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In Which Dear Prudence Turns Into Maggie Gallagher

zuzu

The Pink Superhero has been waiting ALL. DAY. LONG. for us to tackle today’s Dear Prudence column, and the Pink One has waited long enough.

Dear Prudence,
I am a 22-year–old, self-sufficient adult. I have been dating the same man for the past two years. We recently found out that we will be having a baby. I have a full-time job making a decent amount and he has a good job as well. My main concern is breaking the news to my parents. Although I don’t live with them or depend on them financially, I’m afraid they may think we are not financially or emotionally ready. If they take the news badly, I will be devastated. His family has embraced the news and all seem genuinely happy for us. Although this was not planned, I believe that any pregnancy is God’s blessing and should be embraced. How do you suggest I tell them. and how do I react if they do react badly?

—Mother-To-Be

Now, most people would expect an advice columnist to provide advice for the problem presented, or at least make an effort. Sure, sometimes there are other lurking issues that need to be pointed out, but they’re usually actually related to the problem presented, or at least they’re issues that are lurking underneath the problem presented.

But Prudie, as we know, isn’t like most advice columnists.

Dear Mother,
At the risk of sounding like I had a triceratops as a childhood pet, I am concerned by the absence of any mention of a wedding in your letter. Are you going to continue to “date” the father of your child while you figure out if he’s the guy for you? Yes, your baby was unplanned, but now you have to plan how to create a stable home in which to raise this child. Since you and the father are already committed to each other, marriage would be a good place to start.

As you know, this isn’t the first time that Prudie has doled out moral hectoring masquerading as advice. This Prudie certainly seems to have a problem with women who don’t follow the script. If a woman doesn’t want to have children, and asks for advice for dealing with people telling her she’ll change her mind, Prudie tells her she’ll change her mind. If a woman is happily pregnant and in a committed relationship and wants to know how to break the news to her parents, Prudie will lecture her about why she’s not married yet and question her commitment to her SO as well as her maturity. A woman asks for help in getting her husband to share the housework so she’s not stressed out and angry when he wants sex is told to suck it up, put out, and not to expect the poor dear to contribute — you know how those men are. A woman who wants to know how to tell when the guy she’s having casual sex with might be ready for a relationship is told that she’s the kind of trash men don’t have relatioships with.

Perhaps it’s fitting that Prudie is at Slate, where being “contrarian” with regard to issues like reproductive freedom is the order of the day. And it’s not like she’s alone in the campaign to stuff women back into the kitchen. Maybe she’s gunning for a column in the New York Times Style section. She’s retrograde enough.

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22 thoughts on In Which Dear Prudence Turns Into Maggie Gallagher

  1. Does anyone know why they replaced the old Prudie with this one? Makes me wonder if it was a desire to switch to this type of viewpoint. The thing I always liked about the old Prudie was that she was non-judgmental and she always advised people not to take shit from people who shouldn’t be nosing into other people’s personal lives.

  2. I was under the impression that the new Prudie was doing it as part of her guinea pig series, but seriously, this shit needs to stop. Advice columnists who cannot answer the question that was asked have no business trying to tell others what to do.

    Has Slate decided they need a token right winger or something?

    Gah! Stupid, stupid column. Ask Margo is superior in all respects.

  3. I think they replaced Prudies because the old one got a book deal and a better syndication gig.

    I read this this morning, and decided that, even though I’m generally an advice column junkie (call it schaedenfreude), I was going to have to stop reading this particular column from now on, because answers like this just raise my blood pressure.

  5. Anybody have any real-world insight into what would get them to toss her? Should we ask their advertisers to specify that their ads not run on her page? Who knows the webmag biz from the ad sales side?

  6. She’s retrograde enough.

    Yet another example of how the cultural left has come to suddenly revere and honor marriage and monogamy.

    What are those fundies thinking when they assume you guys are not really on the bandwagon.

  7. Anybody have any real-world insight into what would get them to toss her?

    Quick – ruthlessly stifle all contrary opinion. We have a strict orthodoxy to maintain and she has deviated from the Kulturkampf!

  9. ruthlessly stifle all contrary opinion

    And yet Zuzu has not banned you.

    Seriously, what are you, against the free market or something? I’m a consumer; I demand to be entertained by people I like. If you want to hear from conservatives and moral finger-waggers, you go sponsor them.

    Which reminds me: if I want to hear what you have to say, I’ll read First Things, where smart people express the ideas that you attempt to puppet.

    However, I notice that you got through two short posts without blatant grammatical error. This indicates to me not only that (pace Zuzu) you have not been hitting the gin, but also that you have recovered sufficient self-regard to work to correct the problems for which I have gleefully abused you in the past. Bravo.

  10. Grammar’s fine and all, but what about the glaring lack of logic? I still can’t figure out how the hell he got a lefty reverence for marriage out of my comment that Prudie was retrograde.

  11. In the event that anyone needs a real advice columnist fix, Slate archives all the old Dear Prudence columns. Anything before February 2006 is the old Prudie.

    Fitz, clearly you’re not hitting the cooking sherry, but what is your psychotropic substance of choice here?

  12. When I married my first husband, we got married in the Catholic Church and had to go to Pre Cana (lots and lots of fun). In our intake with the priest, he asked if I was pregnant, to which I flippantly replied, “If I say yes, will you move up the wedding date?” (What can I say, I wanted to be a June bride… )

    The priest totally surprised me when he said that if I was pregnant (I wasn’t), that would be cause for him to counsel us to slow down and consider our decision to marry very carefully. The idea being that jumping into marriage just based on an unintentional pregnancy did not have good odds of success. He said he usually counseled pregnant couples to deal with one major life change at a time.

    Honestly, if the usually-conservative and somewhat oppressive Catholic Church can comprehend this concept, where the heck is Prudie coming from?

  13. Honestly, if the usually-conservative and somewhat oppressive Catholic Church can comprehend this concept, where the heck is Prudie coming from?

    Not to say Prudie isn’t abnormally regressive, but the Catholic Church tends to be a lot more progressive (on the ground) than either Canon or it’s more vocal followers would suggest.

  14. I don’t know who Maggie Gallagher is, but it seems to me that Prudie might be turning into Dr. Laura. Before she hit the big time, Dr. L. had a call-in show on a local Los Angeles station with the standard advice format. Even then, she would often give answers which pushed her agenda but related to the question tangentially if at all.

    Of course, once she got syndicated, the show was all about her agenda, with no pretense otherwise. Maybe that’ll be Prudie’s next move.

  15. I still can’t figure out how the hell he got a lefty reverence for marriage out of my comment that Prudie was retrograde.

    It’s sarcasm, zuzu, and a reference to the same-sex marriage debate. If you, zuzu, lack reverence for marriage, then that proves that Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch don’t want same-sex marriage because they value marriage, or even because they’d like to get married themselves, but rather because it’s all part of a long term plan to torpedo the institution. Because you, Sully, and Rauch are all part of one uniform cultural left.

    This is why I have never, ever in my life disagreed with any of the three of you, about anything at all.

  16. FYI – I think the “old” Prudie is now with Yahoo. She made the switch shortly after the beginning of the year.

  17. Sam: I am such an advice column junkie too! Do you read the Vine?

    As for this… man this advice sucked. Offensively so. I’m reminded of the scene in Maria Full of Grace (towards the beginning, so not really a spoiler) where she tells her boyfriend she’s pregnant and he’s like, “do you want to get married?” and she just laughs at him: “married? are you in love with me? you idiot, you would marry someone you don’t love?”

  18. Although I don’t live with them or depend on them financially, I’m afraid they may think we are not financially or emotionally ready.

    So let me get this straight: Mother-To-Be says that she’s worried that her parents won’t think she’s capable of supporting a child, and Prudie suggests marriage!?!

    Has Prudie never been married? Has she never been around anyone going through a marriage?

    Because weddings are things that cost many, many dollars. And then many more.

    So one would think that, should a woman be worried about her financial status, telling her to throw a wedding in on top of it would be, well, fucking insane.

    One would think, anyway.

  19. that’s hilarious–I always read prudie but took a hiatus. I didn’t really process she was a new person, though the columns seemed…. odd somehow. heh. took me until this thread to realize.

    the “get married” part is ridiculous. (at least she acknowledges she’s being a triceratops…) However, IMO it is slightly accounted for, in all fairness, by the final paragraph:

    It would help if you could add what conclusions you and the father have come to about marriage and/or your living situation. If your parents have a fit, you need to remain calm and certain in the face of it. Practicing this response will be good preparation for motherhood.

    which (to me) implies that the important advice it 1) decide on WHATEVER it is you’re planning to do; 2) don’t hide it from your parents; and 3) don’t let your parents push you one way or the other. Unlike “go get married you silly woman” that advice actually is sort of sensible.

  20. I’m glad you picked up on this week’s column…I was thinking of sending it someone’s way otherwise. I’m so happy Margo is over at Yahoo now (so I can get my fix, I’d been reading Margo’s weekly column since at least 2000)…

    If I’m not mistaken Emily Yoffe used to do product reviews at Slate…I’m not sure what qualifies her to be doing an advice column.

    In any case, this week was the last. I was still reading Prudence for some reason but that was the final straw.

  21. So one would think that, should a woman be worried about her financial status, telling her to throw a wedding in on top of it would be, well, fucking insane.

    Not really. Nothing says you have to throw a grand wedding; you can get married cheap at city hall with only a couple of witnesses. And the baby’s then an automatic candidate for both parents’ health insurance; this can be a win if the baby proves to have significant medical expenses or if the mother’s job suddenly gets shipped overseas. So marriage could well be a financial gain.

    Marriage aside, if finances are a big factor in winning her parents’ approval, sitting down and doing a budget might be a good idea. From what the letter writer says about her situation, it shouldn’t be that hard to come up with a budget that includes a baby.

    Has Prudie never been married? Has she never been around anyone going through a marriage?

    This Prudie seems to be once married; the previous Prudie had been married multiple times, and collected suggestions about what to do with your wedding ring if you get divorced.


  22. I enjoyed reading this blog. One of your regulars sent it to me. I would like to clear up a few things having to do with me.
    1) I did not die.
    2) I did not leave for a book deal.
    3) I went to Yahoo! News to be with the two Slate executives who oversaw Slate; to have a much wider, less elite redership; and because I didn’t think the editorial staff at Slate cared about “Prudie,” although the traffic and advertising the feature pulled were major.
    I have been gratified that I get a ton of mail from people who say they’ve followed me to Yahoo! News.

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