn’t hack it? Does this explain, in part, some of the “who-does-she-think-she-is” rumblings that run through the Hillary-hate?

Clinton made a point, throughout her married life, to keep herself financially viable – unlike a rather decent portion of our current female elite. Close to 20 years ago, she hesitated to leave Bill, according to Carl Bernstein’s new bio, because she feared she wouldn’t be able to adequately support herself and Chelsea. This may or may not be true, and may well strike those of us who aren’t corporate lawyers as far-fetched, but it’s also all too typical a fear shared by many unhappily married women – except, of course, the most wealthy and successful.

Clearly Hillary feels “authentic” to a whole lot of women who, on the surface of things, have little in common with her. But among those who do, there is a sense that she’s less than real.

Which raises the issue: is being real – for a political candidate, in the eyes of the public – actually a matter of being true to him or herself? Or is it a matter of properly mirroring us to ourselves? Do we judge as “authentic” those who reflect us as we actually are? Or rather, do we celebrate as “real” the ones who make us feel we’re who we want to be?

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The Irrational Voter

Domestic Disturbances
by Judith Warner

The New York Times

The ever-controversial Linda Hirshman, had an article in the Washington Post this past week, in which she depicted American women voters – and suburban stay-at-home moms in particular – as politically ignorant, disinterested and ultimately self-defeating.

Citing studies and anecdotes culled from a few conversations with Washington-area suburban moms who appear to spend a fair amount of their time sitting around on their living room sofas and reading People magazine, she painted a rather damning portrait of women who don’t read newspapers, don’t read up on policy, and very often get their information on the outside world from their more tuned-in working husbands. Ignorant of the issues, they cast their votes based on such slippery stuff as “character,” and then, in election after election, blow their chances of being “the decisive force that will elect someone who embraces their views.”

Women are not “rational political actors,” Hirshman writes. “Instead, they vote on impulse, and on elusive factors such as personality.”

Some of what Hirshman has to say is, unfortunately, true. Survey after survey shows the consumers of news today to be disproportionately male. In my own anecdotal forays through the living rooms of America’s suburbs, I’ve often been struck by the degree to which women – particularly mothers of young children – don’t keep up with world events.

The reasons are quite obvious – for stay-at-home moms in particular, who don’t have the excuse of in-office dead time to read the paper or browse the Internet, there are just no free moments in the day. But, however understandable the phenomenon, the results can be worrisome. Hirshman cites a recent Pew Research Center study showing that nearly half the women surveyed said they “sometimes do not follow international news because of excessive coverage of wars and violence”; a New York Times/CBS poll last year found that nearly 10 percent more women than men still believed that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. In an age when Americans are showing a troublesome tendency toward irrational belief (There were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark), keeping up, at least minimally, with the news probably ought to be a prerequisite for the job of childrearing.

That said, while Hirshman’s statistics on female ignorance of the news are worth note, her conclusions about women’s particular irrationality as voters truly miss the mark. These days, all voters vote “irrationally” – if such factors as personal appeal and character can be said to be irrational.

Just look at the presidential election results of 2004: a solid majority of voters said they disapproved of George Bush’s handling of the war and the economy. Most voters, furthermore, said they believed the country was headed in the wrong direction. But 70 percent of voters also rated the president as “likeable.” They overwhelmingly said they’d rather have a beer with him than with John Kerry and would be much more likely to trust him to walk their dog. No matter where he was on the issues, Kerry’s “personality gap” just couldn’t be breached.

Look at how John Edwards feels the need to fuss with his hair; how pundits worry that it’s his temper and general bonkers factor – not his anti-choice or pro-war votes – that will prove John McCain’s undoing. Character, personality, “likeability” as the pollsters put it – they’re huge issues for voters now, in particular for the swing voters who don’t have strong ideological leanings. Regardless of gender.

“It’s sort of the same thing that makes us believe celebrities are one of us,” Sherry Bebich-Jeffe, a senior scholar of policy planning at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, told me. “When we see these people in our living rooms all the time, it’s as though they are among us, and then it becomes important for us to feel we can relate to them. We all tend to vote on personality. Women are no different than any other voters.”

In fact, last October, in the run-up to the Congressional midterm elections, another New York Times/CBS poll found no significant difference between the percentages of men and women who cited “personal qualities” as the main reason they were supporting their chosen candidate for the House of Representatives.

Singling out women voters for alleged soft thinking is misguided, and a little bit bizarre. It reminds me of the arguments used historically by the French left to deny their countrywomen the vote. The ladies, the leftists said, were much too close to their village priests; hence, a vote for a woman was a vote for irrationality – and, of course, a conservative candidate. (This worked; French women didn’t get the vote until 1945.)

Hirshman’s disdain for the way many women live their lives today shouldn’t lead her to underestimate their cognitive skills – or overestimate those of their spouses. Our country may well be sliding towards idiocracy (to borrow from the title of Mike Judge’s recent dystopic), but it’s not just a girl thing.

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