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Note to Trophy Wives: This Feminist Has Your Back
The Times ran an article about support groups for the wives/girlfriends of newly dispossessed Wall Street Banker types that bears feminist perusal:
The economic crisis came home to 27-year-old Megan Petrus early last year when her boyfriend of eight months, a derivatives trader for a major bank, proved to be more concerned about helping a laid-off colleague than comforting Ms. Petrus after her father had a heart attack.
For Christine Cameron, the recession became real when the financial analyst she had been dating for about a year would get drunk and disappear while they were out together, then accuse her the next day of being the one who had absconded.
Dawn Spinner Davis, 26, a beauty writer, said the downward-trending graphs began to make sense when the man she married on Nov. 1, a 28-year-old private wealth manager, stopped playing golf, once his passion. "One of his best friends told me that my job is now to keep him calm and keep him from dying at the age of 35," Ms. Davis said. "It's not what I signed up for."
So they get together, have (still) expensive cocktails and bemoan the halving of their monthly Bergdorf allowances while their men fall apart. Bien sur, they have a website defensively described as "free from feminist scrutiny." Well, this feminist feels you.
It would be inhuman not to expect someone whose living standard was suddenly pulled out from under them to bemoan its loss. If I can feel the pain of a recently laid-off Michigan autoworker's wife, why not that of a Bear Stearns' wife? Or the ex, with kids, who'd been living on alimony and child support from one of those Wall Street 'wunder kinds'?
Obviously, they should have saved, given that they had so much. But these women bemoan the loss of formally vital, go-getting men as much (ok, maybe as much?) as the lost ducats:
"It's a big blow to their egos and to their self-esteem," [one scholar] said of the endless stream of economic bad news, "and they may take it out on their partners and children."
Ms. Petrus, a lawyer, and Ms. Crowell, who works for a fashion Web site, started the support group when they realized that they were facing similar problems in their relationships with bankers last fall.
"We put two and two together and figured out that it was the economy, not us," Ms. Petrus recalled at a recent meeting in the lobby bar of the Bowery Hotel. "When guys in banking are going through this, they can't handle a relationship."(She and her boyfriend split up last year; he declined to discuss it.)
Many of the women said that as the economic crisis struck last fall, they began tracking the markets during the day to predict the moods that the men they loved might be in later. On big news days, like when the first proposed government bailout failed in Congress, or when Lehman went belly-up, they knew that plans to see their partners would be put off.
"I was like, 'O.K. I signed up for that, it's fine,' " said Ms. Cameron. "But all of a sudden," she said, her boyfriend "couldn't focus. If he stayed over he'd be up at some random hour checking his BlackBerry, Bloomberg, and CNBC."
One frequent topic among the group is the link between the boardroom and the bedroom. "There's actually the type of person who has a bad day on the trading floor and they want to have sex more," Ms. Spinner Davis offered as she sipped a vodka gimlet, declining to say how she knew.
Ms. Petrus chimed in.
"If you're lucky you'll get that guy," she said, not revealing whether she considered herself lucky. "Middle-case scenario: It gets relegated to the weekends.
"Worst-case scenario," she began, and then took another sip of her drink.
Is a fired steel worker, or Dollar Store worker, much different?
Granted, their men put us in the situation we're in. But we're all in free fall now. Resuming my humorless feminist persona, I'll just say that maybe now more women will make sure they have a financial fall back plan. All our hearts,of course, remain on their own.
I don't understand. The article is arguing for compassion because diminishing resources is a universal stressor. By that standard, "their men" are equally worthy of concern, even as their responsibility for this situation is rightly assessed. Is the article supportive of these women due to their sex alone? Feminism isn't just a gender solidarity movement.
We can discuss how the financial crisis has affected disadvantaged people in much more productive ways. Millions of people have been impoverished, and we can debate ways to aid our neighbors and exercise fallow labor.
Or not.
I saw that the other day and assumed it was a more of a puff piece used to present someone's idea for a new blog.
In other words, I thought it was trying hard for a spot on the pop culture hall of fame but struck out as it isn't really funny, or substantive.
Really glad you got their backs though.
Yeah, no. What's that they say?
"It's better to have been rich and lost than never to have been rich at all"
These pricks can take a hike. I can't compare someone who gets to "bemoan the halving of their monthly Bergdorf allowances" to someone who is watching their family suffering through a cold winter in a homeless shelter because their job vanished like so much play money.
Thanks, Godless. Somehow I was born without the 'Compassion for the Rich' gene. It is a changeless aspect of my life. When I read the article, all I could see was the women from "Tales from the City", another thing I'm evidently genetically unable to care about.
And, no, you cannot compare these people's financial plight to those of the working class. It's like two fraction equations, 1/2 = 48/96. Yes, they have SOMETHING in common, but other than the simple math, these are dramatically different lives. Debra, Debra, Debra... First picking on Ree's hat, now this. You really are showing your true colors.
No, not the same. The steelworker made something. The hedge fund guy just took money for raping the country. No, that is not to strong a word for our national violation. We had a credit meltdown and all I got was a lousy t-bill.
I was hoping this was a joke - I guess not. Sympathy for those who helped bring this country (financially) to its knees (the world, really)? Please.
It's not that I don't feel sympathy, I do. It was just that these women expressed no sympathy for their men (or ex's) just a kind of whining.. oh I can't have what I used to have and now he's clingy... rather than, the man I love is suffering and I'm suffering with him. I could have felt for both of them if that was what they were saying, but that isn't what I heard...
It's not that I don't have any compassion for people like these women whose lives are turned upside down -- I just don't have *feminist* compassion, move-to-the-top-of-my-list compassion, stay-up-worrying-at-night compassion for them. If they happen to be in straits that are particularly gendered -- they're being knocked around by their despondent male partners, they're not getting child-support, they can't get credit on their own because their credit identities are submerged beneath their husbands' identities -- then they get some of my feminist empathy. If they're just not getting enough sex or their dinner plans got cancelled or they're gonna have to go back to match.com and find a guy who can treat them well even when he's in a professional crisis, well, pbfffft: welcome to the world.
I sometimes like to approach an issue like this with the question: WWGD? (What would Gandhi do?)
Certainly, I don't see him as rejoicing in anyone else's suffering, no matter who they were nor what their perceived sins might have been.
Not much I could actually do for these folks, but I don't plan to lower myself to laughing at someone else's pain, no matter who.
I would like to make a modest proposal. Wall Street executives and others who received bonuses for their performance in the past decade (1998-2008) should be forced to pay all the bonus money into the National Treasury for use in debt reduction. They can keep their base salaries.
If my math is at all close to right, bonuses paid to just the "workers" (former masters of the universe) in the securities industry totaled $236 Billion, give or take a few million, between 1998-2008. These bonuses were paid to these people for actions that may in time, totally destroy our economy and perhaps the entire world economy before it is all over.
After this down payment, we should begin looking into the executive compensation for other major sectors in our economy, to see what they can kick in to help our government spend our way out of the mess these jet set Marxists have caused. Executives in any industry that is "shedding jobs" right now should be examined and held accountable for this mess, by contributing their bonuses for the past decade as well.
I am sick and tired of hearing the idea that it is working people and our children and grandchildren who must be saddled with the costs of these bailouts. In this new era of accountability that we have entered, the criminals who caused this mess should be accountable for buying our way out of it. If that happens, justice will be served. If they don't want to give back their bonuses, the money should be taken from them and then they should not be allowed to participate in any way in the economy, except through manual labor, for the next decade.
Mark Hartford sez: I would like to make a modest proposal.
I'm still waiting for it.
All you offered after that opening statement was a vendictive rant about how you'd "sack the castle" and "burn the rich nobles", in a latter-day manner.
But, hey, given the historical evidence that sacking the castle and burning the rich nobles has always resulted in lasting improvements in the lives of the peasants, I can certainly see the wisdom of your position. [/sarcasm]
This is absurd. When the poor lose their jobs, they risk real poverty. Maybe the kids don't get to eat dinner every night. When the hedge fund boyfriends of these rich shrews lose their jobs, their burgdorf allowances are cut. Pardon me if I don't see the equivalence.
Well, color me as having at least a little compassion for these women. They had nice lives, nice BF's and all f a sudden, it went to heck in a handbasket. It still sucks, even if it doesn't mean absolute ruin and abject poverty. It still sucks. I don wonder, as journalist, if the person writing the article purposefully made these woman sound as shallow and undeserving of compassion as they are? I mean, considering the responses here, it wouldn't be too far fetched an idea. But the one commenter who said that if these women were concerned for the men they loved not just for their financial perqs, they might seem a whole lot more sympathetic.
dej
I fail to see what's so feminist-oriented about this article. Everyone deserves some compassion if they are hurting. Everyone should be wary about putting their eggs in one basket. What went unsaid in this article, and may be the author's intended feminist issue, is that these women chose to be dependent on their men, and now it seems that it wasn't such a good idea. But the same thing could be said of anybody who works for a single employer, anyone who decides to get married, anyone who puts all their 401K in a single stock, etc. So, tell me, why was this article printed? Why is it worth reading? I don't get it.
But, hey, given the historical evidence that sacking the castle and burning the rich nobles has always resulted in lasting improvements in the lives of the peasants,
No kidding. See the 19th-20th century labor movements, Cambodia (when the US wasn't bombing it into submission), elsewhere Latin America (when the US wasn't supporting repressive regimes with enough aid to keep them at bay)...
Seems in many cases, lasting improvements 'peasants' have won for themselves came from demands with militant emphasis. Of course, the standard state response is to maim and kill enough people to put the instability to rest. (See: 19th and 20th century labor movements, Cambodia, ...)
[/sarcasm]
Shucks, you were sounding pretty sensible for a moment there.