I want her back.

I want her back in her old, her former, her horrific but real configuration. I want that woman back who couldn’t see me with a new pocketbook or pair of shoes without saying, “Lovely, but I could never afford such a thing.” The woman who asked for detailed instructions as to what my children wanted for Hanukkah and birthdays and then said those requests were too expensive and sent a $10 check instead. The woman who called me on my birthday (when she remembered at all) and said, “I can’t believe I am a woman old enough to have a daughter as old as you are,” who sent gifts (when she remembered at all) that were unwrapped and showed the mark-downed price she had garnered at Filene’s Basement. Who sent me her old clothes that still smelled of her body and Clinique Aromatics.

I want my mother back.

I want her back to see her grandchildren grown and beautiful and interesting, even if she may still find something wrong with them. I want her to meet my new lover, even if she will raise an eyebrow as if to say: Is this man better than the ones you left? I want the mother back who careened from man to man herself, always searching for that one true great big movie love, and who then complained about being alone. I want the mother back who always complained about the noise, the food, the temperature of a restaurant and then went to the bathroom when the check came.

I also want the mother back who taught me to love music and art and theatre and books. The woman who showed me how to arrange flowers. The woman who traveled the world and took breathtaking photographs. The woman who was not afraid to leave her husband and start a new life, even if that new life began in an institution after a breakdown. The mother who held my babies and wept. The woman who handed me a Valium as I walked down the aisle. The mother who was beautiful and smart, who did the New York Times crossword puzzle in an hour. In ink. Who, as an actress, was a better Martha than Elizabeth Taylor and a better Eleanor of Aquitaine than Katharine Hepburn.

I want the mother back who lived with her pain, even if she did not understand it. Who was born sad and could not climb out of her sadness, but who managed a spectacular life despite it. The woman who was born at the wrong time, married the wrong man and had the wrong children. The mother who, despite it all, gathered friends to her like an abundance of autumn leaves and had all my friends convinced she was the most glamorous mother in town. The woman who struggled and struggled to find meaning in her world and railed against injustice and marched and fought for the rights of the disenfranchised. The woman whose house was filled with gifts from admirers, whose portrait serves as the face of the fairy godmother in a children’s book. The mother who wanted to live forever, but bought long-term care insurance so her daughters would not have to pay for her care as she had paid for her mother’s.

I want my old mother back. The one I had finally made peace with. The one whose whims and vagaries I understood. Whose moods and methods were familiar.

The mother who said she never wished to be a burden but was far more a burden then than she could ever be now.

Eight years ago, before she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, visits with my mother were still fraught with tension: How would she be this time? How long would any mood stand? How drunk would she get before she said something terrible? But at least I knew who she was. She was the mother I had had, for better or worse, for nearly 50 years.

Now, she curls up on her bed, recently incontinent. My beautiful and immaculate mother cannot hold in her waste: It flows into a diaper. She must be coerced into eating. She will stay in bed all morning if she is allowed. On a good day ,she insists her memory is fine, although she can answer no question about herself or the world. On a bad day, she gazes at her sister or my sister with confusion; she has already forgotten she has grandchildren. She can no longer write her name.

Soon after the diagnosis, when I first went to clean out her house in order to sell it and move her into assisted living, the out-of-date foodstuffs, the empty refrigerator, the dead flowers, told me what I had already known but hadn’t wanted to admit: that the incoherent late-night telephone calls were not the product of the end of a large bottle of wine, but of something far more sinister. I had not wished to recognize her disease because it would mean taking care of her, something I resisted deep in my soul: She had not taken care of me, after all. But once she moved and I visited her, I knew that taking care of her was all I could do, the most and least, the best and the worst, that I could do. And so I took her on outings, I sat with her while she held my hand and told me she loved me. I sat with her for hours and hours of silence filled only by my chatter. And each time, I felt a huge and deafening grief mixed with a profound guilt that I could no do more. But now, those feelings have changed once again. Because she is changing once again.

For the first several years of her illness, she held me and wept every time I left, followed me outside the door and stood waving until I drove away. Now, she lets me go with little regret or remembrance, her attention already turned to something else or nothing else. She listens to music that would have made her laugh just a few years ago. She cannot read, cannot think, cannot follow a conversation, can hardly speak. She forgets to put on her bra, goes around all day in her bedroom slippers. Not only is her brain shrinking inside her head, but her body is shrinking inside her clothes. Each time I see her she is smaller and smaller. Soon, she will be as tiny as Tiny Alice.

I did not know how to cope with the recent phone call which told me she woke in the night, wet the bed, screaming, and was taken to the hospital where they found nothing physically wrong with her. I called her multitude of doctors. Over and over. Finally, she was taken off some of her medications — especially the ones designed to slow the disease, as there is no possibility of that now — and put on others, specifically one to ease her pain, even if the cause of that pain remains unknown.

But nothing in my history with this woman who shaped me, who abused me and who loved me with her own mixture of crazy and brutal passion has prepared me for the way I weep now, the way I break down when I see her; the way I can’t help but imagine her as she was alone in a hospital room, screaming in pain.

The tears come unbidden. The last time I saw her, I began to weep and she watched, completely detached, as though I were something curious. “Why are you crying?” she asked.

Nothing in our long history as mother and daughter or the relatively short history of her disease seems to be able to prepare me for the way, from now on, she will only go downhill faster and faster, like a skier who has lost his poles. Nothing prepares me for the headlong crash into the tree which will be the end of her. Nothing prepares me for the myriad ways all of it makes me feel.

I know she won’t be back. But still, I want her so to be who she was, as awful as she could be, as wonderful as I know she wanted to be. Anything, even the mother who was so very very hard to love, would be better than who she is now. It may be much easier to love her, but it never gets easier watching her disappear, to see every vestige of the woman who once was — difficult, demanding, beautiful, cruel and exhilaratingly troubled — slide down and off her old self, like raindrops on a window.

(This originally appeared on The Broad Side and the Huffington Post)

The young woman in Steubenville whose life was upended by being raped by two high school football players might never have reported the crime had the event not been filmed and bragged about. Had there not been witnesses. Like many women who are raped or beaten or both — whether by strangers or people they know — she might have chosen to keep the crime secret: perhaps telling a friend or two, perhaps not speaking of it until years later. Because she was ashamed, deeply mortified, deeply frightened and in shock. Because she knew, if she did speak out it would be her word against the rapists. And without witnesses her word might have meant nothing.

As it was, she was shamed, blamed, and castigated for the rape: because she was drunk, because she was at a party, because she “ruined” the lives of the two young men who assaulted her. Because she made an entire town, and entire nation, have to think hard about its culture: a culture that puts the burden of proof on the victim to “prove” she was raped, that she tried to fight back, that she wasn’t in a dicey situation or wearing “provocative clothes.” The mainstream news media, in its inimitable fashion, spent less time on the victim than it did on the perpetrators, just as they did with the mass shootings in Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut. We can all reel off the names of the men who did the shooting but we need to search for the names of the dead and wounded. In the Steubenville case, the raped girl’s name should not be telegraphed, but certainly what happened to her should be: and what happened to her is far more heinous than the punishment meted out to the young men who raped her. In the case of the two girls who killed themselves, they meted out punishment to themselves that is irrevocable and plunged their families into endless grief.

There are hundreds of examples of judges, police and media figures shaming young women who have been raped. The most recent is that of Australian radio host John Laws whose interview of a rape survivor is so surreal as to be unbelievable. But those who have been raped believe it well: they have gone for years, decades, afraid to speak out about what happened to them for fear of the way it would be received.

At least 54 percent of sexual assaults go unreported.

I get that. I am one of those statistics.

In my mid-twenties I was raped on a date with a man with whom I had been set up. I did nothing other than tell the person who set me up that the guy wasn’t a good person. I felt helpless and stupid. He was in my house, I had invited him in, I had, at that time, more than 30 years ago, no tools with which to figure out what to do. I tried to fight but I was terrified.

A couple of years later, a man I was dating, a veteran of the Vietnam War whom I knew had mental health issues, beat me in a violent rage after I told him I was having lunch with an old male friend the next day. The beating, clearly a sexual assault, did not go as far as rape, although my clothes were ripped from my body and there was clear intent. Luckily, he was drunk and I managed to escape and lock myself in my bedroom. I called my best friend. She came and got me and I went to the hospital where I actually told the doctor I had fallen down the stairs. He did not press me. I did not tell the police. I did call the man’s mother and his therapist. But that was as far as I went.

Just by telling these stories I know I am opening myself up to accusations that I have lousy taste in men. Which is why very very few people in my life know anything about these events. Had the telling of these events been taken out of my hands by their being broadcast to the world, I have no idea what I would have done. Although I was a little older than the girls I talk about above I was not yet fully formed, I harbored the same insecurities and doubts that all young women do, I was strong only on the outside: my inner turmoil I kept confined to journal entries and only the closest of friends. Had my privacy been so violated I can well imagine feeling as desperate and lost as the two girls who committed suicide.

I lived with what happened to me for many years. I never told my parents or friends about the rape. When I told my father about the beating he offered, in good faith I assume, to get a couple of guys he knew to teach the man a lesson. He then tried immediately to fix me up with a man he knew, even as the left side of my caved-in face was still covered inexpertly with makeup. I did not tell my mother who would have, I expect, asked me “Well what did you do wrong?” That was her usual response to me when I told her about things which had happened.

I have a 20-year-old daughter who is as cavalier about her safety as most young women; she thinks she is invincible. Her heart has been broken, yes, but never, not yet anyway, her body. I fear for her every day. I have tried to talk to her about watching men who might put something in her drink, about putting herself in situations she can’t quite get out of, about trusting the untrustworthy. I have told her more than once that she cannot go out in the outfit she has on, that it telegraphs signals which may then spark behavior that she may not be able to fend off. But I also told my son at puberty, when the sex talks had long been had, that “no” always means “no,” and that women should be treated with respect and kindness and decency at all times. I told him that he should imagine every woman he dates is his younger sister and treat them as he would wish her to be treated. I know I have not always been successful in counseling either of them; they have both taken risks that frighten me.

I personally know far too many women who have been raped or abused. I have heard their stories even if they have chosen not to tell them to the world. I would not advise them to do so. But today our world is far different than it was 30 years ago. We have lost our choice about who to tell about what happens to us when everyone has a cellphone with a camera and the internet can make even the most intensely private act public in a matter of seconds. Which is why we have to control, as best we can, who we tell and how and why. And we have to keep telling and telling until the boys who tell our stories for us — without our permission — no longer have power over us. No longer have the kind of power it took to destroy Rehtaeh Parsons and Audrie Pott.

Rape has always been about power, not about sex, despite the myriad misunderstandings about the crime itself and the shaming of the victims by describing how they were dressed, where they were walking, how much they had had to drink, how pretty and desirable they were. But the power of rape is magnified exponentially when the act can be broadcast everywhere.

So I say we give up our privacy in the fight for justice, for education: in the quest to take back some of the power we have lost by being attacked. The world is always in our business so we should make it our business to defuse the bomb of shame and to stand up to those who would shame us.

It has taken me weeks to write this article, nay, even years. But something in the stories of the women whose private horror was spread around the world has made me step up. We must report these crimes even if we take the risk that we will be blamed or that our stories will be telegraphed around the world. We must tell our stories even if we fear that our own actions will place the blame on us rather than those who raped or abused us. We must be willing to bear the shame of telling for the benefit of putting our stories out there so that the millions of women who cannot talk about their trauma may be finally able to do so.

And while one in four women will get raped in her lifetime and one in eight will get breast cancer, the chance that a woman will become a high level corporate executive like Melissa Mayer or Sheryl Sandberg is miniscule. Women hold only 4.2 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions.

Which is why Mayer and Sandberg are in the news. They are aberrations. And why this ginned up “fight” among feminists about those women is just that: ginned up by the news of two women who aren’t like most of us. They are celebrity feminists, long after Gloria Steinem became one of the first, 40 years ago.

I have already written about Mayer’s new rules for Yahoo and how she ignores class divides. But now Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg graces the cover of Time with a tagline taken from a hair color advertisement. We are admonished not to hate her because she is “successful.”

But we don’t hate her; we don’t hate Marissa Mayer, either. We are also not jealous. We are just weary at having to defend ourselves against such accusations. I think most women who came to feminism during the second wave are pretty exhausted in general. We are exhausted by the years of trying not just to break through an almost unbreakable glass ceiling but by trying to reframe women’s issues as society’s issues. And because we should be farther along — all of us, men and women — than we are at this moment. We are tired. But we can’t stop worrying about our place in the world because the generations coming up behind us find themselves having to either justify or deny their feminism.

It is swell that at 43 Sandberg finally admitted she is a feminist. But I’m not at all sure her book says anything particularly new or noteworthy. From the excerpts I have read and the interviews she has given she is basically saying that we have to get out of our own way, support each other, and try to form enlightened relationships with the men with whom we wish to start a family. Which is what we long-time feminists have been saying and doing for years. Even as we are forced to fight old battles over and over again.

According to the article on Sandberg in Time, she wishes to “reboot” feminism. Which would be charming were it really necessary. Perhaps her coming to feminism late makes her think that women haven’t been busting their asses for equality every day for the past 50 years. Because they have. Ask any ordinary woman (and I mean someone who makes under a half-million a year) who has long been trying to juggle a career and motherhood. Ask Lilly Ledbetter, the catalyst for President Obama signing the Fair Pay Act of 2009. Ask all those millions of women who lobbied for years for the still-not-ratified ERA. Who marched in the street. The only “new” think that Sandberg offers is an admonishment to “lean” into power. As if that were as easy as it sounds.

Sandberg worries that women aren’t working hard enough to get to the top.

According to Time article : “Compared to our male colleagues, fewer of us aspire to senior positions,” she writes (in her book Lean In). It’s not exactly that they’re to blame, she notes. Females are raised from birth to have different expectations. There’s an ambition gap, and it’s wreaking havoc on women’s ability to advance. “My argument is that getting rid of these internal barriers is critical to gaining power. We can dismantle the hurdles in ourselves today. We can start this very moment.”

But assuming women don’t want and fight for power is akin to assuming that all things are equal which would be the same as assuming that black people don’t suffer from prejudice and an unfair court system, and that poor people need only to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps to get rich. I can’t find any evidence that women don’t want to be in positions of power. What women want is a society that allows us to try and rise, while supporting the idea that we can also raise families. What we want is a society where women in power are no longer an aberration and where those women who have it don’t divide their press time with men who are trying to take it away.

The fact that we have no paid maternity leave (unlike much of Europe) and no universal health care is part of the reason we can’t get ahead as fast as we might like. There is also, despite Ledbetter, too many professions where women are paid less than men for the same job. It is not quite as simple as demanding raises. I well remember the concern that women not be too aggressive, even as we were encouraged to take “assertiveness” training. Same old same old: are women bitchy or tough? It all depends on who is in charge.

Sandberg also states that women are critical of successful women and points to the articles about Marissa Mayer and her new rules at Yahoo as an example. But that isn’t it. As I wrote, women are not critical of Meyer’s success, they are critical of the way she denies the experiences of other women and uses her own privilege to make her life stunningly more easy than is possible for 99 percent of other women.

I think we are all tired of the fact that feminism still needs to be discussed at all. That it took Sandberg until age 43 to admit to being one. That people still have issues with the word. That we can still be called names by right-wingers in Congress and on the radio just for trying to get ahead. We are not a post-racial society, we are not a post-prejudice society, and we certainly are not a society where women have equal status. If we were then there would not be a raft of stories about how there are finally 20 women (out of 100) senators. Househusbands would not be written about as if they were modern miracles. And Sandberg and Mayer would not be getting the publicity they are, decades after Gloria Steinem got similar publicity and was roundly criticized for it. She was also charged with being beautiful — as if beauty and feminism contradict each other.

Sandberg is still a rare bird. So is Mayer. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t be reading about everything they say and every decision they make, as though they were the Kardashians or Snookie. They are celebrities, celebrity women, whose philosophy, feminist or not, is getting the same kind of press that a woman star’s wardrobe malfunction gets. Sensationalist. Gossipy. What a few women who have achieved extraordinary success have to say is important only if they take measures to make sure that their own success is no longer so extraordinary. It will be a fine day indeed, and a huge gain for both men and women, when women who achieve are not a dog bites man story but rather not big news at all.

But more important than our message or even the signals that that message sends is this. What are our beliefs? What are we fighting for? Who are we fighting for? What is it that we must have, that we need absolutely? And can those things be gained by all women of every race and class and background? In our discussion we simply must talk, deeply and really, about whether feminism, in the next generations, will be exclusive or inclusive. This is an issue which has been facing feminism from the very beginning, and especially from the beginning of second wave feminism. And we have yet to completely solve it. How do we speak to and provide options for all women of all classes?

Class is something we don’t like to talk about in the United States. We like to pretend it doesn’t exist. We like to pretend that everyone with a little luck and some hard work can become a millionaire. That all that divides us is money rather than values or lifestyle or desire or, frankly, birth. Of course that isn’t true. As so many have so eloquently stated: Money doesn’t buy happiness; it just makes unhappiness easier to bear. What divides the classes is far more than money: it is opportunity, it is access, it is power, it a voice. And the poorer one is the less power, opportunity, access and voice one has.

Marissa Mayer doesn’t get that. She doesn’t get that her particular brand of feminism — going back to work after two weeks and setting up a private nursery near her office, while denying her workers the chance to work sometimes at home so that they can have the kinds of relationships with their children that Mayer is trying to foster with her own child –is pretty awful. In fact, she is clueless in general. Her quote that babies were easier than she thought will come back to haunt her when her child is a toddler, going through an illness, or starting his first day at school. She will realize fairly quickly that tending to a mostly sleeping infant is a whole lot less difficult than every year after infancy. I want to see her juggle baseball and soccer and school science projects and bullying and everything else kids bring to us while she manages one of the largest companies in the world. Then let’s see how easy she finds parenthood. Even with millions of dollars and a nanny.

Those of us in the generations who came before Mayer are, understandably, cringing. She is just the kind of woman we don’t seem to be able to reach: the kind of woman who has no idea what women before her went through to allow Mayer to bust through the glass ceiling. Her money and her power cushion her from even having to think about those issues. But every woman in the U.S. with less money and less power and less flexibility — which is nearly a 100 percent of us — are still struggling with the issues of equality which we have been struggling with and fighting for, for more than half a century. Mayer is a rare bird. An exotic. She isn’t representative. And so that makes her statements about her workers even less valid. And far more sad. She simply does not get it.

Those of us who went to work in the ’60s and ’70s remember quite well when sexual harassment was de rigueur and how Anita Hill’s testimony set off a flurry of lightbulb moments. Those of us who grew up back then remember clearly the year we were allowed to wear pants to school, which may not seem like a big deal but in the context of that time was enormous. We remember how we faced date rape alone and ashamed, how some of us had illegal and unsafe abortions, how too many of us never received equal pay for our work and could not even imagine getting to the point where Mayer is. I remember a newspaper clipping I saved while I was in high school in the early ’70s: it profiled an all-woman law firm which at that time was a complete anomaly. And if more women than men are attending university today it hasn’t been that way for very long.

Women are still being raped and blamed for it. White male lawmakers continue to try and take away our rights. Women still don’t enjoy equality in the marketplace or the media. As far as we have come we have faltered, perhaps through no fault of our own but perhaps with complicity: some of us got a little too comfortable with the way things are now and we forget how hard it was to get here. Girls even younger than my 20-year-old daughter need to be reminded again and again how far we have come in just a few generations and how they mustn’t let the gains be taken away. But they also need to be encouraged to be completely inclusive. So must we who came to feminism decades ago be more and more inclusive, more sensitive to the needs of all women.

We women who watched second wave feminism’s birth need to retroactively and proactively include women of every color and class in our continued struggle. We need to dismiss the media attention of a woman like Mayer and concentrate on showcasing everyone else. There are far more women who are not like Mayer than who are like her. Far more women who struggle every day to work and raise children with none of the resources and help that Mayer enjoys and who would wish for more compassionate employers, employers who, rather than use Mayer as an example of what is possible, will use ordinary working women as the example of what is reality. Like the sequester, which will affect people disproportionately, feminism has done much for the middle and upper classes and less for lower class and poor women. As President Clinton was famous for saying, “It’s the economy, stupid.” I say here: It’s class, stupid. Class. Class. Class. Class.

It isn’t just that Mayer has nixed Yahoo employees working at home. It is that she is completely blind to the hundreds of millions of women who are not like her. Here’s the thing: no one is equal until everyone is equal. That is as it has been and as it will always be.

In a recent New York Times editorial, writer Christy Wampole actually writes: From the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s and onward, young men – and young white men in particular – have increasingly been asked to yield what they’d believed was securely theirs. This underlying fact, compounded by the backdrop of violent entertainment and easy access to weapons, creates the conditions for thousands of young men to consider their future prospects and decide they would rather destroy than create.

As though power were a finite object rather than a thing like love. Love, we know, is infinite. We do not have a certain allotment of it to go around and when we have used it up it is gone: mothers know this every time they add a child to their family; we all know this every time we make a new friend or fall for a new lover.

White men are not being asked to yield their power, they have not been asked to give up what is theirs. They have been asked, rather, to share. To share success, empowerment, advancement, education, civil rights, with their fellow humans: women.

The notion that women’s liberation has emasculated men is balderdash. That women gaining the vote, the right to work, the right to speak out without fear of being institutionalized (as was the case as recently as the early 20th century) is the reason why young white men pick up automatic weapons and kill men, women and children is fantastic. And far too easy.

There is more than enough blame to go around and laying it all on the backs of women is obscene.

Walpole writes: For women, things are looking up. We can vote, we can make more choices about our bodies than in decades past, we’ve made significant progress regarding fair pay, and more women are involved in American politics than ever before. The same can be said for minorities. However, because resources are limited, gains for women and minorities necessarily equal losses for white males. Even if this feels intuitively fair to many, including those white males who are happy to share resources for the greater benefit of the nation as a whole, it must feel absolutely distressing for those who are uncomfortable with change and who have a difficult time adjusting to the inevitable reordering of society.

But are things “looking up?” Really?

Clearly white men, even if they are no longer the majority, still wield enormous power: that was apparent during the last election cycle when they tried to put in place laws governing women’s bodies that were offensive beyond belief but still informed the national discussion. When judges can still say that young women didn’t fight “hard” enough against a rapist, when women and their children are still shot and killed by their mates and we call this “domestic violence,” softening its blow from the heinous to the more easily digestible, that doesn’t sound very positive to me. And we may be able to work but we still don’t earn equal pay for equal work. We are still relegated to the “mommy” track; we are still bumping up against glass ceiling after glass ceiling. And that is only middle class women. Poor women have made far fewer gains than their more affluent sisters.

Feminism has never been and will never be about taking rights away from men, about gaining rights at their expense. Rights, like power, are not finite. If everyone has them, everyone gains.

Why have young men chosen lives of sloth and violence while women increasingly, despite hardship, setbacks, misogyny, have gone on to grow and change, get educated, become everything they wish to be is a valid question for discussion. What has our society contributed to the culture of violence is another good question as is this: where do our “freedoms” bump up against the good of the culture? We abolished slavery, gave women the right to vote, instituted child labor laws, enhanced worker safety—all at the price of individual freedom but our society as a whole has gained. The freedom to oppress is no freedom at all.

But the truth is also that there have been “angry young men” since the 1950s when a group of male writers railed against traditional British societal norms. If the anger now is literal rather than literary then we need to address it. But not by assigning blame.

Wampole writes: Can you imagine being in the shoes of the one who feels his power slipping away? Who can find nothing stable to believe in? Who feels himself becoming unnecessary? That powerlessness and fear ties a dark knot in his stomach. As this knot thickens, a centripetal hatred moves inward toward the self as a centrifugal hatred is cast outward at others: his parents, his girlfriend, his boss, his classmates, society, life.

Classic. Men feel unnecessary because we have made them feel so. How then to explain the huge numbers of men who don’t feel that way at all? Who are gentle, loving, kind and good? Who willingly and happily search for women who are intelligent equals?

We do no one—not victim nor perpetrator—any good by blaming what some men feel they have lost on what some women may have gained. If young white men are angry, and yes, they seem to be, we might remind them that power lies in one’s own empowerment, that disaffection is both choice and symptom.

Several centuries ago women who ministered to the pregnant, sick and dying were hanged or drowned as witches. For hundreds of years onward they were held down, dismissed, made to feel second class. Our very recent “rise” is cause for celebration not damnation. We are not collectively to blame for men who rampage. And those who say we are are contributing nothing to the discussion.

A few days before, in London with my daughter, where we had met up during her break from a semester abroad in The Netherlands, I had talked her down from yet another existential ledge: Over the past couple of years, perhaps sparked by her study of philosophy and religion, perhaps fired by the news of disasters both natural and man-made she had spoken to me several times about her life, the future, the two of those things in tandem. She wanted to know: What does it all mean?

The young are pondering the future and its possibility, the possibility that there will be none, while my friends and I, in late middle age, on the far side of our lives, are wondering: What are we leaving? What will happen? What have we wrought?

I easily remember a time without computers, cell phones, iPods, cable, VCRs, DVD players and even CDs. Yet, like most of us, I made the transition from that time to this, rather seamlessly. My grandmother, who was born in 1891 and died just six months shy of her 100th birthday, transitioned from horses to cars, from dresses to pants. She lived through two World Wars and Korea and Vietnam. She saw women get the vote and enter the workplace. She learned how to “type” on a computer. In her 80′s she still loved to play the slots in Vegas. But the future is happening far faster than even we can cope sometimes, and we are still worrying about it in 20th-century ways.

If we, too, many years ago discussed in heated terms the world’s probable doom, if we fought against our own existential crises, we also tamped down our fears down enough to bring our children into the world. Was that an act of faith or foolishness?

In The New York Times a convincing argument is made that New York City will sink. Perhaps in our lifetime, definitely in our children’s or grandchildren’s. The Congo is exploding. The fragile cease-fire between Israel and Gaza is as thin as gauze. Syria is being destroyed from both without and within. Everyone has a hand in, a hand out, a need somehow for the violence we have spawned. And I was searching for black boots. A pair of sturdy black boots, not glamorous or high-heeled, not couture or outlandish. Just a pair of black boots to walk the streets of Paris.

I bought them. Of course I bought them. But not without the realization that they, like everything we buy and replace and keep and cherish, is ephemeral. Like our desire. Our hope. We look forward, but not without glancing more than once over our shoulder.

What is it that is coming up so close, so fast behind us? It is the consequence. The effect. All that we have caused by not looking far enough forward, by not taking seriously our history. By crashing into one another on Black Friday, just weeks after we gave up our time and our money to help those who had lost everything to flood and fire. If profound gratefulness brought us to the Thanksgiving table too many of us got up too quickly, to check the sales, to stand in line, to buy things we don’t need, we can’t possibly really want, and that others, who stand in line for a morsel of food, or a blanket, or a jug of water, could only imagine wanting, rather than needing, again, or once, or some day.

The refugees of Africa, the tribes buried deep in the Amazon, wear our cast-offs: t-hirts with American slogans, baggy pants, fancy sneakers. Ann Patchett, in her glorious novel State of Wonder parses this disconnect, and others. But the truth is that we are all disconnected. From each other. From what we really want. From what it is we need.

Many of us read books written hundreds of years ago: novels, histories, diaries and journals. But who will be around to read what we write now, today, this month, this year?

Whether climate change is man-made or just man enhanced, we have put our fingerprint on this planet. Whether wars are over God or land, we fight nonetheless harder. Whether the foolish selfishness of our government will cause another depression or whether we will avoid going over the cliff, we will just be putting off that journey downward. Eventually, inevitably, the worst will happen.

I buy black boots. Others spray pepper spray in the clamor for a video game player. Still others work all day long on a supposed holiday so that those who don’t care about spending their holiday with those they love can shop and buy and destroy the day.

New York is sinking. The Congo is exploding. The rainforests of the Amazon are disappearing, playing host to shopping malls and people yearning for a better life. Our American Congress plays with people’s lives like a puppet master while we the puppets pummel each other like Punch and Judy, so eager, so damned eager to be engines of our own destruction.

Yet I talked my daughter off the ledge. I don’t believe in the end of the world. Not now. Not quite.

Occupy Sandy served 10,000 Thanksgiving dinners.

Cyber Monday was the most successful ever.

I buy black boots as a sign I will be around to wear them — that we may all be around when the fires die down, when we all get tired of grabbing and fighting and killing. When we stop mocking those whose only desire is to stay alive, stop starving those who happen to live on the other side of the world. When those who still have hope that the cities will not sink, the ice caps will not melt, the forests will not be denuded and the world will not explode will be the most of us. The best of us. But hope isn’t enough.

There are those who take seriously the Dec. 21 date as the end of us, or at the least, the end of us as we know us. There are others who point out the other dates of doom over the past centuries — dozens of them each with their fervent supporters. Still others make fun, draw cartoons, or tamp down their anxiety with booze and drugs. And there are those who hoard guns and food, hoping perhaps to have a leg up on those of us who don’t wish to think that way. But the future is now, the enemy is us. We should continue to behave not as though this is the end of the world as we know it but as if we can still make a difference now, right now. And for all the tomorrows we will have.

In today’s political climate I am often horrified by some of the things men in power say: about the way they wish to take women back to the days of our mandated silence, our inability to control our own bodies; to those days even when women were sent to the madhouse for disobeying or being combative. In no time in my life have the differences between the sexes seemed so very sharp.

And yet there are many of us, still and always, who search for ways to communicate better with the men in their lives.

Such is Anthony D’Aries journey in his compelling memoir The Language of Men. D’Aries uses a trip to Vietnam to validate his father’s experiences in the war there and as a spring board to chronicle his own life-long need to understand his father. The surprising result is an examination of his own language and the illumination of the language of men in general. D’Aries provides keen insight, for this reader, into the male mind and guides us through his own journey as he discovers the costs of speaking like a man.

D’Aries grew up in what seems at first to be an almost pathologically normal family: father, mother, older brother; working class, close. But his mother worked a series of difficult and low-level jobs, his father ruled with both brutality and love, and his older brother provided a role model of a man not to be like. The television ran constantly like a meme, often violent films that the family of men would watch over and over.

A man’s man, D’Aries describes his father as smelling of Winstons, coffee, gasoline, a hint of Old Spice, a whiff of bologna. “I picture him on a billboard, straddling a dusty horse, cowboy hat tipped over his face, leather reins clenched in his left fist and in his right a small bottle of amber cologne. Work by My Father.”

This is a romantic portrait. His father was nothing like that picture, except in his son’s overactive imagination. D’Aries had the same view of his grandfather, who lived on a farm and had hands busted and split by work, the same kind of hands D’Aries’ father had. He worked in a deli, a job to which he would sometimes take his son, a place which “took a piece of almost all his fingers, the flesh slivers ending up ‘in someone’s ham sandwich, I guess.’” The hands of his ancestors were the hands he wanted to inherit. But some larger part of the author realized that with that kind of inheritance came a sort of manhood with which he was not completely comfortable.

In his off hours, D’Aries’ father taxidermies small animals, many of them road kill. In both his father’s job and his avocation D’Aries rightly sees an undercurrent of violence, a life on the edge of blood, forged perhaps in the war, but just as possibly in his DNA. His father’s talk of the whores he bedded in Nam belie the gentle and courtly way he treats D’Aries’ mother or the respect he seems to have for D’Aries’ wife, Vanessa; it is in fact D’Aries’ relationship with her that prompts him to make the journey into his own past and figure out what being a man really means.

Freely admitting to an impatient and even imperious treatment of his wife, speaking about his use of pornography instead of intimacy, expressly discussing his own inadequate attempts to understand Vanessa’s commitment to health care for underserved women, D’Aries clearly and honestly opens up his life to his readers as he struggles against his demons. His confessions are well worth the struggle: He begins to see, over the course of the memoir, how much he has assimilated from his father, his brother, his male friends, and how much he needs to both understand and discard.

In a telling passage during their trip to Vietnam, Anthony comes close to the ambivalence of his own “language:”

‘Babe, you gotta hear this. My Dad once told me about this Vietnamese dude who…’

‘I’m really not in the mood right now.’

“It’s not that long.’

She sits up. ‘I don’t want to hear any more. I don’t care about the girls he was with or what he spent his money on. I don’t get why you’re so obsessed with it.’

‘I’m not obsessed with it. It’s not like I’m getting off on these stories.’

Vanessa reaches for her water bottle. Then she stands up and tries to turn up the air conditioner, but it’s already on high.

‘Have you even been listening to yourself on that tape? You snicker each time your Dad says “beaver” or ‘jugs.”

I fight the urge to snicker now. ‘Oh, come on. Those words are hilarious. I don’t condone his behavior.’

“Whatever. You stare into every massage parlor we walk past. You take us to that saloon. Then, after I spend all day talking to these women with horrible stories of rape and whatever else, you take me to a movie that’s basically a 90-minute rape scene. And you keep playing me these stories about your Dad doing whatever he did here.’

‘Yeah, but there is a big difference, babe. He didn’t rape or kill anyone.’ My voice echoes off the low ceiling.

‘I’m not saying he did, but those women he was with –’

‘He was only nineteen. Show me another nineteen-year-old guy who would have done any different.’

She shakes her head. ‘you really think we’re only talking about your father right now?’

My face burned. ‘What?’

To his credit, D’Aries includes that personally unattractive section in his memoir, but he tries hard to learn from it. The fascination and repulsion he feels for his father’s wartime behavior cuts to the core of who he himself is as a man. He searches both his father’s past and his own, looking for answers, trying to figure out just what it is his father was telling him.

Like many children who grow up to be writers (even if they have no idea that that is what they will be), D’Aries spent a lot of time alone or in the company of some very strange friends. There were days he did not speak a word. His room was his “decompression chamber, equalizing the me the world saw and the me I really was.” He pushed back against his own violence, even as he went on odd and dangerous adventures with his buddies. He stole an expensive watch from a relative and, rather than be discovered, smashed it into pieces. His close friend Billy, whose family was far weirder than D’Aries’, provided the template from which he judged his own growing up. But somehow each stage of his life stymies D’Aries, until he begins to collect his father’s Vietnam memories and from them to try and draw a portrait of the man who loomed so large in his life.

Still, like many good men who wish to live an intentional life rather than one shaped by destiny, family, the media, D’Aries struggled with his own impulses, which were often contradictory. He dated a good friend’s ex-girl and destroyed friendships, he gave into his pornography habit even though he adored his wife, he took great pleasure in his father’s unseemly relationships with women during the war, and some part of him envied his n’er-do-well brother who was always getting into one fix or another. Yet his impulses were decent and The Language of Men is the result of those impulses.

D’Aries memoir reads like a film in places: he was influenced by the film of Stephen King’s Stand By Me, by the films of De Niro and James Dean. By the idyllic boyhoods and rough violent adulthood which bumped up against each other. His is a cinematic journey through an ’80s childhood that seems quaintly old-fashioned, almost as if D’Aries stepped out of another, more long-ago decade. There are cars and guns and fights and the simplicity of man against woman that speak of a darker age. But it is important to realize how, in so many ways, the language of both men and women has not changed as much as we might like.

D’Aries obsession with his father’s past is something his father doesn’t completely understand. But for D’Aries to make it work with Vanessa, it is clear he has to come to terms with who he is and who he is is a man shaped by a soldier father; it is clear D’Aries sees the contrast of his father’s war days against who he was later to his son. But D’Aries has his own demons to fight. Up front about his drinking and carousing in college, he and his high school friends (Team Destructo) seem to find their masculinity in the traditional ways of rootless young men: partying, risk-taking, and impulsiveness, all of which D’Aries writes about as though it happened to someone else. This is not who he wants to be. You can feel the push back, even as he allows himself to participate.

Although I continue to try and understand the language of the men in my life, I never got to take the journey toward understanding my father that D’Aries did. His brave and honest book is a testimony to both his persistence and his growth. While, the book ends with a Vietnam-era reunion which the entire family attends, it is not closure for any of them. It answers no questions but rather hints at the possibility of a future new language for all of them.

And the reason he is wrong is because he, and far too many others, persist in the notion–debunked by every possible kind of evidence–that America is the greatest land on earth and everyone here should just stop whining and get on with the business of being successful, i.e., making pots of money.

Until we stop pounding our chests and proclaiming ourselves the kings of the jungle nothing here or in our relationship to the rest of the world is going to change or get better.

Everyone has been in the kind of relationship with someone else–be it lover or a friend–whose constant and consistent refrain is “Love me as I am, baby, and quit trying to change me because what you see is what you get.” Those relationships are inherently dysfunctional and so is both America’s relationship to itself and its larger alliance with the rest of the known universe. We are so busy bragging about our own particular form of excellence that it would take years on the figurative couch to even sort out it all out. And even when we are called out on our dysfunction we don’t stop and think, we just double down on our mistakes and add to them. By God, we aren’t going to do any sort of transformation because we are perfect just the way we are!

Even though we are a relatively young country whose own road to freedom and democracy was very messy. It isn’t as if the Declaration of Independence was signed and all was forever well: we had uprisings like the Shays’ Rebellion of 1786-87 and the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791 and the War of 1812m not to mention the Civil War. Not to mention the protests for women’s suffrage and the civil marches and the huge anti-war demonstrations against the Vietnam War. In fact people are still taking to the streets for all kinds of causes. So why can’t we get our heads around other’s struggle?

Democracy IS messy and sometimes it is also violent. Winning freedom IS hard and those fighting for it know that. They also know that we can sometimes take two steps forward and one step back. That doesn’t mean we stop trying for it.

So the uprisings in many of the countries who were involved in the Arab spring are expected. There are tragic consequences: people die; but no road to a new beginning was ever free of collateral damage. A stupid film by stupid people may have had some influence but it did not cause the revolt of crazy, angry people against the very government who is trying to take them to a new place. And for us to assume so is arrogant in the extreme.

But we are an arrogant country. Romney rails against the sniveling poor while the uber rich who spend more on a piece of jewelry than those poor make in a year huddle together in gated communities and apartment houses where the buy-in is 50 million dollars. Teachers strike and we are furious, all the while our education system has been shown to fail far too many of its students. In the land of milk and honey people still starve to death. Our “best” health care in the world costs heads and tails above other countries, yet fixing it is admitting we are wrong.

And many of the people railing against the “entitled” society (those who pay no federal income tax or are retired or military personnel or the working poor or just plain impoverished) are many of the very same people who don’t want to pay the taxes they are paying: they hide in offshore accounts, convert dollars to gold and use every possible loophole to reduce their tax burdens, while condemning those who have fewer opportunities or such advantages, while castigating those who make so little that federal income taxes are not an issue . Instead of seeing their tax dollars as an investment in an America which will be better for all of us, the monied elite and those who follow them wish to pull out of the system as much as possible; rather than admit that what they have is not all gotten by pulling up their own bootstraps, they are hungry for more. They don’t even admit when they do get government help (Romney to help bail out Bain and Ryan who got his father’s social security benefit to send himself to college), as all of us will at some point if we live long enough.

Taxes are bad. Investing in America is bad. But everyone should have an equal chance to prosper. Does that add up? No, it doesn’t. And that sort of thinking is bad for business, the business of the United States.

As in any dysfunctional relationship admitting you have a problem or you might be wrong is a non-starter. The people on the top have a vested interest in never admitting they don’t always know what they are doing, that past policies haven’t worked, that they might need to take a moment to rethink, reflect. They have no good reason to admit to cruelty or selfishness unless we catch them at it on tape.

Because to admit any flaw is a sign of weakness.

But someone has to call them on their dysfunction and that someone has to be rest of us. The 47 percent, the 99 percent, the clear majority, no matter what numbers you use. The messy participants in our messy democratic republic, a perfectly imperfect system that is still being worked on.

Years ago, in a discussion about Marilyn French’s feminist polemical novel The Women’s Room, someone said to me: “But she is so angry!” Yes, she was. Indeed. I argued then and I argue now that her anger, while off-putting, was necessary to jumpstart the dialogue. Women had held back their anger quite long enough and no change was going to occur in our dysfunctional relationship with men without our getting mad, plain and simple. One can’t begin to negotiate change from the center. Because at that point compromise means the ones negotiating from the point of the subjugated get far far less than half of what they need.

President Obama made that mistake when he tried to negotiate with the Republicans in Congress. Instead of standing hard and fast, he capitulated before the argument started. And the American people are suffering from it.

Those in power who are afraid of losing their power will do anything in their power to make sure that they stay on top. Which is why you see white men trying to pass laws to push women back down where they once were. Which is why you see Romney’s blatant class warfare. Which is why you see America pretending that a film caused a world-wide uprising.

Democracy is ugly and messy. Ask women, ask African-Americans, ask anyone who is trying for a change in societal “norms.” It is impossible to go from zero to sixty without stalling out here and there. But if you truly want your dysfunctional relationship to change you have to keep coming back to the table and arguing for your point of view, keep pushing hard against the oppressors, keep pushing back against those who would have you fail.

The demonstrations in the Middle East are tragic, horrific, the death of some of our own equally so, but that doesn’t mean we give up or assume that a better way isn’t wanted by those who pushed for change not so long ago. We would do well to remember our own messy, ugly history, and the continued nastiness of the fight against complacency and xenophobia that many Americans continue to wage.

Fifty percent of Americans are the battered spouse who is continually told we are careless, worthless, lazy and incapable. Then there are those who yell the tops of their lungs at us. Boasting about their own inherent worthiness, their strength, their ability, their superiority. We are being browbeaten, once again, into submission. Like the vestiges of slavery and the Jim Crow laws that kept black Americans down for long after they were emancipated, like the mores which kept women behind the scenes years after they fought for the right to vote, the rich and powerful are hell-bent on keeping their place at the table and crowding the rest of us out.

But life is not a contest. There are no winners if a huge number of us lose. The United States of America is a great place. But it is imperfect. Very imperfect. Shouting about its superiority to the world while our own house is in shambles is more than a little hypocritical.

It also took my own sexual harassment and date rape to wake me up to the horrors of those issues.

Life is kind of like that. We don’t think about losing our job until unemployment hits us in the face, or losing our home until payments simply can’t be made. We don’t worry about grave illness until we bump up against it and have to maneuver the ins and outs of trying to get well. We worry about the day to day and convince ourselves, like Scarlett O’Hara, that tomorrow is another day.

From the comfort of our living rooms we can watch powerful white men discuss what is to be done with women’s bodies and we can believe that none of those decisions will affect us. We observe wealthy celebrities and their screwed-up lives and be sure that if we had that kind of money we would spend it wisely, or at least differently. We watch reality shows and breathe a sigh of relief that our children are not so messed up, that our houses aren’t full to the ceilings of garbage, and that we don’t behave that badly. And as we turn ourselves away from life and into someone else’s created world, it becomes easy to convince ourselves that the big decisions being made in our government, in the world, have no effect on our day-to-day existence. That what we really need is just a good job, a decent place to live, a happy relationship, and enough money to cushion our lives. For now. So, in truth, we will only confront those with so much less than us if we are actually forced to do so.

And, when forced, most of us do the right thing: We send checks off to disaster relief or the Red Cross. We donate clothes to hurricane victims. We hear about a story that moves us, like the school bus monitor who was horribly bullied, and out come our wallets and our kindness. If a child is dying of cancer and her parents can’t pay her medical bills, we slip a few coins into a jar on the counter at the convenience store. We contribute to bake sales and yard sales and clothing drives when people ask us directly for help.

But in the larger, national and global challenges that face us we shut down. Despite the fact that each year 32,000 women become pregnant by rape, it doesn’t seem to actually affect us if it isn’t a wife, a friend or a daughter. The poor in Africa tug harder at our hearts than the poor next door. We call our poor lazy and shiftless and complain about their televisions and their video games and their cell phones and don’t understand that the poor, like anyone else, need to cushion themselves from the horrors of the world. But unlike the uber-rich whose lives are so completely fashioned as to never ever come across a lower middle class or poor person — with their private jets and personal shoppers and gated communities and the staff who takes care of every single silly detail: Rhe kind of details that most of us have to take hours out of our lives to deal with — we do not condone a poor person buying a television on layaway or giving their children video games for Christmas because those people should be spending every single penny on food and clothing, cheap, second hand clothing at that. While all the while we bombard the poor with television shows and magazine spreads that illustrate the kinds of things they can’t even dream about.

We refuse to pay more taxes for good schools in our own states, while we give our churches money to build schools in the Middle East and Africa. We weep at the site of poor black children in another country, their eyes covered in flies, their tummies distended by famine; but we will walk quickly by a poor child of color on the street next to us. We will call those children’s parents freeloaders and drains on the system, and we will make efforts to cut food and medical aid to those poor because they should be doing more to help themselves.

I look at a man like Paul Ryan, poised to become the Vice President of the United States; I see him surround himself with his children, two of whom are girls, and I wonder: what if. What if. What if one of his daughters was brutally raped? Would he force her to bear the child? How would he feel if the rapist/father were to request visitation, which is allowed in 31 states? Would his dug-in stance waver, would the site of his daughter traumatized, her life as she knew it destroyed, make him rethink his unwavering fervor to force her to bear her rapist’s child? How about Todd Akin who so loves his daughters? Would an encounter with the real change his entrenched mind? Would it force to him to rethink his egregious medical information and go in search of some truth?

Were rich men like Romney and Ryan reduced to the kind of life that the huge majority of Americans live, would they dance to a different tune? Would the realization of how fragile life is when one has very little money sink in? Or is even imagining that scenario unthinkable?

Would either of them cry out in rage if their daughters were doing the same work as their sons and receiving far less pay? If their daughters could not get decent medical care? If their ill sons had their insurance cancelled? If anything that happens to millions of Americans each day happened to their children?

And what of the many middle-class white men (Romney’s support among blacks is zero percent) who so enthusiastically support the Republican ticket? Do they feel so beleaguered, so frightened of their imagined loss of power to women, minorities, the “other” whoever it is, that they cling to the fantasy that those rich men could be them one day, no matter how far-fetched? Are they holding fast and hard to Romney and Ryan because they are convinced those men are truly God-fearing, even if their God isn’t quite one they are all that familiar with? And the women? How to explain the women who hold fierce to the idea of a benevolent patriarchy, in the belief it will really take care of them?

Or are they all victims of a sort of Stockholm Syndrome? Held prisoner not by their captors, per se, but rather by their outdated, outmoded, unrealistic ideas, and those ideas so firmly held that they truly believe the oppressor is their savior?

All I know for sure is that, despite their rhetoric, neither Romney nor Ryan, nor a good part of the white Republicans who hold and wield power have any idea at all what it is like to live on the edge of disaster, even less idea what it means to depend on the kindness of strangers rather than the support of government.

Because government, no matter how evil to Romney and Ryan, is still an evil they wish to control. At, it seems, most any cost. They will gather up the winner’s purse and pull the purse-strings tight, letting go of them only when the already rich and powerful ask for yet another handout. Meanwhile, too many of us know too well how quickly events can upend our lives. We should be better about being less selfish with our resources and more cognizant of how important it is to think of others before ourselves: especially those others who live, coincidentally, right next door.

(This post was originally published on the Huffington Post)

In my over forty years as a feminist and writer, I have been particularly interested in the ways, especially medical, in which women have been oppressed, like Silas Weir Mitchell’s rest cure. Women who spoke out, acted up, or just didn’t know their place were subjected to bed rest and force-feeding in order to quell their rebelliousness. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is, perhaps, the most famous woman treated with this method, and young women who read The Yellow Wallpaper today are as shocked by it today as I was. But institutionalizing women was, unfortunately, commonplace, and the treatment of often perfectly “normal” women — by today’s standards — is bloodcurdling: icy sheets, padded rooms, electroshock therapy, lobotomies. Those days may be long gone, but oppression remains in a myriad ways.

167 years after Seneca Falls and less than a hundred years after women got the vote, things are not as much changed as we might think, or like, them to be.

Marissa Mayer, the new 60-million-dollar, pregnant CEO of Yahoo is a case in point. So are the huge numbers of millennial women who balk at the kind of success Mayer has and really don’t want to be in charge of much of anything, let alone a billion-dollar company. And although the reasons both Mayer and the millenials hurt the cause of women is different, all the reasons speak to a huge disconnect in American society. When it comes to women, we still don’t seem to know their “place.”

On the one hand, Mayer exemplifies the very best of women’s ability to compete with men in the marketplace. But like Michelle Bachmann — a mother of five who is in Congress and made a run for the presidency — Mayer disavows the word “feminist.”

Mayer, like other very rich women, will likely turn over daily care of her baby to a nanny after taking a few short weeks off, a choice the huge majority of working mothers don’t have. But unlike Ann-Marie Slaughter, whose essay about “having it all” went viral and provoked a huge number of responses, I daresay we will never be privy to Mayer’s angst about whether she is working too much to care for her child. The problem is that women like Mayer and Slaughter and even Bachmann are aberrations, still. Nothing in their lives speaks to the real issues: How can society as a whole make sure that women can work and raise children? The fact that Mayer is such a huge news story supports the fact that, despite our gains as women, she is a novelty. The majority of women, working women, do not earn her kind of money or have her kind of power. Of course, nor do the majority of men. But men in Mayer’s position are not newsworthy in the same way.

The millennials, on the other hand, are still caught between what they wish for themselves and what society seems to still see as their place — being beautiful objects of desire. They are the women who, despite the increase in numbers of women in college and positions of importance, illustrate clearly and poignantly why Mayer is doing women a huge injustice. As one young writer tells it: “Young women today are bred to doubt ourselves, question our worth and view ourselves as improvable projects rather than embrace the imperfection of our humanity.”

The media blitz which still embraces the notion that women must be, have to be, thin, pretty and desirable is at odds with the idea that they must also be smart, educated and willing to have a career. Young women get mixed messages from the day they are born: Should they be princesses or doctors? They can’t do both. And any choice demands perfect breasts, beautiful bodies, clear skin and flowing hair.

Any day, anywhere on the Internet you can find trollish comments about feminists and how strident they are, how ugly they are, how no man could possibly want to f*ck them. So if they want to be f*ckable, women better be sweet, compliant, not too ambitious and very attractive. And God forbid they should make more money than a man.

In the middle of the feminist movement of the ’60s, Bella Abzug said: “Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel”.

That still hasn’t happened. Women have to be better, smarter and nicer than the average schlub. They have to worry and wonder and balance a dozen balls in the air at once. And society isn’t doing much to help them with their struggles. And there is, of course, a huge group of women: poor, undereducated, disenfranchised, for whom a discussion of whether or not they are a feminist isn’t a priority at all. They are too busy, too harried and too overworked. All of this means feminism, for all its detractors, still hasn’t achieved its goals.

Of course things are better than they were a hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, but the stories of women marrying down are anecdotal enough to end up as stories in women’s magazines, alongside the stories of women who struggle with body issues, perfection, rape and abuse, alongside stories about men who are stay-at-home fathers, alongside the stories like Slaughter’s which argue against our having it all and the stories about Mayer, a pretty pregnant woman who is now running a huge company. When those stories don’t make news we will finally be somewhere.

(This essay was originally published in the Huffington Post)