Liz Jones is not one to back away from sweeping statements. Not content to give voice to the common complaint about the modern cult of smug maternity, the food-phobic editrix does everyone one better, launching a bizarre rant about...well, you'll see. Jones seems bound and determined to undermine the insight of some of her columns with incoherent, defiant screeds. I guess she's styling herself as a provocateur - and is apparently taking credibility lessons from Ann Coulter. If I had to describe the structure of Jones' essay, it would go a little something like this:

-I hate working moms

-I hate stay-at-home moms.

-I hate my friends' involvement with their kids.

-Moms are freeloaders.

-Kids hurt the environment.

-I hate that moms are ugly

-I hate kids

-Women only have kids because of men.

-I love my dogs.

We get Jones' initial point: you don't need kids to be a valid woman and she shouldn't be made to feel inferior because she hasn't chosen that life. "I really, really, really hate the fact mums believe that if you don't, like me, have children, you are incredibly self-indulgent and lazy." This begins and ends the only not-crazy writing in the whole piece.

Here, a few choice quotes:

I have long moaned, too, about the working mums who sprint out the door at 6pm on the dot, leaving the rest of us (the hopelessly barren, like me, and the men) holding the baby. Although not literally, of course.Hardly more commendable are the dedicated, oozing and secreting stay at-home mums, the ones who are always so tired.

I hate the way they dump their jazzy, squashy hold-alls in the hallway. I hate the way these women snatch their uninoculated germ-brewing sprogs away from the path of my cats, eyes wide with alarm in case the horrid child were to get scratched.

I once (oh dear God, never again) had a friend called Liv for tea; she was en route to a £6,000-a-week holiday rental on the Exmoor coast. She brought with her four children, a dog and a long-suffering, entirely mute husband....As she sat there, nursing her muffin stomach, she looked around at my beautiful garden and said: 'I wish we could afford a garden like this. (Afford! She spends £400 a week on food! Not to mention school fees for the oldest two.)

As a woman with no children, I am constantly outraged, too, at the way the Government heaps incentives upon prospective parents. Money for fruit and veg, child support, baby's trust fund, help with childcare, flexible bloody working, tax breaks. Never mind the ludicrous idea of putting IVF on the NHS, as if having a baby were a God-given right and not a blessing.I believe that women should pay for the services of a midwife and health visitor. I don't have a child in education, so how about the Government gives me some money towards cat food?...And do not even get me started on how incredibly bad for the environment bringing even more humans into this world is. My neighbour has two boys and has just announced she's pregnant with her third child. 'I really want a girl,' she told me, as if she were ordering something online from The White Company.

The other day, a group of mums was stood in my garden - don't ask me why - and one reached up to scratch her head, probably at me and my hedonistic lifestyle, and I caught sight of her stomach with its texture and hue of cold, congealed porridge and I couldn't help but stare, aghast.
My point here is that these mums think that to care about how they look is beneath them when they have more important things to worry about - such as organic lunch boxes and whether or not I have diluted the fresh orange juice...Which brings me smartly to the reason most women have children. They want to hang on to their husbands. While this tactic might once have worked, now that men are the giant toddlers in need of babying, to have a child for that reason will never, ever work.

By essay's end, Jones is somewhat melancholy at the thought she'll never have kids. "I might look young on the outside, still wear platforms and pigtails and ride ponies, but I know I have missed my chance to experience something that could have been wonderful." But she has her dogs. And from the sound of it, she made the right choice.

I Loathe Smug Modern Mums...[Daily Mail]

Related: 3 Reasons Ex-Marie Claire Editor Hates Ladymags
Lifelong Anorexic "Forced" To Eat Normally For 3 Weeks
Daily Mail Writer Says Drive To Be Thin Holds Women Back
Daily Mail Columnist: American Women Are "Mindbogglingly Stupid"

According to the Associated Press, two women were also shot, in the legs. Three suspects are currently in custody, including 21-year-old Francisco Ponce, who has been charged with attempted murder. The women are reportedly in good condition; the girl remains hospitalized at this time and has reportedly been "stabilized." A clip from WISH below:



Child, Two Women Shot At Wedding Reception [WIBC]
Three Arrested In Wedding Party Shooting[UPI]
Toddler Shot At Indianapolis Wedding Reception[AP]

Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin was conceived when, after her stint living as the male alter-ego "Ned," Vincent suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized as a suicide risk. The experience led Vincent to investigate the patient experience more fully when she'd recovered, and for the book she did stints in a large, urban hospital, a small private facility and a more experimental program. She found the public hospital's conditions to be shocking. Recaps the Times' review:

The staff comprises Teflon-slick professionals and brutish aides; the food is unappetizing, the bathrooms are dirty, the attempts at therapy are cursory, and a heavy reliance on major tranquilizers leaves the patients, many of them street-living incurables, barely conscious. The occasional middle-class citizen trapped in this mix quickly learns to feign recovery to escape.

Those who seek to dismiss the book as stunt journalism — as well as those who'd seek to learn from it — are both stymied by the fact that, in the course of her investigation, Vincent relapsed into serious depression, and ended the project anything but an objective observer. Which is too bad, as the Times points out, because it's an issue that bears investigation. We're at an interesting point in our cultural dialogues about mental illness, something that's been made plain by the reaction to the new TV show The United States of Tara. As you probably know, the Toni Collette vehicle centers on a woman with Dissociative Identity Disorder - more commonly known as multiple personalities. This being TV, the guises are wildly different and played for laughs, but nowadays mental-health advocates push for accurate representation of illnesses that were once regarded as an easy comedic device. There are watchdog groups who monitor such depictions carefully, and as a result current projects tend to avoid, at least Snake Pit-style dramatizations, allow characters like Tara to be relatable and successful, and throw around enough jargon to let people know they're taking it seriously.

Of course, it's a fine line. Because while no one should laugh at mental illness — it's, quite simply, not funny — I'd say that accurate depiction sometimes demands laughing with it. For those of us who've suffered from mental health problems, or whose family does, gallows humor is often a necessary means of coping. It's one of the things that separates well you from sick you. In my family, any institution is referred to as "the bin" — it makes it less scary when someone's there. I wonder if that might have been part of Vincent's motivation: reclaiming something scary by approaching it when "healthy." It doesn't shock me that this proved impossible, and in a sense, even if it derailed the project, her relapse, somewhat ironically, shows as well as anything the power and true scariness of the disease and the need to take it seriously.

Reality Intrudes on an Undercover Mental Patient [NYT]
TV’s Split Personality [Newsweek]
'Voluntary Madness' Details Life In 'Loony Bin' [NPR]

No, the importance of Little Edie is that her variation on a towel dress is representative of the can-do spirit that we're all being urged to adopt now that we're in a Recession. What she wore — the countless bizarre "costumes" and outfits and mix-and-matched pieces — was cool, yes, but what made her a true Recessionista (as it should be used) was that she used limitation as a jumping-off point and did more with that than had she had a huge clothing budget. Did she sew? Re-use? Reinvent? Yes! But even more important, she dressed without fear, for self-expression. She reminded us of the redemptive powers of clothing and how little they have to do with frivolity. There is nothing of the clotheshorse in Grey Gardens: the point is never acquisition, but the actual purpose of the clothes themselves. When designers took inspiration, it was literal: replicating a bejeweled sweater turban or a skirt made from safety pin trousers. But it was the spirit of her dressing that's a help to the rest of us. Nowadays we're inundated with tips for essentially how to manufacture the illusion of an unchanged lifestyle, and that's not tenable. Little Edie, from madness or wisdom, didn't do that. She created a new reality for a new set of circumstances.

It's easy to see why fashion types are enchanted with the famous eccentric, but still a bit jarring. When the Grey Gardens musical first hit the stage, suddenly Little Edie wasn't just the property of those of us who'd long loved the cult Maysles documentary — and maybe wrapped sweaters around our heads in high school: everyone loved her! A film of cut scenes was released. Philip Lim's 2007 show, Marc Jacobs, the Olsen Twins and Italian Vogue were all competing for her favors. Rhapsodized Isaac Mizrahi in 2006: "The way that we now make mistakes on purpose comes from Edie Beale. I'm still and always trying to match her sense of the absurd, her playfulness, her sense of the drama of clothing." The stylesmith for the newest Grey Gardens stage production, Alex Jaeger, had this to say in Sunday's Washington Post:

Her fashion sense comes out of a deep need to be creative. And she was fabulously creative. These outfits, she made them out of whatever she had. As strange as they may be, there was a lot of thought put into them, and she would make 10 or 12 a day. She would change her clothes all day long.

But all of this is really beside the point: Little Edie was poor — very poor — and she was obviously not well. Said Simon Doonan, seldom a slave to fashionable bromides, in May: "[Said my friend Deb] who works in a psychiatric hospital and has a front-row seat at the unwitting fashion show that is mental illness. 'Walk around any in-patient unit: Lots of people are sitting around with things tied around their heads, just like Little Edie. They are not making a fashion statement; they are trying to block out the voices in their heads.'"

It should be said that Little Edie was probably more concerned with covering a bald pate, but there is something exploitative about mining what is essentially tragedy for inspiration (while crying homage), but whereas the Little Edie fashion moment of the past two years had me cringing, I feel like now her true fashion moment has come. Because the times in which we live are unprecedented, an unprecedented role model is called for; we're left not with a scant pile of threadbare basics that need to see us through the next half-decade, but, rather, the detritus of petty decadence: trendy, cheaply-made things never intended to last, that now reproach us from our overflowing closets. In this, Little Edie is a great help. She made the clothes work for her, remembered that they were nothing more than fabric — not a season, not a style, only raw material. She had nothing to do with Fashion, but a lot to do with everyday clothes and the people who wear them. People embraced her a few years ago because they were jaded, hungry for novelty, and sick of perfection. We can embrace her now not ironically, not patronizingly, but as a true role-model, and a boon for our times.

Standing on Fertile Ground for Creative Expression [Washington Post]

Related:
One Flew Over the Couture's Nest[New York Observer]
Little Edie, Big Style [New York Daily News]