"And then there were the wife bonuses. I was thunderstruck when I heard mention of a 'bonus.'..."

"A wife bonus, I was told, might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband�s fund had done but her own performance � how well she managed the home budget, whether the kids got into a 'good' school � the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks. In turn these bonuses were a ticket to a modicum of financial independence and participation in a social sphere where you don�t just go to lunch, you buy a $10,000 table at the benefit luncheon a friend is hosting. Women who didn�t get them joked about possible sexual performance metrics. Women who received them usually retreated, demurring when pressed to discuss it further, proof to an anthropologist that a topic is taboo, culturally loaded and dense with meaning...."

From a NYT op-ed about the Glam SAHMs (glamorous stay-at-home-moms) of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, written by Wednesday Martin, who is identified as a writer and "social researcher." She has a memoir coming out called "Primates of Park Avenue."

4 stray thoughts:

1. The illustration at the link is really good.

2. Don't confuse this topic with the more general subject of stay-at-home mothers (a topic I prefer to call single-earner household). This is about how very rich people structure things.

3. It made me think of that excellent Woody Allen movie "Alice."

4. The book title "Primates of Park Avenue" made me think of another title that it took me a long time to drag out of the 1980s canyon of my mind: "Slaves of New York." Remember that? Tama Janowitz. That was a big deal back in the days of "Bright Lights, Big City" and "Less Than Zero." Here's the NYT review of it from 1986, by Jay McInerney (the author of "Bright Lights, Big City"):

Eleanor longs for the good old verities of marriage, the kind of legal bondage under which she'd have a few enforceable rights... Heroically passive, Eleanor has half a mind to think about doing... something. ''If I ever get some kind of job security and/or marital security, I'm going to join the feminist movement.''

When a friend calls from Boston to say she's thinking of moving back to New York and living with her old boyfriend, Eleanor advises her not to do it. She'll be a slave. ''Your only solution is to get rich, so you can get an apartment and then you can have your own slave.''

"How do you reconcile your avoidance of computers and iPads, when you signed on to create a TV series for Amazon�s streaming service?"

Deadline asked Woody Allen. He said:

I don�t even know what a streaming service is; that�s the interesting thing. When you said streaming service, it was the first time I�ve heard that term connected with the Amazon thing. I never knew what Amazon was. I�ve never seen any of those series, even on cable. I�ve never seen The Sopranos, or Mad Men. I�m out every night and when I come home, I watch the end of the baseball or basketball game, and there�s Charlie Rose and I go to sleep. Amazon kept coming to me and saying, please do this, whatever you want. I kept saying I have no ideas for it, that I never watch television. I don�t know the first thing about it. Well, this went on for a year and a half, and they kept making a better deal and a better deal. Finally they said look, we�ll do anything that you want, just give us six half hours. They can be black and white, they can take place in Paris, in New York and California, they can be about a family, they can be comedy, you can be in them, they can be tragic. We don�t have to know anything, just come in with six half hours. And they offered a lot of money and everybody around me was pressuring me, go ahead and do it, what do you have to lose?...

So he agreed. "And I have regretted every second since I said OK."
Click for more �

"I�m not going to get my own room, am I?" Mariel Hemingway asked Woody Allen... when she was 18 and he was in his early 40s.

They were making the movie "Manhattan" together, and he'd been trying to get her to go to Paris with him. When he � as Howard Kurtz puts it � "fumbled for his glasses," she announced: "I can�t go to Paris with you."

The headline chez Kurtz (at Fox News) is: "Young Mariel Hemingway had to rebuff Woody Allen�s advances."

Is that fair? I know it's fun to kick Woody Allen around, but "rebuff... advances" creates a picture of him groping her. And "Young Mariel Hemingway" suggests an underage female (like the character Hemingway played in "Manhattan"). But it was a powerful and not-all-that-old movie star inviting an adult female into an old-school romantic adventure. I mean � it's a romance clich�! � Paris.

Yeah, older men like younger women and trips to Paris are tempting. It may be a little hard to say no, but I can't believe there was that much scheming and trapping going on here, because how smart do you have to be � and I hear Woody's a genius � to figure out that you get the young lady to isolate herself with you in Paris by saying "Of course, you'll have your own room, and it will be a beautiful room in this charming hotel, blah blah blah. I would simply love to show you Paris, blah blah blah, museums... restaurants... the Seine blah, blah, blah"" You figure out how to lure her into your room after you're there.
Click for more �

"Do you wonder why people are so mixed up when the bimbos the TV stations send out don�t even know what the bill does?"

Said Mark Belling on the radio, using a word that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Daniel Bice questions:

OK, "bimbo" is a little dated. Still, should Belling be using that term to deride female TV journalists? What's his term du jour for their incompetent male counterparts?

When I hear "bimbo," I think of "bimbo eruptions," a term coined by Governor Bill Clinton's chief of staff Betsey Ross Wright:

As deputy chair of the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, Wright established the rapid response system that was responsible for defending Clinton's record in Arkansas and promptly answering all personal attacks on the candidate. During the 1992 campaign, Wright coined the term "bimbo eruptions" to describe rumors alleging extramarital affairs by Clinton. 

How sexual is the term "bimbo"? Can it just mean idiot or does Belling seem to be insinuating that the reporter is slutty?

By the way, "bimbo" originally referred to a male, as the "o" ending suggests. (It means "baby" in the original Italian.) The oldest English usage is for "A fellow, chap; usu. contemptuous." That goes back to 1919, with the female meaning arriving a decade later: "A woman; esp. a whore." That's from the (unlinkable) OED, which has a draft addition from 2004: "derogatory. A young woman considered to be sexually attractive but of limited intelligence. (Now the usual sense.)" The OED quotes a Woody Allen story from 1976, "The Whore of Mensa":

"I'm on the road a lot. You know how it is - lonely. Oh, not what you're thinking. See, Kaiser, I'm basically an intellectual. Sure, a guy can meet all the bimbos he wants. But the really brainy women - they're not so easy to find on short notice."

ADDED: I searched for "bimbo" in Carl Bernstein's book about Hillary "A Woman in Charge," and I found this quote from "one of her aides":

She doesn�t look at her life as a series of crises but rather a series of battles. I think of her viewing herself in more heroic terms, an epic character like in The Iliad, fighting battle after battle. Yes, she succumbs to victimization sometimes, in that when the truth becomes too painful, when she is faced with the truth becomes too painful, when she is faced with the repercussions of her own mistakes or flaws, she falls into victimhood. But that�s a last resort and when she does allow the wallowing it�s only in the warm glow of martyrdom�as a laudable victim�a martyr in the tradition of Joan of Arc, a martyr in the religious sense. She would much rather play the woman warrior�whether it�s against the bimbos, the press, the other party, the other candidate, the right-wing. She�s happiest when she�s fighting, when she has identified the enemy and goes into attack mode�. That�s what she thrives on more than anything�the battle.