Glamatron

Sometimes you just have to veer off-topic and the news that Caitlin Flanagan is no longer occupying the woman-issue writer’s berth at the New Yorker is good news indeed, as my female cohorts at Salon would agree : “To hell with all that magazine writing”

As a Glamatron, I’d like to think Flanagan got axed because of her irony-free Stepford coiffure. As a woman and mom, I’d like to think she got it because the editors finally noticed that her snarky essays actually didn’t make sense. But it sounds more likely that Flanagan got it because A) her heavily promoted book was a flop and B) her inability to properly credit writer Valerie Lawson in her essay on P.L. Travers made her a little suspect. Which given that Flanagan is a former English teacher at the tony Harvard-Westlake school in LA-LA Land is pretty funny. I guess cracking-down-on-plagiarism wasn’t an issue for her . . .

But, then, Flanagan seems to specializing in not practicing what she preaches. Along with moaning about exploitation of nannies and the evil working moms who use them, Flanagan, of course, had a nanny because she couldn’t cope with, oh, actually taking care of her kids even when she was at home. This is widely known.

What’s less known is that Flanagan, who’s currently big on traditional marital roles, is on her third marriage. So, yeah, reading her self-righteously pontificate on marriage is like asking Carrie Fisher how to be a social drug user. Though Carrie would be funnier.

Which leads me to wonder–is there anything genuine about Flanagan as a writer? Anything that is derived honesly from her experience? Or is all of her writing aimed at shilling a nebulous anti-feminism that her editors and agents thought would sell in this neocon era?