Do women novelists work in "miniature"? This was the question posed by the cover piece in the New York Times Book Review this weekend. The piece was a review of Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women, a novel that offers a canny fictional portrait of how women's rights have (and have not) evolved over time. In the book (which I haven't read in full yet) Walbert tries to summarize women's history by dramatizing it. At the opening of the piece, the review's author, Leah Hager Cohen, restates Virginia Woolf's famous quote about how we see men and women's novels differently: “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.” Ahh, I thought. Hager Cohen is going to take on the old dichotomies and demolish them! And she's going to do so in the Book Review itself, one of the few literary edifices that still shapes people's careers—and itself sometimes reflects these same old fallacious assumptions. She is going to create a revolution from within!

Alas, no. In fact, this review is a prime example of what I'll now call literary Stockholm Syndrome, in which women reviewers and writers all too eagerly embrace the sexist—and hell, yes, let's call it what it is—terms by which women's writing is still evaluated. An example. At the beginning of the review, Hager Cohen writes that Walbert's new book "delivers what feels like a reasonably representative history of women—at least of white, Anglo-Saxon women, over the past hundred-odd years. What is that history? What are its implications? And why should we care about them?" She goes on to explore those very large questions. But at the very same time, Hager Cohen buys into the notion that to write closely and intimately about women's lives (particularly their domestic lives) is somehow to deal in miniature. The final line of the piece is "Kate Walbert may work in miniature, but her scope is vast." I understand what Hager Cohen (an intelligent critic) is trying to do; but at the same time, I find myself frustrated that yet again a critic is buying into a language of smallness, of prettiness, we resort to when describing a woman's work; a language that we often wouldn't use, I am convinced, if the text in question were by a man.  This is why I call it literary Stockholm Syndrome: We have so identified with the captors that we are smitten with their superstructures, their rules, their way of seeing.

Of course there are women (and men) who work in miniature. I recognize that Walbert's work, which I know and like, can seem quiet, or still. But it doesn't seem to me that on the one hand a critic can say a book delivers a history of women for the past hundred odd years and at the same time say she does so by working in "miniature." It's just not logical. Or am I missing something obvious?

Tags: kate walbert, new york times book review, women novelists

If you're wondering why there isn't reliable polling data to help settle the question of whether the Iranian election was a farce, the Washington Post offers all sorts of (contradictory) opinions:

Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty argue that reliable polling is possible, that they did it, and that the results were strongly in Ahmadinejad's favor. But Jon Cohen points out that their poll was completed in May, before the contest got really heated, and that even then more than half of the respondents said they hadn't made up their mind yet (so the 2:1 number Ballen and Doherty cite was only among people who had decided who they were voting for). Meanwhile, Mehdi Khalaji says "reputable polls" showed Ahmadinejad losing ground in the weeks before the election, but doesn't get specific.

Tags: iran, iranian elections

TV images of street protests following Iran’s disputed election offer perhaps the strongest argument against U.S. interference as a tool for democratization. The footage shows vibrant, vigorous dissent of a kind not seen in Iran since the revolution: protesters moving through the streets like a human wave, ignoring the batons of riot police and shouting their support for opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, the loser according to official tallies that give Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 63 percent of the vote. Whether the election was rigged, whether the protesters succeed in reversing the results, they have already won a huge victory by disrupting on their own the political status quo in a nation that Anne Applebaum rightly calls “a classic example of managed democracy.” This is the kind of organic democratic movement that is both more satisfying and more lasting than elections imposed at the point of a gun.

For women, too, Iran seems a model of how change that comes with frustrating slowness, yet with a clear understanding of local realities and historical context, can be particularly rewarding and durable. This is evident in the life story of Zahra Rahnavard, Mousavi’s wife, who Hanna notes has stirred great excitement during the campaign, appearing in posters holding her husband’s hand, a revolutionary event in Iranian politics. Yet Rahnavard’s route to feminist activism has been neither direct nor short. Born Zohre Kasemi, her religious zeal drove her to rename herself Zahra after the Prophet Muhammad's daughter, and Rahnavard, which means “she who is on the (Islamic) path.” A painter and art history student at Tehran University, she opposed the authoritarianism of the shah, but later supported Ayatollah Khomeini. She founded several Islamic women’s groups and edited a women’s magazine, where she used her influence “to propagate Islamist values in Iran and abroad, working in particular against Iran’s feminists,” writes Janet Afary, author of Sexual Politics in Modern Iran. It wasn’t until the 1990s, Afary writes, that Rahnavard began working to lift restrictions on women’s employment and noting that they were treated as a second sex in Iran. Since Muhammad Khatami appointed her head of al-Zahra Women’s University in 1997, she has fought unsuccessfully for tougher laws restricting violence against women by male relatives. During the campaign, Rahnavard traveled around the country, sometimes alone, advocating for expanded rights for women in custody battles, as well as better education and job opportunities. At a recent press conference, she wore a denim shirt beneath her black chador and heavy makeup, a violation in Iran. Asked if she saw herself as Iran’s Michelle Obama, Rahnavard said no. “I am a follower of Zahra (the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad),” she said in English, adding that she respects “all women who are active.” The answer captures her particular brand of feminism, which is no less authentic for being authentically Iranian.

In the west, we like dramatic change and we like it fast. Shock and awe and then, right away, the toppling of the dictator’s statue and the mission accomplished banner that becomes a glossy advertisement for triumphant democracy (Get yours here!). But real, thoroughgoing democracy, especially in places as radically different from America as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, takes a long time. It isn’t important that Iranian women throw off their head scarves in unison tomorrow; in fact, as others have noted in response to Obama’s Cairo speech, head scarves should probably rank near the bottom of the list of things we think about changing. Women like Rahnavard prove that wearing a chador doesn’t make you a wilting violet, and being a feminist doesn’t make you secular or western. By expanding our definitions of what a feminist is, what an Iranian is and—after this weekend—what a democracy is, we may have a better chance of achieving the freedom we seek in the rest of the world. And if Rahnavard’s popularity during the campaign is any indication of the pulse of the Iranian street, we haven’t heard the last of her, or the rights and freedoms she advocates.

Photograph of Iranian protesters by Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: iranian elections, zahra rahnavard

Nora Roberts has written 182 novels. Last year alone she sold 8 million copies of her new romance titles, 5.5 million books off her backlist, and 4.5 million copies of her mystery books. Her work has been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 700 weeks, but she’s been reviewed in its pages only once. This week Lauren Collins at The New Yorker throws Roberts a highbrow lifeline in the form of a charming, funny profile that fully convinced me 1) I should read a Nora Roberts book and 2) I really want to hang out with Nora Roberts.

There are clear sociological motivations for reading Roberts (one in five readers is reading romance; Roberts is the Goliath of romance; she sold 17 million books last year, almost all, one assumes to American women), but Collins makes the case, without ever overselling, that Roberts' books might not be totally devoid of artistic merit. Her novels will always have a relatable main character, always have a plot, always include sex (sez Roberts, “Sex is important in the books because, without it, it would be like eating a rice cake instead of a cupcake”), and, most compellingly, contain dialogue that could be delivered by Hepburn-Tracy, Grant-Russell, or Hepburn-Grant, e.g. “I’ve decided to hate you.” “Oh? Again?" and “I’m informed that you and the deceased had a relationship.” “What we had was sex.” Snap, crackle, pop.

More charming even than these screwball exchanges is Roberts herself, who comes across as a down-to-earth, foul-mouthed, self-deprecating, extremely grounded, extremely disciplined woman whose key commandment of writing is “Ass in the chair.” This may not help turn a girl into Proust, but I think I’m going to tape it on my refrigerator anyway. Roberts also has advice for Susan Orlean, who Twittered last week about the trials and tribulations of being a working, writing-from-home mom. With respect to her own kids, Roberts' rule was, “Don’t bother me unless it’s blood or fire. And, as they grew more responsible, arterial blood and active fire.” Arterial blood! I need to go start a Nora Roberts book, stat.

Tags: Nora Roberts, Romance novels

Meghan: After watching Steven Soderbergh's call-girl movie, The Girlfriend Experience, starring adult film star Sasha Grey, you ask: "Can Sasha Grey really liberate herself—and other women—through porn?" My answer? Um, no?

But first things first. I thought the movie was great. I liked it more than most, who, like you, found it to be relatively cold and distant. (Although, frankly, I'm not sure how much you liked it or didn't? Anyway.) I thought it was an intriguing, sometimes sweet, occasionally disturbing, and frequently funny peek behind the curtain at the business of sex. I thought his gently mocking, sympathetic portrayal of the men who pay for it was pretty spot on. I think he didn't quite "get" Grey, or her character. It's hard to understand what it's like to sell sex for a living, especially if the seller is a woman, and the voyeur is a man. Penises have a tendency to get in the way.

Like you, I guess I see Grey as more of a self-constructed body politic than, well, genuine. But that's sort of the nature of the beast, and this business, isn't it? It's all simulacra.

Ultimately, while I get what you're saying when you ask about women's liberation and porn, it's a bit of an oxymoron of an idea—or, well, a head-on collision of irreconcilable concepts. Earlier this month, a female adult performer tested positive for HIV. Most adult movie producers don't require adult performers use condoms, and most performers don't use them. For a lot of reasons. Mostly, the practice is born out a spoken and unspoken theory that condoms kill fantasies. They're "too real" of an intrusion into a world that is totally unreal. Condoms are boner-killers, or so the thinking goes.

Which is too bad in an industry where the issue becomes a very real matter of life or death. Liberated? No. Screwed? Yes.

Tags: female sexuality, porn, sasha grey, sex, steven soderbergh

Proof that, as Emily says, Pixar's Up is for everyone: I took 10 11-year-old boys to it for my son's birthday, a little nervously, hoping an animated movie involving helium balloons wouldn't seem childish. At least some of them have seen their share, now, of James Bond and Family Guy and Austin Powers and South Park and whatnot. Sitting behind them, I watched their riveted, upturned faces as, in between fistfuls of popcorn, they absorbed the emotional montage of the couple's life together, including the brief but harrowing scene of the pregnancy loss.

My son worried afterward that it was a little downerish for a birthday party—not your usual laser tag, or even Transformers—but overall they seemed to really like the movie and were affected by the sequences that Emily and Meghan described. One of my son's friends reported without embarassment that he started to cry during the montage portion. This was reported as he and the others were dashing around the outside movie plaza firing little discs from disc-firing guns (I know, it's awful that I bought them, but CVS didn't have enough water pistols, which I guess are also taboo in some households, though not mine) from his goody bag. I like these boys, unafraid of the sensitive side of their nature. It did seem a little too bad that, as is so often the case in movies and children's stories, the death of a central female character (usually a mother; here a wife) provides the catalyst for adventure, and my daughter complained afterward that there weren't enough female characters. (The only other one we could identify was the bird.) I do look forward to the upcoming Pixar movies that actually, finally, feature females. Fodder, perhaps, for a 12th birthday party, unless by that point the boys insist upon something by Judd Apatow.

Tags: boys, Pixar, Up

On May 30 several men and a woman broke into an Arizona trailer, killing 9-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father. This weekend three people were arrested for the murder, two of whom are leaders of the Minutemen American Defense, an anti-illegal immigrant group not connected with the Minuteman Project. Here’s one of the accused on his web site:

"I take a very hard line with drugs and illegal immigration. Make no bones about it, I have a zero tolerance for terrorists, and that is what they are.”

It would not have occurred to your average anti-immigration activist, before 9/11, to describe Mexican families seeking honest work as “terrorists.” Nor would it have occurred to liberals to call the Minutemen themselves “precursors of domestic terrorism.” Yet George Bush used this rhetorical device so successfully, and so pervasively, that it has now become standard to characterize any violent person with potentially politically motives as representing some larger terrorist threat. James von Brunn was declared a terrorist hours after he murdered a guard at the Holocaust Museum. Dayo points out, as has Ann Friedman, that Tiller’s killer might be deemed a terrorist.

These men are terrorists, but I don't know that shouting "terrorist" from the rooftops gives us any insight into the causes of violence. The word "terrorism" is rhetorically useful precisely because it’s substantively vacuous. Bush used accusations of terrorism to render complex political situations black and white, to dehumanize entire nations, and to demonize a class of people rather than merely those responsible for an atrocity. He used it to drive any semblance of complexity from the conversation. Like “industry,” as in “abortion industry,” the word terrorism is meant to trigger thoughts of a coordinated conspiracy rather than individual action, Manichean morality tales rather than nuance, an amorphous glop of evil rather than gut-wrenching individual stories. As blogger IOZ puts it in a discussion of Tiller’s-killer-as-terrorist, this kind of rhetoric exists to remove any given crime “from the ordinary processes of criminal law and sanction, which are already quite draconian in these United States.” The men at Guantanamo, we were told, weren’t among those deserving of basic legal protections; they were alleged terrorists after all, and everyone knows you can’t use normal interrogation techniques with terrorists.

What does the left gain by calling a lone gunman an agent of right-wing terror? I think it obscures more than illuminates, but I don’t know that it’s an ineffective political strategy. The right has been extremely successful in adopting a leftist rhetoric of victimization. No surprise, then, when the left finds use for a rightest rhetoric of militarism.

Tags: Terrorism

The miscarriage in Up has stayed with me, too, Meghan, because of the emotion packed into a slim 20 seconds, and also because it opens the movie to adults who don't have kids. In fact, that opening out into different audiences captures one of the movie's several wonderful themes. Dana pointed out the motley nature of the crew that goes on Up's adventure. It teaches, without ever preaching, a lesson about finding love and chosen family wherever you can. Spoiler alert: In the last scene, square-jawed widower Carl sits next to kid Russell on the boy's favorite curb, where he and his dad used to go to count red cars and blue cars. The dad is gone, into the clutches of a woman who we've been briefly told has admonished Russell about calling too much. And so Carl and Russell count the cars, and argue over whether to count a motorcycle, and we glimpse the rare possibility of a random encounter made into love. And are reminded that it shouldn't be so rare.

Tags: chosen family, Pixar, Up