Rhymes With Rich
Atlantic, The, May, 2006 by Sandra Tsing Loh
More and more these days, reading women’s writing fills me with a vague, creeping, slightly nauseating feeling. Lying in bed the other night, cradling some seltzer water, my stomach gurgling, the word for my malaise suddenly came to me: “afflufemza,” wherein the problems of affluence are recast as the struggles of feminism, and you find yourself in a dreamlike state of reading firstperson essays about it, over and over again.
We’ve always had rich mothers, of course; it’s just that the boundaries between the privileged and the unused to be clearer. Back in the eighties, for instance, I was among the many couch, or at least futon, potatoes who used to love Dynasty—the Mothra-versus-Godzilla grapplings of the Carringtons and the Colbys, of Joan Collins’s deliciously nasty Alexis and Linda Evans’s nurturing, oddly affectless Krystle. Alexis was the Execu-Bitch; Krystle, the Saintly Wife. It was the eternal female ur-struggle, ever campy, ...