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Some months ago, a student journalist at my school wrote an opinion column that basically said “Women today have it better than men because boys buy me drinks at bars and I went and applied for this job and got hired by this guy and he didn’t even ask for an application! Tee hee hee I’m so cute.” So for the second time in five years, I wrote a letter to the editor that said basically two things: 1) You are a ditz. 2) If your editor was worth a damn, he would have intervened before this hit the paper in order to spare you all some embarassment. The editor sent it back to me on the grounds that it was 1,000 words long and he could only print letters of 350 or less so could I edit it down and resubmit it?

That letter was printed, and I was outed as a feminist (in addition to being a bitch, which some people were still not aware of), title deserved or not. She wrote another piece stating that feminists were all big meanies and so nyah! Plus, we were petty and uncouth and who was the columnist here, huh? Later that day her editor emailed me over facebook to let me know that they were taking applications for next year’s opinion columnists, you know, just so I knew.

Several of my freinds wanted to write more letters, but it was an exam week and we never got around to it. The next time I saw an article from her, it was about Apple computers and that they were a great big secret and well worth the extra $1,000 because they were just so pretty and there were like no viruses! She was fuckin’ lucky it was finals week and we all had some graduatin’ to do. I folded up the paper thinking, fuck! What a ditz! She’ll have trouble getting a job at a real newspaper.

Then I found that her doppelganger is writing for the New York Times.

As a girl, I was in love with the idea of love — love poems, letters, stories, songs, even Courtney Love, for what seemed to me her well-worn heartache. Boys themselves, with their fake guns and dirty knees, didn’t interest me much. But as they were my ticket to romance, I adored them more or less as a practical matter.

Already we know two things about J Courtney Sullivan:
1) She is going to bore us to tears. This is going to be a self-absorbed, naval gazing piece, more suitable for Livejournal than the New York Times.
2) The only Hole album she owns is Live Through This, which was (and I was a Hole fan, so this took me several years to begrudingly admit) almost certainly written by someone other than the person who wrote basically every other song she ever sang. And although it’s a good album (it would have made a killer Nirvana album, too), I always prefered the pre-LTT angry-screaming Courtney.

If Sullivan was half the man-hater she’ll claim to be, she’d agree. But Sullivan is just here to give us a younger, fresher first person take on the Times’ theme for aught-six: Don’t You Girls Have Something to Do At Home?

Step 1: Establish yourself as a bonafide man-hater

I read, re-read, and underlined “Backlash,” “The Beauty Myth” and “The Feminine Mystique.” I grew enraged by what I learned. Enraged, and utterly confused. Who was keeping women down?

Step 2: Don’t frighten your readers! Reassure them that you’re also a tool, and a thoughtless ditz

Men. But who were just so cute that I couldn’t sleep at night for thinking and writing and obsessing about them? You guessed it, the self-same.

Woah! To far! Lay on some more hate, baby! Put some straw in that feminist!

Then I went off to an all-women’s college, Smith, where I didn’t see a whole lot of men. I joined the campus women’s group and studied up on gender issues. My rage toward men in general grew ever stronger, as did my desire to meet that one specific man who could make my dreams come true.

Now quick, back to non-threatening conformist! Think pink and fuzzy!

I had fantasies of moving into a city apartment after graduation with some blurry-faced guy, my partner. We’d cook dinner together, read the paper in bed. Later, we would shield our children from sex-stereotyped toys and take turns driving to rid them of the notion that Dad is always the captain. There would be true equality in our home, and there would also be candlelight and Ella Fitzgerald records and adorable baby shoes in the hall closet.

So blah blah, feminism was all well and good at the girls’ college where everyone was doing it, but now I’m in New York all like “Grrl Power!” and the guys are all “Wha?” and I’m all “Watch me lift this bus, and Quentin Tarintino sucks!” And they’re all “Ok bye” so I couldn’t get to the Ella Fitzgerald since no one would sit through the Ani DiFranco and don’t even ask about the baby shoes! Oh, and I am not insane! Isn’t stuff like this:

A comparison of our favorite movies turned into me complaining about Quentin Tarantino’s senseless misogyny. Perusal of the dessert menu somehow ignited a screaming match about women’s socially imposed body-image issues.

Often there was no warning. One minute we would be talking baseball, and the next we’d be embroiled in a standoff about pornography, which would end with me refusing to return his calls and express mailing him a copy of Catharine MacKinnon’s “Only Words” without a note.

all part of a well-regulated, stable, mature adult relationship? Of course! I’m not crazy! You’re the one that’s crazy!

So something had to give, because J Courtney had a biological itch to scratch and there is no way she could afford a kid, much less a car, on one income in New York, so she’d better re-evaluate what’s important. So she makes some amount of sense in her overwrought, stay-with-me-this-will-all-go-somewhere sort of way for a few paragraphs before letting us know what’s really important.

On the other hand, no matter how enraged I become, I still adore men and the possibility for romance they bring. I love the smell of a man’s skin. I enjoy the breathless feeling of waiting to see if he’ll call back. I like dressing up for dates and dissecting a dinner conversation with a new guy to determine if he might be The One. I admire the linear and decisive way a certain kind of man thinks, to my curlicue boundless overthinking. And nothing beats the feeling of a man’s arms wrapped around me. Nothing.

Jesus hopping Christ, barely out of the Wimmin’s School and Cosmo has already undone all of the Sisters’ good work. Damn you, patriarchy! You’re too strong!

You’ll all be pleased to find that there is a happy ending. By admitting that you can’t in fact win friends and influence people by subjecting them to undergraduate women’s studies lectures on what are supposed to be dates (and that, my friends, is what’s WRONG with FEMINISM, and why it WON’T WORK, so just GET BACK IN THE KITCHEN already -NYT Ed.) J Courtney had signaled to God that she’s ready for The One, who of course is just perfect and gives the right amount of lipservice to her dearly held radical feminist ideals while he treats her like the lady she is.

I’ll never fully reconcile those ideas, I know. But sometimes love surprises us with its timing and its lessons. Ten months ago, I finally met someone who, so far, has stuck. And to my Catholic family’s great relief, that someone’s name is not Irene.

His name is Colin, and I liked him immediately. And so I vowed, this time, not to sabotage things by mentioning sexism right away.

Well, at least our strawfeminist is not a dyke. Thank God and his Mother Mary for small mercies. Ha, get it? Would it be so awful if all that feminism turned her gay? But it didn’t so the joke is funny, get it? Get…oh, ok let’s move on.

So Colin sticks around, and is gracious enough to tell J Courtney when he thinks she is full of shit, for which we can all be grateful because if she’s going to be writing where the rest of us can read it, then someone needs to introduce her to this giant grey area we call reality.

And now I have fallen for a man who understands and respects my feminist beliefs, and who also takes me to dinner, holds the door, calls me Babydoll in a slow Southern drawl.

It too can all be yours! All you have to be is so young that you think having some hi-liter in your copy of Backlash makes you a radical feminist, and that ceasing to lecture everyone and the lamppost about what you learned in women’s studies seminar and listening for a change means you’ve “embraced contradictions.” OK, you’re officially transitioning from self-absorbed flighty undergraduate to functioning adult. Great, but get a livejournal before you unburden yourself to us again; some of us did this a couple years ago and frankly, it wasn’t that interesting back then either.

Now, this is the part that really pissed me off. Take a little from column A:

Ten months ago, I finally met someone who, so far, has stuck. And to my Catholic family’s great relief, that someone’s name is not Irene.

And a little from column B:

J. Courtney Sullivan lives in New York. Her book, “Dating Up: Dump the Schlump and Find a Quality Man,” will be published by Warner Books in February 2007.

*Sputtering rage* Who the hell are you? Who are you with your less than a year of relationship writing an advice book about relationships? Who the good goddam*sputterrageragesputter* Memo to the New York Times: I’m a bitchier quasi-feminist who hates everyone, not just men, and is engaged to a guy I only dated for eight months. Engagment in eight months trumps dating for ten! I win! I want my book deal NOW.

Oh wait, I see why you picked her instead.

At press time, Kosztolnyik had just signed J. Courtney Sullivan ’03’s post-postfeminist take on the dating world, Dating Up: The Ultimate Guide to Finding the Man You Deserve, due out next fall.

(boldface mine)

This entry was posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2006 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Douchebag on Feminism, Feminism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.