Dawn has a brilliant post on pedophiles
I think that Maureen Dowd is brilliant on politics but frigging clueless when it comes to regular women. She has no idea what it’s like for the average Executive Asssistant in a city say like New York where rents went up 7.2% for a two year lease yesterday, but the average raise is from three to five percent.
She has no idea what it’s like to raise a teenage daughter on a salary that would be laughable in most small cities, but because say my best friend didn’t join the 9-5 workforce until seven years ago, she’s stuck at a bad paying job for a tyrannical boss, and he knows that.
Why doesn’t Maureen Dowd explore that issue? Not funny enough? Maureen Dowd consistently confuses status for achievement. Only a Times OP-ED columnist, Oprah, or Anna Wintour is good enough for her.
She would never think that a teacher has enough status for her to respect them. If she does her writing doesn’t reflect that. She probably thinks that I’m a fool for having given up “status” type jobs to work for Social Security and then to become a Social Worker.
I’m lucky. I have a ton of degrees, certificates and a license. I’m thankful everyday that I don’t have to work for a bitch, or if I did could walk. But I understand that was some luck and a lot of planning.
I’m a “have.” But being concerned about all women isn’t in the abstract to me. I know too many woman who are barely making it. But who cares about them when you can make fun of Lauren Weissberger?
I didn’t like the book The Devil Wears Prada, but more than that I have a vehement dislike of Dowd’s dismissal of all women who don’t have her status. I don’t think that The Devi Wears…is a great example of being mistreated, but given Dowd’s other columns and her book on women, I think that she should stay away from making fun of any women who aren’t equal or above her in status. It just isn’t funny.
I would never expect an assistant to pick out my cellphone ring. Were she a “personal” assistant I hired to help me with the minutia of life, yes. But not an assistant at The Times
On my sort of jog home from the dentist I thought about this some more. When Dowd was young, was she called “the girl” and asked to make the coffee? If she were did she resent that and vow to do better to her employees, if she were lucky enough to have them?
I was never a tuxedo shirted bow-tied feminist. By the time I was 32 I managed a project with over 200 employees. Some of the men resented me because they were 20 or more years older than me. I earned their respect by treating them with the dignity I hoped people would treat me were I ever in that position.
I understand that she’s talking, or I hope that she is, about young privileged women, but her attitude spills over to all women who aren’t as “accomplished” as she is. And even young privieged women shouldn’t be expected to do errands for their boss during their lunch hour without being compensated by her boss, with money from her boss’s personal accounts or expense accounts.
If Maureen Dowd cared about women at all, she wouldn’t write the columns she does. All her great politics is meaningless to me because she couldn’t care less about regular women. Dowd shoud be a role model.
I find nothing funny about Maureen Dowd because she never learns that all women didn’t have her breaks or might not be as fortunate as she is.
And she is fortunate, yet never acknowledges that. I find that to be sickening. For some reason, oh yeah, I live in New York, so the column follows
I considered myself quite a benevolent boss until I learned that my old assistant Marc was secretly slipping Saint-John’s-wort into my smoothies in hopes of perking up my mood.
Maybe I just seemed benign compared with a fellow columnist, whose assistant had such a bad panic attack when her boss was due back from vacation that she had to be rushed to the emergency room, where she was surprised to find herself part of an epidemic of palpitating assistants dreading the return of their bosses.
Or maybe I figured I was a peach because I only asked assistants to help select my cellphone ring — 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” or the Fox Sunday football theme? — rather than throwing a cell at them while grabbing their throat, biting their lip and head-butting them, Naomi Campbell-style.
Whatever tart remarks I’d made, I was not in a league with David Spade, whose assistant, Skippy, got so agitated that he shot the star — who was playing a snide assistant on “Just Shoot Me” — with a stun gun. (From now on, my first requirement for assistants is that they always show up for work unarmed.)
So, given my relatively angelic self-image, I was surprised, at a screening of “The Devil Wears Prada,” to find myself sympathizing with the devil — Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly, the Anna Wintoury editrix of a top fashion magazine who is described as “a notorious sadist, and not in the good way.”
Is it so wrong of Miranda to expect her assistant, Andy Sachs (played by Anne Hathaway), to know how to spell Gabbana, reach Donatella and ban freesia? Is it so bad to want help getting a warm rhubarb compote for Michael Kors? Or to have an assistant who knows what an eyelash curler is?
This was, after all, the business they had chosen, as they say in “The Godfather.” It might be heresy for Bergdorf blondes and Park Avenue princesses like the Sykes sisters — Plum, Peach or Apricot — but it doesn’t matter if my assistant mixes up camisoles and cardigans in conversation, as she has been known to do. Here in the nation’s capital, size 6 is not “the new 14,” but a cause for celebration; a knowledge of cloture, not cloche, matters; eyelashes attract less attention than earmarks; and red Fox TV is more essential than red fox Fendi.
It’s not that I agree with the contention, espoused in the movie, that if the malevolent Miranda were a man, no one would notice anything except how good she was at her job. Certainly, strong women are more easily caricatured as castrating and shrill termagants and harridans. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some powerful women who are bullies, just as there are male bosses who are bullies. The Devil can wear Timberland.
It just seems better, this time, to side with the Wicked Stepmother than the opportunistic Cinderella.
After a high-fashion makeover, Andy — the character based on Lauren Weisberger, the tall, lithe blonde who worked as an assistant to Anna Wintour at Vogue before writing her whiny hiss-and-tell best-seller — decides to reject the high-end porn of the fashion world, where everyone is “one stomach flu away” from their goal weight, and return to her real values.
Unfortunately, this Cinderella’s primary value turned out to be voyeurism, profiting by keeping her nose to the glass and poaching off her glamorous former boss’s life. The only thing worse than the Devil who wears Prada is a person who profits from the fact that the Devil wears Prada.
Even with a dazzling performance by lovely Meryl Streep, who tucks the picture in her Chanel bag and runs off on her Manolo stilettos with it, “the story is glossy junk begat of just-plain junk,” as Lisa Schwarzbaum writes in Entertainment Weekly.
“The Devil Wears Prada” is not “All About Eve.” As a friend noted, it’s more like Rona Jaffe’s “The Best of Everything” with fashion, a fun look at what it’s like to be young, servile and breathlessly climbing in Manhattan, dealing with a tough woman for a boss and the struggle not to let your professional ambition supersede your romantic ambition. (Except for Faye Dunaway in “Network,” Hollywood de-eroticizes women in power.)
Eve Harrington plotted to be rich and famous by becoming Margo Channing. In this age of media exhibitionism, Lauren Weisberger plotted to be rich and famous by writing about how she didn’t want to become Anna Wintour. The enterprise is no less vampiric, second-order cruelty as opposed to first-order cruelty.
Whether Anna and Miranda are sacred monsters, at least they are themselves. It’s more admirable to be the beast to which the parasite attaches itself than to be the parasites
Crossposted at BIO
http://www.teambio.org/
A great post, Pia, and a worthy topic among men as well as women.
The problem, I believe, is that 21st Century American Society has — thanks to ubiquitous cultural icons like Donald Trump and Martha Stewart — adopted a warped sense of leadership. The popular, tyrannical images of the likes of Donald and Martha teach that financial success, for men and women, follows from tyrannical and mean-spirited behavior.
Leading isn’t about getting specific people to do what you want by browbeating them. Its about getting everyone to want the same thing, the RIGHT thing, and motivating them to work cooperatively for it. A real leader follows an ethical compass and is driven by a kind heart. The loud voice and cudgel are the power-tools of idiots with money.
There are philosophical alternatives, e.g. –
http://www.greenleaf.org
Thanks.
I liked the book “The Devil…” mostly becasue I’ve been in similar positions of being sub-servient to men, but more importantly, to women as well. When I was young I put up and shut up because I needed the paycheck. Most recently, I worked as a nanny in between teaching jobs. The women was a thirty-something lawyer who couldn’t change a diaper or wipe her daughter’s face. I put up with it because I fell in love with her kid, but she fired me because she needed my salary to renovate her house….two weeks before Christmas. I guess I relate to these women.
Maureen Dowd is part of the Washington “cocktail circuit” so of course she wouldn’t know anything about real life. She’s hott, though. Funny voice, sort of kills that.
I remember hearing Maureen Dowd on NPR a while back and she was complaining about loneliness and not being able to develop relationships… Just the way she talked about it, I thought, “ain’t nobody gonna want to be with you, lady.” That said, I do enjoy her writing and insights, I wouldn’t want to work for or live with her. But that’s true for a lot of folks.
I like “A’s” comments. Leadership is about casting a vision and having others buy into it to make everyone successful. Leadership isn’t about getting folks to do what you think they need to be doing–that’s dicatorship.
I just broke out in a cold sweat.
Me — making it front and center on “Courting Destiny.” And me — with no acceptance speach prepared.
Seriously, there is not one ounce of sarcasm in that. (Those who know me will know how surprising that is, I bleed sarcasm.)
To have it followed by Maureen Dowd is like sparklely icing on the cake.
More than one person is pushing me to submit to OP Ed in the NYTimes, etc.. and was having the conversation with the Hubster about how NYT has MD and she is so very brillant, etc.
Please understand that I am NOT putting myself up on a pedestal with the likes of her brillance.
Just basking in the glow of what seems like a little thing to most but a very big honor for me.
Thanks Pia!
Keep doing what you do and never stop.
Dawn