18 November, 2005 | Leave a Comment
Perhaps I should consider myself lucky. After all, it’s not every aspiring novelist and recent MFA graduate who gets to see her work reviewed in The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly. But that’s exactly what happened to me within the past few months. And while I don’t consider myself lucky, I certainly do feel wiser. I’ll never read a book review in the same naïve way again, that’s for sure.
From September 2003 to August 2005, I worked at the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, the feminist organization that publishes Our Bodies, Ourselves. The first edition of OBOS (as it’s known) was published in the early 1970s, before I was born. I was hired in 2003 to help produce a new, completely revised 8th edition of the book. As the photo editor, I was given the monumental task of finding almost all new photographs for a book that had used the same hippie chick images for over 30 years. I was also assigned to rewrite the chapter on body image, which was one of the greatest challenges of my writing career.
The new edition of OBOS was published in April of this year. For the first time in my life, I felt the fear that writers must experience before their books are published. I felt mildly nauseous for a while, until the early reviews started to come in and they were overwhelmingly positive. Local newspapers and television stations, academic journals and mainstream magazines alike all heralded the book as a triumphant revision of a classic. My chapter on body image was frequently singled out, perhaps because it’s the first chapter in the book. My sidebar on Brazilian bikini waxing was of particular interest, called a misguided diatribe in one review and bland in another.
I stopped paying attention to the reviews after a while. The thrill wears off quickly. But when two of the most important publications in the country decided to write about OBOS, I must admit it was thrilling.
The New York Times Book Review: When Snark Attacks
In July, after the initial buzz had died down, we were told by our editor at Simon & Schuster that The New York Times Book Review was going to publish an essay about OBOS on the back page and that the essay was not altogether positive. We anxiously stood by the fax machine one afternoon, awaiting an advance copy of the essay. The moment we received it, I was surprised that I knew the author of the piece, Alexandra Jacobs. She and I had been interns together at Entertainment Weekly in the mid-nineties. We kept in touch for a while after our internship, then lost track of each other. I had always considered us friends and whenever I saw her byline, I was happy for her success.
In her essay, Jacobs never discloses that she knows me, even when commenting on the photos or the body image chapter. I wasn’t surprised. When it comes to book reviewing, ethics fly out the window. I’ve been around the literary universe long enough to know that critics review the work of their friends/colleagues/lovers/enemies without ever making these relationships known. Hell, professors serve on prize juries and give the top awards to their students.
Jacobs’s essay is primarily a paean to the OBOS of the seventies. It’s a highly personal piece written by what I can only describe as a “character.” The narrator certainly does not resemble the Alexandra Jacobs I knew. She was a small child in the late seventies, yet she indulges in quite a bit of self-mythologizing, presenting herself as a hardcore feminist of a bygone era. My friends and colleagues were shocked to learn that the author of the essay is only slightly older than me.
As a journalist for The New York Observer, Jacobs has perfected the snarky tone that is the backbone of so much contemporary journalism. I wasn’t surprised that her essay on OBOS is snark-infested. I would have been shocked if it weren’t. What did shock me was that The New York Times Book Review published an essay about Our Bodies, Ourselves – a key text in the feminist and women’s health movement – that has about as much depth and intellectual gusto as an article from Vogue magazine. A meaty discussion of women’s health is nowhere to be found. (A publishing insider recently told me that many independent publishers have stopped sending their books to the Times for review because of the “ignorant treatment” they often receive there.)
I could pick apart the essay line by line, pointing out the serious mischaracterizations and inaccuracies. I could dwell on the fact that the essay is all style and very little – if any – substance. But this would only make me seem like I’m out for revenge. The Times published a letter by my colleagues, which you can read here.
Did I feel hurt after Alexandra published such a mean-spirited and dishonest essay about a book I had dedicated myself to for almost two years? Yes, of course I did. Even if the essay had been written by a complete stranger, it would have been upsetting because of the way it utterly misrepresented the new edition of the book. But it’s never fun to be attacked by someone you thought was your friend, especially not in the pages of The New York Times. I should make it clear that I don’t think her attacks on the book had anything to do with me personally. I was just collateral damage. Writing for the Times is a big opportunity, and a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.
The Atlantic Monthly: I’m a feminist, but…
Unlike Alexandra Jacobs’s essay, the review of OBOS in the October issue of The Atlantic Monthly attempts, at least, to grapple with the serious issues. Unfortunately, the end result is a harangue by Cristina Nehring, who in her spare time is a chorus girl in that long-running show called “Blame Feminism!”
It’s clear from the start that Nehring has a score to settle with mainstream feminists, the scary bogeywomen she blames for many of society’s ills, the ultimate party-poopers epitomized by the likes of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Throughout her review she swats at the book as if it’s a piñata.
A little Internet research turned up an exchange between Nehring and the Independent Women’s Forum, that bastion of right-wing “feminism.” Apparently, the IWF blog accused Nehring of being a feminist of the man-hating, hairy leg variety. An outraged Nehring set the record straight. Here are two excerpts:
“LOVE–romantic, Valentine’s Day love–is my cause celebre. I have spent the beginning of my career defending it against rabid feminists, not attacking it.”
“So what say we band together (as far as our contrarian and upstart spirits will admit) instead of fighting each other senselessly? Let’s be part of a renaissance of female public intellectuals who love romance and men and don’t just write about our navels, victimizations, or vaginas.”
(You can read the whole exchange here.)
Nehring’s review of OBOS is clearly driven by her agenda, and one suspects that The Atlantic’s decision to assign her this review is also part of an agenda – to spark controversy (or worse, but let’s not go there). Is even a smidgen of open-mindedness too much to expect from a reviewer, or does The Atlantic prefer that critics make up their minds before they even crack open the book?
Nehring is not only close-minded and agenda driven, she’s prone to the kind of grandiose pronouncements that might befit a leader in the field, but not a no-name critic. Behold:
“For all its comically bad prose and cloying eulogies to female anatomy, Our Bodies, Ourselves was in its day a solution to women’s problems. In our own day it is the problem.”
“Now published by Simon & Schuster and 600 pages longer, this women’s health classic has become a compendium of the curses and clichés that beset modern feminism—curses and clichés that feminism must discard or else render itself obsolete.”
“That women’s interest in their appearance lies largely in wanting to please men is a myth, and one that should be retired without further ceremony.”
“Our Bodies, Ourselves is a comforting book—even a soporific one. But it represents the end of honest inquiry and the end of curiosity. It represents the death of passion.”
Nehring clearly detests the new OBOS and everything it stands for, but sista, the world’s not coming to an end. Chill out.
She directs considerable venom at my chapter on body image, declaring that it’s “an attack on beauty.” Yet in her haste to steamroll over nuance, she fails to see that it’s an attack on beauty culture, a culture that does not honor beauty at all, but offers up cookie-cutter images of starved white women with fake breasts as the ideal for us all to emulate.
Nehring also focuses at length on a Calvin Klein ad I included in the chapter as an example of repellent advertising:
I could have chosen a worse ad, one with a dead woman modeling haute couture, for example, but the CK ad was more subtly subversive. I showed this image to friends and colleagues – both male and female – before deciding to put it in the book. All of them thought, immediately upon seeing the ad, that the girl-woman clad only in her undies, with her ass up in the air, was waiting for just one thing (and I don’t feel the need to spell it out, thank you). To anyone familiar with the advertising techniques of Calvin Klein, inventor of heroin chic and purveyor of pre-teen porn, this assumption is likely right on target.
But Nehring sees things differently: “I would wager that most women, if they were honest, would say they like the Calvin Klein model in Our Bodies. She looks vulnerable, to be sure—but we cherish vulnerability in our fellow creatures. What is more affecting than a picture of a sensitive cowboy or a doe-eyed street kid; what sells calendars faster than a forlorn kitten?”
Yes, I agree that the model in the ad is as vulnerable as a kitten – if you’re…I don’t know…Roman Polanski? It’s too bad the readers of The Atlantic could not see the ad which prompted Nehring’s leftfield analysis. She cannot take a break from shooting arrows long enough to cede that this ad is at least mildly creepy. Instead, she disagrees that the woman is a sex object and makes the leap from this to accusing the Boston Women’s Health Collective of promoting the idea that “any woman who looks attractive or dresses agreeably” is only trying to please men.
It seems highly likely that many readers of The Atlantic Monthly are smart enough to see through this ideology masquerading as book criticism. It also seems highly likely that these same readers would have appreciated an actual review of the book, not a lecture. But I imagine Nehring and her brand of feminism will continue to find a home in the pages of magazines and newspapers because it is not threatening to the status quo, unlike a certain 832-page book I know.
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Anonymous Says:
November 18th, 2005 at 8:14 pmI enjoyed reading this post. I rarely read book reviews for many of the reasons you outlined.
On the bright side, there’s no such thing as bad publicity!
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Anonymous Says:
November 19th, 2005 at 5:20 amYou go girl!!! Reviews mean nothing!
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Anonymous Says:
November 19th, 2005 at 2:22 pmThose who can write, DO.
Those who can’t, REVIEW!Sorry, but it just made me angry that people can dwell on the photos, etc. when the content and providing updated information to women is what this book is really about.
CAV
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Anonymous Says:
November 19th, 2005 at 6:27 pmWhat a wonderful essay!!! I’m so glad you spoke up at about this.
I never read book reviews and go along with what my friends have to say about books that they’ve read. I especially cannot stand the NYT book reviewer Michiko Katukani. She’s always seems to have an axe to grind.
