First, Caitlin Flanagan pretends to be Helen Gurley Brown's friend. Pretends to understand her better than anyone else. She wasn't really a second-wave feminist, oh heavens no. She was just a woman trying to get what we all want--"the comfort and protection of marriage"!
Not, Flanagan says, like those (moneyed) outliers...the FEMINISTS...who for some reason want to "go through life looking like Sasquatch and feeling angry all the time." No, no. Helen Gurley Brown was too smart and feet-on-the-ground for that.
In fact, Brown was so smart and feet-on-the-ground that she got the prize: the desirable (i.e. rich and powerful) husband! And then she dedicated herself to helping other women do the same!!
Into this tale of triumph, however, Flanagan introduces her first warning bell. There was a slight problem with Brown's rise: its underlying strategy.
"Now that [Brown's reader and follower] had retooled herself and her apartment, she had to go about catching herself a man, but—here’s the sleight of hand—she shouldn’t think that any one man was the man. The place to start was with the married men at work, the ones [Reader] had never taken notice of before, because she hadn’t thought of them as “eligible”—which, strictly speaking, they weren’t, but they were the shimmery lure on the water’s surface. Does a [powerful husband] want to catch a steno-pad lonely heart or a happy-hour sex kitten who can hardly fit him onto her dance card?"
The sex kitten was to become that way by bagging married men at the office.
"For the reader with moral qualms? 'I’m afraid I have a cavalier attitude about wives,' Brown announced from the outset of her public life."
Caitlin Flanagan will not take kindly to such an attitude.
As we can see, when she starts talking about Elizabeth Edwards.
(You know, the painfully wronged wife of former Presidential candidate John Edwards.)
Except she's really just using Edwards to get at her real target--Rielle Hunter, Edwards' mistress. Witness her final paragraph:
"Rielle may have gotten a payout and she may have gotten a late-life baby, but what she has really gotten out of the arrangement—the thing that will stand as her life’s remembered work—is that she brought another woman to her knees: polluted the home in which Elizabeth is raising her children, made her steady approach toward death a time of exquisite anguish and fear, made a mockery of the marriage and home that she tended as a tribute to her late son, Wade. That’s what Rielle has gotten for herself, at the end of the day. And really—didn’t she have a perfect right to it? It’s a free country, after all."
Woo! That is some shocking angry.
And, Flanagan would by implication have us conclude, it's all Helen Gurley Brown's fault.
SHE'S THE ONE who convinced "spinsters" to think of themselves as "single girls" and start fucking men on the job!
Yes, she did warn them not to fall in love with any of the married men, Flanagan concedes. She did tell her readers to merely use the married men in order to appear desirable to the single man who they themselves will eventually marry.
But, argues Flanagan, we women--weak, unruly--cannot follow that iron dictum. We will fall in love with John Edwards and decide to usurp his wife, so even though HGB told us not to, IT'S IMPLICITLY ALL HER FAULT THAT RIELLE HUNTER DID IT ANYWAY AND ELIZABETH EDWARDS IS SUFFERING!
Flanagan appears to believe that, before Brown, no young woman with a clerical job had ever dreamed of fucking her way upwards either personally or professionally, but rather, had humbly kept to her place as one of the losers of female life.
In other words, like most ideologues, she believes that there was once a time before people were people. And it would have stayed that way if it weren't for you meddling kids! If some Pandora--a feminist, a communist, a sky-god worshiper, a shrewd office girl (perhaps one with an apple)--hadn't opened the box.
Flanagan wants to go back to that world. She wants to go back to the past which exists inside her mind, in which no wife would ever be humbled by a mistress, or at least, not stand in danger of actually losing her home to one and having her children raised by one.
But she can't, and here's why: not just because that past never existed, but because this is what happens when men are a commodity and women tell themselves they can't live without one.
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So--I am thrilled to see that Caitlin Flanagan has had her feminist epiphany and will shortly be joining us Sasquatches!
(Memo to Caitlin--you are allowed to shave, and as for the angry part, I gotta say that you're already there. Way, way there. Re-read that last graf of yours in this essay. Turn that flamethrower onto, say, rape, FGM or child marriage, and women's human rights will advance two centuries in ten minutes.)
Because honestly, Caitlin, if it hurts you deeply to see what's happened to Elizabeth Edwards and Rielle Hunter, then you've understood feminism. Feminism seeks to prevent any more Edwards-Hunter debacles, not by slut-shaming the Hunters of the world into meek acquiescence (or deep cover), nor by putting the Edwardses of the world onto pedestals, but by de-commodifying and de-status-symbol-ifying men. Making men--take a deep breath now, and sit down if you have to--less important to women's lives and well-being, so that they can take their place as dear companions rather than remaining as gods whose acquisition and retention are the sine qua non. That's not a healthy place either for them or for us. It leads to pain. It leads to tragedy.
In the middle of your essay, you mention that John Edwards wasn't worthy of such a woman as Elizabeth Edwards. ("Every time he took the microphone in his Brooks Brothers shirtsleeves and talked about poverty...you cooled on him, but every time she stepped up to bat cleanup, you decided to give him a second look.") On the evidence of how he's treated her, I'm inclined to say you're right. In fact, I don't even think he's worthy of Rielle Hunter.
So here we have the lives of two women, and their children, ruined...because John Edwards was so damn important to them both. And actually, I don't care if he was worthy of them...no human being is worthy of that.
Do you get it now, Caitlin? Do you?
Good. Someone from Sasquatch HQ will be in touch with you shortly to teach you the secret handshake.
