I’m staring down my pub date (JUNE 12!) and I spent the weekend doing all these online interviews – which was hugely fun! One interviewer asked me about the subtitle, and I thought I’d post my response here:

The radical women are the radical feminists who appear in the early chapters of the book—the ones who came of age in the Civil Rights and antiwar movements and the New Left, grew tired of pouring coffee and licking stamps (and, though I didn’t say this in the interview, licking other things) for the male heavies, formed a movement of their own, and gave voice to that transformative slogan, “The Personal Is Political.” Grrl is the young feminist appropriation of “girl” first voiced by the Riot Grrls—punk girls who grew tired of playing sexual side dish to the drummer and started creating their own scene, which included all-girl bands. This is just one example, but there are continuities here that I think are lost on women from both these generations. Sometimes older women today think the boob-flashing on the video series Girls Gone Wild is all there is to a younger generation’s so-called feminism, when really there’s SO much else going on.

Ok, I’m more than a little happy that the letter to the editor Daphne and I wrote in response to the New York Times June 3 story on only children made it in! (Happy dance image here.) Not that we’re bitter that the article didn’t mention our book cough cough. Nope, not at all.

Yep, you guessed it! It’s coming! And it’s going to be GOOD, cuz my friend and blogospheric idol Miriam Peskowitz is coauthoring it with her MotherTalk partner Andi Buchanan. Read more about it here.

Perhaps, finally, we’re beginning to see a reality check on the “opt out” mythology: witness the astute coverage of recent books and articles on mom professionals who opt back in. Don’t miss Helaine Olen’s interview with Pamela Stone (author of Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home) on Babble. And check out the excellent forum with Stone, Bennetts, and others in the current issue of More, and the accompanying article by Leslie Morgan Steiner titled, aptly, “Back in Business.”

Among the enticing stack of books currently on my desk is one called Back on the Career Track: A Guide for Stay-at-Home Moms Who Want to Return to Work, by Carol Fishman Cohen and Vivian Steir Rabin–two Harvard MBAs who sucessfully relaunched after staying home full-time with their kids. And perhaps of greatest interest to Girl with Pen Terrified And Excited About The Concept of Motherhood is another one called Mothers on the Fast Track: How a New Generation Can Balance Family and Careers.

These comments are just too good to leave as comments, so I’m elevating them to post status. Thank you, Veronica, Marco, and Feminist Review for weighing in on my recent post about Knocked Up! The points you all make are quite excellent and astute.

Veronica said…

I haven’t seen it, but I know I will. My lust for Paul Rudd aside…Isn’t it just horribly difficult to watch a movie without our feminist alarms going off? I try so hard to turn it off and enjoy a movie, but like you, after some time that ‘guilt’ creeps over me and I have to face the fact that if they had done this or that, well you get the picture. From 40yr Virgin to Ron Burgundy, we get just enough feminism to keep us smiling.

Marco Acevedo said…

OK, boyly-boy Marco here… I thinks it’s fair to say I loved the movie with some of the same reservations… it’s clearly a geek fantasy dressed as cautionary/coming-of-age fable, while managing to feel honest in its character interactions. But I resent the idea it’s an every-guy movie. We don’t all feel the need to bond by nesting together in our own refuse, or to be that crass in front of the ladies. The constant pop-culture-referencing, though, is pretty spot-on.

FeministReview said…

While I agree that the female anatomy (esp. when being used for procreation) should not be on par with fart jokes as a grossout gag, I think that some might be taking this a little too seriously. Your entry is a balanced review of this film (I viewed the film in much the same way), but the Slate review annoyed me. It’s not necessarily Apatow’s job as a director to address abortion as a viable choice for women. But he does. Katherine Heigl’s character considers it and decides that she wants to keep the baby. She made a choice. And it was completely her’s. That’s something. Just because the character doesn’t choose abortion doesn’t mean that she’s the product of a man’s misinformed imagination. And I also think that Apatow shows that even though his male characters are completely clueless, they are harmless schlubs. While much of the guy bonding is comprised of misogynist endeavors (porn sites, sex mimicry, blow job jokes), it’s not malicious. I am not saying it’s right and I don’t think Apatow is either. He’s not claiming that he or any or his characters are in touch with the female psyche. At least they are trying.

My post on Knocked Up is now up at HuffPo. Check it out, and tell me if you agree/disagree!

(And ps Jessica was a hoot on The Colbert Show last night! Loved that she opened by giving him a t-shirt that said “Feminist Chicks Dig Me” – cuz we do.)

Jessica Valenti will be on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” discussing her book, Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters, tonight. Tune in at 11:30pm Eastern! (GO JESSICA!)

If you’re looking for a summer read to kick off the season, I highly recommend Lynn Harris’ Death By Chick Lit. Maybe I’m enjoying it so much because I’m about to launch a book and am drinking that complicated cocktail of selfish envy and altruistic delight for all my friends who are currently publishing books to great acclaim. Or maybe I’m enjoying it because it’s just damn lol funny. Enough about why. Just read it. Because it will make you laugh. If you don’t believe me, ask Marco, or ask my cat, because it’s been making them laugh out loud too. (Ok, that cat line proves it: *I* am not funny.)

Here’s a teaser:

LOLA SOMERVILLE WOULD KILL FOR A BOOK DEAL.
APPARENTLY, SHE’S NOT ALONE.

You’ve heard of Lola Somerville. Or not. Her first novel, much anticipated by her mother, was promptly eclipsed by…everyone else’s first novel. These days, seems no one Lola knows can write a letter to the editor without having it optioned for a major motion picture. Sure, Lola thinks, I have a great geek-hottie husband and a cool apartment in “up and coming” Brooklyn—but just once, can’t I write some random article and have Jodie Foster call me for the film rights? Or jeez, okay, Minnie Driver. Just something?

Then one night at a swanky book party, Lola finds her frenemy Mimi McKee, author of Gay Best Friend, dead in the basement, throat slashed with a broken martini glass. And when the bodies of It-Girl writers begin to pile up, Lola starts asking dangerous questions: Are the murders connected? Am I next? If not, um, why not? If I solve the mystery, then will my agent remember my name? And as Lola digs deeper, the stakes get higher. Will getting her hands on the killer—and the book deal bound to follow—mean losing the people she loves most?

As I mentioned, I came home from a very heady feminist conference this weekend in the mood for some slightly lighter fare. So on Sunday Marco and I went to see Knocked Up–the original plan was Spiderman 3, but Judd Apatow won out. Yesterday, my dear boy sent me the links to reviews in Salon and Slate. “Both positive, but Slate has gender issues.”

So did I.

Let me say first that I enjoyed the movie, wholeheartedly. I laughed. And I cringed. Maybe it was my feminist hangover from the conference, but I pretty quickly got the sense that Knocked Up was a pregnancy movie for boys by boys. Which is great. I mean, we need those, and we need them badly. Men are parents too. It’s about time we had some sensitive stories about what it’s like for men to become fathers–when they’re so-called ready and especially when they’re not. I love that the Ben character (Seth Rogen) walks the three miles to the gyno’s office even after Allison (Katherine Heigl) throws him out of the car, and that he eventually reads the pregnancy books. And Apatow’s portrayal of male bonding throughout the movie was disgustingly sweet–by which I mean disgusting at times, according to this perhaps-too-easily-grossed-out girly girl reviewer, but I get it: genuine and sweet.

Still, I agree with Slate’s Dana Stevens, who comments that, in this movie at least, Apatow doesn’t get (or write) chicks as well as he writes (and gets) dudes. Knocked Up is eons from being misogynist. But the movie’s two basic premises–that, boom! young rising professional Allison wants to keep the baby, recent-life-changing-promotion-notwithstanding, and that she’s willing to take such a heartfelt second look at the guy who severely grossed her out the morning after–struck me as forced vocabulary. This is Guyland indeed: pregnant is “knocked up,” abortion is referred to in euphemism (“rhymes with ‘shmashmortion”), and (spoiler alert!!) the geek gets the prom queen. In other words, it’s a fantasy about the sensitive slacker who, learns, through impending fatherhood, to grow up–and gets the girl. (The girl, to be fair, finds love where she least expects it. Fairy tale endings for all!) (Spoiler ends here.)

When the lights came up and my beloved dude turned to me and said, “I loved it!”, I didn’t want to be a spoilsport and offered up an enthusiastic, “Me too!” But truth be told, my love’s qualified. Sure, I’m willing to suspend disbelief when the Grey’s Anatomy hottie grew soft on a guy she couldn’t even get through breakfast with, and even after he flunked the second date. But when the image of a crowning baby head elicited the same “eew!” as the scene where Ben’s roomies transmit pink eye by farting on each other’s pillows (don’t ask), my grossdar got offended. Next time someone makes a movie about pregnancy for guys, maybe someone could throw us lingering feminist girly girls a little more than just a bone?

I just got back from the National Council for Research on Women’s 25th anniversary conference at Spelman, in Atlanta. Very historically rich feeling to be on that particular campus–and to hear directly from Moya Bailey, one of the Spelman students behind the Nelly protests. The conference was deliciously rich too. I had big fun unfurling the “Milestones in Women’s Research” banner I’d been working on with NCRW, and giving a workshop on translating research for trade. To balance things out a bit, I went to see Knocked Up last night with my beau. Since I haven’t had time for a real post since coming back, I’m vicariously offering up the following tidbits in the interim:

The New York Times has a piece today on new shows including The Starter Wife by Alessandra Stanley, who has an interesting observation on female bonding/fighting:

The fact that nowadays women are allowed to like one another, even at the expense of men, is at the core of ladies-night hits like “Grey’s Anatomy.” So atavistic series like “The Bachelor” and “Desperate Housewives” that play down female camaraderie and instead showcase hissy fits and catfights have a naughty, contrarian tang.

Let’s hear it for the death of hissy. Bonding is in!

Over on HuffPo Courtney Martin serves up some intergenerational wisdom in her
review of Hannah Seligson’s new book, New Girl on the Job: Advice from the Trenches, which, says Courtney, “speaks directly to this disappointed generation of highly ambitious and more than slightly unrealistic women” aka Gen Y:

The New Girl on the Job uncovers the new American Dream. It’s not the perfect house, the white picket fence, and the 2.5 kids — it is fulfilling work and respect. We don’t just want to make a good living and put food on the table anymore, we want to be professional creatives, entrepreneurs, inventors, visionaries, and influentials. Sure it is a tall order. Sure we’re a little entitled. But isn’t this what you raised us to believe was possible?

Seligson sees the intergenerational rifts and addresses them very matter-of-factly: “You shouldn’t fear that the arrival of a new girl will undermine your position, or write off the older women you work with as out of touch. There is room for all of us.”

Yes and yes.

And many thanks to Veronica Arreola at the Women in Science and Engineering Program at the University of Illinois-Chicago for calling my attention to CNN’s latest bit on GGW and porn that includes an uncharacteristically nice little bow (sort of) to the Suicide Girls.

More tomorrow for reals, promise!