There’s another problem afoot: If men tried to build their own version of The Wing, using the same rhetoric and over-the-top gender identification—a vast departure from older, stodgier, all-male or all-female New York clubs, by the way—approximately five million female heads, fresh from their on-demand blowouts, would promptly explode. Remember when feminists targeted Harvard’s all-male clubs and all the media blow-ups over the country’s few remaining, mostly sports-related, private male clubs?
Yet here’s New York magazine, describing The Wing’s launch party: “At the end of the evening, after several members had changed into white monogrammed pajamas for the sleepover portion of the proceedings, one woman wondered aloud why exactly the party had felt so easy and fun.” The answer, ending in a decidedly un-empowered question mark: “I think it was because there were no men here?” Later in the piece, Gelman explains to the reporter what made a recent birthday party so great: “It was the absence of men.”
I now formally invite you to imagine these things said by men about women, out loud, to the national press. I’ll wait while you take cover.
In the meantime, never fear: Any criticism of enterprises like The Wing will likely be chalked up to our good old friend that starts with the letter P. “Lord knows, patriarchal capitalist society does not want women to band together at all,” Meredith Graves, an MTV News correspondent, said of her involvement with the group. “That would be detrimental to the whole system.”
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