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About the Author
Gina Barreca is a professor of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut. Her books include They Used to Call Me Snow White, but I Drifted; Perfect Husbands and Other Fairy Tales; Babes in Boyland; and, with Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post, I'm With Stupid. She's written or edited other books on vice, Victorians and sex, American humor, the erotics of instruction, The Sopranos, women's humor, and Italian-American literature. She will blog about teaching, sex, humor, money, publishing, ambition, books, marriage, envy (professional and personal), politics (professional and personal), aging, and cartoons.
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Recent Posts
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Featured Articles By the Author
Good Company: About Feminism and Various Sorts of Women
Let’s remember that any lesson we learn, we’ve probably learned before:
1. From “The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911—17” [Ed. Jane Marcus]
“Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world. With all the wonderful things to do in life, men are constantly distracted by the desire of beautiful, luxurious women. But the women, using their double power of sex and superior economic position, make their own terms. Men cannot have them unless they undertake to support them — an undertaking which becomes more and more exacting every year as this expensive worship of sex raises the women’s standard of living and incomes remain stationary. So most men have to wait until their prosperous maturity before they marry. The passion which these parasitic women inspire, being based on no pretence of comradeship or equality, is not such as commands faithful waiting, so men visit the vagrant passion of their youth on the daughters of the poor.”
“Women know the true damnation of charity because the habit of civilisation has always been to throw them cheap alms rather than give them good wages. On the way to business men give women their seats in the tube, and underpay them as soon as they get there.”
2. From “If You Can’t Live Without Me Why Aren’t You Dead Yet?” by Cynthia Heimel
In one essay Heimel distinguishes between “Professional Girls” who “firmly believe that men have been placed on this earth to take care of them and they fully expect and want to be taken care of” and those she deems “Amateur Girls”: “Amateur Girls are desperate for a boyfriend who can deliver a good punchline” not “a boyfriend with a Platinum Amex card.” Maybe it comes down to asking what women want from men: “Professional Girls want security. Amateur Girls want hot sex.”
3. From “Female Friends” by Fay Weldon
“Don’t discredit what your elder sister says. Much less your grandmama. Listen carefully now to what she says, and you may not end as tired and worn and sad as she. Be grateful for the softness of the cushion, while it’s there, and hope that she who stuffed and sewed it does not grudge its pleasure to you. The sewing of it brought her a great deal of pain and very little reward.”
“Treasure your moments of beauty, your glimpses of truth, your nights of love. They are all you have. Take family snaps, unashamed. Dress up for weddings, all weddings. Rejoice at births, all births. For days can be happy — whole futures cannot. This is what grandmama says. This moment now is all you have. These days, these nights, these moments one by one.”
Posted at 03:54:13 PM on June 28, 2008 | All postings by Gina BarrecaComments
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Nice.
— Gayle · Jun 28, 06:19 PM · #
Found U only now and I like what U say. Will B in touch.
— FemGrl · Jun 28, 07:38 PM · #
“…well-fed world”?
Abstinence, we’re supposed to suppose, is the reason for the birthrates in the parts of the world that don’t have enough to eat?
— Mr. Wiki · Jun 29, 07:11 AM · #