Says one of Aleksander's youthful friends of her particular CM, "Rarely do I hang up the phone with her and feel comforted. Usually, I feel anxiety and paralysis about the decisions that I need to make to avoid everything she warns me about." The Cautionary Matron is all about soul-baring, stories of disillusionment, failed relationships, the realities of marriage, the hazards of staying single. They write essays and books and star in sitcoms, and their message is: the reality's not all it's cracked up to be.

Aleksander interviews both a number of these professional confessors, as well as the younger women they've traumatized. Says writer Sandra Tsing Loh, who wrote memorably about her disillusionment with marriage, she and her ilk are moved to bare their souls,

I think because we're really surprised! In our 20s, the world was totally our oyster. All those fights had been fought. We weren't going to be '50s housewives, we were in college, we could pick and choose from a menu of careers, and there were all these interesting guys out there not like our dads. We were smart women who had a lot of options and made intelligent choices and that's why we're writing these pieces. We're shocked!...It must be very confusing...We were the protégés of old-guard feminists: ‘Don't have a baby, or if you must, have one, wait till your 40s.' We were sold more of a mission plan and now you guys … Well, sadly, it all seems like kind of a mess. There is no mission. Even stay-at-home moms feel unsuccessful unless they're canning their own marmalade and selling it on the Internet. You just have a bunch of drunk, depressed 45-year-old ladies going, ‘A-BLAH-BLAH-BLAH!'"

And, eulogizes one of the author's friends,

They are the first generation of women who were presented with choices...I think they are in the process of reflecting on a half-century of existence and are realizing that ‘having it all' was really a lie. Sometimes I think the idea of ‘having it all' can almost be more disempowering than ‘having it all' because one is never allowed enough time or energy to excel in one area of their life.

So, is this the way of the world? Are things really so bleak? And are we in a creepy, antagonistic us-and-them relationship with women half a generation older? Sometimes it seems that way. After all, why are these writers bent on saying all this, sharing all this, imparting this "advice?" Part of it's the natural instinct towards sharing and guiding, I really do believe. But I also think there's something else at work. This isn't really about helping people make better choices. It's not really about other women at all. Rather, it's about themselves. The same people thought they were fascinating and representative in their 20s, and nothing has changed as their lives have followed a course that wasn't novel when Flaubert and Tolstoy took it on in the 19th century. There was always disillusionment. There was always age. And there was always youth, just not openly deified. Sometimes today it seems like every generation wants to co-opt youth. Our parents did it - never again would Youth Culture match theirs. Now we're being told we'd better not even compete with those a few years older; these few writers have done youth, and it's overrated. If they can't have it, it sometimes seems, no one can.

So. If there's one lesson I think we can learn from this spate of self-congratulatory self-flagellation, I'd say it's not about when you marry or who you marry or whether or not you have kids. At the end of the day, each of these stories is personal and particular and it's the assumption of smug, knowing universality that's most annoying. Because what can you say? As writer Lori Gottlieb tells Aleksander, when younger women don't want to hear these hard truths,

I think it's part denial and part arrogance. I get it because I used to be that way in my 20s. I wanted the fairy tale. I thought that I deserved to have it, that it was my inalienable right! So that's the arrogance, and the denial is that they simply can't acknowledge that they, too, could become these older regretful women who wished they knew what was important in love earlier on. We're not envious-we're wiser.

Hey, she's the one who used the word "arrogance."

First of all, I don't think these women represent their generation, married women, anything. If I were their age, I think I'd quite resent being painted as a disillusioned, embittered casualty of idealism. These are squeaky wheels, and, dare I say it, narcissists who assume that their experiences must be universal. No one objected to Elizabeth Wurtzel's bizarre Elle I-hate-aging piece because we couldn't handle what she was dishing out, but because it was pretty clear her priorities, which she presented as universal, didn't speak for the rest of us. We weren't weirded out by Gottlieb's "Marry Him!" essay in the Atlantic because it burst our ideological bubble, but because it seemed flatly contradicted by so much reality.

And, assuming she is representative, what does Gottlieb want? For younger women to accept her words as law, throw in the towel, have kids/never have kids/settle/not settle and all-around admit that our lives are bound for disappointment? The piece is rife with young women getting depressed by their elders' gloomy prognostications. But, really, this violates every tenet of youth, and I don't really see how it would help anyone, save that maybe we'd crank out fewer personal essays ourselves.But, that said, there is wisdom to be gained. A big danger, to me, seems to be everyone thinking she's the protagonist - tragic, or comic, or romantic. And the truth is, most of us aren't protagonists, we're bit players or sidekicks or secondary storylines, and there's nothing wrong with that. For the most part, surely, our experiences are both unique and common. I don't think people always felt entitled to the spotlight; and maybe Rita Wilson's less glamorous than Meg Ryan's Annie, maybe Celeste Holm is less dramatic than Margot or Eve, but I'm guessing their lives are calmer, happier, or at any rate more private. There are worse things. I'm not a heroine; I'm a best friend, an observer. It's a good deal easier and if that's settling, it's a kind I can handle. (Oh, and let me add here something that Commenter Coreybear said: "What people need to remember is that they're not the heroine of EVERYONE's story, and that seems to be the problem with these women." Much better put, but that's what I meant to say!)

The Cautionary Matrons [NY Observer]

Related: Let's Call the Whole Thing Off [The Atlantic]
Marry Him! [Atlantic]
Failure To Launch: When Beauty Fades [Elle]

Freeman specifically mentions Christa D'Souza's Daily Mail article about her increasingly harrowing experiences with breast implants, and of course Liz Jones's truly upsetting story (also, predictably, in the Daily Mail) of trying to treat lifelong anorexia with three weeks of scones and brie and — shocker — still feeling bad about her body afterwards. But she has a larger point: a genre has sprung up in contemporary lifestyle journalism, in which "a female journalist describes her obsession with her weight/breasts/ageing face/food or alcohol problems/inability to have a happy relationship" and usually ends up "sufficiently unhappy to be commissionable for another very similar piece."

As Sadie pointed out in her coverage of Jones's piece (Jones is pictured above), this kind of writing is bad for everybody. It's bad for the writers, who — if they're not totally manufacturing their distress for the reader's benefit — probably need therapy. But Freeman argues that it's actually worse for readers. For them, she writes, articles like Jones's "are surely just as dangerous and potentially influential as the photos of the skinny models the journalist professes to abhor."

Liz Jones is certainly troubling as thinspo, but Christa D'Souza is more complicated. Her experience with scar tissue, lopsided breasts, cancer, pain, and the total absence of any self-esteem boost from her new breasts isn't going to convince anybody to get implants. But it might convince some readers — male and female — that women are "self-hating, self-obsessed," and that it's normal to be like this.

One of the best pieces of feminist advice I've ever gotten is not to insult my own body in front of others. It perpetuates the idea that women should hate our bodies — that our inevitable physical flaws are worth valuable brain-space and conversational time. But pieces like Jones's and D'Souza's aren't just body-snark, they're self-snark: public expressions of low self-esteem so intractable that it lingers for years, harms relationships, and even endangers physical health. Freeman says editors assign these pieces because they have a "misogynistic image of what women are like," and that may well be true, but it's a vicious cycle. The more "boom and bust boob" stories we read, the more it seems that women are like D'Souza or Jones — irrevocably fucked up by aesthetic or social strictures they recognize are unhealthy but can't seem to escape. And the easier it is to assume that we, the female readers, can't escape them either.

These strictures aren't just about beauty — Zoe Lewis's I-chose-a-career-and-now-I'm-miserable screed and Lori Gottlieb's cautionary tale about how failing to "settle" caused her lifelong loneliness are basically cut from the same cloth, maybe just a little more highbrow. All these sob stories basically promulgate the notion that women can't have it all, or even much of anything, because even smart ladies who write for newspapers and magazines are basically unfulfilled and miserable.

The truth, of course, is much more complicated than that — even the disturbing Liz Jones is probably happier, at least at times, than she seems in her anorexia piece. Freeman is correct that most confessional journalism of the Jones/D'Souza variety is likely conceived with the goal of "getting a reaction from readers," and female misery seems to get hits. But editors who rely on self-loathing for numbers (and we're looking at ladymags too here) need to recognize that they're exploiting their female writers and giving their readers a twisted view of what it means to be a woman.

The New Confessional Journalism Turns Female Writers Into Tedious, Self-Hating Semi-Celebrities [Guardian]

Related: My Boom And Bust Boobs: What It's Like To Suffer The Agony Of Enlargement Surgery - Only To Realise You've Made A Terrible Mistake [Daily Mail]

Earlier: Lifelong Anorexic "Forced" To Eat Normally For 3 Weeks
Settle For Mr. "Just OK" - While Your "Marital Value Is Still At Its Peak!"
Feminism Is The Supposed Key To Women's Unhappiness
The Self-Flagellation Of The First-Person Beauty Piece

Well, except for Lori. She just feels like she should have "settled" when she was younger and prettier, before her eggs shriveled etc. etc. But then what would have happened? At best she would have had a kid with one of those perfectly agreeable guys who is beloved by everyone except his wife, spent three years alternating between barely disguising her contempt for him and cooing unconvincingly over how great he is to all her friends, only to cheat on him the moment she'd lost the baby weight. But no sooner!

Anyway, I'm sorry, but if you're like this, you're NOT THAT GREAT. In fact, that's a good rule of thumb, if you constantly find yourself dating dudes for whom you think you are too good, that is probably the personality flaw that is keeping you from the perfect Mr. Right type characters you think you deserve. And you can either think about that for awhile and work it out in therapy and maybe find some interests and pastimes other than the constant obsessive superficial life evaluation engaged in by all too many thirtysomething women you know, or commence dating fat guys.

Finding Mr. Good Enough [LA Times]

Earlier: Settle For Mr. "Just OK" — While Your "Marital Value Is Still At Its Peak!"
Marry Him! [The Atlantic]

Okay, so far be it from us to dispute a self-help manifesto constructed on the basis of possible alternate conclusions to popular television series, but what's author Lori Gottlieb smoking? Well, she had a kid with an anonymous sperm donor and is 40 and really fucking lonely. Her looks have faded and the men she broke up with in her thirties because they were short/boring/rude to waiters/physically unattractive are looking real good around now. It's sort of refreshing how honest she is, even though hers are thoughts any 28-year-old has already probably had in advance. But then you hit a sentiment like this:

After all, wouldn't it have been wiser to settle for a higher caliber of "not Mr. Right" while my marital value was at its peak?

At which point you google her, learn that she not only wrote a memoir about how she's a recovering anorexic but now has an author bio page on her website on which all the photos of herself feature her in super "skinny" poses.

See? She's ana. A perfectionist, a number-cruncher, a quantitatively-minded overachiever obsessed with stats. Of course she never managed to find someone to "settle" on before! She's incapable of settling! It's like giving up. Like eating carbs.

Anyway, apologies to Lori, but it was kind of a relief to learn that, at the very least, her problems are different from mine, and probably yours, too. Now leave the office and go get drunkenly knocked up by some stranger before you end up like her!

Marry Him [Atlantic Monthly]