With a tagline like this, you know it’s gonna be good:
Is the Internet and not the washing machine or the pill the technology that finally liberated women?
At the risk of having the tired "humorless feminist" epithet lobbed at me, I haven’t decided if Virginia Heffernan’s column on women and telecommuting in Sunday’s New York Times magazine is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, or overtly serious in its sexism. Take this doozy of a paragraph:
Thanks to the Internet, women who prefer never, ever to leave the house to enter the unpredictable world of vice presidents and printer hubs get to pursue fame and fortune as greedily as anyone. (The phrase, for your records, is “work independently.”) Our vaunted verbal skills come through just fine in instant messaging, and we get to skip the stuff that requires broad shoulders, a baritone and understanding of wolf packs: the dread face-to-face interactions. Sure, all those deals that were supposed to go down on the golf course or at the urinal — they probably still happen there. But now, if we so choose, we have the means to text-pester the golfers all the livelong day. Show them which colleague will not be ignored!
What do you think: sardonic, or is she for real?
4 Comments
It’s clearly sarcasm. At least to me.
I’m with Kevin. The tone is just dry enough to be mistaken for seriousness if you’re already predisposed to look for something to be offended about (not that I’m trying to lob the humorless feminist label at you), but it has a definite self-aware ironic wit to it.
Ha! I thought that was pretty funny. She overall believes that the internet has opened opportunities to women who want to work but need to spend more time at the home. However, she seems to think that the ease with which women can retreat back into the home, even if they do so in the name of “work”, might be dangerous for the feminist cause, and for women in general. I think that’s where the posted paragraph and its sardonic language come into play. If I’m correct, I think that her point is good… one can assume that a woman who stays home to work is doing the same job as if she were going into the office every day, but is that true? Yes, being able to stay home, work, and take care of her family’s needs might seem to many people a boon to feminists everywhere. She’s doing “it all,” right? The problem is, she’s not in the office, so to the other people working for the company, she’s invisible, in a way. Some won’t ever know who she is or what her impact on the company is. Thus, her impact as a woman in the landscape of the company is diminished because she physically is not present. Problematic, no? And maybe she loses something when she’s not present for the water cooler banter, when she’s left out of the “wolf pack” pep talks. In all of her jocularity, I think that Ms. Heffernan is concerned that going back into the home, even to work, will set women back when it comes to getting those promotions and being visible, viable, corporate leaders.
But yes, she is being sarcastic.
people never ever use the phrase “never ever” in sincere statements.