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August 05, 2006
Desperate Grandmas
No, what grates about the Desperate Grandmas is not their optimism. It is not their determination to firm their glutes or to do good deeds in West Africa or, for that matter, to study the Kama Sutra like Orthodox Jews study the Torah. It’s their enthusiastic display of that chronic boomer disease: narcissism. Tom Wolfe once dubbed the 1970s "the Me Decade." Desperate Grandmas seem determined to make every decade a Me Decade. With its consciousness-raising, its denigration of family life, its rejection of the past, feminism has always flirted with excessive individualism, bordering on mere selfishness. Now, as Second Wavers like Steinem and Levine filter out politics, what’s left of graying feminism are the dregs of self-actualization, passionate pursuits, and sexual self-expression.
Not that Desperate Grandmas are entirely without social conscience. As in Juska’s case, blue-state politics seem to go with the territory. It’s a way for women to reassure themselves that they are filled with enlightened altruism, despite all the time and money they lavish on their self-actualization. Jong proudly describes the anger she stirred up when she gave an anti-Bush graduation speech several years ago at a Staten Island college. (The "Boos were honors," she writes. "They meant I was questioning authority, speaking truth to power. They meant I was trying to tell the truth—my quixotic calling.") Margot, the corporate-executive-turned-Peace-Corps-volunteer Suzanne Levine interviews, captures the combination of unapologetic self-absorption and liberal sensibility that characterizes the Desperate Grandma. When asked whether she will go back to work after she returns from Africa, she says yes. "Maintenance is expensive. Being a jazzy older woman costs money. And that includes plastic surgery--when I get back from the Peace Corps." As the saying goes, you couldn’t make this stuff up.
. . .
For these books do not simply recall their mothers’ profound, feminist-sanctioned self-absorption; they are expressions of it. Not all Desperate Grandmas are quite so ready to cross the boundary into Jong’s and Juska’s brand of exhibitionism, but their positive thinking shades easily into discomforting egotism. It’s not just that older women continue to enjoy sex; it’s that it has to be--in defiance of all common sense--Better Than Ever. It’s not that they like working to rescue animals; they’re Pursuing Their Passions. "They are the most amazing women our country has ever seen!" Levine quotes a gerontologist as gushing in Inventing the Rest of Our Lives.
Please. Narcissism is the last thing a society needs from its graying population. Their job is in part to counter youthful egotism, especially in an individualistic society like ours. No one should understand better than those getting on in years our dependency on one another. And no one should have a stronger intuition of our own fundamental inconsequentiality. We "fill a slot for a time and then move out; that’s the decent thing to do: make room," John Updike’s Harry Angstrom muses in Rabbit at Rest.
Desperate Grandmas may not need to move out yet. But it would be decent--quaint word!--if they would make some room.
"Desperate Grandmas," by Kay S. Hymowitz, City Journal, Summer 2006
This reminds me of Desparate Grandpa Hugh Hefner ...
Posted at August 5, 2006 11:47 AM | Categories: Narcissism
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