Sunday, January 13, 2008

Is Caitlin Flanagan Trying to Tell Me Something?


So I thought I had a sense of what to expect from Caitlin Flanagan, that sharp-witted woman-hating Wahoo. But her op-ed in today's New York Times ("Sex and the Teenage Girl") struck me as, well, pretty weird. She transitions from a quick look at Juno to some big talk about "commitment to girls" and then concludes with a bizarre anecdote about something she spotted in a high school girls bathroom: "In the last stall, carved deeply into the box reserved for used sanitary napkins, was the single word 'Please.'" This strange piece of writing stops short of being a full-on critical look at the film, or a flat-out call to action or even a wholesale emotional appeal; it proposes no new solution and offers no new insight into the issue of teen pregnancy. Instead, it's just head-scratchingly fuzzy restatement of a familiar problem. I thought that kind of writing was reserved for blogs?

1 comment:

s said...

i saw this article and thought the same thing, rao! i don't understand what she was trying to get at with the "please" at the end of the article--a high school girl hoping to never get her period again? a mean girl wishing her friends weren't so mean? weird.