What it Takes for Laura Sessions Stepp to Piss Me Off Enough to Write A Blog Item

In Tuesday’s Post, Staff Writer and self-proclaimed “feminist” Laura Sessions Stepp gives us another hard-hitting column on her particular journalistic beat: gender, kids these days, and, you know, making out, or something.

This one, “What It Takes to Be a Woman,” is, frankly, a doozy. It’s also addressed particularly toward people like me: Stepp’s “younger colleagues.”

Alright, Stepp, lay it on me: What does it take to be a woman?

The answer, it turns out, isn’t easy, mostly because Stepp’s writing style is as rambling as her premise is ridiculous. It doesn’t help that, even before reaching the lede, the reader must first endure that the column is called “Genderations,” that it’s published, incomprehensibly, in the Health section, and that “People who read this also read…” “Who Needs a Gynecologist — and When?” and “Not Her Mother’s Hysterectomy.”

Lucky for you, I’ve navigated Stepp’s column so you don’t have to. But enough chit-chat! Let’s find out what it takes to be a woman!

LSS Womanly Wisdom:

If they [young women] aren’t sure what being a woman means … I can hardly blame them, because the social culture they’re swimming in doesn’t know, either. Forty-year-old women get their faces stitched and tummies tucked in an effort to look 18 again. Fashion houses tout the thin-boy look over the curvy female. Last week, NBC rolled out a remade “Bionic Woman,” super-intelligent and super-athletic but, let’s face it, also a super-cold robot. Yet less than a year ago, the media could not get enough of the “train wreck girls,” Britney, Lindsay and Nicole, seemingly so fragile and way too human.

What It Takes to Be a Woman: Curves? Fragility? Humanness? The culture we are “swimming in” doesn’t know, and I can’t make heads or tails of it either. ‘Bots, however, are probably out.

LSS Womanly Wisdom:

Thank goodness they [young women] don’t feel that they have to wear neckties instead of necklaces, as many women who started working in the 1970s did.

What It Takes To Be a Woman: A necklace. Thank goodness.

LSS Womanly Wisdom, On Travelocity president Michelle Peluso, who, Stepp notes, “adores pretty dresses”:

Although Peluso hasn’t yet taken time off to have a baby, if she did, “we’d figure it out and make it work,” she says.

What It Takes to Be a Woman: Pretty dresses; having babies. (Don’t say “not now” … say “not yet”!)

LSS Womanly Wisdom:

In many ways, this debate is a luxury of the privileged. If you’re a young woman in Sudan searching for clean water for your family, or in Cambodia looking through dumps for small items you can trade, teasing out the difference between “girl” and “woman” isn’t exactly on your mind.

What it Takes to Be a Woman: Clean water, small items (varies by country); perspective.

LSS Womanly Wisdom:

We, their elders, sang “I Am Woman” to make ourselves heard. They [young women] have the tougher job of living our dream.

What it Takes to Be a Woman: Karaoke night; a desire to rock the women’s lib clock back to ‘72!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Media, Washington Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.