aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Monday, April 14, 2008
Robin Morgan on “Goodbye to All That” 1 & 2
Ariel Levy talks with Robin Morgan about her “screed against sexism.” I’m an admirer of both. But then, I’m of the generation of lefties that would be.
With the first one, it took about six months for it to leach out across the country. With the Internet, it’s six minutes.” Morgan posted “Goodbye to All That (#2),” an essay about the misogyny directed at Hillary Clinton-Hillary nutcrackers, the “South Park” episode in which terrorists plant a bomb in Clinton’s vagina-on the Women’s Media Center Web site, on February 2nd, and since then it has been picked up by thousands of blogs, translated into six languages, reprinted in newspapers around the world, and, most famously, mass-forwarded by Chelsea Clinton. “For a while, I was getting eight hundred e-mails a day,” she said. She estimated that one out of every fifty is negative. “I was braced for much more opprobrium.”
After the piece in Rat, Morgan got death threats. “Because they said I was divisive-I was hurting the revolution,” she said. “There were even threats against my kid!” Her son, Blake Morgan, a musician, is now thirty-eight. His father, the poet Kenneth Pitchford, was an original member of the Gay Liberation Front and Morgan’s husband for twenty years. She was “Alice in Bloomsbury” then, living and swinging with Pitchford in a duplex over the Kiehl’s store on Third Avenue (the rent started at a hundred and fifty dollars a month), attending leftist literary parties with Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, and Leonard Bernstein.
Famous people were nothing new to Morgan, who starred with Dick Van Patten on the television show “Mama” for seven years and, starting when she was four, had her own half-hour weekly radio program, “The Little Robin Morgan Show,” on WOR in the nineteen-forties. As she put it in her memoir, “Saturday’s Child” (2001), “It’s a rare little girl who gets to play with a doll of herself.” The Stork Club even named a drink for her: 7Up, grenadine, cherries, and a pineapple chunk. Once she joined the women’s movement, Morgan militantly opposed references to her child stardom. When she appeared on the “Tonight Show” in 1969 and Johnny Carson played clips from “Mama,” she walked off the stage.
These days, she is more concerned about offending people. “I always fall into the trap of thinking if I’d written it better, surely, surely they would have understood,” she said, referring to the young women who were upset by “Goodbye (#2).” ("Morgan’s essay is incredibly condescending,” one blogger wrote. “It completely fails to recognize that there are a variety of valid reasons younger women might decide to support Obama.") Morgan put a log on the fire with her good arm. “They think I’m telling them what to do, but they are investing me with an authority I never had. Why is that? Do you know why that is?”
Here are the essays. And the Wikipedia entry on Robin Morgan.
