The Rise (and Fall) of That Whole Femivore Thing
I posted earlier about the NYTimes article on femivore's and radical homemakers, and the verdict is in from all over the web, and it's not too favorable. Erin said in the comments section of my post;
Ack! I can't stand all the labeling. Do we have no way of understand our world without trying to categorize people and their intentions? What about this: I'm a college-educated stay-at-home-wife and mother who is just trying to do the best she can. Rather than trying to fit people into neat categories, it seems to me that we've progressed beyond the need for "progress" and are now willing and able to pick and choose the best of all of our options to fashion lives that work the best for us. Just as medicine is revisiting the "old cures" and discovering worth in them even as it presses forward with new thinking, I think we are doing the very same in our homes. How sad that it is considered radical to be willing to learn from those who went before us. Maybe it is our college educations that make us willing to look everywhere for knowledge and keep us always willing to learn? I don't know...
Her's wasn't the only "Ack!" heard around the interwebs.
Amanda Marcotte at Slate had the most blistering assessment;
If you've ever lived in a rural area (as I did growing up) and spent time around actual pecking, squawking chickens, you probably think of them as mean, stupid, filthy animals that get into more scrapes than an unattended Roomba left to handle a fringed rug. Which is why my first reaction to this article by Peggy Orenstein in the New York Times Magazine about rich housewives raising organic chickens was to laugh for a solid 30 seconds at the ridiculous accompanying photo. In it, a slim woman in a shawl standing under an arbor of roses clutches a chicken fondly. Said chicken looks for a means to escape, while probably thinking about going to find some hole to get stuck in. Only after laughing until I let out an unladylike snort did I actually read the article, which was yet another one of those expensive NY Times pieces about how some rich ladies found an out from the supposed demands of feminism, a space where they can stay at home without being so bored they have to subsist on Valium.
It's a disappointment to see a usually strong feminist writer like Orenstein get sucked into the Times vortex of finding any and every way to suggest that women in the workplace was just some weird '70s lark that can totally be rectified, that there are ways to keep the little ladies occupied without tempting them to emasculate their husbands or male colleagues by drawing paychecks.
As a man reading that, I kind of feel like joining the chicken and looking for some hole to go get stuck in. So much for femivore. Time to come up with some other -vore word, like metrovore or globavore or pizzavore.
