New York Times forgets that Gen X has any women in it

Argh. Argh argh argh. I am so sick of writing posts about how the media so routinely and pervasively excludes women’s perspectives from their coverage of humanity without even realizing that something is missing. You’d think someone would notice when an eighteen-hundred word feature categorizing an entire generation was published without addressing women. But apparently not.

A. O. Scott’s generational profile Gen X Has a Midlife Crisis is currently featured on the home page Week in Review on NYTimes.com While covering Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, Sam Lipsyte’s new book The Ask, and the oeuvre of John Cusack, Scott only managed to throw the tiniest scrap of attention toward anything having to do with women:

At a certain point, Dad buys a sports car, or starts a rock band, or has an affair or walks out on Mom or quits the law firm to make goat cheese. When this kind of thing happens to Mom, it’s not a crisis but an awakening.

Even the article’s artwork is all-male, and conspicuously white-collar:

But I don’t have a penis! Does that mean I don’t count?

You can imagine how blind this article looks from my perspective, having immersed myself in a world of fantastic, thoughtful, intelligent women authors and bloggers for the past seven years. Many of us have even been writing about Generation X for a very long time. But I guess that it will take more than a blogosphere of smart women to get the New York Times’ attention. And as far as Gen X mothers go, I suspect that A. O. Scott’s But what if you never gave up adolescence in the first place? narrative ran out of steam a good five to fifteen years ago. We’ve been caregivers dealing with the day-to-day, hour-to-hour needs of our families for long enough to have the adolescent cobwebs swept out of our brains.

So am I having a midlife crisis? Yes, absolutely, thanks so much for asking. Like many Gen X women, my crisis now involves sandwich generation issues, as I wrote about recently. As my daughter grows into her tween years and my parents reach their elder years, I feel more squeezed in the middle than I ever could have imagined. And we’re just getting started, which is a little scary. The crisis is getting my attention and forcing me to wake up to the fact that I must create a sustainable path for myself and craft a life that will be physically, mentally and emotionally nourishing for everyone in the family. We spent a lot of time this week leading up to Mother’s Day talking about how to do just that. It was a highly unsentimental yet effective way to mark the holiday.

The supreme irony for me (see, irony, I am Gen X) is that while women have come so far, and each generation is reinventing self and motherhood as they go on, at the same time these core caregiving issues have not been solved or shared equally enough. While A. O. Scott is busy musing on the merits of Hot Tub Time Machine versus The Big Chill, I’ve been having therapy sessions that sound like they’re coming right out of The Feminine Mystique. We seem unable to escape the gravitational pull of the issues of work, life, identity and fairness that come up again and again. And I’d love to be able to discuss these issues beyond the fenced-in neighborhood of a mom-blog, in a societal context that is even larger than motherhood itself. And I wish with all my heart that caregiving was not an issue that fell primarily into the laps of mothers, wives, sisters and daughters.

As you can tell, I don’t have all the answers, but I wish The New York Times would wake up and recognize the validity of my questions.