Why I Can't Stand Daphne Merkin

Let us now deplore the present moment and lament all that has been lost on the way to becoming overstimulated and spiritually starved inhabitants of an imperiled social order. First we must ask: Where did we go wrong? Where did we go so terribly wrong? I know many of you would blame it on the usual suspects, on the insatiable maw of the media or on large, amorphous forces run amok — our having started up in Iraq, say, or our having ravaged the planet in the name of progress and capitalist gain — but I blame it all on lip gloss. I believe there is something irrevocably ruinous about a culture in which women are expected to go around with their lips in a permanent state of shiny readiness, a perennial Marilyn Monroe moue of glistening sexual receptivity, hinting at the possibility that they, like Monroe, sleep fetchingly in the nude. Just after this thought occurred to me on a recent Saturday night while I was waiting for the subway, I found myself sitting next to two college-age women who were discussing — I kid you not, this is either synchronicity or Sartre’s idea of hell — the merits of various glosses, Kiehl’s as compared with Lancôme’s as compared with Trish McEvoy’s, which one lasted longer and why.

Neither the irony nor the references are cute. Nor are they effective. The diction and phrasing are headache inducing. The self-satisfied naughtiness (see Merkin on sex, anywhere and everywhere) is oppressively banal. God, she just makes my skin crawl.

This piece only gets worse. Or rather, the second paragraph is worse, and then I had to stop. If anyone has made it through and wants to persuade me I should keep reading, feel free.

Daphne Merkin, you are no Susan Sontag.