So I just read this article by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic about sexism in TV ads. It seems like his thesis is this:

A certain kind of sexism, however, is still considered pretty funny and not terribly sacred. In most modern ads, there are two kinds of sexism. First there is winking sexism, where women are objectified but something in the ad seems to acknowledge to the audience: "We know we're being sexist, so that makes it okay." Second, there is the boomerang sexism, where we see men fighting back against their domestication and emasculation.

Then he ends with this:

A post-sexist age of advertising might be elusive. But it counts as a small victory, if not cause to throw a parade, that we've reached this moment, just a few decades after it was fashionable to scream at women for making bad coffee and not even pretend to feel wrong about it. 

Derek, you want me to get excited about the victory of a post-sexist age of advertising being elusive? I shouldn't worry because at least it's not okay to blatantly portray women as second-class citizens who should feel bad if they can't make good coffee? 

In some cases, the institutional sexism in today's TV ads is more disturbing than the old your-coffee-sucks-take-away-your-woman-card sexism of the fifties. It's underground. It's done the same thing, in my opinion, that institutional racism has done -- removed itself from blatant public exposure but still ingrained enough in our society that we don't question it at all when we do it: talk about Hillary Clinton's outfit instead of her politics, assume an angry woman just has PMS, question an attractive woman's intelligence before she opens her mouth. And television is a huge influencer on society -- I don't care how much you wink, if you're showing women fighting over beer in a fountain more often than you're showing them designing bridges or running companies, you're not making progress. Last SuperBowl I almost threw up my seven-layer dip at the sexism I saw in the commercials.

Am I wrong in my read of Derek's article? It feels -- to me -- like he's acknowledging the sexism still exists but saying it may never go away, oh well. He may not have actually added "don't worry your pretty little head about it," but the fact he's not demanding change or spitting mad pretty much says it all.

Listen, most men are taller and physically stronger than most women. We have different reproductive organs, different body fat percentages. It is not okay for one gender to make assumptions about the other, and that goes both ways. Women represent over half of America and more than half of higher-educated America. It's high time Madison Avenue stops pandering to the lowest common denominator to sell their beer. 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxnGMdXZkc0] 

The stack of magazines I'd dragged outside under the umbrella was formidable.

We fully intended to do more today. But when I got done with my workout and my husband and daughter returned from the grocery, there were three small children waiting under the tree, one of them wielding an umbrella. Ever since our neighborhood barbecue, the children of our street have been playing a bizarre game involving umbrellas as houses and curtain rods as swords every chance they get. This girl with a golf umbrella was a sign from the universe to abandon the plans for the Labor Day fest and just chill out.

So I did. I dragged my magazine pile outside and also the boombox I got as a senior in high school way back in 1992.

Three or four magazines in, I learned what Sarah Palin actually did do for the citizens of Alaska.

On the fifth, I learned that Amy Chua's publicist should have a nice fat promotion, because in the no-ink-is-bad-ink category, this author was getting more press than I've seen in years. At least half of one magazine was dedicated to whether or not she should be lauded or imprisoned. And article after article devoted itself to this generation of mothers and children -- how the mothers are too fixated on extreme parenting after becoming so well educated ourselves and how kids, dagnabbit, don't know how to play. They're so used to structured time and toys that talk that this poor, poor generation of Carly-loving zombie-heads is doomed, DOOMED I TELL YOU, and maybe Amy Chua is right.

I looked up once while reading that article to make sure the child using a curtain rod as a sword didn't impale the other four on bikes festooned with my daughter's stuffed snakes as protection.They seemed to have negotiated fair use of a curtain rod, in fact deferring it to one another at certain points, so I returned to my reading.

Two more magazines later, I learned that the state of education in America is in a terribly state, largely because we won't fire any teachers in New York City. And how nobody can get into Harvard anymore because there are a certain number of seats that need to go to legacies and a certain number that need to go to under-represented minorities and the seats that are left require an IQ of eighty gazillion plus an aptitude for restructuring small countries and OHMYGODAMYCHUAWASRIGHT. Literally, I was shocked at how often since March Amy Chua was mentioned in the intellectual news media. I think she freaked out writers for these highbrow magazines more than she did anyone else in the country -- perhaps because the rest of the country (which I also learned in another article) isn't college-educated in the first place, with only 30% of American adults possessing a BA, let alone one from the Ivy Leagues. The gap, the middle class, is doomed. And also, apparently, the middle class doesn't read The Atlantic.

Existentially questioning subtext: Maybe we should all teach our kids the violin and withhold slumber parties, because oh my Lord, we are certainly going to hell in a Dora-driven handbasket.

I looked up at this point as a child I'd met two weeks before when her family moved in behind us handed me a hand-copied recipe for the chocolate chip cookies her mother had brought over an hour earlier. She left the cookies on the floaties in the middle of my yard, because they were homebase from the Pretty Pony squadron, who had now taken to scooters. Or something. This child was also covered in fairy glitter and face paint, which I fully admit to having given the lot of them.

I returned to my magazines. I'd plowed through about half of them, skipping any article dealing with Iraq or terrorism (so tired of it) and focusing mostly on the 2012 election, literature, education, parenting and the economy.

Literature is still the bright spot. And I can't believe I still haven't bought Mark Twain's autobiography. I was going to, and then I forgot, probably because I'm a distracted working mother 67% more likely to spend more time with my daughter than a mother in 1972 and therefore completely neglect my own marriage and personal time because I have, oh, a full-time job, which, according to another article, it is truly an anomoly that I was not attending to there under the umbrella because I should be chained to my smartphone at all times thanks to the economy.

I chucked that magazine onto the pile for recycling.

All in all, the children appeared at noon and ate the lunches their parents had packed them under the birdfeeder tree, then played until five pm when I kicked them out under extreme duress so we could eat an early dinner. I read thirteen magazines in five hours. And I learned a lot about the state of our union, about the state of myself. I value these long-form articles so much because they really get me to think about my own life and the state of Rita, and I do want to spend time pondering the economy and education and the arts as they pertain to my life, and if I had even one moment of concern that I was letting the kids play with pointy objects, it was allayed by the articles telling me that children these days? They don't know how to play. They've forgotten, or they never knew, or something.

It's not true.

They do need each other. They need small groups of kids with no game plan, and a lot of space, and an adult close enough to bail them out of a pinch but not so close as to interfere with the spat solving and game rules.

I don't know what to say about Obama or Sarah Palin or the state of the economy or of education, but I learned a lot today that I wouldn't have learned had I been checking my email or reading Twitter. In order for me to bring a 360-degree self to my work and my writing, I have to read, and often it's stuff that doesn't appear on a backlit screen. I have to read 8,000 words in order to fully process the issue. I have to spend six days with a person to know them, as the reporter doing the interview for a magazine did. I love you, old media, I do. When I read the article about Gawker headquarters and existing only for traffic and how there should be no verbs in the headlines and how we have to stop force-feeding stuff Americans don't want to read just because it's good for them, I was a little sad. I hope there is always an outlet for the kind of articles that stir my heart, the kind that are well written enough to demand my attention for five hours straight when I get the chance to read them. I may very well have to pay a lot of money to keep some of these magazines in circulation. I may, in fact, need to renew my subscriptions even though for some reason they keep sending me the magazines for free. 

I need to put my money where my mouth is, I see now. Because I feel smarter for having spent today doing what looked like absolutely nothing.