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- 6
Last year when the poorly-reviewed Mamma Mia! was a mega-hit, some speculated that it was because the protagonists were women over 40, and that the female audience of a certain age was desperate to see someone born before Woodstock find love. This summer's Meryl Streep vehicle, Julie and Julia, is probably hoping to capture that same group of women.
In the movie, which is out this weekend, Streep plays TV chef Julia Child. Of Child's "acutely libidinous" marriage, Streep told the New York Times, "I don’t know why everybody is so surprised ... I guess people don’t attach sexuality to people who look like their parents." But the people who are their parents will probably be pretty excited to see their relationships getting some silver screen time for once.
Photograph of Meryl Streep promoting Julie and Julia by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images.
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My esteem for Ryan O’Neal takes another hit after reading in Vanity Fair the actor who personified love is never having to say you’re sorry, failed to recognize and then propositioned his estranged daughter, Academy Award winning actress Tatum O’Neal, at the funeral of his long-time companion Farrah Fawcett. O’Neal also tells writer Leslie Bennets he dumped Farrah when she hit menopause, “I believe Farrah was going through some kind of life change,” O’Neal says, “But they’re hard work, these divas; I was sick of it.”
Photograph of Ryan O'Neal at Farrah Fawcett's funeral by Jason Merritt/Getty Images.
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- 7
Skip Gates' daughter, Elizabeth Gates, wrote for the Daily Beast about attending the so-called Beer Summit at the White House. Rather than furthering a discussion about race relations, the only responses have been about gender relations: specifically, calling Elizabeth catty for remarking on Sgt. Crowley’s daughter's green eyeliner. Elizabeth wrote:
our family rounded the corner to the White House library and I first caught sight of Sgt. Crowley’s lovely daughter; she was wearing an appropriately heavy and charmingly untrained amount of green eyeliner on her lower lashes, and I saw my former self in her.
Ann Althouse says of Elizabeth's remarks, "Let's begin a great national conversation about how women judge and maybe even hate other women. In the fourth chair—the Biden seat—Hillary! Instead of beer, various girlie drinks—maybe Focus Vitamin Water or something. Cosmos for the older ladies." I agree with Althouse that Elizabeth's tone was unnecessarily condescending. However, I didn't really get "maybe even hate" from Elizabeth's extraneous makeup commentary.
But furthermore, it makes me wonder: Is it ever okay to write about the sartorial choices of women outside the fashion industry? Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan was recently criticized across the internet for discussing Sotomayor's confirmation hearing wardrobe. While Givhan's commentary was negative, it is possible to remark on what someone is wearing without judgment. Wouldn't we be losing a great deal of color from descriptive writing if we no longer even mentioned the attire of the people involved in any event worth talking about?
Photograph by Getty Images.
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Peggy Orenstein had an essay in the New York Times Magazine this weekend on the lack of female superheroes, and what that means for little girls. Orenstein’s 6-year-old daughter has called feh on Disney princesses (“All Sleeping Beauty ever does is sleep,” says the wise little one), and surprises her mother by asking for a Wonder Woman lunchbox for her birthday. Wonder Woman—who recently starred in a pretty awesome-sounding animated feature—has always been there for little girls who like capes and duels and spectacle-laden mythologies. But who else have we got in that super sorority?
A quick Facebook poll yielded some great options—not only our ever-beloved Buffy, but also She-Ra, Elektra, Sailor Moon, the very cool-sounding Zatanna Zatara, and of course, the fierce women of the X-Men: Storm, Rogue, Jean Grey, et al. One friend pointed me toward Birds of Prey, a female crime-fighting crew founded by Oracle, a paraplegic code-breaker/martial arts expert. (In her younger days, Oracle was Batgirl, who earns some gentle derision from Orenstein in the piece.)
I’d argue that many of these characters exhibit “the true drama of the superhero,” as Orenstein describes it:
[The superhero is] the ordinary Joe who discovers that he has a marvelous gift, something that sets him apart from everyone else, simultaneously elevating and at least potentially isolating him, forcing a series of moral choices about the nature of might and goodness. It’s a story writ large about coming to grips with power: accepting it, demanding it, wielding it wisely. Those themes are rarely explored in the fantasy culture of little girls, yet given how problematic power remains for adult women — in both fact and fiction — perhaps they should be.
Fantasy and comic-book fans, what laser-wieding, ass-kicking, spell-casting women do you want on your daughters' lunch boxes?
Photograph of a woman reading a Wonder Woman book by Amy Sussman/Getty Images.
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- 1
When I was a girl, children who bore their mother’s surname were typically considered legally “illegitimate.” Now that science can settle paternity, questions of authenticity, legitimacy and matrimonially-linked inheritances have thankfully faded from the social consciousness. Jessica’s comment about hyphenated surnames though, and Kerry’s post on “matrilineal cults” both made me think about the historically recent phenomenon of couples who, for reasons of their own, assign their children the mother’s last name.
Although many of my contemporaries in their 20’s had become Mrs. Somebody, by the time I married in 1985, brides had begun to routinely retain their own last names with, typically, future children carrying the husbands’. By then, at 35, I had no interest in changing my cognomen to Grady. I had grown into my Goldstein name and we were inseparable.
Surprisingly, my 13-year-old daughter, though she would have been happy to remain fatherless, changed her family name from Goldstein to Grady. Like many teenage children in newly blended families, she was not particularly embracing the new guy. She’d begun testing a punk persona and taken Rachel Grady as her “street name.” There was really only one thing about her step-father she especially liked: his 5-speed silver Porsche 911. Being practical, we sold the Porsche the next year. He taught her to drive on a manual Ford which burned through several clutches as father and daughter got to know each other better.
Eventually my husband adopted Rachel legally and the court sent us a new birth certificate that has his name on it. The following year, our family added a baby brother, my son Nate. I wanted to name the boy “Howard,” after my dad who’d died nearly a decade earlier, but my husband didn’t like how my father’s patronym sounded. I was hormonal and, at nearly 40, pretty sure this was the last child on whom I could bestow this dubious honor, so I pushed the “baby Howie” option.
I told my husband that we should split this decision: he could choose his son’s first name, provided I could choose the last—mine. He looked so crestfallen I immediately took it back. Our son became Nathan Howard Grady and I can’t imagine him being called anything else. It turns out how we arrive at what we call ourselves, has a lot to do with who we are.
Photograph by Stockbyte/Getty Images.
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