In my online meanderings re: the Lori Gottlieb book, I happened upon an interview with Julie Klausner, newly minted author of I Don’t Care about Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-Sensitive Hipsters, and Other Guys I’ve Dated. (Full disclosure: I added the hyphen between “Faux” and “Sensitive.”)
In the interview, Klausner is presented as something of an anti-Gottlieb, a hilarious comedian and feminist railing against “the very guys Gottlieb might implore you to settle for.” So, I bought the book. And read it. ‘Cause I’m all about staying on top of this critical and life-affecting debate, whether or not anyone else cares. Plus, I love dating horror stories. Who doesn’t?
Conclusion: I don’t think Amelia McDonnell-Parry, conductor of said interview (whose orientation, should we wish to know, is “slutty”), fully read either book. ‘Cause Klausner ain’t no feminist, neither. Her book is hilarious, salacious, and rompy, and I’d recommend it for the quickest beach read since Tuesdays with Morrie. (Disclosure: didn’t read TWM.)
But while Klausner may be actually kind of alarmingly . . . “sex-positive” would be the generous way to see it (”sex-addicted” seems equally possible), she’s also obsessively man-focused and fat-phobic, and her dating-don’ts are not mere “he never called me back” stories. They’re authentically scary. What she allowed various men to get away with, in the name of earning their love, is dark indeed.
True, she knows that now. The point of the book is that she has graduated from that kind of behavior. And Klausner never makes the Gottlieb-ian mistake of pretending that her personal decisions represent a troubling, spinsterizing movement among women. Yet even as an older-and-wiser 30-year-old (yup), Klausner has some redonk ideas about dating. Cases in point:
1) She doesn’t believe that women should compete for men. She believes that men should compete for women.
2) “A successful relationship with any guy is going to ground itself in him knowing that he shines, but you shine brighter.”
and
3) “If you’re the one at the lip of the stage hoping to get perspired on or clamoring for an autograph, that doesn’t speak too well of your desirability. You’re sort of putting him in a feminine role up there, watching him decked out in eyeliner, singing a song, aren’t you?”
Uh, “feminine role?” Yeah, and those Beatles boys had such long hair, they practically looked like girls! Of course, these assertions are coming from years of Klausner’s giving the rocker guy all the power, objectifying his musical talent or conventional beauty, and assigning him greater worth than she assigns herself, so I can understand an emotional need to err at the other extreme. But “feminine role” my ass.
Julie, some words. Everybody gets to perform—or not. Nobody’s better than anybody else. Nobody needs to shine more brightly than anyone else. Nobody needs to compete for a partner, male or female. And if you want the guy to worship you just as you used to worship him, you’re asking to be objectified. That’s not equality.
I would now like to make my own totally unscientific and largely unsubstantiated observation about straight, single, middle-class, urban women interested in LTRs with men—at least the ones who write dating memoirs and “Modern Love” columns in the NYT:
What’s with the chivalry bullshit? I keep reading pieces by women with the above identity markers complaining that their romantic prospects don’t dress formally enough, or hold the car door, or pay. Pay! As if that weren’t an antiquated and paternalistic-at-best remnant of a time when women had no earning or other power!
Women, we’re all adults here. And if we’re ever going to gain full-fledged equality with men, it’s time to let go of princess narratives and start acting like equals.
YAY-ah.
Time to go rearrange my stuffed animals.