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R E C E N T L Y

Young, black and too white
By Karen Grigsby Bates
Social clubs for black children are making a comeback among middle-class parents who fear their kids are losing their roots roots
(05/15/98)

Death comes for the bishop
By Sallie Tisdale
Does the murder of a leading Guatemalan human rights activist no longer qualify as news in the United States?
(05/14/98)

Raging hormones
By Polly Shulman
Honest, respectful books that tell kids what they really want to know about sex
(05/13/98)

Les birds et les bees
By Debra S. Ollivier
When it comes to teaching their toddlers about sex, they really do do things differently in France
(05/12/98)

The single-mom scam
By Douglas Cruickshank
"About a Boy" with a yen for single moms
(05/11/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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WHERE THE GALS ARE | PAGE 2 OF 2

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After repeated exposures, the lonely gal heroine -- whose love life never works out, who pines for the wrong guys and who's having a really good day when she can scrape together enough shreds of self-respect to tell one of them off -- starts to feel just as suffocatingly limited as Martha Stewart. It's as if the icons of femininity that women create for themselves must be either flawless, like Martha, or a total mess. "I feel ashamed and repulsive" scribbles Bridget Jones after a Cathy-esque junk food binge, "I can actually feel the fat splurging out from my body" -- this despite the fact that she weighs a perfectly normal 130 pounds. She can't allow for, or live with, any middle ground between fashion-model slender and "flabby body flobbering around."

For Bridget, feminist ideals likewise mean either emulating an impossibly detached "inner poise" or indulging in sodden they're-all-bastards raging at the local pub with her pal Sharon. This impasse is partly the heritage of the ham-fisted cultural analysis of feminism's second wave, which devolved into op-ed page homilies about "good role models" and "strong women" without ever getting at the root of the problem. Surprisingly, sometimes tackling the problem can be as easy as learning from the other side. For example, pop culture is just as full of idealized images of masculinity -- take James Bond, again, who looks, dresses, fights, loves, shoots and drives better than any real guy ever could. But men don't seem to have the same love/hate relationship with Bond that women have with supermodels. They can walk out of the latest 007 (or Bruce Willis, or Arnold Schwarzenegger) movie, well-entertained and with a bounce in their step -- not muttering bitterly about "unrealistic standards." While masculinity's more excessive demands can lead to chronic social woes ranging from war to domestic violence, the average guy is happy just to win every once in a while, while the average woman wants to be perfect.

To maintain the appearance of thinglike perfection presented by someone like Stewart or Kate Moss requires constant vigilance and unending effort. That's a lot of time to spend working on yourself, but Martha's not the only one logging in lots of time with her own navel. In one episode of "Ally McBeal" the Zeitgeist's darling collars a co-worker in the powder room and launches into a litany of disappointment. She expected, by age 28, to be married, pregnant with her first child and on track to make partner at her law firm, she wails. "Ally," the other woman replies, "can you tell me what it is that makes your problems so much bigger than everybody else's?" Ally takes a deep breath, squares her plucky little shoulders and says, "They're mine." In fact, in "Ally McBeal," everybody else's problems are always Ally's problems. Every case her firm tries is just another opportunity for her to reflect on Issues Important to Ally, whether it's monogamy, romance or her own biological clock. Whenever she blunders into someone else's personal dilemma, the conflict turns out to be little more than a Lesson for Ally to Learn.

For it turns out that daunting perfection and chronic self-loathing have something in common (beside their complete alienation from reality): They both require precisely the same massive amount of self-absorption. Fielding's "Bridget Jones' Diary" riffs on Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" to the extent that the good egg Bridget finally winds up with is named Mark Darcy. But, although Bridget lives a much less constrained life than Elizabeth Bennet, reading about her feels much more claustrophobic because Bridget's mind and self are so much smaller. By the end of Fielding's book, it's not plausible that a brilliant "human rights attorney" like Mark Darcy would really fall for Bridget; she's certainly no Elizabeth Bennet. Of course, Mark's own work only interests Bridget to the extent that it labels him a stellar catch, bearing the imprimatur of liberal do-goodism in addition to having all that money.

Bridget begins each diary entry with meticulous accounts of her weight and the calories, "alcohol units" and cigarettes she consumes. Like Ally McBeal's washroom confession, bringing this kind of secret, compulsive self-monitoring into the open air wins an immediate, knowing laugh, but the revelation quickly begins to curdle once exposed. At some point, you start to wonder whether this kind of humor isn't just a way of getting comfortable with the neurotic legacy and restricted worldview of conventional femininity, when just 20 years ago women dreamed of kicking off those traces. That wry, isn't-that-just-like-life grin segues so easily into a shrug; how could life, then, be any other way?
SALON | May 18, 1998