Fortini has a point: the genre of autobiographical writing be pretty dull if everyone wrote about how healthy and self-actualized they were. And, as Fortini's many examples illustrate, confessional journalism is neither wholly new nor wholly limited to women. However, there's a pretty big middle ground between requiring writers to pass a mental health test and applauding "My Boom And Bust Boobs."

Fortini writes,

Freeman not only frets about the women who write confessional journalism, but she also frets about the women who consume it. These are "vulnerable readers" for whom sentiments about disordered eating "are surely just as dangerous and potentially influential as the photos of the skinny models the journalist professes to abhor," to quote Freeman. Journalism of this stripe supposedly makes women appear "self-hating" and "self-obsessed." But why should a female journalist writing an essay be required "to open a window into what life is like for women today?" Why can't she write a singular account of herself, and expect that readers will recognize it as such? Why not trust that they will perceive what is useful or interesting or even damning about an article? How boring if all pieces of writing were made to meet some standard of exemplary behavior and thought. I say, if some women want to write about their miseries, let them. And let readers judge for themselves.

Certainly readers should judge each piece of writing for themselves. But that doesn't make writers above criticism. Saying that a writer bears no responsibility for the effects of her work — that laying any blame on her or her editor is tantamount to "not trusting" readers — is a little like Oprah's claim that she doesn't mean to influence her viewers in any direction. When a writer publishes in a public forum, her voice carries farther than that of an average private citizen. She shouldn't have to speak for all women, but she can no longer claim that her words have zero power. And readers aren't stupid or untrustworthy if they take what she says to heart.

It's true that if writers couldn't write about their pain, we'd be missing a lot of great literature. But there's a difference between exploring one's misery and offering oneself up as a sacrificial lamb to a culture that, on some level, wants to see women suffer. We wouldn't say that Liz Jones, who has previously written intelligently on fashion and weight, shouldn't discuss her struggles with her own body. But her chronicle of a ridiculously ill-advised, gimmicky "treatment" for her anorexia, and her relapse into the depths of the disorder, essentially turns her mental illness into a stunt. This isn't self-examination — it's self-mutilation.

At least Jones tells her readers to get comfortable with their bodies in order to escape her fate. Other practitioners of female confessional journalism have more damaging messages. Under the guise of "facing facts," Zoe Lewis says her choice to pursue career over family has made her miserable — and implies that it will make readers miserable too. She writes, "If you find a great guy, don't be afraid to settle down and have kids because there isn't anything to miss out on that you can't go back and do later - apart from having kids," and, more upsettingly, "every day, minute, hour that goes by makes you older and more desperate." Lewis isn't just describing her experience and letting readers judge for themselves — she's giving explicit advice, advice colored by a jaundiced perspective on feminism and life. The trouble with her piece, and with Lori Gottlieb's, is that they take misery as their vantage point, offering wisdom to women from the depths of of self-loathing. And while self-loathing may sell papers, it doesn't help make good decisions.

Debate still rages about how "confessional" Sylvia Plath's poems really were, but some lines from "Lady Lazarus" leap to mind here. Plath wrote,

There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart—--
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

Plath was certainly aware of the mass appeal of female pain, but she may have been aware, too, of the damage that regular consumption of this pain can do. There is a charge for the eyeing of Jones's or Lewis's scars — an image of helpless, self-hating femininity that we cannot un-see once we have seen it. No matter how smart or self-possessed we are, what we read affects us, and the defenders of confessional journalism are disingenuous if they deny that.

Boobs, Bulimia And Breakups [Broadsheet]

Earlier: Female Confessional Journalism And The Business Of Self-Hate

Upon seeing a magazine cover of Lindsay and Sam Ronson, Samuels says, "That’s the addiction to fame…I mean, I have nothing against being with a woman, but it’s the selling of the magazine cover. It’s just another thing to fill the void." What's more is that Samuels sees this behavior as above board. “He was able to go on TV and not ever cross the line when Lindsay checked into Promises. There was a total media blitz for two weeks, and you don’t get a lot of opportunities like that. He wasn’t her therapist, anyway; he’s the executive director," Samuels' assistant claims.

And Samuels is all about seizing opportunities to make cash: Wonderland is almost $60,000 a month for a single room, and of course it doens't take insurance. Unlike other famous rehabs like the Betty Ford Clinic, Wonderland patients are allowed to have cell phones and are allowed to come and go as they please. According to Fortini, "They are taken on shopping trips, and are allowed to bring their dogs. Actors are sometimes released to work on films; musicians can travel for tours."

It's basically like summer camp, except with less weed. This is rehab for the uber-wealthy exclusively, but even in this rarified environment, celebrities get special treatment. According to one Wonderland patient who was there at the same time as Hurricane Lindsay in early 2007 (before her public relapse and subsequent treatment elsewhere):

I said, ‘Well, I think some people are a little bothered that their program and their stay at Wonderland is being negatively impacted by this craziness and why rules don’t apply to her that apply to us. I mean, there is some resentment building up.’ And he said, ‘You know what, Mike, I hear you, but we have to cater our program and our treatment center to each individual to make it work for them. Because if we didn’t do that for this individual, she would have been gone on Day One.’

And who cares anyway, because, according to Samuels, himself a former addict and the son of a wealthy, politically prominent New Yorker, his plush rehab doesn't even work! "I’m not a believer that treatment centers save people’s lives," Samuels tells the New Yorker, "I think if you’ve got a really good treatment center you can go a long way toward helping a person, but at the end of the day it’s not about the treatment center. It’s about the individual, and about whether or not they’re at that place to change.”

Of course, it's true of all treatments that the individual has to want to make a change for the rehab to be successful. But, as Dr. Drew told Fortini, "The more you cater to an addict’s demands, the more you support their disease." How is a celebrity going to learn that their behavior has consequences when they're treated like deities, even in rehab?

Special Treatment [New Yorker]

While Clinton's oft-proclaimed "bitchiness" was certainly not a positive development, Fortini argues that "It was far more destructive, we would learn, for a woman to be labeled a fool." However, Fortini's premise made me wonder if, as Barack Obama defied the negative stereotypes applied to African Americans, a woman would have to defy all negative stereotypes of powerful females to get elected. Or, to put it another way: if Sarah Palin had been brilliant, we would have been in a lot of trouble.

"Here was a woman who—even if you didn’t agree with her politics—seemed to have achieved what so many of us were struggling for: an enviable balance between career and family," Fortini says. And indeed, Sarah Palin is poised and pretty and appropriately "female" in a way that is not threatening — nothing like Hillary Clinton. She defies the stereotype that women who seek power are ball breakers. However, Palin also defies notions of prissiness and weakness with her searing, borderline-cruel rhetoric and her much-touted moose killing.

Thank goodness for those of us who like our abortions legal, Palin's "blithe ignorance extended from foreign policy to the symbolic value of her candidacy. By stepping into the spotlight unprepared, Palin reinforced some of the most damaging and sexist ideas of all: that women are undisciplined in their thinking; that we are distracted by domestic concerns or frivolous pursuits like shopping; that we are not smart enough, or not serious enough, for the important jobs," Fortini explains.

However, I'm not convinced that Palin's inadequacy has set women back. Fortini quotes a study that said 69% percent of people think men and women are equally able to lead, and then follows up by noting that 60% of people thought Palin wasn't qualified to be President. To think that one woman has dismantled all the progress other women have made gives her too much credit. But, like all non-white, non-Christian males running for office, at first one must transcend stereotypes to become electable. As many have said before, if Barack Obama had been divorced, or Michelle had been a pill-popper like Cindy McCain, or if a teenage Malia Obama had turned up pregnant out of wedlock, you can be sure he would not have made it anywhere near the Oval Office. For a woman to get to break that ol' glass ceiling, she's going to have to do the same.

The 'Bitch' And The 'Ditz' [NYM]

"...In our reluctance to appear nagging, scolding, hectoring, or petty, many of us have made a practice of enduring minor affronts not realizing that a failure to decry the smaller indignities can foster blindness to the larger ones," writes Fortini, who, three paragraphs later, explains that her "first experience" with sexism occurred when she was asked by a high school debate coach to loosen the bun in her hair). "We then find ourselves shocked when one of the smartest, most qualified women ever to run for public office is called 'fishwife-y' by a female pundit on national television."

Who exactly is this "we" Fortini is talking about? Are the young, well-educated women quoted in these articles — most of them economically secure and white — really so shocked to discover that misogyny exists, even among their seemingly-sensitive male (and female) peers? You can argue that young women's failure to see the pervasiveness of sexism in this society underscores the fact that the work done by second-wave feminists in the 60s and 70s has paid off, and maybe you'd be right. But I'll go out on a limb and say the problem isn't that women are reluctant to "decry the smaller indignities" of being female, but that a lot of them seem so willfully blind to them in the first place. (Talk about the dumbing down of America.) Maybe that — not the identity politics in the race for the Democratic nomination — is a good thing for elite, solipsistic, newly-outraged Americans, female and male, to start focusing on.

The Feminist Reawakening [NY Magazine]
Hey Obama Boys: Back Off Already! [Salon]

Earlier: Some Men Who Hate Hillary Are Sexist. We Get It. Now Let's Move On
Ms. Matriarch To Daughter: When Push Comes To Shove, [Why] Can't You Vote For A Woman?

That's right, it wasn't anorexia! Turns out she had a whole bunch of Entamoeba Histolytica , tropical parasitic protozoa she'd contracted in Belize, digesting her food for her! Ewwwww!

Anyway on a side note, she describes herself as someone who worked in "fashion magazines," but when you Google her it seems like she was also once on staff at the New York Review Of Books — which is sort of the annoying part: literati dudes actually dig waify anorexic types, in my experience, more than bankers. Because they are little and not very manly and it's not as brazen as digging girls with weaves and implants and also it's cool to hate on fat people. God I hate New York!