Unlike Erica Jong's Molly, Kyleigh Kühn Honors Her Mom's Work
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This Bruce Weber editorial ‘An American Aristocrat’ featuring Kyleigh Kühn for Vogue Italia’s July 2010 issue was sitting in the posting queue, waiting for a spot in our ongoing discussion about fashion, feminism, philanthropy and the values of Smart Sensuality women.
My final thoughts before drifting off to sleep last night were focused on the reality that we have no reason to believe that the daughters of America’s second wave feminists will carry on their mothers’ work. I opened my eyes at 5 am with the same realization.
As long as they have their own privileged rights and lives — which is the reality of Molly Jong-Fast, daughter of American author and feminist icon Erica Jong — they are free to throw stones at women like Jong and myself, who have fought tirelessly for the world’s women and believe that the patriarchal control of female sexuality by monotheism is at the core of most of the grief in our world.
Jong’s daughter Molly responded to her mother’s concerns about the growing loss of rights for American women, and her focus on the devastating suffering that women experience globally, with the words in an interview on Feministing.com:
MJF: I would say the greatest danger is climate change. We’re going to be screwed. We’re going to have such bigger problems than women being oppressed when we’re living on a bubble on Mars with no water. We’re going to have much bigger problems than feminism. The entire world is going to be obliterated, so that worries me a little more. We won’t have time to worry about who’s being oppressed. That kind of thing is really a luxury problem.
EJ: But why is it that feminism is always considered a luxury problem?
MJF: I mean, I think we’ve gotten far enough. We’re not that oppressed.
Reading a series of Erica Jong|Molly Jong-Fast interviews, the one thing I know for sure is that my own mother would slap my face in front of you all if I ever disrespected her in such a public way. She would deck me, simply stated. A mother in India might well set Molly on fire or throw lye on her face, blinding her for life and disfiguring her beyond recognition for such insolent words about her mother, revealed in yesterday’s interviews.
Those of who have read Molly’s assertion that women aren’t that oppressed globally are speechless, particularly after Erica Jong responded to the Feministing.com question first from an American loss of control of our bodies including birth control perspective, and then in an international context about controlling fertility as the key step in building stable nations.
Retiring Secretary of Defense Robert Gates agrees with Erica Jong about the absolute focus on international women’s rights as the most important issue on the global agenda.
Molly Jong-Fast is at odds with women like Angelina Jolie, Shakira and Eve Ensler in her views about international trends in women’s rights. But the commentary on my FB private wall reflects a strong sense that many American women her age could care less about women’s rights. Molly calls it resetting the balance.
Feminists Are Accused of Cultural Relativism When We don’t Find Burqas Sexy
In September 2009, Naomi Wolf wrote:
The West interprets veiling as repression of women and suppression of their sexuality. But when I travelled in Muslim countries and was invited to join a discussion in women-only settings within Muslim homes, I learned that Muslim attitudes toward women’s appearance and sexuality are not rooted in repression, but in a strong sense of public versus private, of what is due to God and what is due to one’s husband. It is not that Islam suppresses sexuality, but that it embodies a strongly developed sense of its appropriate channelling - toward marriage, the bonds that sustain family life, and the attachment that secures a home.
Just as US Vogue magazine gave a ‘pass’ to Syria’s First Lady Asma al-Assad, wife of the Syrian despot, Naomi Klein brushes off societies that practice gendercide, stoning women to death, setting women on fire and expecting women to serve multiple husbands and bear a child a year with the comment:
This may explain why both Muslim and Orthodox Jewish women not only describe a sense of being liberated by their modest clothing and covered hair, but also express much higher levels of sensual joy in their married lives than is common in the West. When sexuality is kept private and directed in ways seen as sacred - and when one’s husband isn’t seeing his wife (or other women) half-naked all day long - one can feel great power and intensity when the headscarf or the chador comes off in the the home.
Naomi writes that she doesn’t mean to dismiss the many women leaders in the Muslim world who regard veiling as a means of controlling women. Choice is everything’. But she and Molly are not activists on the road to carrying on the work of second wave feminists to guarantee that choice for women in America or internationally.
Both Wolf and Jong-Fast have more important priorities then coming to grips with the reality that Erica Jong and I know well: the status of women in burqa-wearing, full-coverage clothing countries is pathetic and desperate.
Speaking of Cultural Relativism
Last week, Naomi told Elliott Spitzer that if she was Rep Anthony Weiner’s adviser, she would say he has a real problem, but in truth, she’s not all that concerned about the Boys Club (my words) and a bit of bad boy texting in Congress. Wolf’s priority is our loss of privacy in the digital age.
How the heck do I keep on the backs of the Republican agenda to take away birth control and discrediting the C Street gang of anti-female, Christian members of Congress, if I agree with Naomi — which I don’t — that Weiner’s little sexcapades are no big deal? How do I do that, Naomi — oh wise woman?
It’s one thing that you have no concern about women’s rights. But must you undermine my effort to help women internationally?
Molly Jong-Fast believes that gendercide and bride burning aren’t so bad, when you understand that climate change may end everything sometime in the future.
I daresay Molly agrees with Naomi that life under a burqa isn’t that terrible. In fact it’s romantic and sexy. Molly prides herself on wearing long skirts and keeping her knees together — as if you and I don’t.
Sounds like the Republican War on Women to me.
Molly Jong-Fast’s words I think we’ve (all women) gotten far enough. We’re not that oppressed have galvanized me to the core of my being. Molly’s views are is as dangerous to the world’s women as the ideas of Phyllis Schlafly, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin. My Facebook friends of all ages agree.
‘Perhaps her (Erica’s) daughter is rebelling against her mother’s views, just to be a contrarian. Much the way children rebel against parents to create their own ‘space’ in the world,’ wrote a credentialed human sexuality psychologist.
Max and Molly
I liked the response of Max Dashu to my FB post about Molly. I just met Max on Facebook last week and am thrilled to report today that her film project ‘Woman Shaman | The Ancients’ is featured today on Indie GoGo.
Max Dashu has worked for 40 years on Suppressed Histories Archives, a body of work that sheds new light on women’s history. For four decades she has toiled away with little compensation compiling a body of work that tells women’s pre-patriarchy story and also our lives under empire(s).
Max and I share a view that the truth will help to set women free, and I am committed to supporting her on a long-term basis, raising money with no strings attached, to help Max tell women’s history.
Max doesn’t have her MFA in English from Bennington College. Max attended Radcliffe as a scholarship student for 18 months and then dropped out because women’s history was literally a joke at Harvard before the advent of women’s studies curriculums. Max then went to Laney College’s graphic design program in Oakland to earn a living. Thankfully, we now have a valuable women’s history asset from her determination to carry on with the telling of women’s history — and without trust fund parents.
Max didn’t marry Matthew Adlai Greenfield, son of Westport, Conn. Max does not live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, committed to a life of virtue and high principles (unlike her trash-talkin’, irresponsible, me-me-me mother Erica) after dropping $5 million cool buckaroos to live in the neighborhood.
Max lives more like the vast majority of people in America and far better than most women in developing countries. Max Dashu has not turned her back on the world’s women — and American women, too — telling us that we are liberated enough. Max’s response to Molly Jong-Fast’s statement is:
Global warming *exists* because women have had virtually no control. This young woman is just rebelling against Mom, and speaking of privileged, she pretty much defines the term. It’s all fine for her, so nothing to talk about. She’s not the one getting less food, raped by the man of the business or family she’s hired out to, or married off at 12; preyed upon by pimps or kept out of school because the little money goes to her brother’s schooling; battered by husband, divorced and separated from her children by patrilineal lordship; struggling to support the children sired by a man who has abandoned the family or has two other women in other parts of town. She (Molly) is in other words totally clueless.
Canadian, stay-at-home mother of three Sherry Palmer wrote about Molly:
Some travel to experience first-hand the everyday life of a desperately poor woman and her children in a thirdworld country would open her eyes. Wouldn’t it be wonderful for Molly to carry on with her mother’s cause in the future, she’d have a recognized name to galvanize some positive action. i do hope at least the very least that she educates herself on the issues……i am stunned by her statements. (Note, we are adding a much more expressive note in the comments that Molly, born in 1959, has sent to Anne about Sherry’s life, observations about women’s lives today, and also Molly’s public disrespect of her mother. We are curious about the extent to which Molly — writing away in her $5 million apartment — is carving out her own public identity and self worth — not on her own merits as a writer, mother and wife— but by mocking her mother. Is it possible that she is not as talented, creative or courageous as Erica, therefore take down mom, rather than applaud with admiration? Would we even know about Molly, if she wasn’t Erica Jong’s daughter? Would the same doors have opened for her? )
New York journalist Stefanie Iris Weiss wrote:
Her comments are incredibly ignorant. It’s so sad to see the daughter of one of my heroes turn out this way. But I have to say, it’s quite common for women born in the 70s and later to reject feminism wholesale — simply because they don’t understand what it is. Conservatives won the culture war on this (creating terms like “feminazi”). They made women afraid of embracing feminism because they thought it meant man-hating. I was born in 1971 and only 2 percent of my friends, the most politicized, understand and embrace the label. The rest practice a form of feminism in their daily lives, yet would never call themselves a feminist. We’ve gotta re-appropriate it somehow.
Susana Mayer, Ph.D, Clinical Sexologist; Founder & Host The Erotic Literary Salon wrote:
Perhaps her daughter is rebelling against her mother’s views, just to be a contrarian. Much the way children rebel against parents to create their own ‘space’ in the world.
Pretty damn nauseated with Molly Jong-Fast and Naomi Wolf, I return to Kyleigh Kühn, another aristocrat, but one who is determined to carrying on her mother’s work. The beautiful model is not bashing and dishonoring her mother as ‘incapable of commitment’, when mom has made such an unwavering commitment to goals that are a torch for women worldwide.
Between you and me, I think Molly Jong-Fast should get down on her knees and ask her mother’s forgiveness. The girl who said in 1994 ‘Women have been really hard on my mom. Partly because they have a hard time admitting they enjoy sex’ has joined the crowd that flips off Erica Jong as committed to an agenda that no longer matters.
Kyleigh Kuhn | American Aristocrat & Activist
Meet Kyleigh Kuhn, committed to making a difference. Kyleigh Khun graduated from UC Berkeley with a BA in Peace and Conflict Studies. As an undergrad she worked as a teaching assistant for Jerry Sanders a Professor at UC Berkeley in the Peace and Conflict Studies Department.
She founded Pennies for Peace — Making Change Work, a student-to-student humanitarian program inspiring students to organize their schools’ student body to collect pennies and spare change for converting minefields into safe schools and playgrounds in war-torn countries.
Lyleigh Kühn also worked with Roots of Peace to transform a tent school housing 60 students to a five-room schoolhouse in the village of Mir Bocha Kot, Afghanistan which was later named the Kyleigh Khun Roots of Peace School by the Afghanistan Ministry of Education. Kyleigh is also a 6 Billion Paths to Peace Ambassador.
Like committed feminist Max Dashü, Kyleigh Kühn doesn’t live in a $5 million apartment. Kyleigh lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn See pictures of her modest apartment. This interview with Opening Ceremony shares a lot of details about Kyleigh’s background and her parents’ work at Roots for Peace.
Anne of Carversville celebrates young women like Kyleigh Kühn who are actively committed to all the world’s people, rather than driving wedges between generations and diffusing our abilty to make a difference in a world where the clock is ticking fast and women desperately need our help. Anne
