I like reading different people’s takes on the same thing. That’s why blogs are great. At their best, they represent individual points-of-view and the Internet allows access to a whole lot of those points. Sadly, many people seem to like to read a lot of blogs that are very close in outlook. They like to get variations on the same view, the one they already hold.
Caitlin Flanagan irritates me. She seems the sort of writer who is perfect for magazine editors who are looking for female conservative views that aren’t as nutso as Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin. She’s a conservative who comes across sounding like a moderate. She’s almost sounds kind of “with it.” She ticks me off because she seems (to me) to repeatedly commit what I consider a cardinal sin: The Universalization of the Individual Experience.
It goes like this: “I went to summer camp every year for 13 years and it was great; therefore, every kid ought to go.” Or “I was forced to go to summer camp once and it was horribly traumatic — no child should go.” Or “Some of my friends have been doing this activity, so it’s sweeping the nation.” Your experience is your own. That’s great. It may or may not represent what’s going on in the larger community. The way to prove it is through evidence, not anecdotes.
I don’t mind conservative thought, but I hate sloppy thinking.
Flanagan has written against the notion of mothers working outside of the home; she has also written in favor of nannies. Let’s ignore the inconsistency for a moment: What if you cannot afford to stay home or afford to hire a nanny? (For more criticism on these articles, read here and here.)
Back to my original point about how blogs can reveal different takes on the same issue. Flanagan recently wrote a piece in The Atlantic Monthly about the trend of teenaged girls giving blow jobs to boys. Over at PopLicks, Oliver Wang criticized her use of CDC statistics and her views on hip-hop. At Spot-on, Chris Nolan was upset by Flanagan’s anti-feminist stance and the view that it’s only bad that girls engage in sexual behavior; Flanagan wasn’t worried about her boys doing so.
At the STATS site, this post notes that statistics for teen sex and drug use are down. This fact sheet (PDF) from the Kaiser Family Foundation similarly reports a decline in sexual activity for teens. If I read this correctly, intercourse has continued to decline, but oral sex has risen in incidence, perhaps as a substitute for intercourse. A few things to keep in mind. This data is from 2002, so it may or may not provide an accurate reflection of today. Then, the National Center for Health Statistics reports:
There are no trend data for females. Trend data for males suggest that no large changes in these behaviors have occurred since 1995.
Flanagan’s article focuses almost completely on female activity. If there are no trend data, how do we know what the former rate for oral sex performed by young females was?
As a dinner guest said to me this weekend, “Our culture really doesn’t like teenagers, do they?” Quite correct. There was a time when no one paid any attention to the young. However, throughout the 20th Century, it seems that there were periodic scares about Youth Gone Wild. For example, following a small series of school shootings, school and the authorities clamped down on all kinds of behavior because of the potential threat of violence, despite the fact the statistics for such violence in schools has been decreasing and is actually quite low.
Companies love the young as a source of income. Society hates them because… Hell, I don’t know. I raised two teenagers as a step-father. I was in my Thirties at the time. Is it really that hard to remember what it’s like to be a teenager? Like many endeavors, such as being an opinion writer like Flanagan, it requires two skills: empathy and objectivity.
Without empathy, you can’t understand the other person’s point-of-view. If you can’t begin by understanding why your opposition takes the stand it does, you won’t do a very good job of analyzing the issue at hand, whether it’s welfare reform, gun control or teen sex. If you don’t have objectivity, then you’re likely to assume that your own personal little bubble has any meaning to anybody else. I’m sure it’s very nice in Flanagan World, but I don’t live there. Wouldn’t even like to visit.
Read more about her here, here, here, and here.
Read Flanagan’s essays on why married people don’t have sex, why Dr. Laura Schlessinger is great, why teen girls have gone crazy for trips downtown, and why nannies are so great that every mother should get one! (sub. req.)
4 Responses
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LondonLee Says:
As I used to work at The Atlantic (and designed several of the articles you linked to) I feel I should defend Caitlin a little. While I disagree with a lot of what she writes you should note that she is a very entertaining writer (ditto Hitchens) and I’d rather read someone who writes well who might not have the same world view as me than some dullard spouting liberal cliches.
For a start, her Dr. Laura piece wasn’t a rave, she agreed with some things she said but also pointed out the woman’s hypocrisy on quite a few points. Her lengthy piece on Nannies wasn’t about how every woman should have one, it was about the awkward position having a nanny puts well-off liberal feminists in.
As for “Flanagan has written against the notion of mothers working outside of the home” – do you really believe that kids aren’t better off with a parent at home? To point that out isn’t the same as saying that women (or men) should be made to stay home. As a Lefty myself I find it sad how some on “my” side react when old liberal truisms (women have to work to find fullfillment) are challenged. That doesn’t necessarily make Caitlin a “conservative” you know.
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The Pop View Says:
Ah, hell. One more set of quotes.
From Flanagan’s essay “To Hell With All That” (The New Yorker, July 5, 2004):
Afternoons alone in the house were often frightening. It did not help that I am a hysteric by nature.
Being on my own recognizance was supposed to toughen me up, to deliver me from my mother’s crippling cosseting and vault me to new levels of independence — not an unreasonable theory. If I had had a different temperament, it might have worked.
And from here:
…one letter-writer observes that “Flanagan seems to believe that, because she was miserable when her mother went out to work, all children everywhere feel the same… Having worked her mother’s choice into a sad psychodrama, she writes that for mothers—not fathers, a subject she barely mentions—the decision to work outside the home ‘will always be the stuff of grinding anxiety and regret.’ For her maybe, but not for everyone.”
The Universalization of the Individual Experience.
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The Pop View Says:
As stated above, she has a way of sounding like she’s criticizing something, while actually (ultimately) praising it. To illustrate, here are quotes from a review of one of Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s books:
She’s a fishwife and a bit of a kook, a woman given to comically dramatic changes of heart and habit, but Dr. Laura gives some of the best advice about marriage and family life available on the radio, or perhaps anywhere in popular American culture. I say this somewhat wearily, for it is no easy task defending this woman.
For the first few years that I listened to her show, I never failed to be impressed by the notion that old-fashioned morality – inflexible and unforgiving – is sufficient unto any FUBAR situation human beings can dream up. I didn’t always agree with her: she opposes legal abortion, which I support; she’s against premarital sex, of which I dimly recall being distinctly and unapologetically fond. She once harangued a mother who was clearly at sheer wits’ end that she shouldn’t hire an afternoon babysitter – advice I could hardly bear to listen to, I felt so keenly the mother’s desperation and exhaustion. But more than once I wondered if she might have been right about one or another of the points on which we differed.
She also disapproves of Dr. Laura’s stance on the role of men. Note the irony — many of these same points have been made against Flanagan, since she wrote these words in 2004.
And [Dr. Laura] used to be an avid proponent of fathers who stayed home with their children while their wives worked; she didn’t care which of the parents raised the kids, so long as they didn’t resort to daycare. But The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands gives me the impression that she’s taken the final step toward conventional ultra-conservative thinking: there isn’t a single mention of a stay-at-home dad this time. This is a bit of a letdown, since it makes her less of an iconoclast. The book is also undermined by her old bugaboo, hypocrisy. Men need to be breadwinners in a marriage, she says, although she makes millions of dollars a year while her husband – whose career had faltered so severely before his wife’s success that the couple was on the verge of bankruptcy – is employed only as her manager. Women ought to cook for their men, but it has been widely reported that her husband does all the cooking (he also converted to Orthodox Judaism; the possible switch back could be a load off for him in the kitchen). Men need old-fashioned respect in their homes, we are told, but Laura kept her maiden name, and their son bears his mother’s surname and not his father’s.
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The Pop View Says:
What I called “The Universalization of the Individual Experience,” James Wolcott (as usual) expresses more elegantly.
[Adam] Gopnik tends to universalize his impressions, to generalize from his insulation.