Alisa Valdes — a good kiss and Steinem goes out the window.
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The Feminist and the Cowboy
An Unlikely Love Story
by Alisa Valdes
Gotham Books
Here are some lessons for women provided by “progressive feminist” Alisa Valdes in her new memoir:
* When talking to a man, don’t digress. “Keep it clear and direct . . . their brain processes language differently than ours do.”
* Never expect anything; instead win him over “by giving and giving and giving until it hurt.”
* If an alpha male cheats, let him. “I would share him if I had to.”
* Spiffy up: “Men want women to look like women, in dresses and skirts.”
All of this coming from a woman whom Gloria Steinem once blurbed and Ms. Magazine supported — a self-described hardcore feminist: “I was one of the demanding ones, combating injustice and inequality on the front lines.”
They were beliefs she was raised on. Her father, Nelson Valdes, is a Marxist professor who emigrated from Cuba. And her mother, a light-haired and blue-eyed beauty queen, “looked like Jayne Mansfield but favored Jane Fonda in politics.”
In 2001, as a journalist at the Los Angeles Times, Valdes made headlines with her parting letter, in which she compared the paper’s use of the word Latino to “genocide perpetuated against the native people of the Americas.” She called the Boston Globe, where she also worked as a reporter, a “racist institution.”
Valdes’ star rose in 2003 with the publication of her first novel, “The Dirty Girls Social Club” (followed by its sequel, and other novels), a book meant to empower young, female minorities.
Last year, Valdes got in hot water again over remarks made on Twitter and Facebook attacking producer Ann Lopez (ex-wife of George Lopez) who had optioned “Dirty Girls,” as “racist and sexist.” The option was subsequently dropped.
So what are we to make of her new memoir, “The Feminist and the Cowboy” — original title, “Learning to Submit” — in which one Wrangler-wearing rancher was able to upend all these deep-seated beliefs?
With a gimlet eye toward the bestseller list, Valdes has delivered a story as old as time, the taming of the shrew with a new, very sellable twist — the liberal learns a lesson.
The story begins in 2010, when Valdes, a 41-year-old divorcee and single mother, decides to join a dating site in search of “a guy who belonged to a food co-op yet understood snark and appreciated sushi . . . A man with a flurry of liberal bumper stickers on his Subaru.”
What she finds instead is a never-been-married 52-year-old conservative actor-rancher named Steve Lane, who collects guns, buys only American cars and watches Fox News.
“I’m not quite what you’re looking for,” he writes to her, “but I was impressed by your profile.”
She’s initially unmoved. “Conservatives were stupid! Or evil! There was no other kind. Period.”
But then she catches sight of his picture. “He was exquisite. So handsome it made you ache,” she writes. Though ready to discount him, “My eye got caught on his dimples. Again.”
She agrees to meet him at a restaurant in her hometown, Albuquerque, NM. All 6-foot-4 of him arrives wearing a cowboy hat, matching boots and driving a pickup truck.
He calls her “darlin’ ” and holds the door for her, which secretly “turned me on.”
And though he’s so wrong, the woman who describes herself as “mean, combative and angry” is suddenly reduced to a giggling, teenage girl in the presence of such rugged manliness.
They agree to arrange a second date at his 10,000 acre ranch. And right off the bat, he is anything but passive. As they arrive on his land, he leans over and kisses her.
“Figured I’d let us get it out of the way now, so that if you think I’m a terrible kisser you still have time to get back to your car,” he says.
That night they disagree on nearly every subject, but “that kiss was so flippin’ good that I didn’t want to risk not getting another one by, you know, arguing or making unreasonable demands.”
So she holds her tongue. And gets in bed with the cowboy. “Angels sang arias. The earth moved,” she waxes on.
After only one night, she’s seemed to undergo an entire political change of heart.
“Maybe I didn’t know that I thought I knew. Maybe the world wasn’t as simple as they made it seem on the Rachel Maddow show,” she says.
With him, she’s in heaven, finally “free” of the feminist dogma that had defined her.
“The dirty little secret of feminism, I suddenly understood, was that it could never go as far as it aimed to, because we were, all of us, fundamentally shackled to our own biology,” she writes. “Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution could not be erased in one bra-burning decade, just because Gloria Steinem or Alice Walker said so.”
Now the idea that women are capable of doing anything that men can do — one that defined her earlier career — is almost overnight damned as mere “craziness.”
A month into the relationship, she notices how much her general demeanor has changed. She even removes the anti-Fox News bumper sticker from her car.
The cowboy begins to train his new girlfriend — once such a spitfire — like he would a dog or a horse, he tells her.
“Atta girl,” he clicks at her when she does something right. When she makes a mistake — say by getting drunk and picking a fight with him — he freezes her out, teaching her “a lesson.”
He lays down his rules:
“You’re going to have to stop challenging what I tell you and just listen to me.”
“If I’m in a relationship with a woman, I’m going to be the one driving,”
“You will never walk on the street side of the sidewalk.”
“You will always go first when we walk into a room.”
And she acquiesces to it all.
“He looked at me in such a stern and paternalistic way that I backed down again. And, again, it felt good,” she writes. “He was an alpha male, a patriotic American alpha male, a cowboy with an American pickup and guns, and he wanted to drive me around and protect me, and I actually really liked it.”
She begins to take to life on the ranch among his cattle, horses and workings dogs. When she climbs aboard his ATV, she feels, “very Sarah Palin, minus the being-an-idiot part.”
Even after she discovers that her cowboy has been secretly ponying up with another woman, she remains steadfastly by his side.
She contacts this other woman — whom she renames “Mary Pickle” — to get her side of the story and finds, to their shared horror, that the cowboy has been sending them both verbatim text messages.
“Wanna wrestle?” he would often write.
Mary Pickle disappears; Valdes hangs on. She even discovers that she’s “turned on” by the competition and decides that she will do anything to keep him.
When she agrees to take him back, the cowboy shoots her a text message: “Wanna wrestle?”
“Unfortunately for me. Yes,” she writes.
After they’ve made up, she tells him: “I love you enough to share you if I have to.”
The more submissive she becomes, the stronger the relationship grows. By the end of the book, Valdes has completely given up her city life and has moved in with the stern and strong cowboy and has even altered her parenting style.
She learns to “control my emotions more and bite my tongue more often.”
What about those feminist ideals she once so highly prized?
“Freedom would never come from trying to force men to be women and women to be men, as so many radical feminists seemed to believe it would. Freedom came when I connected to this ancestral feminine womanhood that I carried in my DNA and stopped feeling guilty for all that it spoke me.”
In return, he offered her this: “Never thought I’d say this about you, but you might make a handy little ranch wife someday.”
The cynical among us might say that this all sounds too good — or too absurd — to be true.
The bestseller list is chock-full of books on “traditional values.” Perhaps this is her way back into the bestseller club that might no longer want her as a member?
Valdes admits that despite receiving a reported $400,000 advance for “Dirty Girls Social Club,” she is flat broke and nearly homeless. Her Lexus had been repossessed and her half-million-dollar home was short-sold.
“I had badly mismanaged my promising literary career a few years before, by being a woman without proper boundaries, an angry woman and self-destructive on a grand scale,” she writes.
Is this her mea culpa? Or is it merely link bait, a calculated bid to drum up controversy and a way to ensure a coveted talking-head spot in the media?
Either way, she might have some trouble with the marketing.
This October she wrote a blog post called “Saying Goodbye to the Cowboy.” In it — and probably despite her publisher’s hesitations — she writes about their breakup.
The cowboy’s last words to his feminist lover are downright brutal: “Stop. It’s over. This isn’t your home. It will never be your home. I don’t want you. Goodbye, Alisa.”
She followed up with few harsh tweets about her former paramour: “Things he now says he didn’t like about me? My ethnicity (!), my friends, my son (!), my parents, my tweeting unflattering truths like this.”
Valdes might be down — but she’s not out of the game just yet.
She’s started yet another blog devoted to love letters sent between her and a much younger writer, 29-year-old Michael Gandy, a fellow bleeding heart and founder of the nonprofit organization The Benevolence Community.
Do we smell a sequel?