This month’s take on marriage was written by a woman called Kate Bolick. Maybe she’s a great writer. Maybe she’s got phenomenal insights and instincts. I don’t know. What I do know is that she’s the “culture editor” – apologies for the quote marks, but seriously – of a magazine called Veranda, which, according to its website, offers its audience a front row seat to “the best of everything.” Compared to the fact that an article about an approach to paying for healthcare in the same issue was penned by a couple of partners at a huge consulting conglomerate who have just published a book on marketing, I guess it’s not so egregious to dedicate many pages to a lifestyle magazine writer’s musings on a subject that many believe is their birthright while many others think it is, of should be, a civil right. But for a magazine once considered a standard bearer, I think it’s unfortunate.
Before I slam the author properly, I would like to applaud her for finally saying something that’s long overdue (even if others with less cache than she have said it before, which I’m sure they have). The business about two-parent families of yesteryear where the mother stayed at home with the young ones while the father went to a job every morning that he returned from in the evening was a television show. That’s because the poor have always been forced to take jobs that required them to do things like build ships or railroads or fight in wars waged by the money for extended periods or, for the poor women, work in other people’s homes, where they raised other people’s children and did other people’s laundry. And the rich, even though they aren’t and weren’t forced to spend a lot of time outside of their homes away from their heirs, did and do so because … well, who knows? Perhaps they’re dialoguing at forums sponsored by the Atlantic.
It’s all downhill from there, unfortunately. It seems Kate Bolick is unable to get her hands on husband material because, in spite of the thousands of words it took her to explain it, she just cannot find anyone good enough for her. And being good enough for her would be a tall order, I suppose. She did an internship at the Atlantic (full disclosure!) and she lives on both coasts and she stayed, while writing the article, at an impressive array of digs described in the article in a way that really flexed her culture editor muscles and that, sadly, seemed perfectly natural in an Atlantic cover story that, if I were the betting type, I’d say will mark her ascent into the realm of big-time culture commentator: books that explain to us how we feel about ourselves and that explain, furthermore, how she discovered how we feel about ourselves and how wrong those who went before her were, and how this all relates to her mother, and how she’s had a much rougher go of it than her mother, and big fees for speaking at conferences and appearances on an endless slew of talk shows, where she’ll doubtlessly explain what’s trending this way and that and why it’s all really, really interesting.
The inclusion of a snippet of chatty e-mail she exchanged with Julianne Moore while writing the article was unforgivable, but worse, I think, was this. Near the beginning of the article, the following passage was so painful that it made my fillings ache:
We’ve arrived at the top of the staircase, finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up – and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don’t want to go out with.
I’m confused, you know, about the men you – which I assume means her – don’t want to go out with. I kept waiting for a reason or two, and all I could find, over and over again, was that the kind of man with the looks and the position and the money Kate Bolick believes she’s entitled to is elusive. Which for me, you know, begs a very specific question, one that, in spite of the thousands of words dedicated to her take on the whole situation, was not explained: What’s so special about Kate Bolick?
