by Katha Pollitt. Random House; 224 pgs.; $22.95. REVIEW BY YASMIN NAIR
Katha Pollitt lived with a man for seven years before he left her for another woman. 'G.,' whom she childishly refers to as her 'boyfriend,' had affairs with many women during the course of their relationship.
That's the essence of Pollitt's memoir, Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories. Seven of the eleven essays here directly—and tendentiously—address what she sees as G.'s betrayal. They include the first and title essay about testing for her driver's license now that he's not around to drive her places, and 'Webstalker,' about her stalking him on the web. The remaining essays are about her parents, motherhood and porn but even these seem overshadowed by her experience with G., as if she's examining her past for signs of the woman who would be betrayed by him. A foreshadowing of that appears in the first piece, where she writes about her father admonishing her to never become helpless like her mother.
Learning to Drive is full of cringe-inducing clichés about woman-ness: 'Women just have more sense, and they are made of more enduring materials, too.' The book would have gone unnoticed, but Pollitt is also an avowedly feminist columnist for The Nation. Reviews of her book metacritically debate whether or not she has betrayed feminism. She depended on a man to drive her around? She let him take over her kitchen and life? But the topic of her feminism evades the real question: What about her left politics? Looking back at Pollitt's past columns, it becomes clear that Learning is only an extension of the neoliberal politics she's always espoused.
Walter Benn Michaels brilliantly draws a distinction between a right neoliberalism ( think Cato Institute ) and a left neoliberalism. The former, whose followers call for the proliferation of the free-market economy, is easy to spot. The latter is harder to discern. Deeply embedded in identity politics, its followers call for social justice and the proliferation of human rights. Left neoliberals want sexual and gender parity for all and adopt causes that claim to further that without questioning the systemic inequality that might be put into place by the same.
Pollitt's feminism precludes any kind of systemic analysis. The perfect left neoliberal feminist, it's no accident that she should support the perfect left neoliberal cause: gay marriage. The gay marriage movement argues for expanding to queers the benefits currently available only to married straights. Pollitt got married in 2006 and echoed that argument in her column—gays should be able to marry and get the same benefits she would now receive. But a left critique of gay marriage would argue that clamoring for gays and lesbians to get benefits as a 'progressive' move only hinders creating a system that guarantees social protections like universal health care to all, regardless of marital status.
Pollitt, who is deeply attached to attachment, doesn't point out the pro-gay marriage movement's silence about the injustice of denying benefits to people because they're not married. She stares this contradiction ( we want parity, but only for ourselves! ) in its face without exposing it. The gay movement is a movement like feminism, and as such deserves to be interrogated on the grounds of its ideology. But Pollitt's politics are not about testing anyone's ideology, only about those who constitute it. Her response cheerfully solves the problem of civil inequality ( let's treat the gays just like the rest of us married folk! ) but not the more pressing problem of economic inequality.
In Learning, Pollitt claims that G.'s infidelity took her completely by surprise. But her own therapist declared the man a 'bounder,' and she indirectly suggests in 'After the Men are Dead' that she may have succumbed to the popular idea that every man can be changed by the right woman. It's difficult to believe that she didn't know what she was getting into. She should never have been surprised, just as we should not be surprised that her feminism is the ( neo- ) liberal sort. Learning to drive doesn't betray Pollitt's feminism; it merely extends it and exposes her views on economic inequality.
Pollitt will be at Women will be at Women and Children First, 5233 N. Clark, on Oct. 11.
E-mail Yasmin Nair at welshzen@yahoo.com . Nair also blogs at www.bilerico.com .