I rarely blog on the weekend, but I'm compulsively writing at the moment and I need a blogging break. Here are some articles that have crossed my path this morning:
The Professor and the Bikini Model
Klein talks about how expert bloggers revolutionized journalism. Yes.
Wow. I'm in the midst of writing something very similar to this post by Penelope Trunk. I'm glad that I sent out the pitch before I read her post.
Apt. 11d 
To me idolizing/trying to emulate Sandberg and other high performers (male or female) is like trying to emulate professional snowboarders. I love to snowboard. Love it. But I certainly don’t hold the Olympic level snowboarders as the example of the level of performance that I SHOULD be aspiring to – I don’t eat/sleep/breathe it.
Sandberg and others at her level are in such another world that I can’t begin to imagine living that life let alone aspiring to it. I admire their drive and abilities, of course. As I do the Olympic snowboarder.
I’ve never wanted any one thing enough to give up everything else for it. Nor do I have the stomach for the high stakes gamble that it is. For every Sandberg there are probably 100’s who didn’t make it that far.
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“Sandberg and others at her level are in such another world that I can’t begin to imagine living that life let alone aspiring to ”
But that’s ’cause we’re old (at least I am). When I was 20, Sandberg’s life (or my own version of it) was definitely a possibility. Now, I come from the generation of feminists who didn’t see clearly that there would have to be trade-offs, as others say, we were competing on a equal playing field in college, in our first jobs, and it wasn’t until the children came (sometimes many years later) that the reality set in. I think that young women today are more aware of the tradeoffs (not the last because there are Sandburgs now).
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Wow. The professor and the bikini model. I enjoyed his ex’s comment about him having the emotional intelligence of a 3-year-old. Amazing how someone can be so successful in one realm and, well….
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RCinProv – I wonder if that “emotional intelligence” comment was to assist in his defense. As I reached the end of the article and read the texts, it seemed more like “dumb like a fox” rather than naive.
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Thanks! Enjoyed all of these stories. The Penelope Trunk one, however, is one I know I’ll keep thinking about for a long time. (these women gave up their kids like models give up food — who could forget a quote like that?). We had a friend when we lived in Eastern Europe whose kid ended up speaking Czech before he spoke English, and both parents were American! They had a day nanny, a night nanny and a weekend nanny.
I realized I was stepping off the fast track when my husband and I realized that one of the rules we had just developed was: One parent needs to be in the same town as the children at all times. If one person is out of town on business travel then the other one needs to stay in town. Apparently that put us out of the running for many serious jobs. Odd, because that particular rule always just struck me as kind of non-negotiable. If somebody falls off the jungle gym and needs stitches in their face, then a parent should be able to get there in half an hour or forty five minutes, tops. But apparently if you want to be really successful, that is not the case. Crazy!
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Sandra,
We puzzled in my household about what to make of those texts. But dumb foxes don’t end up in prison, nor do they think that some bikini model half their age has fallen madly in love with them. This guy’s emotional intelligence seems incredibly low, even by his own account.
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Yes, Sandra and RC! Steve and I spent some time trying to figure out if this guy was really stupid or smart, but not smart enough.
I do think that a lot of scientists are undiagnosed Aspies, so maybe he was smart and dumb at the same time.
Louisa. Even though Steve doesn’t travel for work, his job is an hour and a half away. Too far, if an emergency happens. And because we will always be scarred from 9/11, we decided that someone always has to be on the same side of the Hudson River as the boys. It really kills me not to apply for jobs in NYC, but someone has to be 30 minutes away at all times.
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Re: Is There Life After Work, I’ve wondered for a while if women are more vulnerable to workaholism because so many of us are/were socialized to be such pleasers. Say what you will about work – if you are (as I am) in embarrassingly constant need of positive feedback about your performance, you’ll usually get that at the office. Not so much with your spouse, or your kids.
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Have you read Erin Callan’s opinion piece in the New York Times?
AT an office party in 2005, one of my colleagues asked my then husband what I did on weekends. She knew me as someone with great intensity and energy. “Does she kayak, go rock climbing and then run a half marathon?” she joked. No, he answered simply, “she sleeps.” And that was true. When I wasn’t catching up on work, I spent my weekends recharging my batteries for the coming week. Work always came first, before my family, friends and marriage — which ended just a few years later.
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Ugh, Penelope Trunk’s piece reads like sour grapes: “the women at the very top all do not see their kids.” All? And she knows how many of them personally? Zero. The fallacy here should be obvious. Sandberg says she leaves the office early to be home for family dinner; Trunk insists she’s lying. Besides self-serving bias with a side of Schadenfreude, what makes Trunk so sure Sandberg’s lying? Since Trunk couldn’t do it on a smeller scale no woman anywhere can. Riiiight.
Laura could write circles around that drivel.
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Thanks, hush. Though I probably won’t get a chance on the Sandberg issue, at least on a larger stage. The Atlantic is sick of Sandberg stories. So, I need a new topic… Thinking about Indian surrogate baby farms.
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“Sandberg says she leaves the office early to be home for family dinner; Trunk insists she’s lying. Besides self-serving bias with a side of Schadenfreude, what makes Trunk so sure Sandberg’s lying?”
I believe Sandberg about dinner, but I expect she spends the rest of the evening working.
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Michael Sandel wrote about Indian surrogacy in _What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets._
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I suggest looking at Jeevan’s archives at jeevankuruvilla.blogspot.com. Jeevan is an Indian doctor at a mission hospital in rural India. He has a lot of really hair-raising stories (with photos), and it might be a helpful place to look for cultural background.
One possible ethical issue that comes to mind for the surrogacy is that on Jeevan’s blog, there’s a pattern of women attempting homebirths after c-section. If a woman had a c-section as part of her surrogacy job (which might very well happen, particularly with twins), a subsequent uterine rupture could kill her and her next baby.
It would be very interesting to do a follow-up on alumnae of the surrogacy program to see if they are doing better or worse health-wise than peers who did not participate. It’s possible that this is the best medical care they’re ever going to get.
Also, it’s hard to underestimate how little girls and women are valued in that milieu.
Here’s a quote from a recent blog post:
“However, towards the end of the day, I had another patient . . . Patient D . . . She was in labour for more than 36 hours in one of our neighbouring district headquarters hospital.
“The issue here is that the healthcare personnel left the family down.
“To make the story short, the baby was obstructed in the birth canal. We had to rush her in for Cesarian. The baby’s head looked as if it was put in a tube press. He was lucky to be alive.
“However, the parting shot was that of one of the relatives’ of patient D . . . ‘We’re glad that the baby is a boy and not a girl. We feel that our efforts were not wasted’.”
http://jeevankuruvilla.blogspot.com/2013/03/iwd-3-stories-no-4.html
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This man has done ‘infinitely’ more for women (myself included) than all the phony unholy efforts of the zionist-feminism agenda combined. He’s a living Christ. ‘If’ You’re not a lunatic and therefore love the truth, as I do, he wakes you up, heals you and performs miracles.
Quick, before he gets nailed to a tree again, by hate-filled vacuums, autistically cut-off from ‘reality,’ in which they’re needlessly digging their own grave, by projecting their hatred at innocent beautiful, wonderful and generous, near-perfect men, the mindless-bigot deluding themselves they’re ‘winning’ revenge against an object, ‘precisely’ as Zionists and their raging ghoulishly-stupid armies of sexual-deviants can ‘rely’ on :-
Cheers,
Cheryl
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Sandra,
If you’re around, I’ve just learned that my husband is doing the big Victoria conference in early June. We’ll likely be in Victoria and Vancouver around that time–not sure exactly on dates yet.
If you’re interested in meeting up, you can contactify me via my blog at xantippesblog.blogspot.com. (There’s a button for writing me under the “About”.)
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