A "startling" 90 percent of women say they feel financially insecure, according to a survey of almost 1,925 women released yesterday by Allianz, a Minnesota-based life insurance company. Almost half are troubled by a "tremendous fear of becoming a bag lady" -- 46 percent of women overall, and 48 percent of those with an annual income of more than $100,000.
The story confines itself to financial anxiety, but I'm going to blow right past the generalities that might be made about male v. female attitudes about money or even about women and math to make a different point. I can understand fearing to be poor, anxiety about how to pay for retirement or big health care bills or your kids' college educations. But if you fear you'll be a bag lady, doesn't that suggest you can't imagine any extended family, friends or adult children taking you in in time of dire necessity?
That, ladies, is not a financial problem. It might be the fruit of living like this. Desperate Grandmas is Kay Hymowitz' essay on aging Boomer feminists and their quest --well past their 60s--for the BestSexEver, which they feel they must tell us all --and I do mean all--about in their books.
They rejoice in their lovers, their fantasies, their sex toys, their orgasms—which they have in airplanes, in elevators, in the shower, in the woods. “Whether the writer is having sex after heart surgery, self-conscious about a wrinkly stomach hanging down, making love without an erection, experiencing leg cramps in certain positions, or worrying about dentures . . . ,” writes Joan Price in a review of Still Doing It, “most report that sex after 60 is the best they’ve ever had.”
RC2 hastily backs out of the room, turns the light back out and shouts, For petessake, Grandma, put your clothes back on, or have the decency not to make us look!
Note to grandparents: Children do not want to picture their parents in the marital embrace, much less you. It's one thing to endanger your soul for the mortal sin of pornography when the bodies are young and nubile --but when they're not? Egad, emphasis on the Eeeeeeeee.
(Hmm. On the other hand, maybe an ElderPorn flick could serve as a kind of Scared Chaste video for young people. Learn the virtue of continence or end up like this.)
Matthew Peterson at The Remedy has a more serious response however. Thousands of years of human history and the Boomers still think they discovered sex can be pleasurable. (As Steven Colbert recently said to a guest mocking "repressed" Christians, "My parents had 7 children. Don't tell me they didn't have any fun.")
They have never understood that the argument for traditional morality and the nuclear family, far from being merely the pronouncement of negative rules and conventional constraints, used to be that virtue was what makes human beings happy. "Happy,” as in truly fulfilled and content as is possible in this life; as in that activity which allows us to develop ourselves into what we are naturally made to become. No one ever had a problem with sex, the problem was with ripping sex out of its human context and rendering it a meaningless distraction—a purely physical, animal exercise for the sake of pleasure alone, signifying nothing.And his sad conclusion:
We are now left with the pathetic spectacle of 67 year old women writing books patting themselves on the back for acting like prostitutes even as they admit that such actions—besides shattering the lives of those around them—leave themselves utterly unfulfilled and woefully lonely. Notice that while they are certain of their right to pursue whatever they want, they don’t talk about being happy very much. The one thing that their narcissistic literature never directly addresses is the fact that everything they have advocated has made them all miserable.
Which brings us full circle to the fear of becoming bag ladies. Hymowitz writes:
The memoirs by Erica Jong and Jane Juska in particular illustrate how feminism’s promotion of self-actualization makes it particularly ill suited for women—no matter what their politics—who are racing toward the day when they will become deeply and humbly dependent on the kindness and love of others. In fact, Jong has always been a case study in the porous boundary between feminism and narcissistic indifference toward other people’s reality. Her breakout novel, Fear of Flying, celebrated for its uninhibited depiction of female sexuality, was also thinly disguised autobiography that must have caused great pain to the two ex-husbands and numerous lovers she once had and (presumably) cared for.
Not to mention her neglected daughter, Molly, who ended up drug-addicted and depressed (she's okay now). You can't treat people like that and build up the safety net of community that saves you from bag-ladydom if the worst should befall you. But the cruellest cut of all may be this: not only are the Desperate Grandmas miserable and alone, they're not even good artists. The Good Lord made us free, and there is a kind of perverse nobility in going to hell First Class as my godfather used to put it. To be a Nietzsche entails a kind of greatness. This is something else.
Ironically, after Fear of Flying, reviewers compared Jong with Philip Roth and J. D. Salinger, two legendarily private men, who, though uninhibited in their fiction, would probably sooner get a sex-change operation than treat their readers to a glimpse of their jock itch. Feminism applauded Jong’s exhibitionism, and though it may have given her fame, a yacht, and a face lift, it has been no friend to her art
Ouch. I know what she means, though. There's a certain kind of woman who thinks she's refreshingly honest because she's not ashamed to talk about her period in mixed company. But the truth is if that's all you've got to talk about, you are a colossal bore not to mention boor. So you just might end up alone, talking to yourself.
