July 19, 2005

Flame, Blame & Shame : When Stepford Wives attack BlogSheroes
by Liza Sabater

I was so up to my eyeballs yesterday and today in NYC politics that I read this article in the NYT and completely missed the fact that Tessa is a member of the BlogSheroes meetup here in NYC :

The New Nanny Diaries Are Online - New York Times

As I read her words I was transported back to my own youth and those feelings of awkwardness, fear, false bravado and self-importance. I could have told her that I understood her life more than she realized, that I had not always been the boring hausfrau she must see. I could say that I, too, once stayed out late, drank too much and slept with the wrong people. I, too, once found my work obligations a tedious distraction from creative pursuits and thought myself superior to my surroundings, just as she appeared to.

Yet my awareness of this prior life and my knowledge that I'd outgrown it didn't spare me from feelings of intense doubt about my current life, times when I was convinced I'd made the wrong choices, days when my husband and I would spend hours tearing into each other over who should clean the tub after a child mistook it for the potty. On the other hand I also got to revel in days when I loved my life and children so much that it hurt.

But there was another element of her posts that unnerved me. Most parents don't like to think the person watching their children is there for a salary. We often build up a mythology of friendship with our nannies, pretending the nanny admires us and loves our children so much that she would continue to visit even without pay.

When our nanny referred to our house on her blog as work in a seemingly sarcastic fashion, she broke the covenant. The more she posted, the more life in our household deteriorated. It almost seemed that as she created the persona of a do-me feminist with an academic bent, it began to affect her performance. The woman who was loving if a bit strict toward the children became in our view short and impatient, slamming doors and bashing pans when my toddler wouldn't sleep and sighing heavily if asked to run an errand.

The story is simple : Tessa is a highly educated, highly skilled young woman who was a "child-care worker" at a journalist's home. Even though it was not live in, her days were long, long enough for it to be called a "nanny job". Now, Tessa did this because it was, in her mind, the best way to earn a living while preparing for graduate school; and I remember having this intense conversation about nannies with her because, I too have employed a nanny (who doesn't in New York City) and we joked about what a nanny really is : Mommy care. The nanny is not there because the kids need her, the nanny is there because the mother needs her. And this is a distinction that I think escapes a lot of people; even people that employ any type of childcare.

What is not simple here is the power trip of the "mommy" who used this situation and exploited Tessa's story not only for economic gain but uses it as a sorry excuse to look with faux-longing a life she allegedly left behind in her youth because now, as a mother, professional writer, journalist and woman of character, is is not appropriate.

Appropriate is one of those words I have come to loathe since the day my first son was born. Decorum is the way to dress up, decorate, pretty up contempt for other people. Fuck appropriateness, fuck decorum.

One of the things I always like to remember when dealing with women is the savagery known amongst chimpanzees and macaques. I read recently in a Natural History magazine of how an alpha-female will use her female relations to murder up-and-coming alpha-females (especially if they are either fertile or pregnant) and commit infanticides, sometimes cannibalistic, in an attempt to wipe-out the offending lineage.

Now, given we humans are closer to chimpanzees than to gorillas, I'm going to say that it the reaction of the journalist/mother/employer does not come as a surprise. We're talking about a silver-back female competing not just socially but professionally for power. Instead of killing Tessa physically, Olen went ahead and tried to kill her character; using her newspaper column as a chimpanzee would use a club. And even if Tessa did not have kids, she is not only fertile for being a young woman but a fertile mind, and undiscovered talent that blogs and will go on to graduate school to further develop her future. Olen, in a chimpanzee sort of way, cannibalized Tessa's creations to establish her undisputed hegemony.

And this is what women like her call "propriety" and "decorum". A swift and easy way to attack, kill and cannibalize verbally a female opponent.
The timing on this is really weird given the panel I will be leading at Blogher. Why? Because I think women are more savage in their flaming than men.

From all the online lists and communities I am in online there is one particular list which I will not name that absolutely drives me berserk. There is a number of these women on that list (not all) who gang up on other women --outspoken, questioning and with strong opinions-- for not being "proper". And the way they go about it is by being really nice, and courteous and praising of one another as to say "We don't thank you for your comments because you're not one of us". It's the most despicable kind of "propriety"; so passive aggressive, so insulting that I'd rather deal with a loud-mouth macho asshole than deal with women like these.

You know what is even worse? When men jump in and basically paraphrase what the "offending female" has said, they somehow, somewhere find the clarity of mind to agree with him. This, BTW, has not happened just with me but with other women in that list. And what is most offensive is that they do not consider their behaviour sexist at all. On the contrary, they think of themselves sophisticated, educated, worldly and most grievous of all FEMINIST!

If that is feminism, I'd rather be a macho grrrrl.

UPDATE! I forgot to include some awesome quotes from some really cool inappropriate macho women I like :

[via Bitch. Ph.D.: plus ca change, plus ca reste la meme chose]:

By becoming more fully human, Tessa "broke the covenant"--an unspoken contract in Olen's mind (one that Tessa not only didn't sign on to, but was apparently completely unaware of) that "her" nanny should make her feel "young and hip by proxy," should not give her reason to fear that she was now a "boring hausfrau," should maintain a "mythology of friendship with our nannies, pretending the nanny admires us and loves our children so much that she would continue to visit even without pay." In other words, because she wrote well enough to engage her reader, Tessa was a bad nanny.

Majikthise : If Karl Rove worked for Helaine Olen

It's amazing how different employment standards are for the White House vs. the real world. If you work as a nanny in a Brooklyn brownstone, you can get canned for any reason whatsoever, including veiled online grumbling about hypothetical surgical procedures. You can even be fired for making your employer feel like a middle aged mum instead of an edgy young hipster like yourself. Even your employer's harshest critics will agree: your boss has the legal right to can you. Who knows, she might even get a few column inches in the New York Times to congratulate herself for demanding your head on a platter.

Whereas, if you're the President's most senior advisor, you can reveal a CIA operative's identity in wartime. You can destroy the career of a leading expert in weapons of mass destruction in order to discredit her husband. You can use and discard the First Amendment at will, but not before your "anonymous" tips send reporters to jail. You can force your closest colleagues to lie for you. You can drag your employer's entire operation through the mud. But, hey, as long as you didn't actually commit a crime...

Amanda at Pandagon: The politics of nannies and blogging

The defensiveness of this NY Times article is astounding, because I don't even get the impression that Olen is being defensive about her choice to deprive a woman of her job in part because that woman's sexuality made her uncomfortable. God forbid she be defensive about being sexist and unfair to her employee. No, Olen is defensive because her younger employee's youthful fun made her a little bit jealous and she wants everyone to know that even though she's a big enough fuddy-duddy that a woman expressing admiration for another woman's beauty makes her clutch her pearls, it's not her fault and she'd really be fun if it weren't for her great sacrifice of having children. I'm not buying it,

And Dru Blood in that same posts comments (read the whole lot of them, the comments are awesome!)

I think Ms. Prude Thang is just mad because, clearly, the nanny is a better writer than she is. What does it say about a snobby journalist if a freaking NANNY is a better wordsmith? You know the domestic help can't ever surpass the master in intelligence!

Actually, viewed that way, it's sort of an interesting juxtaposition of "amateur" writer v. "professional" writer. Blogs v. journalism.

For the person who said the nanny had no right to talk about her employer (without identifying them!) on her blog...what do you have to say about the employer talking about the nanny (and getting paid for it) in her article?

It's bullshit. It's absolute fucking bullshit. I'm adding ms. Helaine Olen to the long list of people I would really like to kick in the shins.

Posted by Liza Sabater in Blog Sheroes, BlogHer, Blogs, Class, Domesticity, Feminism, Media, Motherhood, New York City, Newspapers, Parenting, Prejudice
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Cross-posted from c u l t u r e k i t c h e n: BlogHer, terror and the business of compassion

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