From Jess Bravin’s “Court Nominee Sotomayor Quits Women-Only Group” in the June 20, 2009 Wall Street Journal:

U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor on Friday resigned her membership in an all-women organization, hoping to head off criticism that she belonged to a discriminatory organization before her confirmation hearings begin next month.

The group, the Belizean Grove, calls itself “a constellation of influential women” formed in response to the all-male Bohemian Club, whose annual revels at its expansive Northern California estate are attended by powerful and influential men.

I’m not quite sure how to feel about this, to be honest.

Ever since visiting Gales Ferry, the training camp for the Yale Men’s Heavyweight Crew an hour away from New Haven, Connecticut, I had a deep appreciation and respect for “men-only” environments.  Sure, I was jealous and wanted my own little ladies-only training camp, but I also appreciated the importance of men being able to cordon themselves off from the noise brought up by inter-gender mingling and simply be boys, in all their stinky, dirty-socks glory.  So I’ve never been opposed to men’s clubs, as it were (though understand that insofar as they can work to perpetuate existing power structures, perhaps they can be considered occasionally (though not definitionally) problematic).

This is why, when friends ask me if men can come to DinnerGrrls.org events, I also feel comfortable explaining that sometimes women feel safer talking about certain topics in the absence of men.  Because that’s a two way street, it seems.

Those kinds of private, ladies-only discussions may have been harder to come by back in the olden days.  Fortunately, modern American society has progressed from the days of “jailing” women behind lace curtains on quiet tree-lined streets in suburbia.  And it seems that even in less-progressive geographies, women have an increasing ability to connect with one another as well as society at large.  As Kathrin Day Lassila writes in her Editor’s Letter “Iran, laboratory of the Middle East?” in the July/August 2009 issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine:

you cannot keep women isolated from society if they can use the Internet and send text messages.

Right on.

But sometimes, we do want to isolate ourselves from society and just hang out with one another.  I think that’s okay.  And I think it’s okay for men to do the same.  

Which basically means that I’m in support of Andres Duany.  Who’s he?  Well, according to Ben McGrath’s “Keep Out Dept. – Cavemen” in the August 3, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, he’s an architect that 

At a conference of New Urbanist planners and theorists, in 2006 … identified a budding crisis in American life:  the decline of “male space,” which he defined as zones “where the enthusiasms of Super Bowl day are unchecked year-round,” and where “the men are not factually corrected when they exaggerate.”  The den, with its knotty-pine panelling and mounted moose heads, used to suffice, before it was subjected to a cultural makeover and emerged as the “family room,” relegating Dad to the garage.  Then Sheetrock and the Container Store, with its “completely insidious” plastic cabinets, conspired to feminize the garage, and man was effectively neutered…

“Men need to be able to refine their ‘fish that got away’ stories, exaggerating without bragging.  It’s about what a pathetic creature you are.  ’I saw the most beautiful bear, and I missed, because I tripped over my underwear.’”

“This is not a trivial subject.  We worry about the thirteen per cent African-Americans and fifteen per cent Hispanics.  Well, there’s fifty per cent males who are very ill served by our physical environment.”

Well then.  Go get ‘em, boys!  Go build some stuff out of dirty socks and empty beer cans.  Go on with your bad selves.

I’m not going to stop you.  I only ask that you please don’t pressure women like Sotomayor from connecting with fellow women via organizations like Belizean Grove.  And don’t stop me and the grrls from connecting over dinner.

xo