The Problem with Everything

by Meghan Daum

  The number of women in the workplace had been rising steadily for the past several decades. Moreover, women in poor and working-class sectors had always done paid work outside the home. But the media was newly obsessed with the image of women commuting to high-rise office buildings every day, briefcases in hand and stiletto pumps on feet. (The impracticality of getting to work in high heels led to the trend of pairing running shoes with business suits for commuting purposes and changing into heels at the office.) The weekly newsmagazines churned out a steady rotation of stories about women with huge hair and huge shoulder pads making huge strides for all of womankind. I was only twelve, but these images danced inside my imagination like flashes from my future. I couldn’t wait to grow up and wear a power suit with Nikes and carry my high-heeled shoes in my briefcase.

  I suspect my mother wanted to put on some version of a power suit, too. The ERA might not have passed, but surely her children were old enough and the culture (even the culture of our stultifying Reaganite town) had changed enough for her to leave the house every morning without feeling like she’d committed an act of criminal negligence. It was the 1980s, after all. The next year, in 1983, Sally Ride would join the crew of the space shuttle Challenger and become the first woman in space. The year after that, Geraldine Ferraro would run for vice president and be the first woman nominee on a major-party ticket in a presidential race. Women were doing and having it all. What could possibly stop her from doing and having the same?

  Plenty, as it turned out. This was the 1980s. Suddenly, it seemed that the job of motherhood included acting as a round-the-clock security detail. This would be difficult to combine with having an actual job.

  * * *

  “Concerning the cultural legacy of Etan’s disappearance, we have created millions of helicopter parents who have spawned a generation or so of emotionally stunted children due to this extremely rare tragedy.”

  These words were written to me in an e-mail from Stan Patz, father of Etan Patz, a six-year-old boy who vanished from the streets of SoHo in 1979. Etan’s disappearance set off a nationwide panic that changed the nature of parenting—and, moreover, childhood—forever.

  I had a brief correspondence with Stan Patz in 2015. The case was back in the news because a man named Pedro Hernandez, who’d been eliminated as a suspect decades earlier, was on trial for killing Etan based on new evidence. I wrote a newspaper column about the case, specifically its role in the phenomenon that would eventually become known as helicopter parenting. I mentioned in the column that I thought there was insufficient evidence against Hernandez. Patz disagreed with me on that (and, indeed, the jury had found Hernandez guilty), but we exchanged a few cordial e-mails, one of which included his startling remark about the legacy of Etan’s disappearance. I never forgot it.

  By the 1980s, two high-profile child abductions, those of Etan Patz in 1979 and Adam Walsh in 1981, kicked off a massive movement around a supposed epidemic of missing children. (A horrific string of murdered children and teenagers in Atlanta added further to the sense of panic.) Photos of the missing children, along with their vital statistics and details about when and where they were last seen, appeared on billboards, pizza boxes, grocery bags, and, most famously, milk cartons. The effect was nothing less than macabre. These images wallpapered the public consciousness and suddenly turned childhood itself into a form of personal endangerment. The media, always hungry for a story too sensational to check, happily ran with the “epidemic” narrative, repeating the widely disseminated statistic that a million and a half children were reported missing each year.

  Though there was no denying the horror of the Atlanta murders, the epidemic of vanishing children was never even close to being true. The faces on the pizza boxes and milk cartons were overwhelmingly those of runaways or kids who’d been taken by non-custodial parents during divorce and custody battles. Incidents of vanished children who had been taken by strangers were, so to speak, vanishingly rare. In 1984, the FBI investigated just sixty-seven cases involving stranger abduction. A few years later, reliable statistics showed that 99 percent of all child abductions annually were family-related.

  Still, in 1984 Newsweek published a cover story with the words “Stolen Children” screaming from the stands. The article allowed that “90 to 95 percent [of children reported missing] are likely to be runaways or youngsters abducted by a parent involved in a custody fight.” It also managed the rhetorical feat of suggesting that the visceral impact of the rare cases was enough to effectively render them the rule rather than the exception. “Though they constitute the smallest portion of the missing-children phenomenon,” the reporter wrote, “they can be weighted at ten times their number for the emotional havoc they leave in their wake.”

  It’s always seemed to me no accident that the panic over kidnappings in the 1980s—as well as the panic over satanic-cult members molesting preschoolers, which happened around the same time—coincided with masses of middle-class women, many of them mothers, returning to or entering the workplace. What better way to punish women for breaking free from the housewife mold than to reimagine children as a victimized class? After centuries (millennia?) of playing outdoors alone and generally being left to their own devices, children who came home to empty houses now fell into a woebegotten category called latchkey kids, their house keys hanging from shoestrings around their necks like scarlet letters. But even as these unsupervised urchins haunted the public imagination, the threats to them were just that, imaginary. Working moms weren’t just the scapegoats of these threats, but, often, the target audience for the doomsaying. It was a perfect marketing ploy. Who could be the more ideal viewer for those requisite yearly news stories about razor blades stuck in Halloween candy than moms too busy working outside the home to sew homemade costumes? (Did you know that kids with store-bought costumes are disproportionately poisoned by anthrax-laced Snickers bars? No, you didn’t, because it’s not true. Nor has there ever been a single documented case of a stranger poisoning trick-or-treaters’ candy.)

  Moral panics can frequently be traced back to the discomforts brought about by social change. With the invention of electricity came fears that lights inside houses at nighttime would alert intruders as to whether people were home. In the 1950s, when films and musicals like Rebel Without a Cause and West Side Story made teenage gangs into a cultural trope, everyone suddenly became afraid of switchblades and federal laws were proposed to ban them. Since then, we’ve been told that the population is under threat from everything from video games to juvenile “super-predators” to the idea that the United States is rife with child sex trafficking (a claim often made by those wanting to see punitive measures taken against adult sex workers). Today, social media can take a random conspiracy theory or misreported fact and turn it into a population-wide anxiety attack in a matter of hours. So, in the scheme of things, stranger-danger panic may look like just another entry in the Encyclopedia of Problems People Invent in Order to Distract Themselves from Their Actual Problems.

  But stranger-danger panic always seemed to me to follow a particularly cynical and shameful logic, since it ignored the fact that less affluent mothers had been going to work for decades, though apparently to such little notice that no one bothered to poison any Halloween candy in retribution. Only when middle-class, college-educated types (the kind who might write Newsweek headlines or be on intimate terms with those who do) joined the fray did the official backlash begin. Only when women began encroaching on spaces where there was real money to be made and real agency to be gained were we suddenly notified of a pandemic of child peril. Inevitably, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thirty years later, children are more fussed over than ever, dulled by psychotropic medication and so lulled by technology that many parents can’t get their kids to play outside if they try. This, in turn, has become its own moral panic. Newsweek may have lost most of its currency, but type “coddled child” into Google and you’ll get about nine thousand results (type it in without the q
uotations marks and you’ll get more than half a million).

  I’m not going to do a retread of the coddled-children phenomenon here. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has already done excellent work in this area. In his 2017 book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Haidt and co-author Greg Lukianoff talk about the current fixation on “safetyism” and suggest that the impulse to “always trust your feelings” (which is hardly unique to children) can set up a fragility that makes life harder than it needs to be. For my part, I do think kids in the middle and upper-middle classes are often over-entwined with their parents. But I have plenty of friends who are epic coddlers of their children, and I respect them enough to assume they have their reasons. As a non-parent, I know my thoughts on the matter are of limited interest or relevance. Moreover, the subject has been so hashed out during the last several years that it’s no longer a hash as much as a pitifully weak sauce that gets poured onto every discussion about why young people are the way they are. But in thinking back on my own childhood, I’m struck mainly not by how coddled or uncoddled I was but how eager I was to grow up. Much as I enjoyed playing with my gender-neutral toys and watching Zoom and imitating Jodie Foster in Freaky Friday, I would have gladly dispensed with all of it in exchange for an express ticket to adulthood. There was something about childhood that was almost insulting. Being treated as fragile, vulnerable, and incapable of making decisions felt like a gross injustice. (If at ten years old I’d been proficient in the idiom of today’s social justice activism, I might have even called it “a violence.”)

  Of course, I was fragile and vulnerable in some ways and definitely incapable of making certain decisions (given the opportunity to choose a name for a younger sibling, I might have suggested Holidome). But the best thing about being a kid, as far as I was concerned, was that it was a temporary situation.

  More than forty years have passed since that awkward encounter with the chivalrous boy at the pool. I am far older now than my mother was back then. I’m even far older than she was in 1982, when we heard the news about the ERA being dead for good. In that time, the earnestness of my mother’s feminism has done a reverse-pike dive into the irony of third-wave feminism. Gloria Steinem’s “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like” shirt is back in style and available in countless Etsy stores in every imaginable color (right alongside all those “Don’t Give a Fuck” T-shirts). But even more fashionable are T-shirts, plate necklaces, and coffee mugs reading “Feminist as Fuck.” Slogans that were considered edgy in the 1970s, such as “Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society,” which appeared on a shirt issued by the Oregon Women’s Political Caucus in 1974, now seem banal compared to “I Drink Male Tears,” “Kill All Men,” “Pussy Grabs Back,” or “My Feminism Will Be Intersectional or It Will Be Bullshit.”

  Is this what a feminist looks like?

  * * *

  Maybe it is, and maybe we should be glad. After all, it wasn’t so many years ago, the mid-aughts, that female “empowerment” became strangely wrapped up in the culture of pornography and Girls Gone Wild videos. It seems like yesterday that female celebrities, when asked how they felt about the state of women, began their answers with “I’m not a feminist, but . . .” In the scheme of things, I suppose a runway model wearing a $700 Christian Dior “We Should All Be Feminists” T-shirt is no more perverse than women flashing their breasts in the name of reappropriating the forces of their sexual exploitation.

  But I’m troubled by the ways in which contemporary feminism has turned womanhood into another kind of childhood, one inculcated with the same kind of fear and paranoia that haunted the children of the 1980s. Instead of milk cartons, we have news headlines. Every morning I wake up, pour my coffee, and click through news sites that are apparently determined to make every fourth story a jeremiad about the ways in which women are screwed. “Climate change ‘impacts women more than men’ ” went a BBC headline in March 2018. “Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden” was the title of a Harper’s Bazaar article this past May.

  Sometimes these are cases of headlines designed to provoke more outrage than anything actually contained in the accompanying article. The climate change story was essentially making the case that poor people are most affected by climate change and since women are poorer than men worldwide, well . . . ergo. The “men have no friends” story was mostly about how men can lean too heavily on their female partners because of stigmas against men seeking emotional support from other men. That’s a phenomenon I have witnessed (though I’ve also noticed that women can wield a lot of power over emotionally dependent men), so the argument is fair enough, I suppose. But did the article really warrant a sub-headline that read: “Toxic masculinity—and the persistent idea that feelings are a ‘female thing’—has left a generation of straight men stranded on an emotionally stunted island, unable to forge intimate relationships with other men. It’s women who are paying the price”?

  That was clearly the work of an editor seeking eyeballs by inserting buzzy terms like “toxic masculinity.” (Well done! It caught my eye.) But in cases like the climate change article, such efforts aren’t even necessary because the story is so easily massaged into a rote social justice narrative. Occasionally there’s no massaging necessary because the story itself is the narrative. A recent standout in my feed was this: “Experts Say U.S. Among Ten Most Dangerous Nations for Women.”

  You read that right. A 2018 Thomson Reuters Foundation survey of “about 550 experts in women’s issues” came up with a list of the ten countries in which women encountered the greatest risk of sexual violence, harassment, and coercion. The list included places like India, where gang rapes occur in public routinely and women, including very young girls, have been raped and set on fire, and countries like Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia, which are homes to honor killings, female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and any number of other atrocities imposed on women.

  When asked why this was, the Thomson Reuters Foundation cited increased awareness of the issue thanks to the influence of the #MeToo movement.

  “People want to think income means you’re protected from misogyny, and sadly that’s not the case,” said one such expert by way of explanation. “We are going to look back and see this as a very powerful tipping point. . . . We’re blowing the lid off and saying ‘#Metoo and Time’s Up.’ ”

  I guess “increased awareness” now counts as some kind of data point. Perception can now be interchangeable with fact. It’s Etan Patz on the milk carton all over again. Wake up to this grim news every morning, year after year, and you’ll start to believe it. Either that, or you’ll start to think feminism itself is a moral panic.

  * * *

  Let’s face it, though, in many ways, mother nature is the ultimate misogynist. There are real burdens to inhabiting a female body. It’s a burden to walk down the street in that body, a burden to grow another body inside of that body. It’s a burden to try to maintain equal footing with men when certain physical tasks we’re less likely to be capable of—operating a pump on an oil rig, picking up steel beams, being seven feet tall and putting a ball through a hoop—have, fairly or unfairly, been assigned a higher monetary value than physical tasks like, say, bearing children. It’s a burden to worry about getting pregnant when you don’t want to be and not being able to get pregnant when you do. It’s a burden—not to mention infuriating—to watch socially conservative lawmakers try to manage their own sexual demons and clusterfucked value systems by policing the rights of others.

  It’s also easy for Gen Xers and baby boomers to overlook the ways in which younger generations might experience those burdens more palpably. Data suggests that millennials, for all their sexting and Snapchat exhibitionism, have less sex than any generation since the 1920s. Research conducted by psychologist Jean Twenge, who studies generational differences, found that 15 percent of twenty- to twenty-four-year-olds who were born in the 1990s had
not had a sexual partner since the age of eighteen. Gen Xers were two and a half times more likely to have been sexually active in their twenties than today’s twentysomethings.

  Though the exact reasons for this are difficult to quantify, Twenge has surmised that easy access to pornography plays a role, as does the fact that so much socializing is done online. And though my own theories are even more difficult to quantify, I’ll nonetheless offer up one of them: when you come of age experiencing sex primarily through the filter of screens, the real thing must seem pretty scary. Moreover, if much of your sex education has come via the virtual classroom of internet pornography, it must be easy to get the idea that sex is more of a performative act than a natural function, a simulacrum of pleasure rather than pleasure itself.

  How can that not contribute to the proliferation of nude selfies? How can it not affect notions of consent, of intimacy, of beauty, of physical adult realities like body hair? (And not for the better, since being programmed to recoil in disgust at the sight of body hair is hardly an evolutionary advantage; if the cavemen had been sticklers for the shaved look, we would all have died out twenty thousand years ago.) If I’d grown up with the idea that men would be repelled by me unless my entire body was as hairless as a mole rat (for much of the aughts, this was the standard for women), I might have wanted to #KillAllMen, too.

  So I get it that I don’t totally get it.

  But what I think I’m justified in not understanding is what women stand to gain by reinforcing a narrative that they are a persecuted group. Even more so, what possible use is there in furthering the notion that to be a hip and cool feminist today means you can reduce men to insulting stereotypes in order to, in some sense, beat them at their own assholic game? Even before the election of the pussy grabber in chief, even before the #MeToo movement came along, there was a sense that feminism now existed as a response to some sort of emergency. But what exactly was the emergency? And how much of it was confined to online spaces as opposed to the real world? The idea of passive sexism, which could mean anything from a man holding a door for a woman to a school nurse calling a sick child’s mother instead of his father, was suddenly on radar screens, and there was an entire genre of online journalism devoted to calling it out, the conclusion often being that “the world hates women.” These journalists were then subjected to the sort of invective that opinion journalists have received for as long as there has been opinion writing. That is to say, they were called stupid, ugly, and unworthy of their jobs. Sometimes they got rape and death threats. Having been on the receiving end of some of that myself, my takeaway was usually that the world hates opinion journalists. But for others, the invective served to prove their point that the world hates women.