After centuries of American idiots drinking beer and doing stupid things, someone is finally taking a stand. Insurance companies! But also, The Atlantic's Caitlin Flanagan, in a new investigative piece, "The Dark Power of Fraternities." The occult forces seem to lie in dumb kids getting shit-faced falling to their deaths.
As the Times' "Cyberfamilias" columnist Michelle Slatalla knows, the new hotness is stalking your own children online. In an article in the latest Atlantic Monthly, chillingly subtitled "Anyone could be tracking your children online—even me," reviled housewifeliness-advisor Caitlin Flanagan is getting in on the action, and, well, seriously biting Michelle's styles. Not to mention revealing, as the kids say, TMI.
Great news for New Yorker readers: Today's Observer reports that Caitlin Flanagan, the rich lady who's made a career of telling you what a bad wife and mother you are for needing to work, is no longer a contributor to that magazine. While Flanagan claims, through Atlantic dinner party buddy Benjamin Schwarz, that she's making far too much money from her book-writing career (her last tome, Get Back In The Kitchen, You Fucking Whore sold a stunning 8,700 copies), the Observer suggests it might have something to do with the fact that a piece on Mary Poppins creator P.L. Travers which Flanagan wrote for The New Yorker early this year that pretty much ripped off vast swathes of a Travers biography. Up next for Flanagan: a book "about teenage girls and the ways that they have been both served and also shortchanged by the women's movement." Cum-Guzzling MySpace Sluts should be available sometime in 2008.
This month's Elle (shut up, we like the horoscopes) contains a profile of Atlantic and New Yorker Authority on Women's Issues Caitlin Flanagan (known in some quarters as "Caitlin 'Marital Rape? What's That?' Flanagan") that needs to be read in its entirety to be believed. Flanagan, who got her job at The Atlantic the old-fashioned way (she was seated next to an editor of the magazine at a dinner party) has some, shall we say, retrograde notions about a woman's place (it's in the home, damn it!). Laurie Abraham, the piece's author, should really be credited: She does her best to make sure that Flanagan doesn't come off as the most repellent person in the world, but, gosh darn it, Caitlin keeps charging in to prove that she is. As we've said, you should read it all, but our favorite part comes about halfway through, where Flanagan expounds on the importance of having a hot cooked meal ready and waiting for your man when he returns home from work, and why it's critical to stay home with your children (and nannies, natch):
