Why Women Aren't Cooking

In his interesting cover story in the Sunday New York Times Magazine Michael Pollan asks, "But here’s what I don’t get: How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking."

Pollan notes that it's not just women working outside the home that have turned to food prepared outside the home, or processed foods, but stay-at-home moms, too. (There's an accepted presumption that it's women who should be doing the cooking; although he does write that when it comes to the popular act of grilling, men do more of it.)

Pollan has struck upon an interesting phenomenon. But my sense is that he isn't in touch with the pressures on modern mothers, with the feeling mothers have of never having enough time in the day to tend to their children and to themselves.

Pollan does offer several reasons for the decline in home-cooking:

"That decline has several causes: women working outside the home; food companies persuading Americans to let them do the cooking; and advances in technology that made it easier for them to do so. Cooking is no longer obligatory, and for many people, women especially, that has been a blessing. But perhaps a mixed blessing, to judge by the culture’s continuing, if not deepening, fascination with the subject. It has been easier for us to give up cooking than it has been to give up talking about it — and watching it."

But Pollan doesn't focus on what I think is at the heart of the reason for why women aren't cooking. He writes: "Curiously, the year Julia Child went on the air — 1963 — was the same year Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression. You may think of these two figures as antagonists, but that wouldn’t be quite right. They actually had a great deal in common, as Child’s biographer, Laura Shapiro, points out, and addressed the aspirations of many of the same women. Julia. . .tried to show the sort of women who read “The Feminine Mystique” that, far from oppressing them, the work of cooking approached in the proper spirit offered a kind of fulfillment and deserved an intelligent woman’s attention. (A man’s too.)"

So there has been a sea change since Friedan published "The Feminine Mystique." What's changed is that that generation of women who came of age in the years right after her book came out, the mothers and mothers-in-law of young marrieds today, did not become big cooks. Cooking and housework was not valued. So in large part their daughters did not learn to cook, and their sons not only did not learn to cook, but did not value home-cooked food. They prefer to eat out. So if their wives cook, their husbands don't appreciate the effort that went into it. And what woman wants to feel under-appreciated?

Pollan asks why we then turn to watching Rachael Ray and Martha Stewart and other TV chefs. Because we value work, and Ray and those like her are earning money by cooking--and that's valued by our society.

Another thing that he mentions but doesn't focus on is the great amount of mess produced by home-cooking. Cooking can be fun and pleasurable and give one a great feeling of accomplishment even if one's children and one's husband doesn't appreciate it as much as one would like. But cleaning up afterwards doesn't provide the same pleasures. If the woman is left with the task, she'll just feel even more under-appreciated.

I've seen plenty of gourmet-looking kitchens that are always spotlessly clean because the woman of the house doesn't cook. And who blames them? If their husbands prefers to order-in, it doesn't make sense for them to cook.

There's also the fact that stay-at-home moms spend a lot of time schlepping their kids to activities after school, so it's much less time-consuming to turn to prepared food.

Op-Ed on Judge Prohibiting Publication of Book Featuring an Aged Holden Caulfield

I just published an opinion piece on Findlaw.com arguing that the district court judge should have found that a Swedish writer's novel was a fair use of Catcher in the Rye.
I ordered the book from Amazon UK last week. Seems a writer on Slate had the same idea. It does the beg the question of how much power the courts really have when one can so easily order a book through the Internet, which, in effect, overrides the judge's enjoining of the book in the U.S. I wonder if there are other examples of how the Internet, by breaking down traditional commerce borders between nations, has minimized courts' control over the enforcement of their rulings.

New TV show "Hung" and "the Body Guy"

I saw the first episode of "Hung" last night, and it reminded me of a conversation I had with Professor Peter Lehman, co-author with Susan Hunt of The Body Guy in the Movies.

Lehman's book describes the emergence of a new genre of films in the 90s that feature a character they term "the body guy". As he explains, "In these films, the body guy is frequently pitted against a mind guy, someone associated with the work of the mind, as opposed to the body, someone typically upper class or educated or a professional person, and the body guy is usually associated with the land or in an urban setting with blue collar work, and in this new genre of work there is an intensification of the sexuality of the body guy, who has a kind of sexual magic that is so powerful that he has the ability to awaken sexuality, and it is always a beautiful woman who is always married to or engaged to a mind guy who is inadequate to engage her, and she discovers this sexual magic the body guy who can fulfill her in a way her successful mind guy cannot."

The series "Hung" well-embodies this archetype. The lead is a school teacher whose wife has left him for a more successful dermatologist. His house (which is dwarfed by a snotty male lawyer's new McMansion next door) suffers significant damages in a fire and he is reduced to asking his ex-wife for a loan, but is turned down, so he has to live in a tent. He resorts to deciding that his skill or his gift is his large penis, and proceeds to try to figure out how to market himself.

Why are we seeing a rise in the "body guy"? As Lehman says, "What we see happening is a kind of something that’s very complicated now because we are living in a world where more and more power and real success for men lies for them in learning to develop their mind and to succeed with their mind and yet these films seem to send out an opposite kind of image that nothing is more powerful or enticing than the body and specifically the penis and this notion of male sexuality as defined by this kind of magical sexual performance that the 'body guy' can deliver, as if there is a belief out there that somehow if you become educated, if you are smart, if you are successful, that that takes you away form your sexuality in a way."

It's an attempt to assuage rising male anxieties about achieving financial success in today's economy.

Penis Imagery Rears its Head again in Recent Movies/TV

Last May I wrote on my blog and in an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune about how images of penises were making their way into mainstream movies, mainly in ones by Judd Apatow, and how underlying this were a rise in male anxieties, hence the projection writ large of their penises on the big screen. I argued that we were seeing a transition from the "melodramatic" penis imagery of the 1990s, as coined by Professor Peter Lehman in his book "Running Scared," think of revelatory moments of penis imagery in "Boogie Nights" or "Madame Butterfly" to the casual revelation for laughs of the penis in movies like "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" and "Harold and Kumar".

I'd argue that a rise in male anxieties due to the recession are at the heart of this increase in "casual" penis imagery in film and TV. Compare the frank relevation of bits of the actor's penis in the ending shots of "The Hangover" with the playful opening "peekaboo" montage shots of the opening credits of The Austin Powers movie, when obstructions keep getting in the way of the audience seeing Austin's penis.

I haven't seen any press on "The Hangover" mention the closing scenes, which are actually images saved on a digital camera of the leads' forgotten bachelor night in Las Vegas that we, the audience, are "allowed" to see before the characters delete them. Thrown in the midst of those largely benign images are a few jarring shots of Zach Galifianakis, playing Alan, getting a blow job from an older woman, with the head of his penis visible in some.

This is a movie about a bachelor night that is, of course, solely told from a male point of view, so the assumption is that the movie is intended for "the male gaze," for a quasi-adolescent male audience ready to laugh at male hijinks. But the fact is that many women make up the audience of this film. So to have these images forced on you at the end felt, to me, like a bit like an act of aggression: I didn't really want to see this actor's penis!

It's interesting that nude imagery of women in films, especially comedic ones like this film, are always of beautiful women, whose bodies flaunt a high level of perfection, while in contrast, here we see the genitalia of a not highly attractive actor, an average-looking guy. These images actually felt aggressive, as if it's the male psyche asserting itself, forcing the audience (the females in the audience?) to take a look at this ordinary guy's penis, (as opposed to say, the privates of Brad Pitt.

There was another moment in the movie when a penis is played for laughs, without any aggression, when the actor of Asian descent hops out from the trunk of a car without clothes on and we see a mess of pubic hair, no penis at all.

More later--thoughts on the new HBO show "Hung."

My Theory on Why Critics "Disgusted" by The Kindly Ones

And now I just read Sara Nelson's take on The Kindly Ones on the WSJ.com: she writes, "I'm not knocking those readers who found his book rewarding (for my part, I gave up in disgust). But I can't shake the feeling that his novel, like [Britney Spear's] as-yet-untitled , unwritten memoir have more in common than might at first appear. They both lean toward prurience; their publishers are hoping for (and counting on) the seemingly bottomless American appetite for scandalous attitudes and behavior. But Spears' book, at least, "is what it is" -- a celebrity bio -- and may well sell to her fans. "The Kindly Ones," on the other hand, will suffer in the marketplace for its lack of transparency and its pretentions to art."

Like Kakutani, Nelson dislikes the book, finding it "disgust"ing. But what she actually objects to is the horrors of the Holocaust that Littell describes in detail--that's what is disgusting to her, not any prurience intrinsic to the fiction.

I find her comparison, her equation of the Holocaust and Spears, to be disgusting. And what she's saying doesn't make sense. An "American appetite for scandalous attitudes and behavior"? The whole point of the Kindly Ones is that it shows what really occurred in the Holocaust, the horrors that ordinary men are capable of inflicting on others in the name of peer pressure and career ambition--but Americans' don't have a bottomless appetite for imbibing books about this. The American appetite is bottomless for Shoah stories about hope and optimism (unless a celebrity tale of doom like Spears'). Nelson is very knowledgeable about publishing trends, but she should have finished the 900-page book before feeling competent to comment on it.

My Book Review in The Forward

Here is my book review of "The Kindly Ones," posted online tonight and in the paper edition this Friday.

Michiko Kakutani gets Holocaust book all wrong

First, I want to say I love Kakutani: she's always so perceptive, so incisive. So I was surprised to read her review last week of Jonathan Littell's new novel (newly translated from the French, that is) The Kindly Ones in the Times last week:

"The novel’s gushing fans, however, seem to have mistaken perversity for daring, pretension for ambition, an odious stunt for contrarian cleverness. Willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent, “The Kindly Ones” — the title is a reference to the Furies, otherwise known in Greek mythology as the Eumenides — is an overstuffed suitcase of a book, consisting of an endless succession of scenes in which Jews are tortured, mutilated, shot, gassed or stuffed in ovens, intercut with an equally endless succession of scenes chronicling the narrator’s incestuous and sadomasochistic fantasies."

"An endless succession of scenes in which Jews are tortured, mutilated, shot, gassed or stuffed in ovens"--isn't that a description of much of the horrors Jews suffered in the Holocaust? Sounds like Kakutani doesn't want to read about that.

I have a review of the book coming out in The Forward next week. I write about how much of recent contemporary Holocaust fiction does not touch upon the reality of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust because it's as if readers don't want to read about it-they've been exposed to it enough, they want tellings of the Holocaust that are infused with hope, hence the likes of recent Hollywood film offerings. It's surprising that Kakutani falls into this camp.

Chicago Tribune op-ed today

The Tribune published my op-ed on imagery of women breast-feeding, which grew out of a blog post from last week.

More Thoughts on Octo-Mom vs Tot-Mom

I'm reminded of a quote I read a while ago in the New York Times, by Susan J. Douglas, author of The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women. She said, 'We have a long history in this culture of mother blame. Media images of the 'bad mother' serve to police all mothers. We still have a virgin-whore binary in American pop culture, and this governs motherhood as well." This virgin-whore binary can be seen in the polar opposite archetypes of the two stories that are captivating us right now.

Ironically, Nadya Suleman seems to have been trying to approach some idealized notion of the "good mother," of the mother who sacrifices all for her many children. But she took this idea too far, and it backfired on her. Suleman eerily has been trying to physically and psychically emulate Angelina Jolie, who herself has successfully co-opted the "good mother" image, adopting children of different races and ethnicities, one African, two Asian, so that she has become an uber-mother, which has changed her image from the punk girl who in 2000 kissed her brother at the Academy Awards and wore the blood of Billy Bob Thorton around her neck, making her more popular with the masses, especially women, than she was before she projected this image.