put how many of these you've read in the comments

January 19, 2022 10:18 AM

If Your Mom Owned "Reviving Ophelia" in 1995, My Best Guess For Her Non-Fiction Purchases In Each Subsequent Year. From Daniel Lavery's Chatner: 'The “What Happened to My Daughter?” genre was strong that year. Who took my sweet little girl away from me? She was so affectionate when she was eight, but now she’s too princess, or she’s too pageant, or she’s too tomboy, or she’s too mental health diagnosis I’m suspicious of, or she’s getting transed (but I’m getting ahead of myself, as that particular anxiety wouldn’t hit the Reviving Ophelia set in a significant way for another few years).'
posted by snerson (138 comments total)

I'm reasonably sure my mom owned or borrowed Reviving Ophelia. (The school social worker definitely did.) I'm also pretty sure she read none of the books he mentioned. She did watch the movie of Hillbilly Elegy, though.
posted by hoyland at 10:22 AM on January 19, 2022

torn between finding this very funny and feeling bad for a middle class lady who didn't get to take the greatest courses in college and just wants to Understand (not making excuses for the terf books though, no intention of doing that)

this is not the first time I have read Lavery being sharp about a woman who cannot let go of the childhood of her daughter -- I think he answered a letter in Dear Prudence about that

anyway, I had Reviving Ophelia AS a teen girl, which was the sort of kid I was -- hardly being a child when I could
posted by Countess Elena at 10:25 AM on January 19, 2022 [28 favorites]

Wait, do adults actually read A Child Called It? I know it as a book that's inexplicably popular with tweens.
posted by LindsayIrene at 10:30 AM on January 19, 2022 [7 favorites]

Yeah, this felt kind of mean-spirited to me. Wow, so incisive to observe that middle-class, middle-aged women often read bestsellers, many of which were discussed on TV shows those women tend to watch, and do a ton of marketing aimed directly at those same middle-class, middle-aged women's book clubs! Breaking new ground here.

I read Reviving Ophelia as a preteen to try to get a sort of preview of what I could expect from my teens. Didn't turn out to be all that accurate.
posted by potrzebie at 10:43 AM on January 19, 2022 [27 favorites]

I am extremely judgy about people's taste in reading material, and I still found this mean-spirited and a waste of my time.
posted by liminal_shadows at 10:45 AM on January 19, 2022 [16 favorites]

I don't know, I think Lavery would be among the first to point out that this is more about his issues than anyone else's (as is most of his writing). I don't think this is either intended to be taken as a serious list or a 1:1 take on how anyone's mom/any and all middle aged women. Satire is satire for a reason.
posted by fight or flight at 10:50 AM on January 19, 2022

I read this as a montage like a DJ Earworm songs-through-the-years remix, saying: in a way these books are all in conversation with each other and are in a particular nonfiction genre. I read Reviving Ophelia not too long after it came out, and then in the early? 2010s I read Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman, and a few years ago I read Educated, and until now I hadn't thought to compare them with each other. There is something interesting here about the contours of what bestselling books in this genre were discussing -- like, the mix of self-help and of real-life horror stories about other people's childhoods -- and in thinking about what overlaps with Oprah's Book Club and with the true crime genre of TV and podcasts.
posted by brainwane at 10:53 AM on January 19, 2022 [9 favorites]

A Child Called They
posted by overeducated_alligator at 11:00 AM on January 19, 2022 [8 favorites]

I mean yeah it's not his best stuff but I see a pretty good critical eye here about books-marketed-to-women, the overlapping cultures of self-help, spirituality, parenting, feminism, etc. that shape middle-class white American women's attitudes.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 11:03 AM on January 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

My mom had Reviving Ophelia, which I probably read 2 or 3 times around 13-14 years old. I'm kind of curious what it would have to say to me now - I was one of many young adults who, rather than being skeptical about the moral panics of their parents' generations, imprints on them pretty whole-heartedly because they seem to provide some explanation for why we are Sad and having a Very Hard Time.

My mom mostly has much better taste in books than this list would suggest.
posted by Jeanne at 11:10 AM on January 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

I feel like this sort of observation is kinder when shared with friends, over a glass of wine. Or a text with a photo of the books on a close relative's shelf, with friends who understand that you still care about and respect aspects of said relatives, and hope for their growth and change. I'd never ever want them to stumble over a mocking list I put online. Even occasionally gentle ribbing between friends works out ok, as long as they understand you respect them--there's that acknowledgement that there are also parts of you they don't jive with or ways you could stretch yourself intellectually. I'm really not loving the mocking write-up. What is the point? To laugh? Call a friend over, have cocktails, and be as catty as you want.

We read for enjoyment, or to try to understand the world, or get help. Publicly mocking the ways people do that is shitty, even if we find the ways that they reach for that misguided. It's something I actively work to be better about, and I'd hate to see that kind of meanness celebrated.
posted by liminal_shadows at 11:28 AM on January 19, 2022 [13 favorites]

typo in the first paragraph, anyone?

I found myself not really focused on the meanness of the piece, so much as appreciating an attempt to reveal types of connections that seem more-or-less valid today.
posted by elkevelvet at 11:42 AM on January 19, 2022

Who took my sweet little girl away from me? She was so affectionate when she was eight, but now she’s too princess, or she’s too pageant, or she’s too...


Yeah, this is indeed mean-spirited and dismissive of legit concerns that many parents had and have about their bright, active girls losing confidence and becoming reluctant to speak up as they enter their teen years. There are a lot of truly hideous messages our society still sends about what it means to be feminine, or to be a woman. Asking how we can help young women stay confident and full of life and in touch with their own spirit and needs instead of demurring to men or spending all their time dieting and spackling makeup on their face is a worthy question.
posted by Flock of Cynthiabirds at 11:53 AM on January 19, 2022 [26 favorites]

0. But the cover of Reviving Ophelia fires the late 90s neurons in my brain.

I haven't read any of these books, so can anyone tell me if these books were... good?

From the tone of the article, it sounds like they make up the reading list of the moral panic/self help book club. I've never had reason to doubt Lavery's insights before.
posted by AlSweigart at 12:04 PM on January 19, 2022

I know it's probably meant to be humorous, but I'm so weary of moms being shit on for just trying to do their best. Sometimes the just a joke defense doesn't stand up.
posted by kimberussell at 12:10 PM on January 19, 2022 [36 favorites]

Not only condescending and mean-spirited, but rather dumb: Who actually bought both Who Moved My Cheese (a book that has "extravagant claims to universal application, great profundity nested in numbing simplicity, catchphrases designed for infinite repetition,") and The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, a 600-page winner of the Pulitzer for non-fiction?

Full disclosure: I've read only the former (in about 12 minutes, standing in a bookstore), but the latter is on my to-read list.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 12:12 PM on January 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

Yeah, my mom was definitely not this mom, so maybe I'm wrong about this, but a bunch of those struck me more as dad books than mom books. I feel like Tuesdays with Morrie, Unbroken, and Who Moved My Cheese were kind of aimed at middle-aged guys.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:19 PM on January 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

My mom never owned a copy of Reviving Ophelia nor does she know to whom the "Ophelia" in the title refers (I literally just asked her), but also she's never owned any of the other books on that list so I dunno, I guess this proves true in the negative at least?
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:20 PM on January 19, 2022

Possibly I'm not the target demographic here, but this seems both reductionist and mean-spirited.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 12:24 PM on January 19, 2022 [6 favorites]

I do think there's a challenge to making lists about mothers and expecting the lists to do the arguing because there's such a strong "moms are dumb, credulous and sex-paranoid, who is more boring than a mom" narrative in US culture and this tends to inform both the writing and the reading. And I think lists that play with the whole "people who are older than you are like THIS" format are tricky, because there's so much anxiety around aging, so much anxiety around being un-self-aware and so much anxiety around not being a unique snowflake in one's intellectual tastes. It's a tough format to detourne.

Also this sort of doesn't match my memory of the cultural position of Reviving Ophelia. I was I think around twenty when it came out and I had to read it for an intro sociology class or something like that. (My mother was, without being a snob, pretty highbrow and really didn't read that kind of book; also, I was a weird kid and I'm confident that whatever she worried about for me, it wasn't eating disorders and sex.)

Around here at least, I would have said that the cultural position of the book was much more mainstream-feminist-left-liberal; at least, that was how I'd describe the professor who taught the book and my general sense of how it was displayed in bookstores.

My feeling in the nineties was not "worrying about suicide, bullying and girls' self image was the mainstream position that readily flipped into a retrograde paranoia about womanhood". On the contrary, worrying about suicide, bullying and girls' self image was controversial, hence all the backlash into "we talk about GIRLS too much when the schools are really failing BOYS" stuff a few years later. The mainstream discourse that I recall was that there were too many books about girls and women, that it was stupid and weak to worry about stuff like bullying, that worrying about "self image" was just an excuse for girls to be fat when being fat was bad, etc.

I think Reviving Ophelia was a turning point and that's why it became a best-seller; that is, it didn't become a best-seller because it recapitulated a series of already accepted middlebrow, middle class talking points. This was also the time when Monica Lewinsky was national hated, mocked and reviled, for instance. There wasn't a lot of received wisdom about the vulnerability of young women at the time.
posted by Frowner at 12:31 PM on January 19, 2022 [45 favorites]

Moral panics have victims. And this writer is a high profile target of a particular kind of moral panic. Maybe he's not talking about your mom.

[ETA: I'm not responding directly to any specific comment in here]
posted by Horkus at 12:38 PM on January 19, 2022 [34 favorites]

I bought Reviving Ophelia when it came out while I was in college because it looked interesting, and it was. The killer quote I remember was something like "We teach our daughters not to walk alone, drive alone, or live alone. What on earth are we teaching our sons?" To me, at a majority male college at the time, it was a great on-ramp into deeper feminist thought. And my mom, who is a therapist, took it and read it and shared it with her friends.

I snickered at this list, but he nailed some it more than others. The Barbara Ehrenreich for sure! Spot on!

As someone rapidly approaching the age at which existing as a woman in the world means I am the constant butt of extremely online jokes, it didn't feel as mean spirited as endless jokes about, for instance, the shape of my neck, and it didn't feel nearly as mean spirited as the non-stop sexual harassment I had endured beginning at age 11 that led me to pick up Reviving Ophelia in the first place.
posted by hydropsyche at 12:40 PM on January 19, 2022 [13 favorites]

Also, as Horkus suggests, it may help to know who Danny's mom is and more generally who his family is.
posted by hydropsyche at 12:42 PM on January 19, 2022 [13 favorites]

My memory of how that book was positioned culturally tallies with yours, Frowner. Although it's been many many years since I skimmed it, I wouldn't consider it the natural on-ramp to "my baby girl is being transed away from me somehow."
posted by praemunire at 12:54 PM on January 19, 2022 [6 favorites]

My Mother in Law was a voracious reader and almost certainly plowed through many of the books in the linked article. Occasionally we would both buy books from popular series so we could talk about them together. When she was diagnosed with lung cancer we both bought copies of "The Emperor of All Maladies" because we share the common characteristic of looking tragedies right in the face. It was a really good medical book for the layperson, no pop-science remedies, no overly hopeful odds-defying narratives. It gave me vocabulary to understand what was happening and what radiation vs. chemo vs. surgery meant.

She died a year later and I lost my book buddy. I still miss her.
posted by Alison at 12:58 PM on January 19, 2022 [24 favorites]

so incisive to observe that middle-class, middle-aged women often read bestsellers, many of which were discussed on TV shows those women tend to watch, and do a ton of marketing aimed directly at those same middle-class, middle-aged women's book clubs

This. An interesting article despite its mean-spirited snarking at an easy target. As a middle-aged woman, I'm sure I would have learned so much more if this piece had included an alternative reading list, since I'm sure Danny would have made much better choices than anyone else at the time.
posted by rpfields at 12:59 PM on January 19, 2022 [5 favorites]

Another vote for Frowner's memory of how the book was positioned.

I know who Lavery is, was an early fan of The Toast and have read Something That May Shock and Discredit You. But this piece's mean spirited -- and from my recollection, off, if only my mother had read it and not blamed me for everything that happened to me and my ambitions and my academics and everything else -- did hit me hard.
posted by warriorqueen at 1:11 PM on January 19, 2022 [7 favorites]

Hillbilly Elegy is absolute, horrific, offensive trash. I tried for a minute to not hold it against people if I saw it on their bookshelves,.

Not anymore
posted by thivaia at 1:12 PM on January 19, 2022 [6 favorites]

The conclusion seems fairly critical to this, "there’s still a pretty direct through-line from “My teenage daughter likes Prince too much and won’t talk to me anymore” in 1994 to “Why are my beautiful daughter’s strange new friends trying to convince her she’s a boy” in 2020."

It's starting from a premise, "There's a big upswelling in this particular moral panic, & it shows up in particular ways along this demographic (See: Mumsnet, over in the UK)." & going "What might've led to this?"

I'm pretty sure a similar sort of "ok, these were broad trends, but tracing forward & back, are there any themes that build into the present state?" lit-historical timeline could be written for a certain slice of dads, perhaps going from Iron John into Sam Harris around the early 2000's into Steven Pinker into (I'm not sure where the concluding book would be here). I try to keep in mind a certain amount of "There but for grace might I have gone", since time-shifted I know there's points where I brushed up against stuff like Slate Star Codex & it took time to recognize what was also getting trucked in (and why I found parts of it compelling at the time).

It doesn't read to me as "If you read any of these books, you're inevitably on a slope to TERF-dom" (the opening paragraph even states as much), but more "This was a popular path, some people dipped in & out, some went all the way to a bad end, & along the way we can see where some factors encouraging/feeding into this were"

Not to say people are wrong for reading it as mean-spirited, of course.
posted by CrystalDave at 1:19 PM on January 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

(Content warnings for transphobia, abuse, pedophilia.)

Dan Lavery on his relationship with his mother.

Just as an example of what Lavery's mother was doing when she was "doing her best". Many mothers are loving and caring parents, for whom this list might seem incorrect. Some are not. I think it's worth remembering that before pointing out that it's "mean-spirited" to suggest that someone's mother is not fit for her job. Some women aren't, and those women cause lasting, irreversible harm to their children and the children of others.

There's also a lot here for me as a trans man who transitioned late in life. For many trans men, witnessing our mother's grief over the loss of her daughter can be an incredibly difficult act, for which we have little support and understanding in wider culture, which we are often expected to struggle with alone. We're taught that, as daughters, we have "failed" our mothers by not turning out how they'd hoped. We are no longer their precious girls, but men beyond their understanding. Some women come through this and are able to continue to be loving mothers. Others cannot or will not get there.

If anything is "mean-spirited", it's the woman who treated her son like Lavery's mother treated him. Where's his moment of sympathy?
posted by fight or flight at 1:26 PM on January 19, 2022 [32 favorites]

Maybe he's not talking about your mom.

This wholly misses the point of the objections to this article, which is:

Why is there a snide list about middle aged mothers' reading habits (why is there a whole universe of vitriolic media and whole fields of scientific enquiry targeted at mothers) - all for what? Literally just the sin of actively parenting their children, trying to improve their own parenting skills, taking an active interest in helping their daughters navigate the changing world.

Fathers get a cultural free pass. Our unresolved anger at a parent is most often unresolved anger at the parent who bothered to do the parenting, after all. (Daniel Lavery has a father who literally abuses little children in his church, if I recall correctly. I wonder if there's a droll list forthcoming about the reading habits of sexually abusive fathers? Somehow I doubt it.)

I always feel like quoting Teddy Roosevelt when people take aim at mothers (which, BTW, this list does - it's not a list mocking Danny's mother, it's a list mocking *mothers*):

The CREDIT (not mockery, not condescension, not vitriol) belongs to the (wo)man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions...

posted by MiraK at 1:38 PM on January 19, 2022 [31 favorites]

I feel like my parents, as immigrants largely on the periphery of the mainstream American parental/cultural anxiety, only accessed the weekly news magazine's version of these ideas. They weren't concerned with the "good ole days" when children were real children because they didn't believe in the good ole days as a myth. They did read the (Newsweek?) cover story on bisexuality and bring it up when I was trying to explain something about my personal life though. Sometimes being marginalized saves you from the b.s. (The position of marginalization is also how I more-or-less disregarded a large chunk of femininity programming in my teen years - I didn't really feel like the cover girls on Seventeen or Vogue had any personal relevance to what I should be doing as a teenager).
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:41 PM on January 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

And ugh just read the Washington Post J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy guy) profile that thivaia linked.

In his NatCon speech, you could hear Vance articulating both sides of the argument: “The fundamental lie of American feminism of the past 20 or 30 years is that it is liberating for women to go work for 90 hours a week in a cubicle at Goldman Sachs.”

...

In July, he gave a sneering speech about the “childless left,” including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (whose twins were delivered about a month later). On Twitter, he called Times columnist Paul Krugman “one of the many weird cat ladies with too much power in this country.”

posted by spamandkimchi at 1:42 PM on January 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

Joke's on them, my mom died in 1992!

Twenty years ago I actually owned a copy of Women Who Ran with the Wolves because my therapist recommended it, and I remember vaguely liking it. I have no idea why it's not on this list though. However I am not a mom myself, so I guess it doesn't apply.
posted by suburbanbeatnik at 1:43 PM on January 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

Addendum: I want to live in the country where weird cat ladies wield too much power.
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:43 PM on January 19, 2022 [29 favorites]

Daniel Lavery has a father who literally abuses little children in his church, if I recall correctly.

You don't. His brother was the one who abused children. His father covered for him, covered it up, and publicly denounced Danny and his partner for bringing it to the attention of the media.

Literally just the sin of actively parenting their children, trying to improve their own parenting skills, taking an active interest in helping their daughters navigate the changing world.

I beg you, once again, to consider the context of this list in the fact that it is specifically taking aim at mothers who reject and traumatise their trans children. That is not "actively parenting", that is not "an active interest", that is not "trying to improve". That is bullying and neglect at best, child abuse at worst.
posted by fight or flight at 1:48 PM on January 19, 2022 [27 favorites]

Ah, okay, thank you for correcting me. (The point still stands: I don't see any snarky listicles forthcoming about the reading habits of pedophile-enablers like Danny's father. Not that it would balance the scales at all if it was, either!)

> I beg you, once again, to consider the context of this list in the fact that it is specifically taking aim specifically at mothers who reject and traumatise their trans children.

That's only one possible interpretation of the list, sadly. On the face of it, especially to folks who don't know Danny's personal history, it reads very differently, and Danny is responsible for the impact it creates due to the fact that he didn't bother to contextualize it better and more obviously.
posted by MiraK at 1:51 PM on January 19, 2022 [13 favorites]

Read both Reviving Ophelia and Who Moved My Cheese? as assigned reading for different college courses. I was today years old before I heard of any connection between these two volumes and bad parenting, although I'm not discounting anyone else's experience with people whose parents read them.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:52 PM on January 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

On average, women in the USA read more books than men do. I agree this is mean spirited. Perhaps many moms did read this entire list of books. But there's a huge chance that these same moms read a bunch of other books, too. Perhaps books of unrelated topics, or perhaps even books whose premise is the opposite of the books called out on this person's list.

I know some moms who read "pop" parenting books and who also read science fiction, history, classic lit, "airport novels," horror, etc.
posted by SoberHighland at 1:54 PM on January 19, 2022 [6 favorites]

I worked in an upscale bookshop in the suburbs as a part time job, but just a couple years too early for Reviving Ophelia. What I would like to see is the future reading habits of people who bought the Celestine Prophecy.

It could be a series. We could do The Bridges of Madison County for the third installment… why, yes, I worked in that bookstore between 94 and 96, why do you ask?
posted by Ghidorah at 1:54 PM on January 19, 2022 [6 favorites]

I've read a lot of these books (neither a woman nor a parent, but I like popular nonfiction), and the throughline from Reviving Ophelia to Irreversible Damage--I just don't see it.

1995 Mom goes twenty-five years without reading a single explicitly conservative book, let alone one published by Regnery Publishing, and then she wakes up one morning like 'let's see, this person shares a publisher with Ann Coulter, Diamond & Silk, and Mark Fuhrman. Maybe I should check her out'?
posted by box at 2:08 PM on January 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

Okay, hey, I have a suggestion:

I think it's reasonable to say that the list form may not be the best way to approach this topic because it gets recaptured by existing misogynist discourse. And I think it's pretty reasonable to say that you'll never go broke in America writing a "mothers are dumb and awful and embarrassing" piece, and that there really isn't a similarly pervasive narrative about fathers qua fathers, and that this is in fact about misogyny.

So, having said....what about that throughline? I'm not totally sure that Reviving Ophelia is a good starting point, but there has to be a history for current "they transed my sweet little girl, girls are so vulnerable to attacks on their bodies" discourse, and it couldn't possibly have developed without a specific "girls are injured through body insecurity" argument.

Admittedly, I think that part of what we're seeing is an international thing that initially got ported over here via the radical right from Mumsnet, so I'm not sure that the best lineage is "US books about girlhood>>>>transphobia", I think there's a missing middle term.
posted by Frowner at 2:18 PM on January 19, 2022 [21 favorites]

I just don't see it.

As Danny points out, it plays on the same fears evoked by the previous list items. If you're browsing in a book store and don't know the history of the publisher or the book itself, but you're in the mindset of someone whose child's choices are increasingly confusing and scary, you may be drawn to this potential offering of answers (particularly if your child's "strange new friends" are themselves trans or gnc).

I think this list is as much a criticism of the way these authors prey on the difficulties of parenthood in order to push certain conservative and misogynistic agendas, be they transphobic, queerphobic, or just "don't let your daughter cut her hair short or she'll embarrass you in church" kind of things.

I think there's a missing middle term.

I agree, which is why I think this list shouldn't be taken at face value and is probably intended more as a "here's what my mother read and look where that got me" piece than an actual, literal, sit down and plot this out graph.

(For what it's worth, my money on that middle term is the presence of Facebook, at least in my experience with my occasionally transphobic when she's been online too much MIL.)
posted by fight or flight at 2:27 PM on January 19, 2022 [11 favorites]

That's a great point, Frowner. A lot of moms of that generation (as opposed to dads) are very sensitized to gendered violence, and they often try to justify their transphobia by talking about trauma from gendered violence. (See: JKR.)
posted by MiraK at 2:29 PM on January 19, 2022 [9 favorites]

Wow! I did not read this as offensive or mean at all - and I'd like to apologize to anyone whose day was spoiled by reading it. Going down the list, I read 9 of these (mostly in my late teens*), and never would have thought of putting them in a list - but they also make a cohesive list, in my opinion. The broad trajectory is white feminism, fueled by fear. I look at this list and its criticisms and go, "ah, uh-huh, yup, if I wasn't introduced to and challenged by intersectionality, mmm hmm." I look at this list, and then at the climate, and it checks out. And I look at this list, and how I will probably never come out to my parents, and, well, checks out.

To me, as a person living in some quieter permutation of Danny's situation, I don't see him being shitty about moms. I see him calling out white feminism as applied to his life. And moms and kids, well. I've never read anything that can touch the depth of the love and the hurt there.

* I actually read a Child Called It in the year of our lord, 2021, on the recommendation of a new friend. *sigh* I'm hoping to steer them towards better stuff in the future...
posted by snerson at 2:49 PM on January 19, 2022 [22 favorites]

> I actually read a Child Called It in the year of our lord, 2021

Me, too! I couldn't make head or tail of it, though. I mean, it's just gruesome, obviously, but I have no idea why this is a famous book. (Immigrant here, lacking American pop culture context.)

Is this one of those books that was popular in the heyday of trauma-porn - Oprah with her guests who told horrific stories, that asshole who made a big hit out of City of Joy, those infomercials about African charities featuring literal starving children, that sort of thing?

And ... this trauma-porn is part of the developmental trajectory of white transphobic feminism in the US?
posted by MiraK at 3:01 PM on January 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I think the strand of feminism embodied by Reviving Ophelia is very much about girls being victimized by their peers - both girls and boys - and by the wider culture, and it IS a very 'white feminism' narrative, and I think it had true things to say about some of the many traumas of being a girl in the late 80s/early 90s, but... it's hard to cast teen girls into the victim role while still acknowledging their agency. It's a lot easier to set up a narrative where the parents are saving the girls (who are innocent and too young to know better) from Society.

And that's a narrative that Abigail Shrier very consciously uses as a springboard.

It's insidious precisely because it's tapping into stories about vulnerable girls in danger that resonate with both conservatism and with a lot of strands of second-wave feminism.
posted by Jeanne at 3:10 PM on January 19, 2022 [9 favorites]

I haven't read any of these books, so can anyone tell me if these books were... good?


No. I worked at bookstores in the crucial 2001-2007 period of this genre and from that perspective most of the criticism is warranted because most of this stuff is fucking horrid and encourages lazy, credulous thinking.

"Mean-spirited," yeesh. I hadn't realized we need to be nice now. Plenty of middle-aged white women with kids read, you know, stuff that isn't fucking horrid.
posted by aspersioncast at 3:40 PM on January 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

"Plenty of middle-aged white women with kids read, you know, stuff that isn't fucking horrid."

Wow, thanks.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 3:47 PM on January 19, 2022 [13 favorites]

Wow! I did not read this as offensive or mean at all

Oh, I think you're fine! I hope you don't take these comments personally. It's an interesting piece and there's a lot to discuss, it's a good FPP.

I clicked the link and read it without realizing that it was written by Danny Lavery, and knowing about his relationship with his parents, that does put it in some context for sure. But the piece starts with this:

Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls spent three years on the New York Times Best Seller list, so obviously a lot of moms owned it — a lot of non-moms owned it too — and therefore it’s impossible to perfectly predict which ones stayed in the Women Who Run With The Wolves genre or which ones stayed in the Child Called It genre, because “anxiety about presumptively-white teenage girls” can take endless final forms. So this isn’t an exhaustive or even necessarily precise predictions.

But I’m reasonably confident that if your mother owned Reviving Ophelia in 1995, I’ve correctly guessed at least one other book she’s kept on her nightstand in the years since.

Which, he's actively asking the reader to consider their mothers, and opening the window to generalize there. Combine that with the "this isn’t an exhaustive or even necessarily precise" caveat and it comes off to me as just a lazy swipe at mothers of a certain age (and probably other demographics), while the rest of the piece is commentary on a selection of popular books by year. I think the commentary is strong enough to stand on its own, so the 'moms! amiright?' framing just came off to me as unnecessary and, like others said, mean-spirited (fwiw my mom had Reviving Ophelia but I don't think she actually read it).
posted by everybody had matching towels at 3:47 PM on January 19, 2022 [10 favorites]

I read Reviving Ophelia in my early twenties, at a point where I had gotten through adolescence but wasn't too far removed for it and I recall it resonating with my experience - the sudden onset of gendered expectations and being sexualized whether your ready for that or not and the danger inherent in that sexualization and somehow it's all your fault. Society puts a whole lot of shit on teenage girls and I think it's legit to explore that and care about it. Lavery's summation of the book seems pretty unfair.
posted by Jess the Mess at 4:03 PM on January 19, 2022 [9 favorites]

What's going on with the "She loves Laura Hillenbrand. She wishes Laura Hillenbrand were her daughter" thing, btw? It's weird to me, because I actually don't think that Hillenbrand's books particularly appeal to the white mom demographic, and also because the thing that Hillenbrand is known for, biographically, is that she has completely debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome and has been unable to leave her house for most of her adult life. Is he saying that the bad moms wish their daughters were disabled?
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 4:06 PM on January 19, 2022

And for what it's worth, the only other book I've read on this list is Nickeled and Dimed, which was great.
posted by Jess the Mess at 4:09 PM on January 19, 2022 [6 favorites]

But I’m reasonably confident that if your mother owned Reviving Ophelia in 1995, I’ve correctly guessed at least one other book she’s kept on her nightstand in the years since.

Yeah, this was the line, where I skimmed down through and went, no actually none of these. (I must've read Mom's copy when I was home on a college break? Because I graduated high school in '92 and I definitely remember seeing it in the bookshelf in her bedroom.)(It sort of fascinated me, but I don't remember why exactly?)

But also my mother is ... a woman of curious reading tastes, who read a surprising amount of Tom Clancy for a middle-aged woman when I was a teenager, and quite a lot of murder mysteries all her life.

So again, skimmed through, thinking there's a story here but not one I know.
posted by epersonae at 4:34 PM on January 19, 2022

Daniel Lavery has a father who literally abuses little children in his church, if I recall correctly.

>>You don't. His brother was the one who abused children. His father covered for him, covered it up, and publicly denounced Danny and his partner for bringing it to the attention of the media.

It's both. See this pinned thread from his twitter account about his biological father, John Ortberg Jr.
posted by needs more cowbell at 5:43 PM on January 19, 2022 [8 favorites]

Daniel Lavery's humor has always been sarcastic and has always needed to be understood through cultural context and sometime between The Toast and now his sarcasm and that need for context is no longer acceptable gosh what changed
posted by Anonymous at 6:00 PM on January 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

So, having gone to seminary and spent a lot of years therefore adjacent to evangelicals (and fascinated by them), I sort-of generally recognize the thrust of this list and what the throughline is there. But, yeah, I think Danny Lavery has missed the mark a bit here, because "Reviving Ophelia" was widely, widely popular, not just with moms but with high school and junior high teachers, psychologists, counselors, and teenaged girls themselves, from all across the political spectrum. My mom read it, partly because I read it, which I did because my high school US history teacher (who also taught AP psych), who was amazeballs, saw I was Going Through Some Shit and lent me her copy because she thought it would speak to me. IT DID. IT HELPED.

*I* read Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies; I'm quite sure my mom never did. We both read Nickle and Dimed; my dad and I both read the John Adams biography. Reading Lolita in Tehran was the local library's "big read" that year, so I know she read that. (I did too, in grad school.) I read "You're Wearing THAT?" but I don't think my mom did, having run out of teenaged daughters by then. I read "Unbroken" in my book club, and it was fine, but clearly polemical, especially in the last section. My (mostly-atheist) book club picked it because they loooooooooved WWII books at the time, and I think they were not prepared for, uh, how much Jesus was going to arrive in the last section, and how flatly the book would reject models of addiction that didn't involve turning to Jesus to fix your alcoholism and wife-beating (but once you do, IT'S ALL FINE, and we can all just forget the wife-beating ever happened, because Jesus is the same as retrograde amnesia). We both read "Becoming"; I read "Educated" and it's possible my mom might have, but she didn't mention it if she did.

But yes, as a throughline for a certain type of evangelical woman, a well-educated one who considers herself feminist within a "complementarian marriage" framework, this is not a bad account of "feminist or quasi-feminist pop-psychology books tracing certain types of moral panic about girls and young women that appealed to smart evangelicals since 1995."

What I felt like, as I read this list, and as I read some of the discussion here, was something that I've felt a lot in the last few years, which is sort of ironically on-point for this list: I have not felt like so many people were so eager to explain my life to me, put me in a box, and insist I stay there since ... well, since I was a teenaged girl! It's SO WEIRD, because I survived and passed out of the worst years of being objectified by men and by the culture, and spent my 20s and 30s fairly comfortably unboxed. But now I'm a middle-aged white mom, and boy howdy does the entire culture know exactly who I am, what I think, what I read, who I vote for, what I believe, what interests me. And objecting to any part of that description is met with people who PUSH YOU DOWN IN THE BOX EVEN HARDER. I haven't felt so much like an object, like an object who only exists for other people to both enjoy and mock, since I was a teenaged girl, there to look pretty and be made fun of for my naivete and inferiority. Now I'm there to look fat, hold the fuckin' country together during a pandemic, and be made fun of for my boringness and inferiority and bad political opinions.

The thing that's sort-of maddening about it is that if you actually go to the local Democrats meeting? It's basically all middle-aged women. If you go to the local Progressive meeting, same. But sure, I want to listen to local dudes who have never attended a meeting or knocked on doors or canvassed for Democratic candidates, and who definitely don't know who their kids' pediatrician is, explain to me how middle-aged white women are inadequately progressive. Like, the people who organized the local library seminar where you learned how to say cleverly dismissive things about how white feminism is inadequately intersectional was organized by local middle-aged white feminists who recognize that and are striving to become more intersectional and who reached out to feminists of color and queer feminists (and who raised the money TO PAY THEM FOR THE SEMINAR, an effort to which basically no men contributed except where their wives put their names on the form but we all knew it was the wife). But so great that you, a dude, took from that seminar a new way to dunk on the middle-aged white women who just ensured your ass got educated in intersectionality. You never heard the word "intersectional" before that day, but you have adopted it as a way to belittle women, U R SO FEMINIST.

And like, I get it. I understand the failings of institutional white feminism. But I also get that it's a hell of a lot easier to condemn middle-aged white women who are doing the work than it is to actually do the work yourself. And I get that pushing an entire group of women into a comfortable box is a lot easier than having to actually interact with women and understand them as human beings -- I understand it because I've been here before, and the way middle-aged moms are treated is absolutely no different than the way teenaged girls are treated, except that when you're a middle-aged mom, you get de-sexualized instead of hypersexualized, but it's still a sexualization template that revolves around creepy male standards of femininity. (It's the dark flipside: You spend your teenaged years being sexualized in horrifying ways by creepy men, have children, and spend your middle age being DEsexualized by those same creepy men who complain that women with kids have "let themselves go," which frees them to go sexualize teenagers again.)

I suppose the one big upside of being middle-aged is that I am able to laugh at the people trying to put me in boxes, even as it hurts me. Whereas when I was a teenager, it was all hurt, no laughter. Now I know they're fuckin' dumbasses, even though I still resent the box.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:03 PM on January 19, 2022 [58 favorites]

But yes, as a throughline for a certain type of evangelical woman, a well-educated one who considers herself feminist within a "complementarian marriage" framework, this is not a bad account of "feminist or quasi-feminist pop-psychology books tracing certain types of moral panic about girls and young women that appealed to smart evangelicals since 1995."

WHAT DO YOU THINK THE POINT OF THIS WAS, THIS ENTRY ON HIS PERSONAL BLOG, THE PERSONAL BLOG OF THIS MAN WHO GREW UP WITH AN EVANGELICAL MOTHER

But so great that you, a dude, took from that seminar a new way to dunk on the middle-aged white women who just ensured your ass got educated in intersectionality. You never heard the word "intersectional" before that day, but you have adopted it as a way to belittle women, U R SO FEMINIST.

tell me you know absolutely nothing about Daniel Lavery without saying you know nothing about Daniel Lavery

FFS
posted by Anonymous at 6:09 PM on January 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

It's interesting that this read as mean or aggressively snarky. I guess it would, when you are not familiar with the emotional wounds of growing up queer with queerphobic parents. Which, trust me, makes affectionate ribbing about reading habits look benign.
posted by coffeeand at 6:20 PM on January 19, 2022 [10 favorites]

That Jesus guy is always showing up in the second half of books.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:25 PM on January 19, 2022 [9 favorites]

There is just some staggeringly ignorant me-centric shit comments here being written by cis women who do not realize this is a trans man writing about his experience with moral panic and how there is a strain of moral panic in a certain type of cis "feminism" that hurts trans people. And you same cis women who are objecting to his tone probably loved his work when he was writing under his deadname and presenting as a cis woman.

Metafilter, you embarrass yourselves
posted by Anonymous at 6:26 PM on January 19, 2022 [6 favorites]

But sure, I want to listen to local dudes who have never attended a meeting or knocked on doors or canvassed for Democratic candidates, and who definitely don't know who their kids' pediatrician is, explain to me how middle-aged white women are inadequately progressive.

God, Eyebrows, your entire comment is so fucked up. Do you have any idea who Danny Lavery is? Have you somehow forgotten? Do you just deny that context is possibly relevant here?

Seriously, this is some weird, gender-essentialist framing that needs to be deleted with prejudice, and the mod reprimanded for coming in so hot to a thread already not going well.
posted by sagc at 6:27 PM on January 19, 2022 [13 favorites]

I read The Four Agreements. I raised free daughters. I didn't have to revive Ophelia. When I cleared out my mom's place when she went into a memory care situation, she had all of Robert Jordan's books, and three garbage cans of brend new, unopened magazines, because she thought, if she bought lots from Publisher's clearinghouse, she would be more likely to win.

Moms of every color and system of belief, hope their children can have good lives. Being an older woman sucks, in some ways and in others it is pretty great. There is an imaginary can in this conversation, and it has nothing in it, that is where I start each day. I am learning about existential physics, maybe I will understand love someday. Meanwhile, I try to do good, and keep the snark away. If you start every sentence with they, while laying blame, constantly point out the holes in everything, that is your life. That is what you have to offer in conversation.

To presume that women of color did not read Reviving Ophelia, is a presumption.
posted by Oyéah at 6:28 PM on January 19, 2022 [9 favorites]

the people who organized the local library seminar where you learned how to say cleverly dismissive things about how white feminism is inadequately intersectional was organized by local middle-aged white feminists

But so great that you, a dude, took from that seminar a new way to dunk on the middle-aged white women who just ensured your ass got educated in intersectionality.

Sorry to double post but this image of middle-aged white women as the weary savior of intersectionality, woe unto her.... I'm going to wake my cat up laughing.
posted by coffeeand at 6:28 PM on January 19, 2022 [13 favorites]

You never heard the word "intersectional" before that day, but you have adopted it as a way to belittle women, U R SO FEMINIST.

this is reprehensible.
posted by sagc at 6:29 PM on January 19, 2022 [10 favorites]

"WHAT DO YOU THINK THE POINT OF THIS WAS, THIS ENTRY ON HIS PERSONAL BLOG, THE PERSONAL BLOG OF THIS MAN WHO GREW UP WITH AN EVANGELICAL MOTHER"

"God, Eyebrows, your entire comment is so fucked up. Do you have any idea who Danny Lavery is? Have you somehow forgotten? Do you just deny that context is possibly relevant here?"

I am actually responding to comments here, who found the blog post mean-spirited. I GET where Lavery is coming from. I also get why "dunking on moms" and "dunking on white moms" is read by many women as mean-spirited, and I am talking not about this specific blog post, but about a larger cultural narrative that wants to objectify moms as much as those same women were objectified as turned into objects of cultural panic as teenagers.

I completely understand the throughline Lavery has identified here. I also understand why some women feel unfairly attacked by this, as many people posted in this very thread. I don't feel attacked by Lavery ... I feel attacked and belittled and boxed up and turned into a monster by people who insist that "this is what white moms thing" ... kind of like what's happening here in your reading of my response to the larger point, about how white feminism is constructed, and who turns it into a weapon, and who they use that weapon against. YEAH, Lavery's mom ABSOLUTELY used this as a weapon against Lavery, and against trans people. But Lavery's discussion of his mother's attacks on him, and his mother's construction of white feminist points, is now, already, being turned to use to attack other women. THAT'S THE CULTURE, THAT'S THE PROBLEM.

(I obviously should have been more clear that "the dude" is not Lavery, the dude is a random middle-aged white dude who shows up to local events to mansplain to women and queer people how they are feministing wrong, but who has no idea who his kids' pediatrician is. Lavery is OBVIOUSLY not "that local dude." That local dude is the white suburban dad-bro who is busy explaining to the women and queer people WHO ORGANIZED THE EVENT how feminism works.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:36 PM on January 19, 2022 [15 favorites]

I do not think you made that clear in your comment at all.
posted by sagc at 6:37 PM on January 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

IDK man, I read a lot of these in high school or college and I’m a little unsure about some of the topics of these being described as moral panics. I read Reviving Ophelia because a ton of my peers were being hospitalized for drugs or eating disorders or mental health problems— it was not helpful, but those problems were real, not the fevered imaginings of some invented clueless Karen fretting about white femininity under siege. And I’m having trouble connecting Barbara Ehrenreich breaking down dehumanizing corporate minimum wage jobs for a middle class audience with trash like Irreversible Damage.

Like, yeah, right now the anti-trans lobby is making a serious push to corner the concerned progressive middle class mom demographic who would have bought those books and turn them against their trans children, but casting all of them and the parents who read them as clueless, hopelessly middlebrow, and transphobic in retrospect is not a great look. Danny and Barbara Ehrenreich are writing for the same socioeconomic class and audience. Is Danny still friends with Nicole Cliffe? Because I can see her (or honestly Danny himself) as someone who read everything on this list much more easily than I can imagine Danny’s evangelical biological mom picking these titles up.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 6:41 PM on January 19, 2022 [11 favorites]

But Lavery's discussion of his mother's attacks on him, and his mother's construction of white feminist points, is now, already, being turned to use to attack other women

Who is doing this? Who is using his points? Show me. Because right now all I see is a thread of comments of people who have taken a piece about the trans experience and turned it how cis people feel because, yet again, we have failed to realize it's not about us.

And I agree with sagc, absolutely nothing in the comment indicated you understood his context and were not writing about yourself.
posted by Anonymous at 6:44 PM on January 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

"I do not think you made that clear in your comment at all."

Yeah, sorry, I get that. I wrote assuming we were all working from a base knowledge of who Danny Lavery is, and I was not REMOTELY clear enough in transitioning from discussing "this specific piece and how I understand it as someone evangelical-adjacent vs. someone who grew up NOT evangelical-adjacent" to "... and these are the specific ways (closely-related to Lavery's highlighting of moral panics around teenaged girls) in which local white dads use intersectional feminism to attack local white moms."

It's INCREDIBLY frustrating, and I totally expect that at our next local progressive Zoom, there will be exactly two dudes who bother to show up (and 18 women who are always there), and both of them will mansplain to us how we need to read this list from Danny Lavery about how we are not intersectionally feminist enough. (And neither of them will know one single thing about Danny Lavery, and we will point out that we live 3 miles from Willow Creek and they will be like "wait, what's that? What's Willow Creek?") (And honestly chances are good we will then have to explain to them what it means to be trans, I can not even tell you what the local shitshow was like when our high school LGBTQ+ club supported the coming-outs of local trans teenagers, and the Democratic moms all organized in support and the handful of men who bother to show up ever were like "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE BATHROOMS??????????" And the women who run the group were like, "Please fuck off back to 2002, thx." But they did not and we spent like the next four meetings explaining SUPER BASIC CONCEPTS to men who felt that their ignorance should dominate all our work.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:46 PM on January 19, 2022 [7 favorites]

Is Danny still friends with Nicole Cliffe? Because I can see her (or honestly Danny himself) as someone who read everything on this list much more easily than I can imagine Danny’s evangelical biological mom picking these titles up.

That's what sucks about this thread is that there are legitimate reasons to criticize Danny and yet here we are getting upset because a trans person was mean to cis women. And I mean, I get it, I've been there, I've been that member of a dominant group who is reacting out of a sense of perceived injustice like, but whyyy are the marginalized people being so mean to me? Why can't they make their point nicely? And yes, it would be better for us all to make our points nicely and prioritize everyone's feelings, but unfortunately that is not the world we live in.
posted by coffeeand at 6:47 PM on January 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

Coffeeand, why are you saying I’m cisgender and then throwing this whining straw man voice “whyyyy are you being so mean to meeeeee” elementary school bullying shit at me? What the fuck is this about? I can recognize several of the “cis” people in this thread who thought the post was meanspirited as transmascs. Mefites, why are you so eager to treat each other like shit at even the merest suggestion that someone might be a white cis woman eg open season for cruel, self righteous bullshit? Everyone in this thread needs to take it back a few steps.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 6:59 PM on January 19, 2022 [18 favorites]

Is Danny Lavery somebody that middle-aged men are into?
posted by Anonymous at 7:02 PM on January 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

I, a trans person, am uncomfortable with critiques that position mothers qua mothers as credulous, middlebow and unselfawarely retrograde. As a trans masc I don't think that we are immune to the culture's misogyny. As a leftist, I'm pretty aware of how misogyny has tended to shape criticism of even really horrible women like Margaret Thatcher who certainly had plenty of non-gendered flaws.

"We can write things that look sexist and you just need to know our personal history to interpret it right" is not an impossible starting point but it's tricky.

I also don't totally like "of course trans men are right in whatever they say about cis women" because it seems very readily to turn into a ranked series of oppressions.

Honestly I wish this piece were either more personal or more clearly on the lit crit side rather than associative.
posted by Frowner at 7:06 PM on January 19, 2022 [42 favorites]

FFS, are we really arguing about how a trans man didn't vent about his abusive mother correctly?
posted by schmod at 7:20 PM on January 19, 2022 [5 favorites]

As an aside, ugh, today is the day I learned Barbara Ehrenreich is a terf. Well, damn.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 7:20 PM on January 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

whyyy are the marginalized people being so mean to me?

1. Women are also still marginalized people unfortunately, in any society I am familiar with. The problems teenage girls face are largely because of the toxic messages they receive from society about what their role as women should be.

2. It's very uncharitable to read all objections in this thread as boiling down to complaints about someone "being mean to me".

3. Eyebrows was taken to task for not providing enough context in her comment, but Lavery provided exactly zero context in his article. I was not familiar with him at all and would never have known he was trans or about his family history without this thread.
posted by Flock of Cynthiabirds at 7:42 PM on January 19, 2022 [15 favorites]

it's a post on his personal blog, it's not the Washington Post
posted by Anonymous at 7:45 PM on January 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

Daniel is relatively famous, and a quick search indicates that he has been the subject of at least 50 FPPs on this site.
posted by schmod at 7:46 PM on January 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

Isn't this written for people whose mom's read these books, not for the moms? Those of us who grew up. If your mother didn't buy the first book, the author says you should stop reading.

I think the subtext is the trauma that many of us dealt with, from the anxieties and worries and attempts to change us, when it was the world that probably needs to change.

The books I see here are all about understanding, about explaining, how shitty and dangerous the world is. how parents, and in particular moms, need to understand in order to protect their kids, and what their kids need to be made to do to survive.

The books about "changing" things I recognize are about getting shot by the Taliban for wanting an education, and Leaning In. I don't see much about empowering young people to understand their world and themselves, or change it.

But it's amorphous. You can read a lot of different things into this collection of books, and the discussion of them.

If it explicitly expressed some detailed thesis and argued for it persuasively,I think it would get a lot less discussion here. People love to argue about what something means or what it should be.

Maybe I better understand my mother, reading this.

But it also makes me angry, angry less with her than with a world that positioned her as someone that needed to help me but then robbed her of the tools to do so, that told her I needed to do things, but not how to help me have the agency to do them.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 8:00 PM on January 19, 2022 [15 favorites]

Why on earth would anyone read this article about the moral panic around "young girls being convinced they're trans men" and assume, without doing the most basic of checks, that the author is a cis man? I had never heard of Danny and didn't know he was trans, but I sure did by the time I got to the end of the article. I mean there was a possibility he was a cis man smugly writing about something he has no experience with but that certainly isn't where I would have placed my bet.

Also there's a description of his blog at the bottom that includes the word transmasculine.
posted by brook horse at 8:04 PM on January 19, 2022 [5 favorites]

Coffeeand, why are you saying I’m cisgender

I've noticed in internet discussions about trans people, someone inevitably accuses someone else of 'assuming their gender' or 'assuming they're cis'. I feel like it happens often enough that it should be some kind of internet law, like Rule 63 or Godwin's law.

(I'm not the identity police, I don't know your gender or your life, but I'm also really confused as to why you think I was talking to you personally. And not like, the whole thread of people making the same argument as you.)
posted by coffeeand at 8:13 PM on January 19, 2022

I'm also really confused as to why you think I was talking to you personally.


Likely because you quoted them at the top of your comment.
posted by Flock of Cynthiabirds at 8:17 PM on January 19, 2022 [8 favorites]

Rock em Sock em, I’m talking about the tendency in intersectional-fluent communities for people to score cheap rhetorical points off people they disagree with by saying that they’re clearly white and cishet, regardless of whether the people in question actually are cisgender, straight, or white. So far in this thread I’ve seen multiple transmasc people dismissed as cis women in ways that felt like this tendency of arguments in progressive spaces to spiral into people strawmanning each other as “you must be [top of the privilege scale]” Whiteness obviously isn’t an axis of oppression and I don’t think I presented it as one, but it wasn’t necessary to bring that in at all, you’re right that it’s not relevant here and bringing in a conversational issue I see in larger spaces like twitter or fb wasn’t a good move.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 9:17 PM on January 19, 2022 [8 favorites]

ugh, today is the day I learned Barbara Ehrenreich is a terf. Well, damn.

Would you mind providing a link? I was googling around and couldn't find anything.

Kind of strange to call Shatner Chatner a "personal blog." It's a (largely) paywalled Substack. I think it's fair to treat this piece like the many other Lavery pieces linked on Mefi, as a piece of professional writing that it's legitimate to analyze and criticize (and praise, which he gets a lot of around here). I'm a big Lavery fan, but this one didn't land for me, because it felt too imprecise, as if he were trying to generalize a very specific experience in ways that didn't quite work.
posted by praemunire at 9:26 PM on January 19, 2022 [13 favorites]

I get that our culture is pretty garbage about being dismissive about moms, but I didn't feel like this piece did that.

Quite aside from the opening 2 paragraphs being a wall of "not all moms" and "not all readers of Reviving Ophelia" disclaimers, I thought the hypothetical reader described was a pretty specific character.

The list worked better for me because not all the chosen titles tied directly together. The imagined reader here seems like a fairly broad consumer of certain kinds of popular nonfiction, and she comes back to the theme of "anxiety about my daughter" frequently but not exclusively. Frequently enough to let her child know that this mom finds her child to be a problem. And the problem with this specific character is that their child is a problem for them; the taste in books isn't really the issue, although the publishing industry has offered them some unhelpful reads along the way.

I haven't read the majority of these books, so maybe they're all terrible, and that's the roast I'm missing that other people are picking up on? (I mean, a few of them are obviously objectionable on content grounds, but is the list as a whole notably bad or is this a "this variety of popular nonfiction is bad and you should feel bad for reading it" thing?)

But yeah, this read to me as a person thinking through some issues with his mom, and if it doesn't resonate with you, maybe you just have a different kind of mom (even if she did read Reviving Ophelia).
posted by the primroses were over at 9:30 PM on January 19, 2022 [9 favorites]

Kind of strange to call Shatner Chatner a "personal blog." It's a (largely) paywalled Substack. I think it's fair to treat this piece like the many other Lavery pieces linked on Mefi, as a piece of professional writing that it's legitimate to analyze and criticize (and praise, which he gets a lot of around here

Add to which, Lavery himself describes Chatner as a "literary periodical" with essays and fiction. He is, as you note, a professional writer.

There are professional writers who publish personal blogs, with notes about their gardening or that they didn't get any work done because they had the flu or that their spouse broke the dishwasher. This really isn't that.
posted by mark k at 9:39 PM on January 19, 2022 [6 favorites]

Would you mind providing a link? I was googling around and couldn't find anything.

Actually all I can find is a locked tweet with a bunch of people mad underneath her, a shitty joke about the trans military ban. I can’t find anything else and should probably redact that, I don’t think I can call it either way.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 10:09 PM on January 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

But it's amorphous. You can read a lot of different things into this collection of books, and the discussion of them.

If it explicitly expressed some detailed thesis and argued for it persuasively, I think it would get a lot less discussion here. People love to argue about what something means or what it should be.

This was my impression, too. It's like, yeah, my Dad hit me with his belt and kicked me with his work boots, but that doesn't mean a lot of men don't wear these things just to hold their pants up and keep their feet dry. I think a variety of women could easily have read a variety of these books for a variety of reasons - yes, those reasons absolutely could be the ones Lavery's abusive mother (and presumably other abusive mothers) read them for, but they could just as easily not be.

Quite aside from the opening 2 paragraphs being a wall of "not all moms" and "not all readers of Reviving Ophelia" disclaimers, I thought the hypothetical reader described was a pretty specific character.

I dunno, maybe my sarcasmometer is on the fritz, but the second paragraph in particular reads to me as heavily facetious. Yeah, it's describing a specific character, but one that he's pretty confident your mother was if she read this one very popular book a quarter-century ago. "If I’m wrong about your mother, please send a corrigendum and a SASE to the Chatner’s central office and I’ll refund you the cost of the book, adjusted for inflation." sounds to me like a variation on "If I'm wrong about your mother I'll eat my hat in the middle of Times Square."

I am in no way trying to minimize how Lavery and other trans people have suffered at the hands of their families of origin. But this essay reads to me less as "this is how my birth parents justified abusing me" and more as making generalizations about mothers in general. I've gone back and read it several times, and I really do believe that the way it's written does not make the distinction clear. I'm not sure so many readers would have drawn different conclusions if it had been made plainer.

And I'm thoroughly sympathetic to the author. There's one particular horror movie that is so close to the way my own childhood trauma looked and felt, that watching it feels like watching home movies of the worst days of my life. It was absolutely horrible going to a screening of this film where the audience thought the most traumatic scenes for me were as funny as a Three Stooges movie. Watching it is usually catharsis for me, but it was a cold bucket of water over my head to learn that people who didn't go through the same thing just aren't going to get it. While it truly felt like that laughing audience was laughing at what happened to me, deep down I eventually had to accept that they weren't.

Anyway, I didn't mean to ramble this long. TL,DR: I think there's more than one valid reaction to this piece.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:21 PM on January 19, 2022 [10 favorites]

I feel bad for those who have been hurt by this thread — on both sides of the argument — because these hurt feelings are completely justified.

Lavery's piece comes from a specific context and it's a very personal and very painful experience that clearly resonates with many people who are trans and have lived through it. And Lavery is well-known in these parts. As well, he did make his context explicit several times in several ways.

Also, though, wow do cultural (moral) panics so often reduce to blaming women not womening right and, especially, mothers not mothering right. Not only that, but middle-aged mothers are almost completely dehumanized and instrumentalized in our culture — it's like if they no longer are sex objects, then they have only one job, which is to be responsible for, well, the future of society via their children. This is so incredibly misogynist and so pervasive, I can totally understand why someone would zero-in on that and lose their shit over it.

When I put myself under scrutiny, I realized that the whole list of books elicited in me an uncomfortable combination of snobbery, judgment, and stereotyping that, really, only revealed how far away my own experience is from those whose lives are saturated by them. I did read the piece with Daniel Lavery's experience in mind, and was looking for the through-line of mothers' panic about daughters and its relation to transphobia. What I failed to do was be aware of my internal sneer at these mothers and what that revealed about me. Sure, I still think most of those books are crap... but it sure as hell isn't those mothers I should be angry at because those books exist and are popular.

I think there's a dark truth to how it is that moral panics are created and magnified in ways that always target those already most disempowered. And I think the darkest truth of it is how, so often, it enlists one group against another. Especially women and mothers. The strong link between the UK's Mumsnet and contemporary transphobia is so very revealing.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 11:24 PM on January 19, 2022 [21 favorites]

What I got from this piece was the specific pain of being hurt by someone well-meaning. In a way, the outright malicious are easier to endure because their opinions should obviously be dismissed. But the ones who hurt you by trying to help, you wrestle with guilt because you wonder if you're hurting them by worrying them, if you don't love them back enough.
posted by airmail at 12:02 AM on January 20, 2022 [13 favorites]

It’s also really weird to be go down a list of books read by unacceptably middlebrow, uncool housewives that was compiled by someone whose main gig is writing a relationship and family advice column for Slate. Danny’s readership is full of exactly the same middle class, NPR listening, earnest mom demographic Nickel and Dimed and most of the rest of these books were marketed to.

I guess in a very literal sense, the compensation that Danny Lavery may be entitled to is that in a just world, it would be his books at the end of the mom character’s reading list rather than Abigail Shrier’s manifesto attacking trans kids, or any other pieces of terf literature claiming that the existence of (especially AFAB) trans and nonbinary kids is part of the same phenomenon as toxic diet culture in the 90s and 00s. I mean, that is a very real phenomenon, and it’s an ugly one. But the disdain in this list doesn’t feel like it’s directed towards those books or the women in peril feminism it outlines or even the “our daughters being transed is the next battle in the same war on female bodies that made everyone anorexic in the 00s” cultural movement it directly lampshades. It just feels snobby and, yeah, mean in a way Danny Lavery usually doesn’t stoop to. Like the really biting criticism here feels more closely aimed at these moms for their uncoolness and lack of cultural sophistication rather than their
bigotry. I know Danny has had what it’s a painful understatement to call a rough couple of years but, bleh.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 12:06 AM on January 20, 2022 [8 favorites]

But the ones who hurt you by trying to help, you wrestle with guilt because you wonder if you're hurting them by worrying them, if you don't love them back enough.

It's not quite the same, but I've been and will possibly always be at a psychological impasse with myself with regard to my mother and her complicity in my father's abuse. I know that somewhere inside I'm very angry, but I don't know how to be angry with my mom because she was the "good parent". And, as I tell her whenever she attempts to apologize to me (which makes me profoundly uncomfortable), she was as terrorized by him as I was.

I think the salience here is how both abuse and institutionalized injustice so frequently set up someone else, also relatively disempowered, to be in the position to face any backlash. It is, for the generally empowered, a cunning strategy.

Putting this back into personal terms, I absolutely am aware that I carry some very strong anger toward my mom and that it would be best for me were I to acknowledge it and work through it... but I avoid it, even so. Because, for one thing, that's exactly what my dad would have liked me to do. After all, in his mind she was to blame for most everything. Thinking this through, it only redoubles my anger at him and how successful his gaslighting was, and enduringly so. Ideally, I'd like to somehow allow myself to feel anger at my mom while never losing site of who the real villain — the real prime mover — of all this was.

Regardless of what we perceive this platform of Lavery's to be (very personal or general) — the topic itself can never be anything less than deeply personal to him. He is certainly aware — excruciatingly aware — of the overriding significance and guilt of those he doesn't refer to in this piece. For him, surely, it goes without saying. It's self-evident.

What he's doing, I think, is something quite like what I haven't been able to do: explore the blame his mother bears, and how she badly wounded him. There's nothing in what he wrote that exonerates anyone else even a tiny little bit. Far from it, really, if you read between the lines.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:37 AM on January 20, 2022 [8 favorites]

I get now that it's much more specific than what I've been reading into it, but you always start with your own bias, irrelevant as it may be. And I did have this kneejerk reaction "Well my mum doesn't read that sort of thing, thank God", intended by the author or not, and I think that is a questionable impulse, actually. Maybe not at all the point, but it does make me wonder about myself.

So yes, my mum wouldn't read a lot on that list, at least not the parenting and self-help entries. Because she reads mostly German, naturally, and because she's more into travelling, history, politics. And I do find that quite a relief, I have to say. Which is weird, because I'm not normally the "just don't overthink it"-type of person, and yet ... The last thing I want is my mom getting introspective about her parenting, because that just tends to end in a lot hand-wringing, what a failure she is, because I'm such a failure and it's all her fault, and then I feel insulted and guilty for making her feel guilty and it's hard to see how that serves anyone involved.

Thing is, I don't actually think I did turn out that badly (and my guess is mum doesn't entirely either; she does trust me with money). Sure, some of mom's parenting instincts, fairly undistorted by parenting books, haven't always been helpful exactly, but all in all, I don't have that many complaints about my life. Mum and I, we've had our shouting matches, there are some things she will never get about me, and that's okay. I do actually ask her for advice quite a bit, and sometimes even take it, and have benefitted from it on occasion! She'll never be quite at peace with my limitations, but I'm pretty much at peace with hers. We're doing well enough as long as we're sticking to other topics, and we're doing even better the more other topics she has.

So I'm glad for every other interest she has. Just as I'm glad that she wasn't stay-at-home and that I'm not an only child. I feel that everything that took some of her focus away from me - her job, her interests, my brother - has rather been good for our relationship. The attention left for me was plenty enough! I feel that reading should be a respite for moms, not additional home work.

But I do wonder if some of that is not also a bit of weird hesitation about talking about emotions/conflict avoidance.
posted by sohalt at 2:30 AM on January 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

>> Eyebrows was taken to task for not providing enough context in her comment, but Lavery provided exactly zero context in his article. I was not familiar with him at all and would never have known he was trans or about his family history without this thread.

Louder, for folks in the back!

And double for all the folks defending Danny Lavery's article as "it's just a blog post, not a dissertation" ... while attacking a comment Eyebrows wrote on MetaFilter for not enough context!!
posted by MiraK at 3:54 AM on January 20, 2022 [12 favorites]

"If I’m wrong about your mother, please send a corrigendum and a SASE to the Chatner’s central office and I’ll refund you the cost of the book, adjusted for inflation." sounds to me like a variation on "If I'm wrong about your mother I'll eat my hat in the middle of Times Square."

Whereas I thought the joke there was about people's incorrigible need to argue when an internet joke list does not perfectly encapsulate their own experience, rather than being about how self-evidently right he is.

I also read the whole essay, even though I don't think my mom read Reviving Ophelia and Lavery tells me in the next sentence to stop reading in that case.

To be responsive to the prompt in this FFP title, I think I've only read one book in this list besides the starting point. So I might well be missing the incisive vitriol in that selection that is causing the offense. But, to me, acknowledging that my reading of a text is not the only interpretation that exists, this feels gently mocking at worst.

Similarly, I agree with a lot of the frustration in Eyebrows' comment but, to me, it was a non sequitur rant that had little to do with this Lavery essay.

Anyway, my mom is cool and has probably read some of these books, but is not the person being described in this piece. I thought the list was an interesting mix of looking at the way public discourse about young women has been reflected in a small selection of best sellers in the past 25 years and a personal essay about a certain kind of personal pain.
posted by the primroses were over at 4:17 AM on January 20, 2022 [6 favorites]

Kind of strange to call Shatner Chatner a "personal blog." It's a (largely) paywalled Substack.

The assumption of the person writing the Substack is that you know who they are. Because you're paying to read it. It is the rare reader who is paying for a Substack whose author they know nothing about. So I am not going to blame Lavery for not re-explaining himself and his background to the readers of his personal work created specifically for the people who know who he is.

Eyebrows was taken to task for not providing enough context in her comment, but Lavery provided exactly zero context in his article

Eyebrows was taken to task because her comment sounded like she had no idea who Lavery was and did not connect him with the work produced under his deadname. That's not context, that's providing a comment that indicates you have a basic comprehension of the author. As it is, her comments now project Lavery's arguments onto imagined middle-aged men who are supposedly interested in Daniel Lavery, who I guess is now a favored author of middle-aged men? With a side of defending white feminists as the disseminators of intersectionality. Which is not a whole lot better.

As I said before: this piece of writing is as oblique and sarcastic and requiring of context as all the other work Lavery has produced. That work has been celebrated by Metafilter. The difference now is that he is producing post-transitio and the context draws on the trans experience. I think it is interesting that the work of someone considered a premier intersectional feminist by this website is now post-transition considered someone who appeals to middle-aged dude bros and perpetuates misogyny.
posted by Anonymous at 5:22 AM on January 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

There was a Lavery piece posted on the Blue not so long ago where he talked about how he always ends up with too many vegetables in his refrigerator. The comments here descended, from an initially light-hearted and good faith starting point, into the usual Metafilter arguments about whether or not doing [X] with vegetables makes you a morally good/bad person and whether it's okay to judge someone for doing [Y], and derails about why nobody is RTFA, which ended up with everyone getting cranky and ultimately wandering out of the comments because just existing in that kind of space takes too much energy. Nothing to do with him being trans, everything to do with this site's culture.

I'm not shocked that this piece has garnered a similar reaction. I'm not shocked that it's ended up in a meta-meta argument about whether or not it's okay to ignore the context and not RTFA before jumping in with a hot take. I'm not even that shocked that there are so many cis commenters here going to great lengths to talk over and ignore the trans Mefites who are gently asking them to sit down and be quiet for once. This is what Metafilter does. We don't talk about the subject, we use the subject as an excuse to pontificate about our own feelings and tell vaguely related personal stories, or vent about some side issue, then we bounce out of the post to go find another excuse to do it again. The fact that it's often marginalised voices getting stepped on the most in order for people to climb up onto their soapbox is exhausting, but that's what this site has become (ymmv).

It's interesting to see that this piece has barely made a blip on Danny's social media and the comments he's received on the piece itself and Twitter have been generally made in good faith and with good humour. Probably because his audience there already knows him and what to expect. But maybe it's also because of certain endemic problems here and I would encourage frequent commenters in this thread to consider whether or not they are contributing to them.

Maybe a good lesson here would be that if you don't see yourself and your particular experiences reflected in a piece, maybe it's worth sitting with the fact that it's not for you instead of trying to make it about you. Which, interestingly, is probably a lesson that Danny's mom and the other moms who buy transphobic "fix my daughter" literature should also learn.
posted by fight or flight at 5:57 AM on January 20, 2022 [24 favorites]

Huh. I read this piece this morning. I subscribe to the free version of the Chatner but I don't always read the articles; Lavery's writing is so heavily referential that at least half his pieces mean nothing to me, but this one was something I could follow, largely because if my mother didn't read Reviving Ophelia, she was aware of it and the conversation around it, because she is a therapist who often works with teenagers. Likewise, I've read a number of the books on that list because she had them around the house. Having actually read a bunch of the books, and being aware of the general idea of most of the others, and having a very good idea who Lavery is and where he is coming from, I had no problem putting this together as a very specific picture of a single person (Lavery's actual mom) finding a cultural throughline to justify her particular beliefs.

I think one of the challenges in general in writing about one's own personal trauma is that it is often very much easier to do it with a degree of distance - Lavery's particular tool seems to be this glib universalized listicle that, when read for subtext, clearly has a ton of deep personal pain driving it. Another common one is writing (or speaking) in the second person - ever since someone pointed out that people will often shift from telling a personal story ("I went to the store") to the second person ("It's just so hard when you see something scary but don't know how to respond") when talking about upsetting or traumatic incidents or feelings, I haven't been able to unsee it. And if you as the reader don't have enough context to parse this sort of thing, it's often frankly impossible to grasp the writer's intent. As I said, I don't always bother with Lavery's articles because while I am familiar with his personal story, I often don't have enough context for the references to be able to put the actual meaning together, and to me those pieces read like trivial exercises in pastiche.

So this made sense as a subscription-only piece available to people who, by virtue of their subscription, could be assumed to have enough context to follow the subtext, and who are also reasonably likely to be able to pull out the "this is a pattern in media aimed at a particular kind of white feminist" message. It doesn't work for a wider audience, though, clearly, because there's way too many other possible readings without that grounding.
posted by restless_nomad at 6:46 AM on January 20, 2022 [25 favorites]

So I am not going to blame Lavery for not re-explaining himself and his background to the readers of his personal work created specifically for the people who know who he is.

Neither am I, but at the same time, as I said explicitly in the rest of my comment, it is fair and reasonable to bring a more critical lens to a piece of professional writing than to a "personal blog," as you keep saying that the piece was.

The difference now is that he is producing post-transitio and the context draws on the trans experience.

I think if you search his name on Mefi you will find that this isn't accurate. There is a great deal of praise, for instance, for his Horrible Goose Game piece, which is pretty obviously about (among other things) being trans ("I invented my body and it was the best idea"), as well as an extremely sympathetic discussion of his writing about the situation with his father and brother.
posted by praemunire at 7:06 AM on January 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

Regarding the reception to the Horrible Goose Game piece, most if not all of the comments praising it on the Blue are coming at it as a piece of funny writing about a funny meme/game, not a single comment mentions his transness or reflects on the pieces as a dissection of his work.

I was actually reflecting on this earlier, when I wrote my comment above. If that piece had been explicitly about being trans, or had used the Goose Game to, for example, criticise the kind of people who like the Goose Game, instead of being a sort of stream of consciousness bit of silly writing, I imagine the comments would have been very different. This whole post is a good example of that in action, actually.
posted by fight or flight at 7:16 AM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

if you don't see yourself and your particular experiences reflected in a piece, maybe it's worth sitting with the fact that it's not for you instead of trying to make it about you

Ultimately, this piece read to me as an essay (in nonstandard format) into cultural history, of the sort that attempts to tie multiple texts and/or the reception of those texts together into some sort of throughline that illuminates aspects of them all. What clunked for me is that it doesn't jive with my own memories of how some of those texts were read. Also, some of those included (Nickled and Dimed stands out here) don't really seem to have much at all to do with what seems to be the major thesis ("these books helped cultivate and reflect an atmosphere of panic about teen girls' bodies that has now brought us the execrable Abigail Shrier"), which is what I think may be prompting people to see a more generalized contempt for a certain sort of middle-aged woman in the piece.

Like it or not, if you write a piece cast as about "moms who read Reviving Ophelia," people who fit into that category, or know people who fit into that category, are going to see it as about them and are going to ask whether the shoe fits. And I don't think that's unfair, even if I also think Lavery's specific context should be kept in mind. Yes, I read it differently and more charitably knowing who he is, but nobody's perfect as a writer and nobody, wherever they are on or off the gender spectrum, is immune to misogyny.
posted by praemunire at 7:18 AM on January 20, 2022 [10 favorites]

not a single comment mentions his transness or reflects on the pieces as a dissection of his work.

Well, I didn't write "Lavery is trans and this line I just quoted is plainly about his being trans and enjoying making mischief in the world of gender," because I thought pointing out the line would suffice to show what I particularly liked about the piece?
posted by praemunire at 7:21 AM on January 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

Like it or not, if you write a piece cast as about "moms who read Reviving Ophelia," people who fit into that category, or know people who fit into that category, are going to see it as about them and are going to ask whether the shoe fits.

Despite the fact that the very piece itself says not to do this? I think this is really a case of people not reading closely, or (once again) ignoring context in order to kvetch about their particular issue with whatever it is they bounced off of. Which, fine, that happens, but when it's happening over and over, especially at the expense of listening to the kinds of voices who need to be heard, it's tiresome.

nobody's perfect as a writer and nobody, wherever they are on or off the gender spectrum, is immune to misogyny.

And nobody's immune to perpetuating transphobia and transmisogyny. Isn't that the point of the piece? Good intentions and all that. Trans men and gnc women are also victims of misogyny, for many of the same reasons as gender conforming cis women, but I see little sympathy for that perspective in some of these comments, only "my mom would never!!" knee-jerk responses, as well as some clear missing the point (see the note above about not reading closely) in assuming this is supposed to be an actual dissection of these books. The fact that the context of the piece has been explained multiple times and resulted in, if anything, a defensive doubling down on that misreading, is disappointing. It's starting to feel a little bit #notallmoms in here.

It's okay to say "I didn't understand this at first but now I do, and now I realise that this piece isn't about me/my mom and that I am personally missing some important context, but I will make space and let others who have had that lived experience speak to that experience instead", rather than accusing Danny of being a misogynist because of how he's dealing with the trauma of his upbringing and transphobic mother.

I thought pointing out the line would suffice to show what I particularly liked about the piece?

Sorry if I wasn't clear: I was specifically talking about the comments on the original Goose Game post, not the comments in this post.
posted by fight or flight at 7:37 AM on January 20, 2022

Lavery's own comment on his piece is:

the only reason i’m not having kids is because they’d write a pitch-perfect version of this about me and my cliches i’m not even aware of

posted by airmail at 7:38 AM on January 20, 2022 [6 favorites]

While my mom is a bigot who read Reviving Ophelia when I struggled in middle school, she is a garden every day undereducated rural bigot and not the kind of enlightened city bigot he seems to be describing.

Looking at my own personal history as a nominally cis woman and writing it in a universalized "you" voice, I wonder if it is a greater crime that your mother sees her daughter is struggling and tries to help even if she comes to the wrong conclusion, or that your dad doesn't see it at all.
posted by muddgirl at 7:41 AM on January 20, 2022 [11 favorites]

I've followed him and his story for a long time, and this piece did just kind of bounce off me—maybe because I'm closer to the mom in this story than the kid-of-the-mom. After reading the comments here, I went back to read it again to see if it was more striking or meaningful taking all this discussion and context back into it, and except that I totally recognize the through-line of reading the kinds of books he discusses, it still kind of bounced off me. But that's OK. It's not for me, I suppose.

I've been acutely aware of the backlash against and targeting of trans kids—I have four children, and 3 of them identify as trans and/or non-binary (and none of them is heterosexual). The first time I heard the word "transed" it was in the mouth of a therapist I'd worked with off and on over many years, and I thought it was some kind of clueless-person awkward coinage. I only slowly learned it's a term from the kid-attacking anti-trans bigot contingent. I on purpose don't follow things like the book mentioned in the article because it's not good for my mental health, though of course I am aware of the attempts to pass laws against gender-appropriate supportive treatment &c.

I remember when Reviving Ophelia came out. I never read it, but of course I heard about it, and I remembered my own middle school years and the disempowerment I experienced as I entered puberty—the sexual harassment from strangers and boys at school and teachers at school. Of course moms worry about their daughters because, if we were paying attention, we know how the culture was arrayed against us when we were girls.

I actually love all the trans and enby and gender-abstaining young people. i remember how fraught it was for each of us to navigate the expectations for being female, and our varying degrees of accommodation and resistance to them. To me, it's no wonder that, offered the chance to opt out of that bullshit, a lot of young people are taking it. It frankly excites me. It's one of the things that gives me hope for the future.

My oldest kid, now 27, was adopted after an abusive childhood among evangelicals. I'll have to send them this link and see what they think of it.

I know this has been a hard conversation but I appreciate you all having it. It gave me a lot to think about.
posted by Well I never at 8:13 AM on January 20, 2022 [9 favorites]

I appreciate that there are parents like you out there, Well I never. That your kids feel comfortable and secure enough to be their authentic selves with you says a lot. Your excitement and hope for the future and our young people is moving to see. Thank you for being there.
posted by fight or flight at 8:19 AM on January 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

a very specific picture of a single person (Lavery's actual mom) finding a cultural throughline to justify her particular beliefs.

Yeah, the picture I got definitely reminded me of some of my friends parents*, who were more interested in using what they'd read or heard somewhere as a way of creating/reinforcing an idea of their kid, rather than understanding who their kid actually was. If their kid wasn't happy, the kid needed fixing, not help navigating a crappy world. For some of those kids, the oblivious parent was less stressful to interact with.

*My mom may have had some of these books, but her nightstand usually had sci-fi or fantasy novels+ radically not religious, so I considered most of this to be "does not apply to my specific situation."
posted by ghost phoneme at 8:19 AM on January 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

I read the piece:

But I’m reasonably confident that if your mother owned Reviving Ophelia in 1995, I’ve correctly guessed at least one other book she’s kept on her nightstand in the years since

Sorry. That's marking out the piece as making a generalization. And if this piece is making any kind of generalization at all, it is about at least some meaningful subset of mothers who read Reviving Ophelia and some or all of the books on the list. If it's intended to be solely about Lavery's mom's own reading list (or the reading list of her small group), that's fine, but then he served his purpose poorly by casting it in the format of "if your mom read RO, she probably also read..." This piece does not present itself as about Lavery, or even just Lavery's mom, it's about other people, and that invites other people to respond.

I didn't hate the piece or find it as mean-spirited as some did. It just seemed off, not on par with his best work, and I say that as someone who remembers the reception of the original book in the mainstream press and someone who doesn't have evangelical parents per se but does have many evangelical relatives and knows the vibe all too well. (Also someone who is not a mom and whose own mom has probably read two of the books listed, if that.)
posted by praemunire at 8:44 AM on January 20, 2022 [6 favorites]

But in that same first paragraph:

...because “anxiety about presumptively-white teenage girls” can take endless final forms. So this isn’t an exhaustive or even necessarily precise predictions.
posted by AlSweigart at 8:52 AM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

eh, bigoted words are very often preceded by disclaimers like "this isn’t an exhaustive or even necessarily precise [opinion/prediction/what-have-you]." Not that this set of words is necessarily bigoted in this case - I'm just saying - that disclaimer in itself is irrelevant to how the words that follow are interpreted.

And in this case the words that follow can be interpreted in several different ways, including(but not limited to): an extremely personal narrative of the writer's experience of his own mother and the way she coped with having a trans child disguised as a snarky listicle, or misogynistic mockery of white American mothers of a certain generation. It sucks that the writer didn't provide the necessary context and clarity of intent to rule out the latter.

Let's not insist that people who see any meaning but the former are wrong, wrong, transphobic, and wrong? Writers get interpreted in different ways. It happens! Just because this one piece rubbed some of us the wrong way, doesn't mean we hate this writer or consider him Bad Mr. Misogynist. Danny Lavery isn't getting cancelled.

IMO Frowner was on the right track above when they suggested that we move past this and react to the article on its own terms. I've learned a lot about the niche cultural phenomena surrounding this particular set of books - specifically the way they link from moral panic to transphobia. Grateful to everyone who's talked about it here.
posted by MiraK at 9:47 AM on January 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

eh, bigoted words are very often preceded by disclaimers...

Yes, but feminists have so often had to precede their words with the disclaimer of "Yes, I realize this doesn't apply to all men..." that it's become cliche. It's not evidence of bigotry. I don't think a "I'm not racist, but" interpretation is a fair one. Lavery is a transman in a time when TERFs are weaponizing white feminism. "Scoring cheap points off of the uncool moms reading mainstream Oprah books" is an easy interpretation to make if you don't know this context, but it's still a wrong one.

Anyway, since this thread has now gone from "mean-spirited" to "bigoted", I've re-read the article. It's not a series ha-ha jokes but more subtle recognition-and-smile ones. Here's one:

2013: Three books this year: Lean In (which she might just as easily have liked as disliked), I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban (which she liked too much)...

Now, you can easily take this "liked too much" joke as a bigoted conservative riff; the kind of subtext that conservatives have when they say "they aren't asking for equal rights, they're asking for special rights" or "what about white history month?" or any other dog whistle that indicates they are none too pleased with the attention marginalized groups have at the moment.

But that's not the joke. The joke here is that the mother-of-presumptively-white-teenage-girls liked Malala's story "too much" because it's a narrative that also is easily weaponized as a Muslims-as-violent-terrorists and brown-people-coming-for-our-wives-and-daughters-with-Sharia-Law conservative political stance. Malala is a hero and she's using her platform for good things, but her message can find a receptive mainstream western audience because it can be co-opted by pro-war, Middle East interventionist hawks.

That's the nearly the whole basis behind criticism of "white feminism" (which is, of course, never entirely white nor what I'd call feminist): TERFs co-opting liberal views to support conservative policies. And that's what this post struck me as: not a mean-spirited "moms wear ugly jeans and don't know any cool bands and read cringe books" but how pop psych and self help books can form the basis for transphobic and conservative values as much as the Bible can.

It's not subtle. Look at the last sixteen words of the last paragraph just an inch below the surface:

2020: Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters is obviously polemical where Reviving Ophelia is at least interested in the idea of even-handedness and peer-reviewed standards, but there’s still a pretty direct through-line from “My teenage daughter likes Prince too much and won’t talk to me anymore” in 1994 to “Why are my beautiful daughter’s strange new friends trying to convince her she’s a boy” in 2020. If not Shrier, maybe Why We Can’t Sleep, swapping out anxiety of the specter of transition for anxiety of the specter of artificial light.

In my first comment, I asked "are these books actually good?" because "artificial light" is exactly what this genre of mainstream, girl-boss self-help book often offers. I think this article is one of Lavery's strongest. He didn't the miss the mark, the readers did. You don't have to know the author is trans is grab the meaning. You just have to read the entire actual article.
posted by AlSweigart at 10:44 AM on January 20, 2022 [23 favorites]

Daniel Lavery's humor has always been sarcastic and has always needed to be understood through cultural context and sometime between The Toast and now his sarcasm and that need for context is no longer acceptable gosh what changed

I guess you weren't around here when Metafilter had FPPs on Lavery's Toast writing and people were pissed the fuck off about it and wondering why anyone liked this writer. Lavery has always rubbed some readers the wrong way and especially when they are coming to him fresh without context.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:14 AM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

(In addition to many Mefites responding very positively, of course--enough to get the derisive "oh just one of MeFi's faaaaaaaves" treatment.)
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:16 AM on January 20, 2022

Another common one is writing (or speaking) in the second person - ever since someone pointed out that people will often shift from telling a personal story ("I went to the store") to the second person ("It's just so hard when you see something scary but don't know how to respond") when talking about upsetting or traumatic incidents or feelings, I haven't been able to unsee it.

I've never heard this before but it makes a lot of sense and this became a totally different piece to me when read with this in mind.

The problem, I guess, as I see it, here, is that these are popular books, a lot of people have complicated relationships with their mothers and mothers are an easy target. That's a pretty tough combination of factors to handle without it coming off as a swipe at mothers, and the intro part can be read at least two different ways (as an invitation to consider your own mother or as Lavery examining his own mother's journey). An editor might have made this a little more clear but like many people have mentioned upthread this is a personal blog and I regret not reading it a bit more charitably initially.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 11:39 AM on January 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

I’m the mum they are talking about and read “Revivinf Ophelia (even though I wouldn’t go on to have kids for a couple more years), but almost all of the other books mentioned I am familiar with (as a former bookseller and librarian for almost 30 years), but only a few (maybe two?) that interested me enough to read.
posted by saucysault at 12:08 PM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Looks like he may have a companion piece up? I haven't read it yet (at work) so I can't say for sure.
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 2:26 PM on January 20, 2022

I’m the mum they are talking about

What does this mean? Who are "they"? You're not Dan Lavery's mum, are you?

(Not trying to attack anyone, just genuinely don't understand this comment)
posted by Dysk at 2:36 PM on January 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

Looks like he may have a companion piece up? I haven't read it yet (at work) so I can't say for sure.

I sort of read it but it felt a little too much like having a seizure so I had to stop. This is totally intentional and a cool stylistic thing he has going on, but means I can't comment much on it except to say it is definitely a companion piece.
posted by brook horse at 4:27 PM on January 20, 2022

Absolutely loved the weight loss books entry. That is more like the Danny Lavery style I've come to know and love. He brilliantly snarks on the style and content of the books in a way that exposes the dangerous things about them, and doesn't invoke anyone's mother but his own (which invites readers to nod knowingly if it describes theirs and doesn't make insinuations about everybody else's).
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:55 PM on January 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

Depressed about Barbara Ehrenreich; no idea what she did but sad if she did it. OTOH, quite pleased to have discovered this treasure trove. The crisper drawer one... So, so good. And the one about the mystery that is Alfie.

I realized I had no idea whether there was a supernatural element to Alfie, or just good old-fashioned English male handsomeness, which has the shortest shelf life of all the various male handsomenesses in the world, that early leaf, the flower that’s only so an hour…

What was it all about, Alfie?
posted by Don Pepino at 5:46 PM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

So there's a big ol' missing through line here that I think folks going "don't be needlessly dismissive of mothers" are totally failing to notice, and while I think it's more likely to be obvious to queer and trans folks I don't think that is quite the sensitizing line.

I think the thing is: there is no room to talk about mothers who are abusive or who do serious harm that needs to be reckoned with. At all. There especially isn't room to talk about all the ways that mothers who are very concerned about women's liberation and not letting your daughter's feminine spirit get crushed can still abuse their fucking children with the pressure to meet their own definitions of womanhood.

See, even the vague dismissive shit lobbed at middle aged women assumes that middle aged women are generally harmless. Inoffensive, if bland. Clueless, but trying their best, no matter how many times they fuck up in public. They have to be trying their best. They're moms.

I don't fucking know, man. My mom is the vindictive one, the one who always leapt first to get defensive at me for--what, for existing? For being visibly unfeminine enough. For not slapping the patriarchy back in the ways that were important to her, just the ways that were important to me. For not being the living embodiment of her sacrifices.

We have a lot of cultural room to talk about lots of levels of shittiness in dads: dads who were monsters and dads who meant well but were absent and dads who pushed us too hard and dads who didn't pay enough attention and dads who didn't love us enough or at all and dads who love us like burning but can't show it and all the many myriads of ways that dads can fuck you up. But we have no cultural room to talk about moms who are inadequate, or hostile, or angry, or who have gender issues of their own they take out on their childish, or who never wanted to be in the role they got forced into, or who get resentful. Instead of supporting parents-especially-moms-who-are-expected-to-do-more, we have to reflexively appease the concept of motherhood all the fucking time, because moms are strung out and tired and overworked and trying.

This lip service seems like all that we are, collectively, willing to do about any of this bullshit, so when it's not present--if anyone doesn't appease the Cultural Veneration Of the Mother--it stands out like the weal after a slap. It's not enough, so when it's gone, there's a feeling of "why aren't I getting at least this much my due?" So that much--I don't have kids myself but I get that. I see that.

But for... call it, for the children women heap their expectations and hopes and dreams and fears about womanhood onto? When that goes bad? We have nowhere to talk about it without incurring a whole lot of defensiveness, because again that lip service about what moms are supposed to be and do is all y'all get and it's not enough. It's not.

Fuck. I got a lot of respect for a lot of other people's moms--friends' moms and friends that are moms and aunties and honorary moms and grandmoms, imperfect and flawed moms and moms who are trying. Sure. I can think of a lot of those folks I can hold up with respect.

But I know a lot of moms who left some scars, and I would like it if we could have room in our cultural dialogue for moms who leave scars just like we have room for dads who leave scars. No one expects very much out of dads, I guess, and that's not fair either. But it sure is a lonely place to be, talking about the scars that a certain kind of parenting leaves you with.

I know an awful lot of folks in a number of places on a transmasc axis that have some weirdly similar stories. Not everyone obviously, that's why I think the through line is "did your mom leave scars" rather than "are you transmasc in some dimension". It's very, very hard for me to read this piece and see Lavery not trying to have a gentle, gentle, wry conversation about that experience that is maybe more gentle and less personally raw than "my mother hurt me, and here is how, and here is the through line I keep observing, so let me air my family laundry out a fucking gain and hope maybe some of my sibs will talk to me again one day."
posted by sciatrix at 7:00 PM on January 20, 2022 [40 favorites]

Thank you, sciatrix. You said a lot of stuff I wanted to talk about and couldn't verbalize. I have seen this conversation play out so much in the past couple of years that I have started to internalize "my mom was just doing her best" even though she was (and still is) homophobic, physically abusive, and medically neglectful. And she would tell you, absolutely, that she was doing her best. And you know what? Maybe that was true. But it doesn't erase the scars.
posted by brook horse at 7:41 PM on January 20, 2022 [6 favorites]

brook horse:

"...she would tell you, absolutely, that she was doing her best. And you know what? Maybe that was true. But it doesn't erase the scars."

So sadly true.

sciatrix, that was a truly excellent, insightful comment. Wow.

Isn't it also the case that not only is there little cultural space available to talk about harmful mothering, it's also the case that there's harm we maybe do culturally recognize but — especially with mothers and daughters — either minimize or even accept as "normal"? Not unlike how our culture previously accepted a lot of abuse of sons by fathers as supposedly good fathering of boys?

What I'm thinking of is all the pain and strife that seems typical between mothers and daughters. As is so often the case with this kind of thing, I think women and our culture in general are well aware of, and are practically saturated by stories of the problems between fathers and sons. While our culture is somewhat aware of toxic mother/daughter stuff — even many men are — it's nevertheless... minimized? Maybe? It just doesn't carry the cultural weight that father/son stuff does.

From my own experience*, possibly the thing that I've carried the most resentment about over the course of my life was that no one ever listened to me or took me seriously when I tried to disclose my dad's abuse. And, culturally, abusive fathers are ubiquitous! So what happens to AFAB children and adults when they try to talk about their abusive mothers?

You and a couple of other commenters are, I think, really onto something when you talk about the indirect and light-handed way Lavery is criticizing his mother. It's because, as you say, we don't know how to talk about or even validate its severity.

I've come to know my mother as an adult much, much better in the last decade and it's surprised me to become aware of some of the ways she can be less than a good person and wasn't a great parent. But in talking to my sister, none of this is news to her — she's always been exquisitely aware of our mother's vices.

Indeed, I had an epiphany a couple of years ago while recalling a notorious incident of my dad's abusive violence towards me, where I suddenly recognized, after all these decades, how inappropriate and hurtful my mother's behavior was in response: though knowing he had physically attacked me, when I came home (after leaving immediately afterwards) her response to my arrival wasn't concern about me, whether I had been injured and how badly; but rather she, in great distress, enlisted me to help her "fix" the situation by "managing" my dad. In suddenly becoming aware of how I had breezed over this all my life when I've recalled it (or retold it), I was suddenly overwhelmed with feeling hurt and angry with my mom. I was very upset and so called my sister — she was almost uncomfortably compassionate with me. But, also, there was an undercurrent in her response that she thought I was admitting things that she had known all along.

Additionally, my sister, like myself, has a lifelong disability that in her case complicated her body image and, in particular, affected how teen boys treated her in a way that I never comparably faced. I can't help but feel that how our mother perceived this with regard to my sister's performance of feminity and her gender identity, her worry about her daughter, relates to a lot of trauma my sister experienced that I didn't recognize and she's never discussed.

Partly this is all by way of using my obliviousness to my mom's failures and, especially, my obliviousness to the complexities and difficulties of my sister's relationship with our mother as an example of this cultural silence about how much mothers can badly damage their daughters.

Also, I'm struck by how confused, angry, resentful, and especially misdirected I was and am by my dad being my role model for masculinity. Or, alternatively, how some of my reactive idealization of my mother influenced my conception of femininity. So that gives me, perhaps, some insight into abusive mothers and their daughters and how often it's directly connected to mothers' expectations of their daughters conformance to their ideas of femininity, especially in the context of a misogynist culture. There's so much going on here and the scale of my ignorance is as much a measure of our general cultural indifference to it as it is the fact that I'm a man.

Finally and most importantly, it can't be stressed too strongly that while this is a general cultural dysfunction regarding mothers and their AFAB children, it's magnified tenfold with non-conforming, queer, and transmasculine children. That's the specific, all-important context of Lavery's piece and this discussion.

* I feel that I should be clear about my own gender identity. It is effectively cis, certainly so in the context of my social identity. I don't know how to be anything other than the (not completely conforming) cisgender man I've always been... even though this gendering has never felt at all comfortable. I do tend to identify much more with women than men, but somehow not explicitly (if that makes sense). I often think that my confused feelings about my own gender identity are more about a strong dislike of traditional male gender identity (much of which I've nevertheless internalized) than it is about feeling a very strong affinity with traditional female gender identities. A lot of women's experience, especially that which is farthest out in the traditionally "feminine", is a mystery to me. That's more information than anyone could possibly care about, but I feel it's important for me — an outsider to much of this conversation — to make it clear who I am and what my lived experience has been.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:25 AM on January 21, 2022 [14 favorites]

Ironically, I was chatting about Goodreads with my coworkers last night and my transmasc coworker rolled their eyes and showed us the three books their mother is currently reading - Straight Parents, Gay Children, The Secret, and iirc something about organic gardening. It also painted a very clear picture of what their mother was like. ("She's really into manifesting lately.") Couldn't help but draw the comparison.
posted by restless_nomad at 4:49 AM on January 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

I mean, it's also.... insofar as we have cultural room to talk about mothers who harm their children period, "she failed to protect me from my abusive father" is almost the only narrative we have. This might stand out to me because my dad is certainly not perfect and he certainly did not protect me or back me up, but my experience of parental gender policing, trying to manage explosive fragility about my gender performance, heteronormatic panic, etc.... that was all actively and primarily driven by my mother. The anxieties that she experiences which drive her to try to exert control over me and who I am are about her self image as a mother; not all of them are explicitly about gender but boy howdy does she expect her daughters to reflect herself and her values.

I'm angry with my father because he failed to protect me from my mother. I'm angry with my mother because she repeatedly hurts me, and the weight of her attempts to forcibly shape me into her image distorts and warps my relationship with the rest of my family. And gender is one of the most powerful topics that make her try to force me into a mold she is more comfortable with.

A thing I think is very uncomfortable to consider is that women who seek to police and control gender expression in their AFAB youth, also, do not only come from a hyper-regressive, explicitly anti-feminist background, and this is not the only direction that can lead mothers to hurt the children they see as daughters by seeking to control them. It's much more complex than that, which is why the things Lavery is clearly trying to sketch out here are focused on considering the trajectory of developing anxieties: my mother's reflexive and furious attempts to redirect my gender performance to something she is more comfortable with come directly out of those anxieties.

I do think you're onto something by contrasting mothers and perceived-daughters with fathers and perceived-sons: I often see abusive parents for whom children reflecting themselves is more important for the children they see as inhabiting the same gender category as themselves. You see gender policing behavior aimed from both but with a certain distinctive insecure viciousness when the parent believes that the child is or should be like themselves and the child fails to perform in that image.

And sometimes that image includes traits that are laudable. Sometimes it includes a form of feminism and an exhortation to seek equal power on a presumed field of gender conflict. Sometimes that image is internally contradictory. Sometimes it includes a desire for children to be strong or to not experience the same kinds of shame mothers do.

The root of the problem is an inability of some parents to disconnect their own beliefs and goals and values for themselves from the understanding that children are people who exist outside the context of "reflecting on the parent," and women who consider themselves feminists are not at all immune to this. Especially the ones who see gender relations as a zero-sum struggle for dominance. That's where TERFism comes from, and it's not a remotely uncommon perspective, but it's something that often triggers a weird kind of--"by not performing gender like me you're rejecting my side" fragility in some women. That fragility often is not conscious, but it is there, and it is absolutely fucking exhausting to navigate and try to have a conversation about.
posted by sciatrix at 4:51 AM on January 21, 2022 [12 favorites]

The root of the problem is an inability of some parents to disconnect their own beliefs and goals and values for themselves from the understanding that children are people who exist outside the context of "reflecting on the parent," and women who consider themselves feminists are not at all immune to this.

Absolutely.

One common thing to hear from queerphobic and transphobic parents, especially mothers (in my experience), is "why are you doing this to me?" and "is it because of something I did?". Sadly, it's a trope for a reason, and it's not always to do with simply worrying about being socially ostracised or embarrassed. It's a rejection of their "other self", the child they've projected themselves onto. Their child's queerness or transness isn't anything to do with them, but seen through this lens it becomes a personal insult, a throwing off of cultural beliefs and goals that the parent has and the child has never agreed to. Often these beliefs are hard-won, or may be foundational touchstones of the parent's own identity (as in second wave feminists, who -- rightly -- deserve to be applauded for the work they did, but also tend to hold that same work over the heads of their trans and queer children). Of course, this is no excuse for being a bigot.

It's so many layers of difficult, knotty trauma. Hurt people hurt people, as the saying goes. Philip Larkin had it right.
posted by fight or flight at 5:06 AM on January 21, 2022 [8 favorites]

Oh, for sure. And I mean, I also don't think it's coincidence that Ivan and brook horse and I are all also coming at this conversation from the context of having been children with disabilities, because the lens of disability is another way that children violate the projected expectations of their parents. The performative grieving that many parents of trans and queer people do has always reminded me of the performative grieving that many parents of autistic children do, and I have a lot of difficulty being at all patient with that kind of grief because... look, fuck, my emotional gut response is always going to be: "your expectations and hopes and dreams for your kid were always at least as much about you as they were the kid, and you don't get to predict the kids you get, so stop bitching that you didn't get the kid you imagined and idealized and start parenting the kid you have." Especially especially if parents start that crap anywhere where the kids can see, because incredibly often it is, and it's a fucked up thing to be told that your authentic human self is a traumatic disappointment to your parents who are supposed to fucking love you because you weren't the imaginary kid they told themselves they were going to get.

I can have conscious, cognitive sympathy for people who had expectations and hopes for their lives like we all do and are now facing a different kind of journey than they expected, but there's always going to be a lot more of my sympathy bound up with the little kid who didn't get to choose either, and who now has to deal with the fact that they weren't the good kind of kid that their parents wanted to have.
posted by sciatrix at 5:17 AM on January 21, 2022 [17 favorites]

I do think the mother-child relationship is one that our culture has a really hard time with when it goes sideways. People get a lot of pushback for not being willing/able to patch over wounds in their immediate families all the time, but motherhood is especially fraught, on both sides.

When I started the Lavery essay, I thought for sure the 2004 pick was going to be The Mommy Myth (link to CBS news article, to show it was the kind of pop pysch news coverage book that would fit the premise), but of course that would be a very different reading pathway from Reviving Ophelia than the one Lavery had to deal with his mom going on. That was the other interesting thing about this piece for me, besides empathy for his relationship with an abusive mother - reflecting on what other books would fit into the pathway he's describing, and also what other books that interest in Reviving Ophelia could have lead a slightly different mom with maybe a slightly different media bubble to.

Anyway, the early responses to this thread reminded me of another time I was totally caught off guard by responses to an essay. I took a creative nonfiction class is college, and one section covered personal essays. For one session, the assignment was an essay by a gay man with a difficult relationship to his father; he had reached out to his dad many times over the years and been slighted over and over. Then he wins an award and his father is impressed! And wants to come celebrate! And the essay was about how he found he didn't actually want his dad there for this big moment, after his father hurt him so many times before.

I don't even remember whether he reconciled with his dad in the essay or not, to be honest. I just remember coming into class, ready to talk about how hard it can be to adjust expectations and how heavy the pressures of having the right kind of relationships can be, and finding out the majority of my classmates just thought this author was a jerk to his father. No nuance, no appreciation of what had come before in their relationship, just "oh suck it up, your father is proud of you, can't you be nice to your dad." I remember just looking around and thinking "Christ, am I really the only person in this room who has been let down by their parents, even once?" And my parents were mostly great! But I still understood the feelings the author was talking about.

I get that personal essays are tricky, and sometimes an experience just bounces off of you. But it's always a weird experience to have read a thing and have that "this, right here, this essay gets a thing" feeling and go to have a discussion about it and realize other people think that feeling you empathize with is just pettiness.
posted by the primroses were over at 6:18 AM on January 21, 2022 [11 favorites]

It's not - or it shouldn't be - "criticism of mothers or of mothering as a social form is always bad because mothers are almost always doing their best". It's that there is a specific form of criticizing mothers that harks back to the "women are killjoys who enforce order, they are dumb and prissy and get in the way of a good time" and "men are creative [chefs, artists, composers] and women are producers [music teachers, cooks, trivial craftspeople]". Mothers like generic content that we, younger and more self-aware, readily understand is cringe; they are constantly trying to impose their abusive-but-also-embarrassing order on our younger, more intelligent and experienced lives in the name of a "propriety" and "correctness" that we, smarter and more subtle, understand to be false.

That is why there's so much generic "lol the embarrassing things mothers do" content - mothers harm by being boring and clueless and un-self-aware and non-sexy and sex-paranoid and middlebrow because that's how women are, except for the ten minutes when they are the fuckable targets of sexual harassment.

That is why, to me, it is very difficult to detourne the "moms consuming pop culture wrongly" format - it's an extremely charged, popular form that is generically used to reiterate a particular set of misogynist ideas and the format itself IMO tends to overdetermine its content.

I think there's a structural question about how women's abuse gets enacted as or understood through this 'women as boring rules-enforcing paranoids" format, but that gets away from the frame of individual experience with abuse and I don't think there's any writerly/readerly obligation to move away from personal, individual, concrete experiences of abuse.

This piece did not work for me because the form is very strong and it is not, IMO, detourned into something else - it just falls back into the cringeness of moms.
posted by Frowner at 6:43 AM on January 21, 2022 [14 favorites]

This piece did not work for me because the form is very strong and it is not, IMO, detourned into something else - it just falls back into the cringeness of moms.

See, I disagree write strongly. The "cringe" as you point out in your comment is based on annoying but harmless behaviours or perceptions - not being fun, being obsessed with propriety, etc, etc.

This is not that. At no point is it not serious. It takes the format of a tired complaint about something trivial (not to suggest that the format or complaint itself is not misogynist, or that said misogyny is trivial) and uses it to dead-ass go into serious problems and trauma, showing the route from starting with something seemingly harmless if annoying ("cringe") to something that is very much not that, suggesting that the starting point was not, in fact, harmless.

If that doesn't land for you, that's fine. But I don't think it's fair to say that the whole thing boils down the relying on "cringe" and the same old tired criticisms of mothers. Much like hatred for mumsnet is often about something other than misogyny and antipathy to the stereotypical British mum figure. It can look superficially similar, but there's a very different substance.
posted by Dysk at 7:14 AM on January 21, 2022 [6 favorites]

Frowner said it best for me.

I am not unaware of Lavery's context nor am I unfamiliar with coming out issues - when I came out as multiple to my own mother, with a diagnosis and 5 years of the family Knowing About The Abuse, she told me that she would do me the personal favour of forgetting that I ever said that.

And as a member of the tribe of the last Moral Panic Bogeyman/Don't Let Your Child Turn Out To Be Abused* I found Reviving Ophelia really helpful in explaining some of the ways the society around me reinforced the shittier stuff, i,.e. that everyone else had a right to my body and that I made myself small in response.

I think the other piece of Lavery context that has been missed is that for many years Lavery was at the centre of one of the few female-friendly literary in-joke communities. That's why, for me, the slay-middle-aged-moms-via-their-reading-habits came across as it did. Lavery doesn't owe me anything! But I also don't feel that prevents me from sharing my response, briefly and not on Twitter/on Substack.

That said, I am not trans and I am not fully up on the TERF wars except to oppose them in my community, and set policies at my place of work. So I really appreciate the further discussion here. I think both things can be true, a piece can read one way for one audience and one way for another and listening is a great way around that.

*As a small note, as a bisexual, multiple, middle-aged, female-bodied group mother, the assumption that no middle-age moms have experienced issues of acceptance with their families of origins read a bit off to me in this discussion. Just as I appreciate the sharing from others here, I thought I would add that in.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:15 AM on January 21, 2022 [12 favorites]

As a small note, as a bisexual, multiple, middle-aged, female-bodied group mother, the assumption that no middle-age moms have experienced issues of acceptance with their families of origins read a bit off to me in this discussion.

I don't think anybody is saying this. But just speaking for myself, a neurodivergent, pansexual woman with mental health issues who is cis, I will never, ever assume that my experiences "coming out" about those issues would ever let me critique the experiences of trans people coming out because I am not trans. Without starting the Oppression Olympics--at this moment in time trans people face a lot more negative reactions and far more criticism and literal threats to their lives than any of the axes I deal with, and that's ignoring the fact that trans people deal with my axes as well.

Sure, pieces can be read multiple ways by multiple audiences--but if one audience is completely ignoring very essential context to how and why the piece is written their interpretation is going to be bad. I am not saying you cannot critique this piece, but if your critique is based around completely stripping away Lavery's background it is a bad critique.

As Dysk says, through the lens of Lavery's background this is not a "haha, moms are dumb" piece. This is a piece about how a whole series of book interests that are all well-meaning and not, until the end, inherently based in transphobia can both reflect and shape transphobic beliefs. You cannot ignore that context and characterizing this as "moms are cringe" requires you to completely center the feelings of the cis woman who is being alluded to--the cis woman who is hurting her child with transphobia. Like, bad enough to center our discussion around cis women, period, but the cis women specifically being described here are virulently transphobic and people are ignoring that and defending them.
posted by Anonymous at 1:47 PM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Mod note: Comment and some direct replies removed. lon_star, coming back in here swinging again isn't okay, just give this thread a pass for good and all.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:02 PM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I just don't think Lavery is commenting on what middle aged moms went through. It's his perspective, not theirs. It's about some folks, and their mothers. Not everyone, not everyone's mothers, but those whose mothers had particular affinities, who acted in certain ways, and their experience of that. Call it a loose collection, a weak grouping, difficult to speak definitively about, but maybe the grouping is suggestive, evocative. And I understand why people think it's about the mothers, but it's not for them.

And I thought, as I reread the piece tonight, yes it's ambiguous, but also if Lavery had tried to cram all these things together, to press them tightly and bundle them up as a single thing, he'd lose what he was trying to hold. It's a grouping that needs to be held loosely, tentatively, maybe even gently, like brittle straw in his hands.

Squeeze too tight and he'd crush the shape of what he was holding. So we have to look in the gaps of his fingers and see the suggestion of the shape he holds.

And I see my mother in his hands, in his work. She tried to hold me, not like Lavery holds this piece.

She gripped me tightly, and never saw how she was hurting me, crushing me. I wish she had held me, but gently, and when I needed to grow, I wish she had opened her hands. And she did it out of love, and I love her too, and I understand, and I forgive her, at least I mean it when I saw that I forgive her. But that doesn't fix the harm.

Thinking about that made me think of Kahlil Gibran's "The Prophet":

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
And he said:
Your children are not your children. (...)
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams (...)
posted by Chrysopoeia at 2:29 AM on January 22, 2022 [10 favorites]

I read through a lot of the comments here before clicking on the FPP, and then I finally read it, and I'm... a little perplexed at the reaction people had to it? And I'm siding with every trans MeFite here who said that the level of cis defensiveness here is a little unsettling.

I'm not even saying this as someone who's a huge fan of modern Lavery—Shatner Chatner amplifies the things in his writing that I, personally, get the least out of, so he's been a pretty remote figure in my life for half a decade or so. Which is fine! He's clearly not for me.

But this came across as a light-hearted bit of funnin' with more than a little heart to it. I dunno, it didn't strike me as dismissive of this kind of person: not entirely approving, necessarily, but not mean-spirited. And it's not about the hypothetical mother anyway: it's about teenagers, and about the strange duality of "authority" and "caretaker", and about how worrying about your kid doesn't necessarily translate to knowing how to be what your kid best needs.

It's been about ten years since my sister came out to us. My mother, at the time, knew very little about trans people. And her response was very loving, but it nonetheless a struggle for her, which meant that it was occasionally hell for my sister. She had thoughts and concerns about what coming out as trans "meant", and about whether my sister was really ready to "commit" to such a thing. She had her own ideas about womanhood that she suddenly really wanted to help my sister out with, as well as daydreams she'd had about having a daughter that she suddenly wanted to enact. She had a bunch of feelings about what my sister was going through that she put on my sister a bit too much. There was a chunk of time where my sister really did not like my mother, and did her best to avoid contact, and while things eventually got better—for all that she came from a somewhat conservative place, my mother did start out with the presumption that my sister knew best what made her happy, and made it her mission to understand and embrace that perspective rather than enforcing her own—none of the three of us would pretend like that wasn't a rocky-as-hell transition. Pun not intended.

The new transphobia tries its best to look a lot like trans acceptance, while imposing a lot of bullshit qualifiers that chip away at trans agency and deny the reality of being trans. Some of it comes from people who actively, maliciously think horrible things about trans people and "the trans agenda" and want to politically navigate society to a place where trans people go back in the closet and go away; some of it comes from people "looking for shades of gray" in ways that are obstructive and counterproductive; but a lot of it, increasingly, comes from people who are just ignorant, and apathetic inasmuch as they don't give a shit until it affects them, at which point they mostly interpret it as "something that's asking me to put in effort or attacking me for not being 'right'". It's easy for these people to lean into conservative (and problematic, if not outright bigoted) ideas about gender, which is why they're so sympathetic to arguments that society should stay more conservative and be wary about any changes to how things get done: it's not even consciously political, it's just that "if it's not broke, don't fix it" here means "nothing needs to change, and people who claim otherwise are just causing a fuss." And that's before the kneejerk defensiveness kicks in.

Throw maternal authority into the mix and that already-not-great tendency can turn really ugly really fast—even in cases where the mother in question is compassionate and intelligent and caring. Lavery faces a far worse version of this than my sister does by far, but my mother is a wonderful woman and one of my role models and still made my sister's life hellish for a while, probably in worse ways than my sister sees fit to let me know about. And I think that, of all the ways to talk about this, a tongue-in-cheek tour of popular books throughout the ages that fit into a particular subcultural milieu is probably one of the tenderer and more empathetic ways of dealing with, you know, a lifetime of feeling like your own mother has taken every opportunity she can to shit on your face.

I really don't want to invalidate all the people who were rubbed the wrong way by this article, but it feels really glaring to me that, as far as intersectional awareness goes, MeFi is unusually good at understanding the experiences of cis women and still really really blind at making allowances for trans people. And when a trans man gets involved, I guess there's some weird "but a MAN wrote this" that doesn't make allowance for the fact that the man in question is not, in fact, cisgender.

idk. Like I said, I'm not a huge fan of Lavery's writing nowadays and don't feel like his combination of pith and cultural allusion lines up for me, and that holds to this article, but at the same time I've got to believe that his audience is probably in the upper 98th percentile for "understands the pernicious effects of misogynist narrative on society at large," and think that Lavery is probably allowed to write something he thought was funny for that audience. Maybe MeFi just wasn't the intended audience for a thing like this. But my take, to the extent that it matters (and I'm a cis man, so that extent might be "almost none"), is that I wish this convo had grappled with the trans aspect of this piece a lot better than it did. (Comments like Frowner's not withstanding, though I'm pretty sure that you could tack "but Frowner's comments were amazing" at the end of any comment on any thread and pretty much be right.)

Apologies in advance if this comment was an overreach or if I made presumptions that I shouldn't have.
posted by rorgy at 7:10 AM on January 26, 2022 [8 favorites]

a lot of it, increasingly, comes from people who are just ignorant, and apathetic inasmuch as they don't give a shit until it affects them

This is an important aspect, I think, and I would encourage anyone who's not trans or GNC to do much more listening than speaking, and more importantly, to spend some time sitting with what they feel uncomfortable about, and why.
posted by Lexica at 4:24 PM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]