The beauty trap, continued

September 18, 2017

Amanda Hess’ Sunday New York Times Magazine piece about our ambivalence toward anti-aging is but the latest commentary about the disconnect between ourselves and our bodies, and by “ourselves” I mean women and their bodies. It is a disconnect that affects men as well – though not to the extent that it does women.

Hess describes how Allure magazine has declared war on “anti-aging,” featuring Helen Mirren on the cover, draped in a boy-toy – the same Helen Mirren who played Cleopatra, of whom Shakespeare wrote, “Age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety.”

And yet, Hess notes, the same issue of Allure carried an ad for the new L’Oréal Paris moisturizer, part of its Age Perfect brand (of which I’m a big fan), featuring – you guessed it, Helen Mirren. ...

Bosom buddies – art and our breast fixation

November 4, 2016

Freud said there were no such things as accidents so it should come as no surprise that The New York Times would carry a front page story on women who decided against reconstruction after mastectomy – complete with fascinating photographs of their flat, scarred and, in many cases, beautifully tattooed chests – at a moment that The Frick Collection in Manhattan is exhibiting “Cagnacci’s ‘Repentant Magdalene’” (through Jan. 22).

As several Times posters noted, the newspaper would not be displaying those photos had the breast cancer survivors had one or both breasts. And that’s in part because of artists like Guido Cagnacci, the Italian Baroque master whose subjects included Cleopatra and who helped sexualize the female body and female breasts in particular. ...

Nightmare on Elm Street – the return of Anthony’s ‘weiner’

November 1, 2016

On Halloween, the scariest night in this god-awful election season, you have to feel sorry for Hill – a woman seemingly destined to be haunted by men who just can’t keep it in their pants.

First, of course, came Bill. Then came Trumpet. And now the compulsive exhibitionist who is the estranged husband of Hillary Clinton’s right-hand woman, Huma Abedin – Anthony the Weiner. (Technically, that should be spelled wiener, but who has time for technicalities with so much at stake?) Talk about your triangulation.

We are left with two questions – the same two questions we’re always left with, because they can never be answered:

Why are men obsessed with their privates?

And why do smart women make such foolish choices when it comes to men? ...

Cover me: Burkini fever

September 4, 2016

The first time I saw the burkini – the controversial swimwear worn primarily by Muslim women, whose ban on French beaches was recently overturned by a French court – I thought, if I wasn’t often so hot, and not in a good way, I would definitely wear one.

Indeed, when I first hit the beach in Bali – the Hindu island of Muslim Indonesia, where everyone lets it all hang out – I was dressed in a one-piece and a sarong, accessorized by a beach umbrella.

I cannot have the sun beating down on my head – I take my daily constitutional with an umbrella or parasol in the warm-weather months – and I don’t want my skin overexposed to Mr. Sun either.

I’m not alone. British chef Nigela Lawson sports a burkini at the beach to shield her fair skin, and the swimsuit has been championed by members of both sexes and several major religions, along with lifeguards in Australia, where it was designed by Lebanese-born Aheda Zanetti. ...

‘SHE’ and ‘the woman’s card’

May 2, 2016

With apologies to Dickens, this seems to be the best of times and the worst of times to be a woman.

At a moment when women dominate higher education and professional schools, they stand on the threshold of one of their own achieving for the first time the highest office in the United States and becoming the most powerful person on the face of the earth.

On the other hand, Hillary Clinton’s opponents seek either to demonize her and her sex, ridiculing her for playing “the woman’s card” (Donald Trump), or to throw chivalry into sharply false relief by confining women to the gilded cage of the pedestal (Ted Cruz) and the nostalgia of the kitchen (John Kasich).

And that’s the good news. Murder; rape; genital mutilation; sex slavery; child marriage; forced conscription into terrorists squads; a lack of access to education, employment, health care and reproductive rights; cyber death threats to and bullying of female sportswriters (a subtheme of my forthcoming novel, “The Penalty for Holding”) and, that old standby, unequal pay for more-than-equal work: The challenges and atrocities that women face are staggering.

All of which makes the incandescent “SHE: Deconstructing Female Identity” – at ArtsWestchester in White Plains, N.Y. through June 25 – a most timely exhibit indeed.

Organized by Kathleen Reckling, the brilliant gallery curator and an avowed feminist, “SHE” considers that identity and the woman’s card through what have traditionally been three power centers for women – their bodies/nature, the home/domesticity and fashion. ...

Of deflated balls, exposed appendages and concealed identities

March 6, 2016

It’s been a great week for news – sporting and otherwise – of the games men play.

First, it’s ba-aaack – Deflategate that is. You will recall that last September, federal court Judge Richard M. Berman ruled that the NFL had overstepped its bounds in its arbitration of Tom Brady’s four-game suspension for allegedly masterminding the deflation of footballs in the New England Patriots’ 2015 A.F.C. Championship win over the Indianapolis Colts.

Now a three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, has said, Not so fast. Taking a view similar to my own from the start of this delicious story, the panel seems less interested in the NFL’s triple role as judge, enforcer of punishments and arbitrator of appeals – a strange trifecta that would automatically make the league vulnerable to the charge of overstepping by the Players’ Union – than it is in the cover-up that always trips you up. To wit: What of Brady’s destroyed cell phone that might’ve contained incriminating information about his altered balls? ...

Updike’s complaint: Gay fiction – and what belongs to us

January 31, 2016

Aaron Hamburger, the short story writer and novelist, begins his laudatory review of Garth Greenwell’s “rich, important” debut novel “What Belongs To You” in the Jan. 31 edition of The New York Times Book Review by indulging in a remembrance of a review past.

He recalls John Updike’s 1999 New Yorker piece on Alan Hollinghurst’s novel “The Spell,” in which Updike – who wrote many sexy novels – complained that Hollinghurst’s “relentlessly gay” fiction bored him because “nothing is at stake but self-gratification.” “What Belongs To You,” Hamburger writes, provides the “ringing” retort to Updike’s complaint.

I suspect that Updike may have been not only bored, though, but frightened and even repulsed. For gay fiction, like gay sex, presupposes the male as love object. And that might’ve been an uncomfortable exploration for the alpha male who wrote the “Rabbit” series and “The Witches of Eastwick.” ...