Fluff 'n stuff

Does the market value of frivolity make life easier for female than male journalists or, more broadly (sorry) women than men? Is lady-journalism best understood as fluff, or as a form no less worthy than current-controversy op-eds?

There seem to be two things operating at once. One, as Elizabeth is right to point out (via Amber), being a woman makes it easier to fail, because women have more options in terms of opting out of the workforce, but also because when a woman is inept, it can be seen as neutral or even add to her charm, whereas few men advertise their inadequacies of any kind. (Are there 25-year-old American men who still don't know how to drive? No doubt, but they would be less likely to be open about it.)

(But are women weaker, or is weakness not condemned as strongly in women? It's like the question of whether women are more social, or whether there's just so much pressure on women to be friendly and people-people that even girls with Aspergers find their way in the world of cliques.)

The other is that 'failure' is defined as feminine behavior. Staying home to raise kids, fussing about shoes and makeup, interest in social and domestic (as in, abortion and the US, not dinner parties and Windex) issues over foreign and economic policy, willingness to admit one might be wrong in a blogospheric argument (starting sentences with 'I think' and ending them with 'but I don't know really', as opposed to the 'you're wrong, you idiot' approach taken by oh, one or two male blog commenters, or blog-commenters presenting themselves as such)... all of these things are defined as negative in part, at least, because they are associated with the ladies. Even moving beyond obvious examples of fluff (like the amusing one Elizabeth gives: "5 Ways to Get Beach Hair"), the female and the silly are often defined as one and the same.

It's not clear to me (to use a female sentence-starter) how to get around this. One could say buying one's children binders is just as important and worthy as rocket science, that shoe-bloggery as crucial to our society as bloggy analysis of constitutional law. It's clear enough where the drawbacks there lie. Another possibility: women could decide to live without men. The problems with that, too, are self-evident.

Some ways out of this puzzle:

-We could remember that time wasted is time wasted. Looking for just the right new pair of shoes or watching the game, these are both time-wasters. Sure, great shoes can help further a career (but a couple pairs would do), and watching sports can mean socializing and thus networking (but can also mean beers and sitting on the couch alone). The point need not be that female time-wasters are actually productive activities, just that girly-nonsense is no more nonsensical than the male equivalent.

-There is excellent writing on fluff, and dreadful writing on Serious Issues. Think Proust on disappointment in love versus an American college sophomore's op-ed in the school paper about how to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once and for all. The comment Amber links to about how brilliant law students write about law, whereas lesser minds deal with "clothes, recipes and literature," is so off, I don't know where to begin. Clearly a link to Zappos is not Supreme Court-level analysis of the US Constitution, but I can't say I understand throwing out there as though it's established fact the notion that writing about literature is what one does when one is too dense to write about law. In fact, I bet I could round up some folks who'd argue the opposite. The law student writing exclusively about something other than law should be held guilty only of having chosen the wrong field.

-Sometimes fluff is just fluff. But other times, an undertaking thought silly when done by women comes to be considered Important when men take an interest, or vice versa. Food beyond haute cuisine, for instance, was thought fluff (not to be confused with Fluff, mmm) until men entered the picture. Or the humanities, once a serious endeavor, now the object of mockery, now that women are over-represented among those whose job is to read a book and write a paper about it. No doubt there are male and female ways of writing about literature, food, or anything else. We seem to equate 'serious' with 'male,' allowing that some men will write fluff and some women seriousness, but that these will be the exceptions.