The old saying, “Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself,” has a somewhat obscure past. It has been attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, but direct quotes from 1805, alas! have rarely 🙂 been caught on tape.
And so we come to Pamela Paul Stern, OpEd columnist for The New York Times, previously editor of The New York Times Book Review, overseeing all New York Times book coverage including the staff critics and publishing news. Graduated from Ivy League’s Brown University, she has carved out a prestigious career for herself. Married and soon divorced herself, she wrote The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony, about couples who marry relatively young and divorce within five years, without having children:
The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony is a pioneering study of first marriages lasting five years or less and ending without children, and of the changing face of matrimony in America.
According to the brilliant trend analyst and journalist Pamela Paul, “It’s easy to conclude that the starter marriage trend bodes ill for the state of marriage. After all, we’re getting married, screwing it up, and divorcing—a practice that certainly isn’t strengthening our sense of trust, family, or commitment. But though starter marriages seem like a grim prospect, there is also an upside. For one thing, if people are going to divorce, better to do so after a brief marriage in which no children suffer the consequences.” But are there other consequences of starter marriages? And what causes these marriages to fail in the first place?
In today’s matrimania culture, weddings, marriage, and family are clearly goals to which most young Americans aspire. Why are today’s twenty- and thirtysomethings—the first children-of-divorce generation—so eager to get married, and so prone to failure? Are Americans today destined to jump in and out of marriage? At a time when marriage at age twenty-five can mean a sixty-year active commitment, could “serial marriages” be the wave of the future?
Drawing on more than sixty interviews with starter marriage veterans and on exhaustive re-search, Pamela Paul explores these questions, putting the issues into social and cultural perspective. She looks at the hopes and motivations of couples marrying today, and examines the conflict between our cultural conception of marriage and the society surrounding it. Most important, this lively and engaging narrative examines what the starter marriage trend means for the future of matrimony in this country—how and why we’ll continue to marry in the twenty-first century.
On August 15, 2004, she married again, this time with Michael Stern, a New York financial analyst. Then, in 2007, she published Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families:
“Strips porn of its culture-war claptrap . . . Pornified may stand as a Kinsey Report for our time.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Porn in America is everywhere—not just in cybersex and Playboy but in popular video games, advice columns, and reality television shows, and on the bestseller lists. Even more striking, as porn has become affordable, accessible, and anonymous, it has become increasingly acceptable—and a big part of the personal lives of many men and women.
In this controversial and critically acclaimed book, Pamela Paul argues that as porn becomes more pervasive, it is destroying our marriages and families as well as distorting our children’s ideas of sex and sexuality. Based on more than one hundred interviews and a nationally representative poll, Pornified exposes how porn has infiltrated our lives, from the wife agonizing over the late-night hours her husband spends on porn Web sites to the parents stunned to learn their twelve-year-old son has seen a hardcore porn film.
Pornified is an insightful, shocking, and important investigation into the costs and consequences of pornography for our families and our culture.
It is, perhaps, unsurprising that Mrs Stern, even living in liberal New York City, would have at least something of a more traditionalist idea of sex, but the left are aghast! From The Los Angeles Times
by Dorothy Pineda | Thursday, July 7, 2022 | 12:21 PDT
The online literary community is slamming Pamela Paul, publishing kingmaker turned opinion columnist, after she wrote a piece in the New York Times criticizing language that is inclusive of transgender and nonbinary communities. And at least one critic is alleging that she used her longtime perch as the head of the paper’s books section to tone down transgender advocacy.
In an article published Sunday, headlined “The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count,” Paul, who stepped down as books editor in March, posits that women in America are being stripped of their human rights not only by Republicans outlawing abortion but also by academics, progressives and transgender activists who reduce women to “a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.”
Earlier this week, author and journalist Patrick Ness called the article “a nasty bit of business” for “equating anti-abortion activists with trans rights believers” on his Instagram. He also alleged that Paul had asked him to change the opening in his review last year of Kyle Lukoff’s “Too Bright to See,” a story about a transgender boy.
“Ms Paul asked me to change my original opening — stating how transgender children are under attack — into something less political and ‘more focused on the book,’” he claimed before posting his original first paragraph, which began: “The culture wars have come for your transgender children.”
Perhaps it would be better to take less of what Mrs Stern’s views are from an obviously angered Los Angeles Times book columnist and quote her New York Times column directly. For ease of the reader knowing what quotations are from whom, Mrs Stern’s column is presented here in Times New Roman font, while Miss Pineda’s piece is shown in Ariel font.
by Pamela Paul | July 3, 2022
Perhaps it makes sense that women — those supposedly compliant and agreeable, self-sacrificing and everything-nice creatures — were the ones to finally bring our polarized country together.
Because the far right and the far left have found the one thing they can agree on: Women don’t count.
The right’s position here is the better known, the movement having aggressively dedicated itself to stripping women of fundamental rights for decades. Thanks in part to two Supreme Court justices who have been credibly accused of abusive behavior toward women, Roe v. Wade, nearly 50 years a target, has been ruthlessly overturned.
Can we state here that Mrs Stern, by virtue of her last quoted sentences, isn’t exactly an evil reich-wing conservative?
Far more bewildering has been the fringe left jumping in with its own perhaps unintentionally but effectively misogynist agenda. There was a time when campus groups and activist organizations advocated strenuously on behalf of women. Women’s rights were human rights and something to fight for. Though the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified, legal scholars and advocacy groups spent years working to otherwise establish women as a protected class.
But today, a number of academics, uber-progressives, transgender activists, civil liberties organizations and medical organizations are working toward an opposite end: to deny women their humanity, reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.
As we have reported here, “body parts” have several times offended real women! At least one member of the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swim team has complained that Will Thomas, who claims to be a woman and calling himself “Lia,” is still a physically intact male and thinks little of parading around the locker room with his male genitalia exposed.
Kristina Wong of Breitbart has reported that:
An Army training slide obtained by Breitbart News instructs soldiers to shower with transgender members of the opposite sex even if they have not undergone a surgical transition.
The training slide offers a “vignette” instructing soldiers on what to do if they encounter a female soldier who identifies as male according to the Department of Defense’s personnel tracking system known as Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS), but has not surgically transitioned and still has “female genitalia.”
The slide, titled “Soldier/Unit Training Barracks, Bathrooms, and Showers,” reads:
Vignette: Following his transition from female to male (which did not include sex reassignment surgery) and gender marker change in DEERS, a transgender Soldier begins using male barracks, bathroom, and shower facilities. Because he did not undergo a surgical change, the Soldier still has female genitalia.
The slide instructs soldiers: “Soldiers must accept living and working conditions that are often austere, primitive, and characterized by little or no privacy. … Understand anyone may encounter individuals in barracks, bathrooms, or shower facilities with physical characteristics of the opposite sex despite having the same gender marker in DEERS.”
It also tells soldiers that they should be “respectful of the privacy and modesty concerns of others,” but that “transgender Soldiers are not required or expected to modify or adjust their behavior based on the fact that they do not ‘match’ other Soldiers.”
Most soldiers are male, so perhaps putting it that way would be more practical, but by doing so, it ignores that which would most commonly be more objectionable: a “transgender female” who “did not undergo a surgical change” and still has male genitalia. As the father of a female staff sergeant and squad leader currently deployed to a desert area of the Middle East, I am aware that she shares quarters with another female soldier, but it doesn’t take much thought to realize that, with President Biden’s reversal of President Trump’s policy of banning the transgendered from military service, my daughter could be assigned a ‘transgender’ female who is still an intact male as a roommate.
As reported by my colleague Michael Powell, even the word “women” has become verboten. Previously a commonly understood term for half the world’s population, the word had a specific meaning tied to genetics, biology, history, politics and culture. No longer. In its place are unwieldy terms like “pregnant people,” “menstruators” and “bodies with vaginas.”
Planned Parenthood, once a stalwart defender of women’s rights, omits the word “women” from its home page. NARAL Pro-Choice America has used “birthing people” in lieu of “women.” The American Civil Liberties Union, a longtime defender of women’s rights, last month tweeted its outrage over the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade as a threat to several groups: “Black, Indigenous and other people of color, the L.G.B.T.Q. community, immigrants, young people.”
It left out those threatened most of all: women. Talk about a bitter way to mark the 50th anniversary of Title IX.
In a way, it’s odd. Most of the objections of us evil reich-wing conservatives have been along the lines of males claiming to be women, and taking athletic opportunities away from real women. But we appreciate Mrs Stern’s objection to the marginalization or real women from the other direction.
The noble intent behind omitting the word “women” is to make room for the relatively tiny number of transgender men and people identifying as nonbinary who retain aspects of female biological function and can conceive, give birth or breastfeed. But despite a spirit of inclusion, the result has been to shove women to the side.
Women, of course, have been accommodating. They’ve welcomed transgender women into their organizations. They’ve learned that to propose any space just for biological women in situations where the presence of males can be threatening or unfair — rape crisis centers, domestic abuse shelters, competitive sports — is currently viewed by some as exclusionary. If there are other marginalized people to fight for, it’s assumed women will be the ones to serve other people’s agendas rather than promote their own.
But, but, but. Can you blame the sisterhood for feeling a little nervous? For wincing at the presumption of acquiescence? For worrying about the broader implications? For wondering what kind of message we are sending to young girls about feeling good in their bodies, pride in their sex and the prospects of womanhood? For essentially ceding to another backlash?
Women didn’t fight this long and this hard only to be told we couldn’t call ourselves women anymore. This isn’t just a semantic issue; it’s also a question of moral harm, an affront to our very sense of ourselves.
For a conservative like me, this is just glorious. Mrs Stern is clearly supportive of ‘transgendered’ people, but she has also, albeit grudgingly, conceded that the transgendered are simply different from the real members of the sex that they claim to be.
But here we go again, parsing women into organs. Last year the British medical journal The Lancet patted itself on the back for a cover article on menstruation. Yet instead of mentioning the human beings who get to enjoy this monthly biological activity, the cover referred to “bodies with vaginas.” It’s almost as if the other bits and bobs — uteruses, ovaries or even something relatively gender-neutral like brains — were inconsequential. That such things tend to be wrapped together in a human package with two X sex chromosomes is apparently unmentionable.
Well, of course it is unmentionable, because conservatives note what we have known scientifically for over a century, that, in humans, as in all mammals, XX chromosomes result in the females of the species, while XY chromosomes result in males. If the far left were to go along with the scientific fact that females have XX chromosomes, they have completely undermined the notion that girls can be boys and boys can be girls.
Those women who do publicly express mixed emotions or opposing views are often brutally denounced for asserting themselves. (Google the word “transgender” combined with the name Martina Navratilova, J.K. Rowling or Kathleen Stock to get a withering sense.) They risk their jobs and their personal safety. They are maligned as somehow transphobic or labeled TERFs, a pejorative that may be unfamiliar to those who don’t step onto this particular Twitter battlefield. Ostensibly shorthand for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” which originally referred to a subgroup of the British feminist movement, “TERF” has come to denote any woman, feminist or not, who persists in believing that while transgender women should be free to live their lives with dignity and respect, they are not identical to those who were born female and who have lived their entire lives as such, with all the biological trappings, societal and cultural expectations, economic realities and safety issues that involves. . . . .
The women’s movement and the gay rights movement, after all, tried to free the sexes from the construct of gender, with its antiquated notions of masculinity and femininity, to accept all women for who they are, whether tomboy, girly girl or butch dyke. To undo all this is to lose hard-won ground for women — and for men, too.
Those on the right who are threatened by women’s equality have always fought fiercely to put women back in their place. What has been disheartening is that some on the fringe left have been equally dismissive, resorting to bullying, threats of violence, public shaming and other scare tactics when women try to reassert that right. The effect is to curtail discussion of women’s issues in the public sphere.
At this point, Mrs Stern just doesn’t get it. By the left’s declaration that #TransWomenAreWomen, they have declared that ‘transgender women’ are identical to real women, that they just cannot be differentiated. To claim that there are things very specific to real women is to differentiate not just ‘trans males’ from real males, but ‘trans women from real women, and that wholly upsets the transgender ideology.
But women are not the enemy here. Consider that in the real world, most violence against trans men and women is committed by men but, in the online world and in the academy, most of the ire at those who balk at this new gender ideology seems to be directed at women.
Can we tell the truth here? When it is asserted that “in the real world, most violence against trans men and women is committed by men,” it has to be noted — though most liberals will not do so — that such violence is almost entirely committed when men are taking up with a woman for sex, usually via prostitution, and then discover that the person they thought was a real woman was actually male.
If a person you believe to be female fellates you, and you then find out that he is actually male, you have been raped! Is it really that much of a surprise that a person who has been raped would respond violently?
It’s heartbreaking. And it’s counterproductive.
Tolerance for one group need not mean intolerance for another. We can respect transgender women without castigating females who point out that biological women still constitute a category of their own — with their own specific needs and prerogatives.
If only women’s voices were routinely welcomed and respected on these issues. But whether Trumpist or traditionalist, fringe left activist or academic ideologue, misogynists from both extremes of the political spectrum relish equally the power to shut women up.
Well, of course: some people have called it ‘shutupery’, the argument that what you say cannot be said, so just sit down and shut the f(ornicate) up!
Me? I don’t want the transgender activists to shut up; I want them to shout their idiocy from the rooftops, because the greatest weapon against stupidity is to have its stupidity demonstrated for all to see and hear.
Back to Miss Pineda:
Paul, whose former position made her arguably the most influential person in print media books coverage, writes that the word “woman” once “had a specific meaning tied to genetics, biology, history, politics and culture. No longer. In its place are unwieldy terms like ‘pregnant people,’ ‘menstruators’ and bodies with vaginas.’”
While she recognizes “the noble intent” of omitting the word “woman” when talking about reproductive health, Paul argues that “despite the spirit of inclusion, the result has been to shove women to the side.”
Others writers, critics and books journalists, who had generally been circumspect about Paul during her books tenure, now decried Paul for what they considered to be her anti-trans and trans-exclusionary views.
Maris Kreizman, host of LitHub’s literary podcast “The Maris Review,” wrote on Twitter Sunday: “Looking at the Opinion section and once again marveling over the fact that this terrible, hackneyed, boring writer was once the most important person in all of book publishing.”
I’ve got to admit it: seeing one liberal calling, via quotation, another liberal a “terrible, hackneyed, boring writer” as a way of dismissing her opinion can only warm the depths of my cold, right-wing heart. Mrs Stern and Miss Pineda ought to be allies on the liberal side, but Miss Pineda clearly hates Mrs Stern’s having taken a position different from her.
I’ve said it before: for the left, when it comes to sex, they feel almost required to take the most extremely left position, because to fail to do so is to legitimize us evil reich-wingers.
In her conclusion, Miss Pineda stated that Bette Midler, who was also concerned about the marginalization of the word “women”, cited Mrs Stern’s article to support her position. Mrs Stern’s writing will be cited by other people, hostile to the furthest left position, and that has the Los Angeles Times columnist very, very worried.
And so the extreme left are trying to destroy one of their allies on the not-quite-so-extreme left. With that, I am certainly pleased.
