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A woman has the right to pretend she’s being raped by a
pirate if that’s what she wants to pretend. Very few people
act out their fantasies, except in
Northern California
.
-- Anne
Rice
Pussy
Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alekhina and
Yekaterina Samutsevich sit in a glass cage at a court room in
Moscow
. (photo by Alexander
Zemliannichenko for Associated Press)
FEMINISM
[Feminism] has been “abducted,” as [Arlie Russell
Hochschild] has put it… by the logic and demands of the
marketplace — what she provocatively calls “the religion
of capitalism.” Feminism has coincided with a drastic
lengthening of work hours and a steep decline in job security,
and in
America
those stressors have not been alleviated by social
supports like paid family leave and universal child care, at
least not in comparison with most other Western nations. As a
result, too many bonds of family and community are left untied
by anxious, overworked couples, too many familial functions
have to be subcontracted, and too many children perceive
themselves as burdens. (One of Hochschild’s finest essays,
also published elsewhere, is called “Children as
Eavesdroppers”; it describes how children listen closely to
their parents’ haggling over child care, and conclude that
they are unwanted.) Feminists once dreamed that the work of
mothering would be properly valued, maybe even reimbursed,
once some portion of it had been redistributed to fathers.
Instead, a lot of it is being handed off to strangers.
-- Judith Shulevitz, reviewing Hochschild’s The
Outsourced Self in the NY Times
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