Shorter Ross Douthat: June 30, 2009 Jill The rich deserve passion. The poor aren’t entitled to that luxury, and maybe if they settled, they’d be less poor.
This article is a sexism nugget dipped in classism sauce. Those passionless career women, always domesticating their wild husbands and stealing their phallic power! Those silly poor people, if only they would stop and think dispassionately–like my million dollar education taught me to–about their problems so they don’t have out of wedlock children or drink alcohol in excess!! *hand wringing* *gag* I can’t even read the whole thing. It’s dripping with smug! *shudder* Ugh. I need to go take a shower and wash the smug off.
He was almost tolerable when he wrote for the Atlantic. But he just gets more offensive and laughable with every NYT column.
I think you’re giving Mr. Douthat too much credit to ascribe ulterior motives, either intentional or subliminal. His former Atlantic colleague (who is probably the best writer they have on staff) at least the courage to lay the facts of her own life story out in her essay. Douthat’s column drips of loathing for his own life situation and the trappings of the class in which he is a part. I read it as a woe-is-me-I’m-upper-class autobiographic piece. An “I wish I had the courage to act like teh poorz, but they don’t get to whine about ennui,” which is, apparently, a favorite pasttime of his.
Not to mention his sneers at the “unwed mother” (who’s the one in the 1950s, again?) and the “tameness” of “collegiate ‘safe sex'”, as if taking precautions against STIs or unwanted pregnancy just kind of takes all the fun out. Yeeeah.
I notice how he mentions that educated people who put their careers first often have more stable marriages–and this is a bad thing.I notice also that he claims that the “elite” are grimly “working” on relationships rather than having any fun, and then talks about Sanford. Who is not elite in any way.Oh, wait, he says elite women are the ones grimly working on their relationships. It all makes sense now… but then he mentions another “elite” woman who is just the opposite. And those so-called “domesticated” men. So even when he goes to all that trouble to throw sexism and classism together to make a point, he doesn’t even quotemine properly. In conclusion, ugh. Not even an A for effort.
Maybe you should create a Douthat tag. That way, you wouldn’t even have to describe the article, just cut and paste a little icon that says “behold! clueless sexist 50’s fetishist.”
Jill—When I read your summary, I thought it couldn’t possibly be accurate. Then I read the column. My apologies for having doubted you. Anyone want to set an over/under pool on when the Times is going to give this guy the Kristol treatment?
So everyone except for “sexually adventurous” post-grad-school upper-class East Coast men are inferior? Because that’s the take-home message I got from that article.
I couldn’t make heads or tails of that piece. It seems to me to be an example of the way that extreme self-absorption can lead to terribly bad writing, since you can’t take enough of a step back to imagine how anyone who does not have your own personal hang-ups and obsessions might read and interpret your words. But maybe it is more clear to others?
Reading the column, I was under the impression that his ultimate point would be that the safety-minded, cautious, “boring” approach to relationships is wrong, that it’s detrimental, and so on. Well, that was his point. It’s just that he ended by suggesting that the lower classes could use some o’ that cautiousness of which he is so contemptuous. I thought it was bad? I guess it’s OK to wish bad things on Other People. (I happen to have, and love, a “boring” marriage, thankyouverymuch.)
the “tameness” of “collegiate ’safe sex’”, as if taking precautions against STIs or unwanted pregnancy just kind of takes all the fun out. Yeeeah. That just might be the case.
That piece was a mess. In addition to the sexism and classism, he makes idiotic assumptions about philanderers being exciting and stable men being the opposite.
I’m confused. Im really, really confused. Because, I am quite sure that that is actually two different articles with two totally different conclusions that somehow got overlapped. I want to write on how classist that is and how it drudgs up images of the rich engaging in acts they bemoan and decry in the poor. Or how it drudgs up images of the upper classes romanticizing aspects of the lives of the poor and longing to engage in such fabricated “simple” plasures an be free of their gilded cages. I want to wirte about how it brings up images of the rich creating a reality in which they think the poor live, and longing to engage in such actitivties that they see as inheriently sensous, sexual, pleasurable, and wild. Anout how it brings to mind a well off persn who engages in those activities they bemoan in the poor by night and then go about their priveleged lives in the day, all the while commentng on the inferiority and hedonism of the poor. But I can not, because I am so very, very confused by whatever the fuck it was I just read.
Can we please fire this man??? He hasn’t written anything RELEVANT, let along intelligent. I don’t care if he is a conservative or a flying tulip from the planet Mars, he needs to write something that might actually, you know, pertain to current events in a meaningful way! ( I suppose he had his poor excuse for a column on Tiller, but really, that’s the only one I can think of that even fulfilled the basic “Is this important” issue)