Tabletop Burner Tuesday*

Black Friday, for my non-US readers, is an annual holiday, celebrated by patting oneself on the back for caring more about friends/family/experiences than stuff. On Black Friday, those who can afford things full-priced, or who are so confident in their socioeconomic status that they see no need to signal such status through the use of anything so crude as brands, or who favor brands too posh to hold discounts on the day after Thanksgiving... all such individuals celebrate the day by ostentatiously not shopping. They may, however, patronize Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, etc. And if they happen to be in Paris for the soldes, it's OK, because "sale" in proverbial yellow subtitles is acceptable.

Anyway, seems I totally forgot to do my annual-ish reminder that anti-Black-Friday sentiment is largely-but-fine-not-entirely about class snobbery. I also skipped Black Friday for the very noble reason of, I slept through most of the day. It had been a very long time since I'd gone running, and keeping up (kind of!) with my fit friends left over enough energy for grocery-shopping and little else. But I did make something of Swing By The Mall Saturday, and am now the proud owner of a $12-but-originally-$15 ear-warmer, purchased half to avoid jogging in a pom-pom winter hat, and half to guilt myself into actually running when it's cold out, having now invested twelve dollars in this activity.

*Not a thing, unfortunately. Although what stops me from going that route remains not so much the price of a hot-pot set-up (which... who knows) as the fear that such a device (which I'd inevitably buy with Japanese-only instructions) would somehow lead to my building burning down.

At a time like this

It was only a matter of time. But eventually, a (white) Facebook friend called out his Facebook friends for using Facebook to post cat videos and the like, when, you know, Ferguson. This post got dozens of likes. Privacy settings would presumably prevent me from checking, but I'm going to assume the likers are split between those who'd never have thought of cat videos at a time like this, and those who absolutely posted cat videos after news of the grand jury decision had broken, but who've been shown the error of their ways. There's also the person - not someone I know - who comments that her use of cute-animal sharing is her way of comforting herself at a time like this, and thus not evidence of ignorance or insensitivity, quite the contrary! Which... is both entirely plausible and unlikely to hold up in the court of social-media opinion.

We've been down this road before. But this time around, I've learned that there's a term for it: "social media signaling." At least I think that's what that expression refers to. What one does and doesn't put online ends up seeming like some kind of ultimate barometer for what a person thinks is important, when in reality, many people are keeping that-which-is-important (political opinions, photos of loved ones) off social media. But the way a feed works, it can seem as if Friend B's complaint about a coffee shop closing early (note: a complaint I've had) is somehow in response to Friend A's heartfelt analysis of police brutality, even if these two friends don't even know each other. It's jarring, though, and it makes Friend B look like a terrible person. Meanwhile, Friend C will be alternating posts about the serious and the trivial - what does it all mean?

Of course, the desire to avoid looking clueless can, in the aggregate, end up making the world a better place. As in, does it really matter if someone shared Ta-Nehisi Coates's reparations article because they want to signal their good-person-ness or out of a sincere belief that that's, you know, a really important story? Shared is shared, right?

The danger, though, is that a certain tone, or approach, has a way of inviting defensiveness. Accusing people of racism because they've shared cat videos - even if the accusation comes from a place of sincere outrage - will cause some to reflect, and others to roll their eyes and hide your subsequent updates.

The normcore appeal of Midtown

There was apparently a time, in New York, when everything cool happened below 14th Street. Then came the mallification. These days, whether you're seeking to avoid mall-stores or (as I am, on occasion) looking for the nearest Uniqlo, it hardly matters which part of Manhattan you find yourself in, or indeed whether you're in Manhattan or Edison, NJ.

These days, a fine case could be made for avoiding lower Manhattan. There's the practical case - i.e. Prince and Broadway is even more crowded with frantic shoppers than 34th Street. Also the subjective one - I have to get into the city through Penn Station, and after two hours of complicated travel, there needs to be some reason to add an additional leg to the trip.

But apart from all of that, there's something just more pleasant about Midtown. Busy, yes, but not pretending to be anything other than what it is. In the Village, you're meant to feel that your clothes-shopping is somehow artistic or bohemian. That because whichever chain store is expensive and on a side street, you're doing something different from a mall-shopper. In Midtown, it's straightforwardly corporate. The tall glass buildings don't lie. Midtown feels - pardon the expression - fresh.

All of this points, unavoidably, to normcore. Midtown has it, and SoHo, etc., do not.

Haves, have-nots, and have-somes UPDATED

It's unfortunate, if provocative, timing that Yascha Mounk's op-ed about whether Harvard's letting in enough Asian applicants pops up on the NYT homepage right there alongside the clearly far more important (and, thank goodness, treated as such) coverage of Ferguson. The temptation is great to say all of the things that, let's face it, come to mind - tone-deaf, first-world-problems, etc. At a time when one's sense of perspective will be questioned if one has any sympathy for a brown-but-not-black store owner whose place was looted, this seems maybe not the moment to lament the possibility that an Asian-American kid will have to settle for Dartmouth.

And yet. If the point is calling out or just better understanding racism, Mounk's article contains an important missing piece to the conversation:

As recognized by the Supreme Court, schools have an interest in recruiting a “critical mass” of minority students to obtain “the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.” This justifies, in my view, admissions standards that look favorably on underrepresented groups, like African-Americans and Latinos. But it can neither explain nor justify why a student of Chinese, Korean or Indian descent is so much less likely to be admitted than a white one. 

Conservatives point to Harvard’s emphasis on enrolling African-Americans (currently 12 percent of freshmen) and Hispanics (13 percent) but overlook preferences for children of alumni (about 12 percent of students) and recruited athletes (around 13 percent). The real problem is that, in a meritocratic system, whites would be a minority — and Harvard just isn’t comfortable with that.

This is more or less what I'm always saying re: Stuyvesant. I've also said similar re: Europe and Jews, but I see that Mounk has said it better.

A dynamic exists where there are those in power, those being oppressed, and then some intermediary group basically created by the powerful. The intermediaries will then serve as stand-ins for the powerful. They don't seem to be in the middle. They seem all-powerful. And then those actually in power can, in turn, seem to be helping the oppressed when they bash the intermediaries... even though they're only doing so in order to defend their own position. Those on the bottom of whichever hierarchy are kept down.

As for who would function as an intermediary... it depends. Jews, Asians, Lena Dunham - it varies according to context.

UPDATE

Another way to put it, that also ties this in with something David Schraub was just writing about: It's not that intermediaries' marginalization should be equated with that of those at the bottom of the hierarchy. (Which is to say, it's not that an Asian kid dealing with college admissions is in the same situation as a black one dealing with a racist cop.) Rather, it's that intermediaries, as I define this category, are more than just people with some intermediate level of (for lack of a better term) privilege. They're not some sort of ethnic equivalent of middle-income. They serve a specific function.

Observations from a day of menswear-shopping

-Men's clothing stores have exactly the same impact on me as the theme music to "Frasier" or "The Bob Newhart Show," which is to say, I feel an urgent need to fall asleep. Something about Banana Republic especially, although it was in the more upbeat Topman that I finally collapsed onto what was, I think, some kind of display lamp, but rectangular, and thus vaguely bench-like. Maybe the drab horribleness is particular to the US, where the idea is that masculinity is asserted by dressing in a way that suggests that one finds clothes-shopping torturous?

-What happened to lower Broadway as a tourist destination for French people? Where was the c'est pas cher brigade, with their bursting shopping bags full of relatively inexpensive Adidas? Probably something to do with the euro's relationship to the dollar.

-When the Yelp reviews of a bagel place say the bagels will be tiny and expensive, they will be both of those things. It's not often that I've regretted walking a couple short blocks out of the way for a bagel, but... let's just say the hipsters didn't need to reinvent bagels. The supposedly inauthentic, puffier bagels of Bagel Bob's and so forth are far, far better than what Nolita's offering. (Yes, yes, "and the portions were tiny." But they were!)

Pinterest-based pseudoscience

When I was a little girl, I don't recall having ever given any thought to my future wedding. Now, this wasn't because I was preoccupied with saving the world or science fairs or anything useful. Nor was I defying gender norms. I was plenty interested in boys and moderately interested in clothes, but weddings? No. I don't think that interest ever set in, even though the desire to get married eventually did.

But this is, allegedly, a thing - this having dreamt of one's wedding since girlhood. So I was curious to read Abby Ellin's Styles piece about the phenomenon. That, and the article's premise was an interesting one. That is, it might have gone in an interesting direction. It is strange that despite a great deal of female economic independence, despite a culture where premarital sex is far from taboo, despite a whole host of developments, the dynamics around marriage remain so gendered. Not the trappings, because that's just... trappings. The actual decision-making parts. The male proposal remains precisely because the default assumption is that a woman always wants to get married. Which is, indeed, curious.

Alas, because Styles, there's no such investigation. The evidence that women dream of princess weddings seems limited to the existence of women who take an interest in weddings prior to having found a groom. But... isn't that just kind of an aesthetic thing? So some women make Pinterest boards for as-yet-to-be-scheduled weddings. I have Pinterest boards full of clothing I can't necessarily afford, but think looks cool - does that point to something fraught? To some kind of delusion or agony? More to the point: I can't figure out how all this virtual flower-arranging lead to the following conclusion:

Dr. Markey also believes the wedding is the “biological imperative” made manifest. “Women tend to be more selective when picking a mate and have a greater desire for monogamy and a stable relationship than men,” he said. “Thus, they are more likely to dream of a wedding, which symbolizes this desire.”

Never mind that the latest science on this is apparently that women are less suited to monogamy than men, and that women's alleged lack of interest in sex in middle age is due to their being bored with their partners. Which would, if anything, suggest that women's greater interest in weddings is precisely due to their being symbols of a new relationship.

I did, however, get a kick out of this:

Sue Johnson, a clinical psychologist and author of “Love Sense,” finds this mentality worrisome. Women are planning the show before the script is written and “before the leading man shows up,” she said. She understands the desire for companionship. Marriage, she said, “speaks to our longing for connection and our fear of aloneness.” But, she added, the emphasis on weddings and marriage is also somewhat dangerous. “In North America, we’ve made progress,” she said. “Hillary Clinton might be the first female president, but a woman still wants this badge of legitimacy that she is wanted and desired by a man.”

Hillary Clinton. A woman who's accomplished plenty, yes, but whose name we know because she was married to a president. At first I thought that this was Johnson's point, but then I reread the paragraph and I'm maybe 95% sure it's not.

My impractical Japanese kitchen implement privilege is showing

-I'm now the proud owner of something called Yamaga Nabe Kuronuri, which I will use to make hot-pot. The question is how to clean it. I more or less know, from what the woman in the store translated for me, how not to ruin it (i.e. don't put it in the dishwasher, and make sure it's dry after use), but apart from that, it's anyone's guess. The device is apparently best for a table-top burner, which is also a thing that exists, but because I have some restraint (and don't want to burn down my apartment), I'll be using it on one of the stovetop burners. How that will work for the fondue aspect of things, I can't say. I guess either standing and dipping, or sitting and accepting that things may be a little more al dente than ideal. But whatever! It's gorgeous.

-There may, at some point, be an earth-shattering post about how I reconcile a distaste for YPIS ("your privilege is showing"; see also the tag) with a belief that subtle forms of bigotry matter, and aren't just the invention of the hypersensitive. The short version is that I don't think YPIS is even about people in marginalized groups feeling offended and speaking out. The real YPIS happens when someone in a position of relative power thinks they stand to gain by calling out a gaffe, real or imagined. When the calling-out takes on a life of its own. Also when the goal is making an individual feel terrible, and not changing society. Basically, I have a grand theory of how the left and the right are talking past each other, but a) it's not quite there yet, and b) not sure WWPD's the place for it.

Drivel

Someone somewhere had shared an article called "Just ignore my kid's meltdown - please," and I thought, OK, another one to keep track of for the parental-overshare files. But no! That's not what it is at all! Exactly all that we learn about Bethany Mandel's child is that he or she is four months old and has been on an airplane. And that, even by my stringent standards, doesn't constitute parental overshare.

A headline writer took some liberties, it seems, and referenced an entirely theoretical tantrum.  If anything, it's an anti-overshare piece. Mandel's real beef is with the people who observe a child they don't know mid-tantrum and decide to film it. But that headline got that way because - I suspect - overshare sells. I mean, I clicked on this thing because that's what I thought it was, although in my defense, I keep track of that genre with the end goal of stopping it. I was pleased to see it was something else.

Note: I'm not Googling the author to see if she's parentally-overshared elsewhere. What interests me is the headline implying overshare where there is none.

What also interests me, though, is her bio: "Bethany Mandel, a New Jersey-based stay-at-home mom, writes on politics and culture." Now, we all get to identify as we see fit, and I'm not the bio-police. But it would seem that if you write on politics and culture, even if you're doing so from your home, and even if you're multitasking that with bringing up your children, you could, if you wanted to, use something like "writer" or "journalist." Would a man who writes about lofty topics and has also reproduced define himself in this way?

It could also be a time-ratio thing, of course, although "writes" suggests this isn't her first attempt. But what struck me about it was mostly that I'd just been reading a different piece, one by a male writer, the gist of which was that because literary agents don't like his manuscript, the marketplace will only accept drivel. And as I was reading that one, all I could think was how incredibly unlikely it was that a woman would have that level of confidence. A woman would think the problem was that her writing was drivel. I've even heard rumors of women who have literary agents, who persist in the belief that their writing is drivel. But then again, if said dude is correct about the marketplace, it would kind of have to be!

A post unrelated to shirts

Rather than dwell on the scandals of the social-media moment,* I'm going to revisit a topic I wrote about in 2004. Yes, matzo. Specifically, the question of matzo marketing. Recently I was listening to Dan Pashman's podcast about matzo, which is very much about matzo as a year-round food. One interesting tidbit was that religious Jews are apparently less concerned with matzo flavor-purity than are secular Jews. According to a guest expert, secular Jews think it's not kosher-in-the-colloquial-sense to have flavored matzos, whereas observant Jews will have... whatever is the matzo equivalent of a blueberry bagel, as long as it's kosher-in-the-religious-sense. Also intriguing, if not so surprising, given the year-round availability of matzo in regular supermarkets: lots of people agree that it's a better cracker than that which is sold as crackers.

But I was also struck by Pashman's intro, which consisted of this... almost apology for taking on a Judeo-centric culinary topic. I get that part of it is because he's introducing a Southern Baptist matzo-producer, but he also seems genuinely concerned that he'll have listeners who will be like, 'ugh, what's this Jew doing, telling us about all of this Jew food we don't care about!' That intro reminded me of nothing more than intros to monographs I read in grad school, where the author explains that a book about French Jews is really one about France, apologizing for having dared broach such a particular subject... as though it were possible to write an academic text of that sort that covered France generally. And I kept wondering, would Lynne Rosetto Kasper apologize for an item on Italian-American cuisine? I mean, maybe she does this and I don't notice it? Somehow, though, I doubt it. There's something specifically Jewish, I think, in this fear, this overcompensation for being thought to think we're "chosen." And I mean no disrespect to Pashman - I'm sure I do this as well. I doubt if being aware of it much helps.

Anyway, I'm also remarking on this because: matzo brei! Now that's a food with which to alienate Gentiles, as well as, alas, some Jews.

*OK, one final, personal note: For all the talk of TBTB and so forth, in my own, day-to-day life, I'm surrounded by scientists, most of whom are men, and all of whom dress much better than I do. I think it may relate to their being European. Or just to the number of items in my closet splattered from matzo-brei preparation.

Naked Rufus UPDATED

As I sat contemplating the Mark Zuckerberg shirt story from every which angle, another whole shirts-and-sexism scandal was underway. So much so that "shirtgate" refers to something else!

In all (humorless) seriousness, I'm probably too late to the #gate on this one. The man has already apologized. The woman who called out his wardrobe choice is already getting threats. I'd known about the comet landing for a while before hearing anything about the outfit.

That said, there's a TBTB angle here, for sure. Not a literal hygiene issue, but... that sense in which a man gets to be a mad genius, too brilliant to follow even the broadest outlines of social convention when it comes to dress. But TBTB doesn't quite cover it. It falls more into a different framework: the notion that women are killjoys. Now, some individual women (and - you guessed it - some men) are killjoys, but that's not the issue. What I'm describing is something more like... Men will say that women are uptight, when the freedom men are asking for is one that women don't enjoy. Depending which men, the next step might involve men saying that it's just not in women's nature to want whatever it is.

I realize I'm being vague, but the "issue" could be anything on the spectrum from ogling to - to keep with the Dan Savage motif - "monogamish." Men will call women prudes, when what these women are actually protesting (albeit discreetly) is that whichever freedom is only being demanded for men. And men won't see this, either because it will be inconceivable to them that women would want equivalent freedoms, or because - and ding, ding, ding, this explains the level of anger among some Twitter-types - it's far too threatening to imagine that women might want the same things as men. Men would rather the issue be that women are humorless scolds than for the alternative interpretation to be true.

As for women's nature, we know that no woman would even think to own a scantily-clad-men shirt. Except, wait a moment. I'm a woman, and guess what? I own such a shirt! (Google "Rufus Wainwright" and "Marc Jacobs.") I'd forgotten about this shirt precisely because it's not a thing that one can wear. Certainly not to, like, work (well, maybe to some work...). I bought it many years ago, as a collector's item or home decor, not as clothing.

So! Maybe I do have a new angle on #shirtgate, after all. I say yes to the inappropriate shirts, but make the privilege gender-neutral, and not limited to rocket scientists. The cost-per-wear on Naked Rufus is abysmal, and it's time for that shirt to... come out of the closet seems the thing to type, but I believe that, technically speaking, that shirt is in a drawer.

UPDATE

The #gate continues, and I'm starting to think there's a YPIS angle as well. While it's absolutely reasonable that the idiotic shirt should be called out, the problem is what happens when the entire world seems to be calling something relatively trivial out in unison.

The question remains, however, what options exist that don't amount to a pile-on. Everyone's commenting simultaneously, and each of the individual comments are measured... but then what happens is, minor annoyance times however many thousand ends up sounding like OUTRAGE. While it could well be the case that obliviously wearing a sexy-women shirt at an important press conference is the very definition of unchecked privilege, the eternal YPIS problem is that privilege-checking has a way of quickly becoming bullying.

That said... I think there's a big difference between pile-ons whose inspiration is an ordinary citizen observed mid-misstep, and a public figure of some kind. This scientist is maybe borderline-public-figure, but let me put it like this: If he had, say, worn the shirt to some departmental meeting, and a photo of him wearing it had leaked, and that had been the inspiration for all manner of tweets and think-pieces, then yes, that would have been a problem. The shirt would have still been a mistake, but a social-media calling-out would have been a far greater one. That would have been bullying. But it's not as if this shirt-wearing were surreptitiously brought into the public record. 

Also: Hadley Freeman sums everything up nicely, as usual. And I will of course be tracking down this book about public shaming that she speaks of...

Outsourced overshare UPDATED

When discussing parental overshare, I tend to draw a line between articles written by the parent and those by a journalist unrelated to the child in question. A reporter isn't claiming to know the child better than anyone else does, or to love the child. Nor is the reporter putting his or her own parenting skills up for discussion. The end result may still be that a child's lowest moments are Googleable later on, but there isn't the same kind of exploitation going on. And there isn't that same sense, for readers, that the information provided is the absolute truth about the child. There's some kind of wall surrounding the family that the journalist isn't allowed past.

So I'm not sure what to make of this:

Often filling his worksheets with scribbles of frowning faces, Matthias barely made it through kindergarten. Then the disaster of science camp made Ms. Kendle fear first grade even more, leading her back to Dr. Diller’s office in mid-July, more desperate than the year before. (She permitted Dr. Diller to record their conversation for this article.) The doctor floated an option: adding Risperdal, which has shown promise in tempering disruptive behavior in some children.

By "this" I mean the ethically-momentous aside about how this child's doctor's appointment came to be recorded (and photographed!) for a national publication. This mother isn't writing the piece herself, but it's her decision that's allowing doctor-patient confidentiality to be abandoned, in favor (presumably) of some possible greater good that might come from addressing the question of pediatric psychiatric medication, a good that can apparently only be achieved if the child is abundantly identifiable.

Which... leads to a not-all-that-out-there slippery-slope question. We don't hear whether the child agreed to any of this, but he's six. At what age is a kid too old for a parent to unilaterally permit such a thing? A "child" is, after all, anyone under 18. Could the parent of a high school senior, in conjunction with a journalist, give that 17-year-old's doctor permission to record an appointment?

UPDATE

And this, from the very same paper, might give parents considering sharing their children's psychiatric visits with a reporter some pause. Turns out that disclosing a mental health condition can get a person fired! Which, unfair as it may be, might be a reason not to reveal a condition your kid has in a newspaper. Disclosure of anything for which the word "disclosure" is appropriate has to be left up to the individual. Disclosing stuff about your kid means your kid, as an adult, won't have a choice either way.

Further thoughts on Mark Zuckerberg's undershirts

We're all aware of the argument: Given that women in [name a country with a terrible human rights record] are subject to [name an extreme form of deprivation or violence], women in the West have no right to complain about anything. Feminism, in this understanding, is a zero-sum game. Except that that's never the point - the point is to dismiss feminist concerns, not to get feminists to change their priorities.

In a piece that vaguely gestures in that direction, Sally Kohn defends Lena Dunham from her from-the-left detractors (conveniently allowing TNR to illustrate the piece in the way that all lifestyle articles must be illustrated, i.e. with a photo of Dunham), yet objects to those who - ahem - called Mark Zuckerberg's gray-t-shirt comments sexist:

Seriously? Zuckerberg did not explicitly—or, I'd argue, implicitly—contrast himself with women, but merely stated that he finds fashion concerns to be "silly" and "frivolous." If anything, he was referring to his fellow male tech CEOs, like Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and his Prada suits; after all, only 6 percent of Silicon Valley CEOs are female. But in criticizing Zuckerberg, Davis and Krupnick relied on a stereotype that he himself did not—that only women care about clothes—and perhaps even reinforced that stereotype in sounding the feminist alarm.

Kohn cites "the risk of feminist overreach." As she sees it, feminist scolds are out to get poor (intentional, intentional...) Mark Zuckerberg and his noble rejection of Prada:

[I]f feminism becomes like the boy who cried wolf—if girls, and women, cry sexism too readily and often—America will stop listening. The minute feminism becomes hypercritical and humorless, it becomes too easy for the mainstream to dismiss our more valid complaints. And let’s be honest, it’s kind of refreshing for feminism to be at the cool kids’ table of society at the moment, fraught and confining though it might sometimes be. Does anyone really want to return to the period of sidelined, shrill feminism?

And so the game is given away. No one who describes any era of feminism as "shrill" - indeed, no one who uses the word "shrill" - is arguing from any kind of pro-feminist position. Now, it's totally fine (if a bit contradictory) for anti-feminist women to write opinion articles. But Kohn is claiming to be criticizing the movement from within, so as to save it from itself. Which seems a bit disingenuous, but who knows. Kohn's basically right about Dunhamgate. Maybe an editor added "shrill"...

What interests me here more than the feminism angle, though, is the crying-wolf one. It's not crying wolf to cite less-than-extreme examples of bigotry, assuming you do so in a way that acknowledges their non-extreme nature. As I've said so very many times, it ought to be possible to call out anti-Semitism that falls short of death camps. So, too, with sexism. That NYMag piece was prominently tagged "casual sexism," for goodness sake! Neither item Kohn cites in any way attempts to suggest that Zuckerberg himself is a particular threat to women. Rather, his comments say something about our culture, and point to a very real reason that women (and others with stereotypically feminine interests) end up dismissed as unserious.

Now, if you're going to write about something - anything - it's a weak rhetorical strategy to open with a big disclaimer about how well aware you are that there are more important things in the world than what you're about to say. That does pose a challenge for those who seek to highlight things that are -bad-but-not-that-bad. Commenting at all has a way of seeming to be overstating the case. I was attempting to address something along these lines, as it happens, in my post about the strudel-commenting stranger. My point there was certainly not that the biggest menace to women today is the possibility that you'll get unsolicited comments about your afternoon cake. Rather, I was trying to convey that there are certain day-to-day... specificities about being female that set women back. And I intentionally don't use the term "microaggression," because for whatever reason, it has a way of coming across as overstating whichever case.

Trollerie

Via Antonia Noori Farzan, yes, "trolling" is the best way to describe this Observer story about the trouble it is for "'kids [...] somewhere between their mid 20s and their 40s, in some cases even older" who want their parents to buy them luxury apartments in Brooklyn. Their problem isn't that their parents are refusing to buy them apartments. It's that Brooklyn's too scruffy, as far as the parents are concerned. Not only is this the firstest worldest of non-problems, but it's framed as service journalism for the not-so-young adults in question:

And for those trying to convince their families to lend a hand, letting them see you take some knocks in the marketplace can be helpful. “Even when children are well established professionals with high income of their own, I see parents buying for them,” Ms. Sewtz, the Douglas Elliman broker, told the Observer. “Often, the child will be competing against cash buyers. And the parents see: Oh, again you lost out on a bidding war. Again you lost out. Hardly any parent sets out from the beginning and says, ‘Let me just buy you a mansion for three million dollars.’”

Well done, then,  Chris Pomorski! You've managed to far outshine Gwyneth-and-crew, whose "Gift Guide" includes a $4,739 gold... juicer, of course. Or does it? Which is the better trollerie - being knowingly out-of-touch (even turning one's out-of-touch-ness into a brand), or engaging in Styles-style rhetoric?

"Yeah"

In a recent interview with HR maven Victoria Humphrey, Leonard Lopate broaches the contentious topic of unpaid interning. To which she, the purported employment expert, replies, "I guess I wasn't aware it was controversial." Off to a great start!

Lopate then explains about how some workers aren't keen on the whole not-getting-paid thing, but adds a not-so-surprising-for-media caveat: "In our field, it's the only way we find out whether somebody would be a good fit for us." Indeed, there appear to be two different tracks by which one can work for free for his show. (As best as I can tell, there's either volunteering or interning, the latter of which includes Metrocard fare.)

Lopate doesn't elaborate on why employee assessment a) can't be done through an application-and-interview process, or b) why, if a trial period is needed, it has to be unpaid. Low-paid is something one can work with. (I should know - I've been working with variants of it for some time now.) Unpaid is trickier to budget. The person being tried out doesn't magically lack living expenses, and if it turns out you're not "a good fit for" whichever industry, the time you spent working in it would be fairly useless but for the pay. It's not like a degree, which can be somewhat transferrable. But if all you have from a gig is the line on your resume, and that's not even a field you're entering, what's the use? (OK, fine, there's some use, in that it's better than nothing, but from the studies I've seen, it doesn't appear that "unpaid" is actually that much more helpful than "blank.")

Humphrey responds, "Oh yes, OK, now I understand," although it's clear from what follows that she hasn't the foggiest. She points out that unpaid internships can make someone more employable, which... are we going to expect her to be up on the research that says this isn't necessarily the case, she who's as good as never heard of the internship question until the past week or so? "It isn't like you're being forced, right?" No, not right, unless you're not counting coercion as a kind of forcing, but anyway. She continues: "I just don't understand why there would be any kind of quote unquote complaining about that from the intern's end. If you don't want to be an unpaid intern then go get a job." Lopate then says, "Well, if you can," to which she responds, "Yeah, I know, well, that's kind of my point, yeah." Yeah. But, I mean, what was she going to say, this workplace expert to whom it was news that unpaid work is controversial?

As best as I can tell, in the most generous interpretation, her "point" was that those losers who can't or won't get a job should be grateful for the opportunity to enjoy the sheer proximity to office life, which could - who knows? - trick down into some kind of money-providing job, at some point in the future. But my real concern here isn't this HR expert I'd never heard of before, but this seemingly left-wing radio host I've been listening to for ages. (Which is, I learned from this program, more than can be said for some people applying to work for him; for pay or not, I don't recall.) Why, Leonard Lopate, do you require unpaid labor to assess candidates? Don't you see how that essentially implies interns from rich families? And how that, in turn, impacts the coverage? (I, as someone who listens to the show regularly, could totally elaborate.) And that it's unfair even to kids from rich families, whose work is also work, and also deserves compensation (and no, subway fare isn't compensation)? Why is it that, in making the seemingly simple claim that work deserves pay, I end up to the left of the left? And what does it say that equivalent employers who present content to the right of what Lopate does are willing to pay at least something to their lowest-level employees?

"My full-time, unpaid, job is managing my appetite, and in between that I write for the Guardian."

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett sums up weight-think:

“You have an eating disorder,” some readers of my blog informed me, and I felt affronted. An unhealthy relationship with food, maybe; perhaps even disordered eating. But an eating disorder? I don’t think so. I am a healthy weight, as are many of the women who contacted me to describe their own struggles, their food obsessions, flaws and feelings of being just “too much”. This is despite these women having made significant real-world achievements: a PhD in astrophysics, two beautiful children, a successful career, a loving partner. This is despite, for many of them, being slim. Slimmer than me. 

There are undoubtedly those who will say that, in the midst of an obesity crisis, “skinny bitches” feeling fat is the least of society’s problems. I can sympathise with that viewpoint. It is how I feel when I speak to those who are thinner than me. “What’s your problem?” I think. “I would love to be that thin.”

I know I have been socialised to compete with other women – to size them up, to envy those who are slimmer – but I believe their suffering is as valid as mine, and that body image problems can manifest themselves even when, from the outside, you’re seen to embody the media-approved feminine ideal.

Yes. It's weight-think - and not some kind of ambient request to vary our shirt color - is the extra-added pressure on women in our society, holding us back from greatness, or just optimal enjoyment of our lives.

As for what to do about it, there are two possible ways to go. One is to raise awareness of the sheer ubiquity of this issue, which - and this is what Cosslett keeps hinting at - is wrongly assumed to impact only the small percentage of women with full-on eating disorders, or the especially vapid-and-vain. What a little digging reveals is that even the women you'd least expect will, say, get a diet Coke, and then drop other cues that amount to, huh, even she worries about this. Women who come across as serious, and who give back to the community. Women who've never been fat. Women who, by all other markers, don't appear to give a damn about their looks.

If we demolished the myth that women who care about their weight and think about this far, far more than the typical man does are some kind of aberration, perhaps progress would follow. Acknowledge the problem! Stop the dithering about how #notallwomen care about their looks, or the largely irrelevant asides about how some women are naturally thin, as if naturally thin women are somehow immune to a) worrying they'll get fat, or b) wanting to be even thinner than "nature" made them?

The trouble with that route is that it has a way of making the problem worse. Think the supposedly empowering blog posts denouncing thigh gaps, illustrated like so. (There were definitely some years in my 20s when I'd have as good as forgotten women's magazines existed if it weren't for Jezebel inviting its readers to summon outrage about them.) While weight-think hangs out in the back of women's minds, it's not always in the front. Certain triggers - fashion mags, protests about fashion mags, conversations with a friend who's thinner than you are but used to be thinner still and thinks you want to hear about it... - can ramp up the background noise.

So the second option is to suggest tuning out that sort of noise as much as possible. Cancel your subscription to the magazines that make a big deal of it every time they feature a woman with any body fat whatsoever. Hang out a bit less with that friend, or change the subject when she starts on it. Let weight-think fade into the background. It can resurface unexpectedly, even in women who think they've outgrown it. But you absolutely can control how present these triggers are in your life, and, to some extent, in that of your kids. Stop treating weight-think as an essential truth of the female experience, and it'll stop being one!

Awareness-raising and tuning-out, then, can seem mutually exclusive. And maybe to some extent they are. But there's got to be some way to reconcile the two, as they're both critical to getting rid of weight-think once and for all.

When sloppiness signals seriousness

A week or so ago, I ended up in a fairly intense (offline) discussion of too-brilliant-to-bathe, a term I coined, but a concept that others in-and-married-to-academia are also familiar with. For the uninitiated: TBTB is the phenomenon by which a man is able to demonstrate his intellectual superiority through his lack of effort in the grooming realm. A man who's been so busy thinking Great Thoughts that he simply hasn't had time to get a haircut in the last two years, or a new shirt in the last decade. Central to the theory of TBTB is that this laxity is an intentional part of self-presentation. As in, it's partly that men have an easier time getting away with looking sloppy, but it's also that sloppiness signals seriousness. For men. White men, mostly, but not exclusively. The sloppiness will help a man's reputation, help spread the word that he's so very lost in thought that he - unlike his colleagues in crisp new Patagonia or whatever academics who do spend time and money on their clothing might wear - can't spare the moment it would take to not dress in tweedy rags.

A variant of TBTB, however, is the man who's too brilliant to own more than one outfit. These men - whom we're now hearing about because Mark Zuckerberg apparently owns a lot of gray t-shirts - by all accounts make time to bathe, but their sartorial limitations hold the key to their great works. Allison P. Davis quotes Zuckerberg:

"I’m in this really lucky position where I get to wake up every day and help serve more than a billion people. And I’d feel I’m not doing my job if I spent any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life."

Davis cries sexism, and rightly so. Jess Cartner-Morley also gets it:

Grey marl is a sartorial humblebrag. It’s everyman and yet classy at the same time. (For instance, if you are in a posh hotel gym, the proportion of grey marl T-shirts will be much higher than in a municipal leisure centre. Fact.) Note that when Zuckerberg talks about other men who wear the same clothes every day, the comparisons he draws are Steve Jobs and President Obama. An ego like that has no need of bling.

Indeed.

What's funny to me about all of this is that ... I also wear a gray t-shirt nearly every day. I may shake it up with a white or black t-shirt, but that's about it. Not because there are billions of people requiring my guidance, but because I gravitate to these shirts, and thus seem to have acquired enough of them to last a laundry cycle.

More generally, though, uniform-dressing is plenty common among women as well, at least among women who aren't required to look a particular way for their jobs. (Blogging and dissertating, both very gray-t-shirt-compatible.) Actually, forget that caveat - a moment of internet-research tells me that Joan Rivers was a uniform-dresser. Brad Pitt's ex and current, both also uniform-wearers. Lots of people do this, including men and women, fashion-conscious and not, brilliant and otherwise. It's only held up a mark of genius when a Great Man does it. When a woman does, it's... that she's thrifty, or that she knows what works with her body/her coloring. So it's not quite like TBTB, in that men and women both uniform-dress. The difference is more in the reception.

Catcalling and power

At 31, I'm ten years past 21, an age that still doesn't sound, to me, all that young. I've lost whichever youthful-and-vulnerable quality leads men to approach women in public spaces to tell them to smile. But it's not over till it's over, or something. I was recently at a coffee shop with my husband, when an older man (of the Caucasian persuasion, I'll note, for intersectionality purposes; he also looked well-to-do, which I know really narrows it down in this part of NJ) started, and basically didn't stop, discussing my choice to decline the whipped cream that comes with the apple strudel. He began by loudly admonishing the waitstaff for "forgetting" my cream, and then when I confirmed that I hadn't wanted it in the first place (saying this more to the server than this guy, but it's a small place), he kept offering me some cream he hadn't finished. I told him I don't like whipped cream, and got to hear extensively about why I'm wrong, why it's delicious, why this particular whipped cream was unusually delicious, and so on. I got another round of this quite a while later, as my husband and I got up to leave.

Now, I have no idea whether this man intended any of this as flirtatious. I didn't feel at all sexually threatened by any of it, just a bit imposed-upon while trying to revise this academic article I'd been working on for, oh, about a year, and had to get done over the weekend. If I'd been alone, it might have been otherwise, but the fact that I was not makes me think this wasn't a hitting-on situation. What struck me was that the chances that a man's food choices would be up for public discussion are basically nil. What a woman's eating, or not eating, is eternally the business of strangers.

Part of it is the whole women-and-weight thing. Never mind that I hadn't exactly ordered the diet platter (strudel and a by all accounts whole-milk cappuccino!), but I guess rejecting whipped cream because of not liking its taste is inconceivable. I must have been depriving myself of some pleasure, and it was this man's business that I enjoy some cream, perhaps his cream. But it's more centrally a matter of personal space, of approachability, of this sense that a woman is a person who, by virtue of being a woman, invites nosy inquiry.

And that's really the essential. Not every woman is chased down the street by men who find her beautiful. And not every public-space encounter can be rounded up to something as ominous-sounding as rape culture. But if we're looking for some common-denominator The Female Experience, it could well involve something having to do with men thinking they're entitled to personal and mildly squirm-inducing banter. I don't think this man was a terrible person, or doing something horribly offensive. What I think this interaction demonstrates is just the baseline difference between public space for men and for women.

What is "liberal" parenting?

Miss Self-Important brings our attention to an egregious example of parental overshare, but of the variant where the parent’s the one who comes across as looking ridiculous. It's a piece about so-called liberal parenting, although I'm having trouble sorting out what that is, seeing as today's coastal elite liberal types are supposedly helicopter parents, while the let-the-kids-be sorts are the throwbacks. Liberal parenting has been in the news, what with the National Review accusing Lena Dunham’s parents of child abuse through excessive liberalism. But let’s turn instead to some historical examples of liberal parenting. Not 17th century pamphlet. 20th-century sitcom:

Two examples come to mind immediately. The first – in the order of coming to mind, not chronologically – is 1990s Britcom “Absolutely Fabulous.” Has there ever been a more liberal parent than Edina Monsoon? But she ends up with a daughter like Saffy. Saffy’s not politically conservative – if anything, she’s a better leftist than Edina, calling out her mother’s various rich-hippie hypocrisies – but she’s super-serious, sensible, buttoned-up. It’s precisely because Edina’s useless in that area that Saffy figured out, at a young age, how to deal with all that's practical. A typical Saffy move will be explaining to Edina, whose alimony's being cut off, how to buy milk at a supermarket. (Edina would have otherwise had it delivered from an upscale department store, which is apparently a thing that can be done in England.)

Next up is the more subtle pairing of Phyllis and Bess on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Phyllis’s thing is that she’s a liberal-and-liberated woman. She has a Master’s degree and myriad artistic and philanthropic involvements. She’s also a housewife, on a show that centers around a woman with a high-powered career. When Phyllis, Rhoda, and Mary are together, Phyllis’s progressive credentials are a kind of running joke. Because it’s the 1970s, Phyllis is into a kind of liberal parenting that seems very… 1970s. She has Bess call her “Phyllis,” and has a deeply-researched parenting philosophy, complete with many books she in one early episode heaves at Mary, who’s babysitting.

Bess's upbringing is in some respects really jarring today. When the time comes for a birds-and-bees discussion, poor Bess comes to Mary and explains that while Phyllis had told her about sex, she didn’t say anything about love. This is a problem because Bess’s boyfriend (she and – presumably – the off-screen boyfriend are 10 or 11 at the time) says he loves her, and she’s afraid that saying she loves him back will mean she has to sleep with him. Mary, who’s the mix of horrified and amused that the audience is meant to be (and might have been in the 1970s; I had trouble getting past horrified.)

There’s also the great episode where Rhoda’s mother - under the influence of Phyllis - suddenly tries out liberal parenting… on a 30ish Rhoda. She decides she's going to be Rhoda's "friend," and announces she's not wearing a bra. Rhoda is aghast.

In any case, Bess, like Saffy, has a good head on her shoulders. She’s not uptight like Saffy (she laughs at Rhoda’s jokes, and plays poker with Mr. Grant), but is several notches more reasonable than Phyllis. The Phyllis-Bess dynamic is a less farcical version of the Edina-Saffy one, but is overall the same idea. The major difference is that Phyllis's liberal parenting is of the hyperinvolved variety. Phyllis has time on her hands, and turns Bess into a project (see the episode where she decides that Bess should write a book, and sits down to write it herself). Edina, meanwhile, is off being a libertine and leaves Saffy to her own devices.

But I'm left wondering: What’s the relationship between liberal parenting and liberal politics? It seems at best a really limited one. Here, we might turn to a different (and far inferior) sitcom, “Family Ties,” where the ex-hippie parents have to contend with their Reagan-loving kid, played by Michael J. Fox (not to mention the mall-and-boy-crazy Mallory). The parents – and perhaps it’s key that in this case, there are two of them (Phyllis is married to the eternally offscreen Lars) – do impose rules. The Michael J. Fox character’s conservatism is a rebellion against his parents’ politics, but not their parenting.

But more to the point, as Heather Havrilesky, Emily Matchar, and others keep pointing out, the new supermom fixation on feeding kids home-farmed everything isn't really one way or the other, politically. Those who embrace it tend to see themselves as being on the left (anti-corporate, etc.), but are also rejecting the basic tenets of what it means to be a feminist, namely the need for a woman to be able to support herself financially, and to have an identity that isn't just relational. "Liberal" parenting today is neither a) permissive, nor b) feminist. And sitcoms have turned my brain into too much mush to sort that paradox out.

I sleep all night and I work all day

The infinite source of fascinating material that is Facebook points me to a story about the "lumbersexual." This phrase that someone is trying to make happen refers to heritage-chic as worn by heterosexual men. It doesn't quite work, because a) the lumberjack look isn't unexpected on a straight or masculine-end-of-the-spectrum man, thus the Lumberjack Song, and b) as someone pointed out on that same Facebook thread, the look is already kind of passé.

So-last-season though it may be, I absolutely gravitate towards the look. Although as I envision it when, ahem, wearing it, it's not so much "lumberjack" as "lumberjack as interpreted by a hip man or woman in Tokyo." This is a look. I know this because of Japanese Instagram, those two weeks in Japan, and the existence of such things as "Shibuya" boots by an American rugged-boot company and Uniqlo flannel. (Also: Muji flannel.) It's a level of cultural appropriation and androgyny I don't think I have the semiotics skills to make sense of, but it's a look, and one that's - unsurprisingly - compatible with living in a muddy, woodsy part of 'merica. I might on some level wish I dressed like a super-chic, ultra-feminine woman in Tokyo or Milan or something, but it just wouldn't work.

On that note, let me announce that I've finally tracked down The Boots. By which I mean brown leather Alpine hiking boots with red laces. Specifically, these are what finally ended up working out. They're all kinds of fabulous, and would probably look that much more so in Japan.

Strange bedfellows UPDATED

Something odd has happened online recently. An allegiance of conservative rabble-rousers and... black feminists? I suppose, upon reflection, it's not that strange, because if you think in terms of common enemies, there's the White Lady. Gwyneth? No - the other one. Yes, that's right, Lena Dunham, whose fame the National Review wants to hate-cash-in on, and whose work is already hate-consumed plenty from the left. This is, Google tells me, not new - way back in 2013, this very "common ground" was already being cited.

I do, rest assured, have a grand theory of all of this, but I don't waste grand theories on mere blog posts. (Actually, I do that all the time, but I'm trying not to!)

UPDATE

Still saving the grand theory, but in the mean time, see also Kay Hymowitz (and other conservatives) discovering "privilege" in the wake of the catcalling-video controversy. Underprivileged men of color become all of a sudden so sympathetic to the right when these men are the (perceived) antagonists of the young-Hillary demographic.

Gyozamergency

Has it ever happened to you that you've made far too much dumpling filling to fit in the dumpling wrappers you've purchased? Because I've dealt with this so often, this time I got the ratio close to correct. But not quite. I didn't want to waste the remaining filling (a mix of extra-firm tofu, bok choy, scallion, garlic, ginger, mirin, sesame oil, soy sauce, and potato starch), but couldn't think what I'd possibly use it for if I put it away in the fridge.

Then came the epiphany! I remembered that Cooking With Dog had recently shown how to make homemade wrappers. What ensued was not, however, that recipe. I instead emptied the small amount of all-purpose flour left in the flour container into a bowl, and then added (cold) tap water from the sink, mixing a bit along the way, until the consistency seemed right. I (very briefly) kneaded the result, then divided it up into pieces to roll out with a rolling pin. Seeing as I'd run out of flour, I used potato starch on the cutting board. The from-scratch wrappers were not exactly circular, and were far thicker than the prepackaged Mitsuwa variety (which seemed, in turn, much thinner than the thin-ish ones from Hmart).

And... oddly enough, the frantically-homemade wrappers worked! I'm sure the Cooking With Dog way is better - and am still meaning to try it out - but between the filling, the deliciousness-making process (steamed-then-fried), and the dipping sauce (an elaborate step involving pouring soy sauce into a small bowl), it's possible that I wouldn't have noticed that much of a difference.

Privilege doesn't pay the bills, Installment # 532

When I saw the title, "How I Got Rejected From a Job at the Container Store," I immediately assumed that the associated article would be a personal essay by someone who finds it inconceivable that a store wouldn't just hire everyone who applies. I don't know why that's where my mind went - and not to any number of other reasons someone might have not gotten a job - but that's what happened.

In a sense, Deborah Copaken's article takes that one step further. Copaken comes across as having felt herself entitled to a job at the store, and is stunned when the titular rejection occurs:

Because seriously, if an Emmy-award-winning, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard grad cannot land a job as a greeter at The Container Store—or anywhere else for that matter, hard as I tried—we are all doomed.

She seems under the impression, in other words, that one would expect the Container Store to put resumes like hers on the top of the pile. When, alas, those are exactly the kind of qualifications you wouldn't want to bring up while looking for a retail position. As Ester Bloom points out, dropping a euphemistic-Boston may repel certain employers, but even without the Harvard angle, it's clear where this approach might fail. If anything about your application suggests you think you deserve a pat on the back for swallowing your pride and applying to a certain position, no matter the sector, you probably won't get the job. And if you are, as the imperfect term has it, overqualified, whoever's doing the hiring is bound to think you think you're too good for the job (which, if you're referring to the job ad itself as "spam," you probably do), and that you'll quit the moment something else becomes available, which is, from an employer's perspective, a reasonable concern.

I say all of this, however, not to chastise Copaken, but rather because these details actually show the importance of her article. As she makes perfectly clear, she needed a job like the one this retail establishment was advertising. She - a single mother and breast cancer patient! - needed money and health insurance, things that ambient privilege does not provide. She may not have known how to get a job along these lines, but that was posing a real problem for her. She wasn't playing at being scrappy, or - as Barbara Ehrenreich once did - posing as a working-class worker in order to write about doing so. She was - as she explains it - genuinely in-between gigs, and as glamorous as those gigs do sound, she was suffering from some not especially first-world problems in the interim.

The thing to which Copaken feels entitled is the ability to support her family and pay for her own much-needed health care. And is that so unreasonable? Bloom has it right when she gives as the article's first takeaway, "Even with the improvements made possible by Obamacare, our for-profit, tied-to-employment health insurance system is a horse poop cupcake topped with FML sprinkles." That's the major point here - and these are issues for the state, not The Container Store, to address. And that, to me, is the essential. Sure, we can fault Copaken for sounding naive, but naive people also have living expenses. That she evidently comes from the class that hasn't a clue about such things didn't spare her from needing to be clued-in. And even if she had been a savvier Container Store applicant, there's no reason to think she'd have been picked from among the hundreds who probably applied.

Stories of the weekend

-The buried lede here is that looks matter in dating, for men and women alike. (As in, nearly all people, regardless of gender, eliminate most of the human population on the basis of looks alone, before even considering such things as personality, kindness, accomplishments, etc. - "looks matter" doesn't mean looks can typically cancel out deficiencies in other areas.) So it's kind of amusing to see comments along the lines of, 'duh, men are visual creatures.' This would be a relevant point to make if Tinder involved women's photos and men's CVs, but, as I understand it, it does not.

-Pretty much everything I could possibly say about the Hollaback! video controversy is on WWPD already in one way or another, but the most relevant post is probably this one. Other repeating-myself points include the fact that street harassment is - as some seem to get - about power. (Thus why a plain-looking 14-year-old girl may find herself bothered far more often than a reasonably attractive 20-year-old woman.) I also continue to think the feminist focus on catcalls is... a bit like the feminist focus on issues like how young and thin fashion models tend to be. These are absolutely real problems, but they're also photogenic ones. Along with the more productive awareness-raising they accomplish, they provoke something that might be called concern-ogling. Depending how the coverage plays out, it can end up reinforcing the idea that to be female is to be young, beautiful, and the recipient of a continuous, admiring male gaze.

-Spot-on.