I just read from Dr. B. (2006-02-04) that Betty Friedan — author of The Feminine Mystique, founding member and first president of the National Organization for Women in 1966, founding member of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws in 1969, and one of the founding mothers of the second-wave feminist movement in the United States — died at her home today, on her 85th birthday. Friedan was a prescient, maddening, monumental, and complicated figure in the women’s movement, and she deserves much better than I could offer her by way of a memorial in the space and time that I have tonight.

More to come.

Further reading

• The Feminine Mystique (1963), Chapter 1: The Problem that Has No Name and Chapter 2: The Happy Housewife Heroine
• New York Times (2006-02-04): Betty Friedan, Who Ignited Cause in Feminine Mystique, Dies at 85
• NOW Press Release (2006-02-04): In Memoriam: Betty Friedan
• Dr. B.’s Blog (2006-02-04): Betty Friedan, feminist icon, Dies at 85
• media girl (2006-02-04): Betty Friedan, R.I.P.
• Jumping Out of Windows in Expensive Clothes (2006-02-04): Betty Friedan R.I.P.
• Pesky Apostrophe (2006-02-04): Hot ashes for trees

You know the rules. Here’s the quote. This is from Staring at the Sea, Arthur C. Danto’s review of an exhibition of Édouard Manet’s marine paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in one of my piled-up back issues of The Nation, from April 2004 (pp. 34–37). (I note in passing that The Nation is one of the few establishment leftist rags worth keeping around for nearly two years; mainly because most issues have one or two reviews like this one.)

Toward the end of January, I received an invitation to a press opening for Manet and the Sea, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It reproduced a painting of people on a beach, taking the sea air. The scene was as fresh as the air itself, bringing a virtual whiff of saltwater, a feeling of sunshine and physical happiness, and of the freedom and adventure the mere thought of the ocean awakens. In part because of the harsh cold we had all been enduring, in part because of the surge of pleasure French painting of that era always induces, I simply forgave the phrase in the press release (The artist and 8 contemporaries chart a new course toward pure painting) and resolved to fuir l?@c3;a0;-bas—flee down there, to cite Mallarmé’s great poem Sea Breeze–even if l?@c3;a0;-bas was Philadelphia in February rather than Boulogne-sur-Mer in August.

The chief problem of the press description is that it invites us to view the show as pointing the way to pure painting, whatever that is, instead of situating the works in the art world of their time. Manet’s 1868 Beach at Boulogne, with the lightness, the clarity, the sense of life at its best, conveyed by the loosely sketched disjunction of holidaymakers surrendering to simple summer enjoyments more than a century ago–promenading under parasols, peering at seashells, wading, gazing at the passing boats, riding a docile donkey, playing in the sand–is a wonderful work in itself. It is not a finished tableau but preserves the quality of a sketch, however intensely Manet may have worked on it; it is clear, just from looking at it, that he transcribed onto the canvas pictorial notations from his sketchbooks, drawn on the spot. It resembles a horizontal scroll, with the kind of spontaneously drawn figures the Japanese master Hokusai distributed across a sheet for one of his booklets. The figures have little to do with one another, without that implying, as a wall text suggests, a proposition regarding the loneliness of modern life. Who really cares what in the twentieth century it heralds? Who really cares about pure painting when one stands in front of it?

Writing of one of Manet’s masterpieces, Déjeuner sur l’herbe, a hostile critic once observed that his paintings had the quality of rebuses. A rebus is a kind of puzzle in which pictures are juxtaposed that have nothing obvious to do with one another. One solves a rebus by pronouncing the names of the objects the pictures show, producing a coherent message. Freud thought the images in a dream have the apparent dislogic of a rebus, and there is a sense in which The Beach at Boulogne has the quality of a dream, with the difference that there is no organizing interpretation to seek. The beach and the sea beyond it have an essential emptiness, with people dotted here and there on the one and boats dashed here and there on the other. It is not a Salon picture, like most of the paintings most of us know by Manet. It feels as if it were made for pleasure and to give pleasure, rather than for the heroic purpose of creating Modernism.

–Arthur C. Danto, Staring at the Sea, in The Nation, 19 April 2004, p. 34.

This week around the web…

• Pam Spaulding @ Pandagon (2006-01-31): A Towering Figure is Gone remembers the life and legacy of Coretta Scott King:

  This loss is so great because Mrs. King was an advocate for civil rights who believed that phrase was inclusive — those of us in the LGBT family knew that she was on our side. While other figures in the civil rights movement, including Coretta's daughter Bernice, have chosen exclusion, demonization, and marginalization of gays and lesbians, Coretta Scott King stood regally and spoke eloquently about why discrimination of any kind is wrong.

• Lynn Harris @ Broadsheet (2006-01-31): Ice cheerleader boos Rangers highlights a couple of recent stories about sexual harassment against women at Madison Square Garden, from the bottom to the top of the corporate ladder.

  From today’s New York Daily News: Madison Square Garden is a den of sexual harassment, according to the former Rangers City Skater who is suing the World’s Most Famous Arena, and heaven help the woman who complains about it.

  Courtney Prince, once the captain of the Rangers’ on-ice cheerleaders, sued the Garden for sexual harassment in 2004, claiming, among other things, that management basically pimped the skaters out to VIP guests. (Read the story for the rest of the gories.)

  The other woman who may need heaven’s help is Anucha Browne Sanders, who earlier this week filed a lawsuit accusing Knicks president Isiah Thomas of sexual harassment.

  This is a company that doesn’t have respect for women, Prince told the News. Anucha Browne Sanders is at the top of the organization and I’m a lowly cheerleader at the the bottom. I have to believe there’s something going on in the middle, too. I now see how polluted it is.

  MSG refused a settlement deal in 2004, committing to fight the charges in court.

  Prince says that in the meantime, she’s been the target of threats and attempts to defame her character. Regardless, she says, her perspective on sexual harassment has done a 180. I went into this being anti-feminist and I used to judge women who claim sexual harassment the same way I’m sure people are judging me, says Prince. But it’s been worth it.

  Be sure to follow the links, but only if you’re ready to be mad at men in suits for the next few hours (madder than you already were, I mean). It’s an ugly, ugly business.

• Kevin Carson @ Mutualist Blog (2006-01-26): Another Free-for-All: Libertarian Class Analysis, Organized Labor, Etc. rounds up, fleshes out, and adds to debate over socioeconomic class, the legitimacy of strikes and other union tactics, and the promise of old school Wobbly tactics such as the use of direct action on the job and the minority union to effect change without collective bargaining (and without the need for an NLRB permission slip, either). He also has some kind words for some comments of mine, here and in various comments sections.

  One of the most important effects of Wagner was to channel union activity into 1) state-certified majority unionism, 2) a contract regime relying heavily on the state and the union bureaucracies for enforcement against wildcat strikes and direct action on the job, and 3) reliance on conventional strikes rather than on forms of direct action more difficult to detect or punish. In short, Wagner channelled organized labor into the kinds of activity most vulnerable to employer monitoring and countermeasures. What’s more, Wagner got the federal government’s foot in the door for subsequent labor legislation like Taft-Hartley, which prohibited the secondary strikes that were so successful in the 1930s.

• fafblog! (2006-01-25): Q & A: Our Omnipotent President offers a guide for the perplexed.

  Q. Can the president spy on Americans without a warrant?
  A. The president has to spy on Americans without a warrant! We’re at war, and the president’s gotta defend America, and he’s not gonna wait for a permission slip from a judge or a senator or America to do it!

  …

  Q. Things sure have changed since the innocent days of mutually assured destruction! But is it legal for the president to ignore the law?
  A. Maybe not according to plain ol stupid ol regular law, but we’re at war! You don’t go to war with regular laws, which are made outta red tape and bureaucracy and Neville Chamberlain. You go to war with great big strapping War Laws made outta tanks and cold hard steel and the American Fightin Man and WAR, KABOOOOOOM!

• Twisty @ I Blame the Patriarchy (2006-02-01): My Jarring Experience has the displeasure of waking up to the second worst part of a film classic. Several commenters independently point out that part of the reason that the worst part of My Fair Lady is so appalling is because that’s not the way it was written to begin with, and that Shaw himself observed that only an idiot whose sensibility has been ruined by romantic comedy would expect things to turn out as, well, the Hollywood writers made it turn out.

• And, in the comments to No Treason (2006-01-31): Dear Karen (No, Not That One), I discuss a personal pet peeve: using the word suicide bombing as if it named a moral rather than a tactical category of attack.

  “I don’t think it justifies suicide bombings however.”

  There’s nothing about suicide bombings that makes them essentially or even presumptively unjustifiable. The problem isn’t the method of delivery but rather the use of the method to attack civilians. (Would it be better if Hamas bombed innocent people from planes?)

  Guerrilla tactics, even tactics as terrifyingly dangerous as body-bombing, aren’t the problem. The use of guerrilla warfare to attack innocent civilians is.

There’s lots to say about Rebecca Traister’s recent unsuccessful attempt at a conversation with anti-feminist lawyer Kate O’Beirne, but Hopelessly Midwestern already covered it better than I could. I add only a reminder, and a kind of memo to Rebecca Traister, re: Catharine MacKinnon.

Here’s Traister trying to distance the feminist views she likes from the ones she thinks that O’Beirne unfairly dwells on:

R.T.: I was surprised that so much of your book was about Gloria Feldt, Ellie Smeal, Catharine MacKinnon. Only at the very end do you mention someone like Rebecca Walker.

K.O’B.: Are you asking about [why I didn’t discuss] twenty- or thirty-something feminism?

R.T.: Yes. The MacKinnon quote about how all heterosexual intercourse is rape is old news. There has been a whole other wave of sex-positive feminism in part in response to ideas like that. …

— Rebecca Traister (2006-01-17): My lunch with an antifeminist pundit

The quote described here as old news does not exist. Catharine MacKinnon never said this. (As O’Beirne might put it: never, ever, ever, ever, said it. Ever. Ever.) Not surprisingly: she doesn’t believe it. It is a gross misinterpretation of her views on sex, rape, patriarchy, consent, and coercion (which are spelled out in detail in, for example, chapter 9 of Toward a Feminist Theory of the State), and the one notorious example in which she was quoted as saying this, the quote was actually authored by critics trying to describe MacKinnon’s views, but misattributed to MacKinnon herself by an antifeminist columnist too lazy to pick up the book again to get his citations straight. (See also comments at Blind Mind’s Eye, for related issues.)

And no, in case you were wondering, Andrea Dworkin didn’t say it either.

I’m just sayin’.

Dick Durbin:

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

— Dick Durbin, on the Senate floor (14 June 2005)

Scott McClellan, White House press flack:

Q Thank you. Scott, Senator Durbin compares the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo with the way Nazis abused prisoners during World War II. How is the President reacting to these accusations?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think the Senator’s remarks are reprehensible. It’s a real disservice to our men and women in uniform who adhere to high standards and uphold our values and our laws. To compare the way our military treats detainees with the Soviet gulags, the Nazi concentration camps, and Pol Pot’s regime is simply reprehensible. … And so I just think those remarks are reprehensible and they are a real disservice to our men and women in uniform. Our men and women in uniform go out of their way to treat detainees humanely, and they go out of their way to hold the values and the laws that we hold so dear in this country. And when you talk about the gulags and the concentration camps in Pol Pot’s regime, millions of people, innocent people, were killed by those regimes.

— Scott McClellan, White House press briefing (16 June 2006)

Commenter PPJ, aka Jim:

His comments are beyond the pale of rational political debate. His false, over the top, comments are demeaning to himself, the Senate, our military and his fellow citizens. He should be censored [sic] by the Senate. He should then apologize to the country and resign.

— PPJ, aka Jim, commenting at TalkLeft (16 June 2005)

Paul at Powerline:

What possessed Durbin to do it? How, after harping constantly on the importance of our image to winning the war on terrorism, could he cast the U.S. in such a false light? It’s not likely that he intentionally set out to injure his country. Until I hear a better explanation, I’ll put it down to a kind of sickness or derangement brought on by hatred — of President Bush, the military, etc. — coupled with a very weak immune system (i.e. intellect).

— Paul @ PowerLine (16 June 2005): Senator Durbin’s trifecta

Michelle Malkin, defender of Japanese internment:

What America needs is for President Bush himself to directly challenge Durbin on his treachery. What President Bush should do is to call on Durbin to retract his remarks (not just apologize) and ask forgiveness from our troops and the American people.

— Michelle Malkin (16 June 2005): THE TREACHEROUS DICK DURBIN

John Furgess, Veterans of Foreign Wars commander-in-chief:

The senator was totally out of line for even thinking such thoughts, and we demand he apologize to every man and woman who has ever worn the uniform of our country, and to their families.

— John Furgess, quoted for Veterans of Foreign Wars press release (16 June 2005)

Lee P. Butler, columnist and GOP apparatchik:

Throughout many sectors of the country Senator Durbin’s name is now synonymous with that of Hanoi Jane Fonda or Baghdad Jim McDermott. He decided he would use outlandish and completely absurd language of equating American soldiers in Guantanamo Bay with Nazis, Stalinist Soviets, and Pol Pot as a way of disagreeing with this administration. It seems as though he may have been emboldened to follow this tact, because of the outrageous allegation spewed by Amnesty International who earlier had labeled Gitmo as the gulag of our time … It’s a pretty big exaggeration for Amnesty International to compare Guantanamo Bay or even Abu Ghraib, for that matter, to a gulag and it’s reprehensible for an American Senator to equate our soldiers to torturous despots, even if they are just trying to malign President Bush.

— Lee P. Butler, OpinionEditorials.com, Senator Durbin’s Gulag Is A Liberal Crescendo Of Rhetorical Absurdity (20 June 2005)

Josh Dwyer, expert columnist from Texas A&M:

Sen. Dick Durbin, R-Ill., desperately needs a history lesson.

— Joshua Dwyer, The Batallion (30 June 2005): Durbin erred grossly in calling Gitmo a gulag

Charles J. Hanley, Associated Press (link thanks to DED Space (2006-01-27) and Hammer of Truth (2006-01-27); more at Echidne of the Snakes (2006-01-28)):

The U.S. Army in Iraq has at least twice seized and jailed the wives of suspected insurgents in hopes of leveraging their husbands into surrender, U.S. military documents show.

In one case, a secretive task force locked up the young mother of a nursing baby, a U.S. intelligence officer reported. In the case of a second detainee, one American colonel suggested to another that they catch her husband by tacking a note to the family’s door telling him to come get his wife.

… The U.S. military on Thursday freed five of what it said were 11 women among the 14,000 detainees currently held in the 2 1/2-year-old insurgency. All were accused of aiding terrorists or planting explosives, but an Iraqi government commission found that evidence was lacking.

Iraqi human rights activist Hind al-Salehi contends that U.S. anti-insurgent units, coming up empty-handed in raids on suspects’ houses, have at times detained wives to pressure men into turning themselves in.

— Charles J. Hanley, Associated Press (28 January 2006): Documents Show Army Seized Wives as Tactic

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, prisoner of the Soviet gulag and author of The Gulag Archipelago:

9. Playing on one’s affection for those one loved was a game that worked beautifully on the accused as well. It was the most effective of all methods of intimidation. One could break even a totally fearless person through his concern for those he loved. (Oh, how foresighted was the saying: A man’s family are his enemies.) Remember the Tatar who bore his sufferings–his own and those of his wife-but could not endure his daughter’s! In 1930, Rimalis, a woman interrogator, used to threaten: We’ll arrest your daughter and lock her in a cell with syphilitics! And that was a woman!

— Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1973–1978), Chapter 3: The Interrogation