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0839305
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Has my watch stopped?" she wrote. "No. But its hands do not seem to be going around. Don't look at them. Think of something else--anything else; think of yesterday, a calm, ordinary, easy-flowing day, in spite of the nervous tension of waiting."
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Ariel Levy |
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e0926a4
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But in a strange way, I am comforted by the truth. Death comes for us. You may get ten minutes on this earth or you may get eighty years but nobody gets out alive. Accepting this rule gives me a funny flicker of peace.
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Ariel Levy |
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885b27c
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I asked if she'd ever wanted children. She told me, "Everybody doesn't get everything." It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essential work of growing up. Everybody doesn't get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality."
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Ariel Levy |
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9e26d2e
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Grief is another world. Like the carnal world, it is one where reason doesn't work.
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Ariel Levy |
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ac9eb45
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There is a widespread assumption that simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is magically imbued with its agenda.
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Ariel Levy |
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1212407
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But I understood, now, her dilemma. I wanted what she had wanted, what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can't have it all.
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Ariel Levy |
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f2eb9b1
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It can be fun to feel exceptional--to be the loophole woman, to have a whole power thing, to be an honorary man. But if you are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that women are inferior, you haven't made any progress.
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gender-equality
gender-roles
misogyny
raunch-culture
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Ariel Levy |
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88d0bc7
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That trip was like all my life, distilled: a compulsion to thrust myself toward adventure, offset by a longing to crawl into the pouch of some benevolent kangaroo who would take me bounding, protected, through life.
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Ariel Levy |
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d2eb129
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Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It's also a symptom of narcissism.
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Ariel Levy |
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44e4f1e
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Writing is communicating with an unknown intimate who is always available, the way the faithful can turn to God.
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Ariel Levy |
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505b8e3
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For a while, it was as poisonous and wrenching as it had been since the day it happened, as intolerable: a crime against nature. Then the grief went back to sleep in my body.
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Ariel Levy |
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7cb33c3
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It didn't help when Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael made his notorious comment to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: "The position of women in SNCC is prone."
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Ariel Levy |
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4a552b8
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Anything seemed possible if you had ingenuity, money, and tenacity. But the body doesn't play by those rules.
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misscarriage
motherhood
women
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Ariel Levy |
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7651b10
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What teens have to work with, then, are two wildly divergent messages. They live in a candyland of sex...every magazine stand is a gumdrop castle of breasts, every reality show is a bootylicious Tootsie Roll tree. And these are hormonal teenagers: This culture speaks to them. But at school, the line given to the majority of them about sex is just say no. They are taught that sex is wrong until you have a wedding (they have seen those in the..
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Ariel Levy |
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69fd177
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The idea that sex can be reduced to fixed components as it is in pornography--blow job, doggie style, money shot, girl-on-girl--is adolescent: first base, second base, all the way. It is ironic that we think of this as adult entertainment. I don't see why we should regard porn as a way to enjoy "sexuality in all of its explicitness" any more than we consider looking at a chart of the food pyramid to be a feast."
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Ariel Levy |
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1a04843
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We shared an explosive enthusiasm that we blasted out of our bodies with alcohol. It was almost a sport. We tore through sobriety together, drink by drink, until we occupied a separate reality from the rest of the world.
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Ariel Levy |
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18d180d
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we were taking on the care of, together. They slept in the bed with us and followed us around from room to room, except sometimes when we crossed paths with them and they looked at us as if they were seeing--for the first time in their lives--creatures so terrifying, so dangerous, they could barely stand to know that we existed. Then they went flying for the closets, where they hid until they were ready to recognize us again for who we were..
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Ariel Levy |
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76ee6ec
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Women as a class have never subjugated another group; we have never marched off to wars of conquest in the name of the fatherland...those are the games men play. We see it differently. We want to be neither oppressor nor oppressed.
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Ariel Levy |
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2348f36
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We decided to get another cat--no, two! A pair of tiny, spotted sisters from an animal shelter on Long Island. We brought them home in a cardboard box punched with holes that they poked their noses through. They ran around the house curious, fearless, and then abruptly collapsed, always right next to each other. They did everything that way: They ate and drank in unison; they got in the litter box at the same time, like a two-headed kitten...
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Ariel Levy |
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e24da4f
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We didn't sit around looking at our phone or looking at our computer or looking at the television. We didn't sit around looking at screens. We didn't wait for a screen to give us a signal to do something: We were off doing whatever we wanted." I"
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Ariel Levy |
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ce238fe
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We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising.
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Ariel Levy |
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40a5fbf
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I had occasion to talk to Erica Jong, one of the most famous sex-positive feminists--"one of the most interviewed people in the world," as she's put it--on the thirtieth anniversary of her novel Fear of Flying. "I was standing in the shower the other day, picking up my shampoo," she said. "It's called 'Dumb Blonde.' I thought, thirty years ago you could not have sold this. I think we have lost consciousness of the way our culture demeans wo..
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Ariel Levy |
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f1483c3
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marriage is like two people locked up with one lesson to read, over and over, until the words become madness. DJ
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Ariel Levy |
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bf16679
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But the danger that we invite into our lives can come in the most unthreatening shape, the
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Ariel Levy |
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bb4d607
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Behind the bar, tall females in white feathered tops danced on poles, their faces set in masks of lascivious contempt. Keith Blanchard, then Maxim's editor-in-chief, told me, "It's a sexy night!" To me, "sexy" is based on the inexplicable overlap of character and chemicals that happens between people...the odd sense that you have something primal in common with another person whom you may love, or you may barely even like, that can only be ..
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Ariel Levy |
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3993329
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We shared an explosive enthusiasm that we blasted out of our bodies with alcohol.
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Ariel Levy |
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a98dfa5
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I was also domineering, impatient, relentlessly verbal, and, as an only child, often baffled by the mores of other kids. I was not a popular little girl.
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Ariel Levy |
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df2698e
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chest--I could hear him denigrating Obama at the top of his lungs, which seemed to make Mary only slightly less uncomfortable than it made me. A few weeks before the trip, she said, when she was in the shower, seething about something he'd done, the words I chose him for you came up on the holy computer screen in her mind. What
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Ariel Levy |
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76df19c
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She said, "Everything happens for a reason." Technically, that is a statement of fact. The reason I was talking to that woman was that she was friends with David. The reason she was friends with David was that he'd moved to the suburbs, where he didn't know anyone. The reason he didn't know anyone was that his best friends (his real friends) had grown up with him in those same suburbs and vowed never to return, because even though Westchest..
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Ariel Levy |
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77004d2
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In writing you can always change the ending or delete a chapter that isn't working. Life is uncooperative, impartial, incontestable.
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grief
memoir
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Ariel Levy |
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a5717b6
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All of my conjuring had led only to ruin and death. Now I was a wounded witch, waiting in the forest, undone.
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Ariel Levy |
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b572441
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It satisfied the edict my mother had issued many times throughout my life: "You have to make your own living; you never want to be dependent on a man."
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Ariel Levy |
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aefbace
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My competent self is doing the talking; my bewildered self is being addressed.
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Ariel Levy |
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a3e2a0d
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I asked if she'd ever wanted children. She told me, "Everybody doesn't get everything."
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Ariel Levy |
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207db70
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But you can never tell with shadows. You have to be vigilant, always, because maybe you're crazy, but maybe you're right. I
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Ariel Levy |
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b565527
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Proving that you are hot, worthy of lust, and--necessarily--that you seek to provoke lust is still exclusively women's work.
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Ariel Levy |
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e7475cb
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It's just a place, not another state of being.
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travel-as-escape
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Ariel Levy |
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4d964c3
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We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers, we want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, cosiness and thrills, but we can't have it all.
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immaturity
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Ariel Levy |
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bcf7cd3
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New York Times help-wanted ads, which were once arranged by gender to distinguish "women's work" from real careers."
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Ariel Levy |
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232c78f
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The Supreme Court could have said, You're just these fringe women in combat boots. But they didn't.
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Ariel Levy |
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5253bb8
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I was standing in the shower the other day, picking up my shampoo," she said. "It's called 'Dumb Blonde.' I thought, Thirty years ago you could not have sold this. I think we have lost consciousness of the way our culture demeans women."
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Ariel Levy |
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4aed9b1
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I got married a few years later--we all did. As we reached our thirtieth birthdays, my friends and I were like kernels of popcorn exploding in a pot: First one, then another, and pretty soon we were all bursting into matrimony. There were several years of peace, but then the pregnancies started popping. I found this unsettling.
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Ariel Levy |
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e61012b
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There was a corresponding orbit of moods this obligatory food preparation induced in my mother: no-nonsense competence, spunky pride, and seething resentment.
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Ariel Levy |
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58c5a07
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People have been telling me since I was a little girl that I was too fervent, too forceful, too much. I thought I had harnessed the power of my own strength and greed and love in a life that could contain it. But it has exploded.
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Ariel Levy |