Hemingway was sexually confused - Maureen Dowd on A Farewell to Macho

[flamingdem]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/opinion/sunday/dowd-a-farewell-to-macho.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

excerpt:
But Diliberto says women are wrong to think Hemingway has nothing to offer them. Especially now that women are rising and men are declining, as The Atlantic has noted in two cover stories, women can feel secure enough to “relax and enjoy him,” as Diliberto puts it.

“Much of Hemingway’s work, particularly the stories he wrote during his marriage to Hadley,” she said, “brilliantly chart the emotional nuances in relationships between men and women.”

Hendrickson notes that after Hemingway’s death, “it was very fashionable to put him down for his misogyny. But now scholars, ironically including great female scholars, have burrowed down into him and found this sly and deceptive sensitivity toward women. He understood there was something about himself so sensitive, a tuning-fork tremulousness, that it was almost as though it shamed him, and he put on the he-man act.”

That “Kansas City-boy brutality,” as Gertrude Stein called it, was an authentic part of him. But Hendrickson believes it was also a mask covering up “a tortured sexual ambiguity.”

The loathed mother, Grace, who raised her little boy for a few years as his older sister’s “twin,” dressing him in frilly bonnets, frocks and Mary Janes, imbued him with sexual confusion.

Following up on interviews with the author’s sons that he did 24 years ago for The Washington Post, Hendrickson explores the bond between Hemingway and his youngest son, Gigi, a doctor who was a manic depressive, transsexual and heterosexual and who sometimes called himself Gloria Hemingway. He married four times, had eight children and died in the women’s annex of a Miami jail cell after being picked up for exposing himself.

[Gman]

1. Dowd is a flake

I think she wakes up in the middle of a night and starts writing about some bizarre dream she was having and then submits it as a column. She is no friend of liberals, but also no friend of conservatives. Is she a friend of anyone, truly? Or does she have any reality based beliefs? She's just out there in her own parallel dimension that on rare occasion comes only tangentially close to intersecting reality.

[TreasonousBastard]

2. Good Grief! She's quoting books on Hemingway-- is there a name...

to the condition that inspires random bits of hate whenever a name, like Dowd's, is brought up that have nothing to do with the article?

[madrchsod]

3. poor ole maureen...

lamenting that she can`t attract men at the holiday inn anymore. she needs to go home and sleep it off.

[flamingdem]

8. DO tell

she did what at a Holiday Inn?

[BeyondGeography]

4. Good to see she's keeping current with the issues for a change

:silly:

What about de Maupassant, Maureen? Why was he such a horndog?

[valerief]

5. Does anyone care what she writes? nt

[Demeter]

6. And Maureen Isn't?

[jowsybart]

7. how thrilling!!

I am all a-twitter!

[flamingdem]

9. Is Maureen

a-twitter or a-twatter?

Inquiring minds want to know, maybe.

[bhikkhu]

10. Well, its not like there's really anything else to talk about these days...

in any case, hardly news to anyone who read his later work.