Lysistrata's Daughter

I was watching YouTube tonight and playing a free online version of Bejeweled. (Don't laugh. I used to stay up til all hours reading really smart articles, whose arguments I have mostly forgotten.) Because it was a free game, I had to put up with advertisements. What was being advertised, you ask? Fish sticks, oddly enough. A blonde girl, maybe four years old, accosts her mother with a generic box of minced, minced fish sticks and demands, in sarcastic disbelief, "Have you ever seen a minced fish?" Does the mother inform her that she can keep a civil tongue in her head? Does the mother suggest that the child make a polite request regarding the fish sticks rather than this snotty rhetorical questioning? Or inform the child that her options are to eat what's been made or help herself to bread and butter? Apparently not. In the next scene, we see Mommy dearest placing before the tow-headed angel a plate of Van deKamp's fish sticks. Does the little girl ...

Awhile back, I read Sandra Tsing Loh's article about her divorce. It is certainly not the best thing Loh has ever done. The article is a litany of all the hardships of modern, two-income motherhood, which, evidently, led to an affair and ultimately a divorce. It's a bit whiny for my taste, as well as poorly argued (three examples in her own life, plus a sprinkling of statistics does not an argument make). One of my main problems with the article is with the contention that the ultimate failure of her marriage is down to the fact that she didn't want to 'work' on her marriage, which prescription is found on the pages of women's magazines. Call it what you will--date night, rekindling the spark, pretending for a few hours that we don't have children. Nothing wrong with any of that, but I don't think the presence or absence of date night is what sinks a marriage. More fundamentally, I take issue with the idea of 'work'. As Loh conceives it, i...