What Would Phoebe Do

Why high fashion is about pleasing straight men

2012-01-26T12:27:00.000-05:00

Recently, I speculated about the relationship between, on the one hand, the ubiquity of ever-younger, ever-thinner high-fashion runway models, and, on the other, the male gaze. The runway waif is not what most men would consider ideal, but most men probably do want (or feel they ought to want) women thinner and younger than are readily available to them. The waif is thus chosen not as a type with a great sex appeal to men, but rather as an exaggerated version of what insecure women feel they ought to look more like, for Society, but also, in more banal terms, for men.

In other words, even if we can readily agree that high fashion is not about pleasing men, it does not exist in an entirely unrelated sphere. The image of the preadolescent gamine isn't a straightforward reflection of What Men Want, or, for that matter, of what women want to look like, but more like a distorted one. It's not, as popularly understood, that the high-fashion build is something that women or gay men happen to prefer. It's about selling clothes, perfumes, a brand, and the typical female consumer probably does think she'd be more attractive if younger and thinner.

But we are meant to understand that fashion (and no, Victoria's Secret, despite the runway format, doesn't count) is about women trying to impress other women, or, in more homophobic than misogynistic interpretations, about women adhering to the oppressive standards set for them by some cabal of gay men. Straight men, meanwhile, are more than happy to explain, at every opportunity, that they don't care if women wear high heels or makeup. In fact, enlightened beings that they are, they're concerned for the women who spend unnecessary time and money on their appearances, who go around uncomfortable. They will tell us that they prefer a natural-looking woman (a 22-year-old bikini model) to an overly done-up one (a 45-year-old with whom they'd actually have a shot at getting a date).

They will ignore that, in telling us this, they're missing the broader picture, which is that women need not make all or any such choices according to what will please men. There are a good number of women out there who are for whatever reason (monogamously coupled, single but not looking, lesbian) not particularly trying to attract any men sexually; of the subset of women who are, there's no reason to think they care what you, random dude on the Internet, would go for.

My earlier thoughts on this topic were that high fashion serves as a break of sorts from the male gaze. That it's liberating, kind of, to wear your nails blue, your hair pink, your heels chunky (and for those not big on fashion, these things may sound "alternative," and certainly didn't originate on the runways, but they all make their way there), because it looks cool, heck, because you saw it on a fashion blog, but not because it will increase your appeal to the opposite sex. I thought that Leandra Medine made a good, if poorly-executed, point.

But there are those pesky caveats. "Man-repelling" clothes are never actually about repelling men. They're about partially obscuring conventional "natural" beauty under an unconventional artificial exterior, as Medine herself admits. "Ugly" looks are about the contrast - the more out-there the clothes, the less out-there the features of the woman wearing them. For most women, a short enough skirt is more than adequate. But it's the rare woman who can have a line out her door while in sweats, or, for that matter, avant-garde high fashion. The miniskirt, the carefully-applied makeup, the perfectly-done hair, these signal, in this framework, that one is not in possession of traits that, alas, are destined to allure.

So is it no-win? Dress to please men, and you're dressing to please men. Dress not to please men, and you're really just distinguishing yourself from the kind of women who require a looks-boost from their artifice, announcing that you're so good-looking that you can get away with pink eyeliner and frizz. A bind indeed. The obvious answer would be to simply not phrase things in terms of the male gaze, but surely that's too straightforward.

Emily Yoffe on Rescue Culture

2012-01-26T11:56:00.001-05:00

A must-read. I'm amazed it applies to cat and guinea pig adoption as well. It makes me wonder if most New Yorkers are qualified to "own" the mice that invariably appear in NY apartments, and that seem perfectly capable of keeping on keeping on, even without setting out special feed bowls, providing fresh water, or taking them out for three walks daily.

Why you should buy those lattes

2012-01-25T17:40:00.000-05:00

Every so often, the NYT discovers that the sky is blue, the earth is round, and if you spend $3 on coffee every day, 3x365 amounts to a bigger number than the multiplication-challenged would have thought. Small purchases add up. Motoko Rich is the latest to bring this fact to our attention:

According to a new survey, half of all American workers buy coffee regularly during work hours, spending more than $20 a week on java, or about $1,000 a year. (Workers 18 to 34 years old spend about twice as much, on average, as workers over 45.) Two-thirds of workers buy lunch instead of bringing something from home, and spend an average of $37 a week. That translates into nearly $2,000 a year — the price of a new piece of furniture or a vacation.

This is no longer an issue in my own life, as I live where there are no stores at all, and the biking necessary to make it to a coffee shop means that I can buy as many $4 mochas as I want and that's still at most a mocha a month. But, readers who live where the coffee shop tempts, you have my permission, no, encouragement to go forth. Ask yourselves:

-Is coffee harmful? I know we-as-a-society are in the mindset of telling smokers how much they'd save if they quit, but this is meant to be a way to convince them to quit for health reasons, not because they've been rendered destitute, or because we think they'd actually prefer whatever it was they could buy with the money they've saved to the cigarettes they're now not buying. But this approach can't just be lifted up and applied to safe and possibly even beneficial forms of consumption. With coffee, the presumed alternative is making coffee at home, not giving it up altogether.

-Is coffee wasteful? It's wasteful to drink coffee in the same way that it's wasteful to own more than the necessary clothes and shoes, to live in a larger-than-necessary home, drive a larger-than-necessary (or, in some cases, any) car, to own 99% of our electronics. It is wasteful to wear any makeup or jewelry, as one can perfectly well stay warm and decent without. It is wasteful to put herbs on food, when the stuff's edible and nutritious without the added garnish/flavor. By all means, make coffee at home, or get the "to stay" cup, or use a thermos. But, worst-case-scenario, a paper cup every workday is, as sins go, not one to hold up as the pinnacle of Western decadence. And no, it is not a uniquely 21st-century-American thing to consume more than is absolutely necessary to survive. That sometimes-tasty sludge known as Turkish coffee? It wasn't invented at the Hummus Place on St. Marks.

-Are coffee shops evil establishments we wish to use our collective power as consumers to put out of business? Opinion's no doubt divided on Starbucks, and those of us who've worked as in barista-worked at the charming independents know how not-charming that can be. But are these really the kind of businesses we feel compelled to shut down? Don't they provide more good than bad? Conviviality? Atmosphere? Change of scenery for the beleaguered 15th-year grad student? Yes, restaurants can claim that food, unlike coffee, is a necessity. But if it's a choice between spending $4 on a home-cooked meal and $3 on coffee, or $30 at the restaurant and 40 cents on coffee at home...

-Would you really prefer the $2,000 purchase to the many $3 ones? It's hard to picture that a $2,000 piece of furniture would be a goal a nomadic 20-something latte consumer is going to hold out for. And vacations... are nice and everything, but less romantic if you have a job that requires travel (air travel especially, ugh), and often end up sucking up massive amounts of money so quickly that you end up learning more than you needed to about urban Italian supermarkets, after getting massively ripped off on dinner upon arriving late and famished the first night. Or so I've heard. With the coffee, you know what you're getting, and the small increase in happiness over that many days (small happinesses add up!) could well be greater than what a vacation or an expensive dining room table might provide. The better question is, do you or do you not have those $2,000 to spare, but even then, eliminating something else (walking down streets with Sephoras on them, for example) can mean keeping the cappuccino if it means that much to you. And why shouldn't it?

-Do you really want to be this smug? For the love of all that's compostable, congratulations to those who make a big batch of lentils every Sunday night and eat that all week, who save money and livestock in the process, and who are invariably incapable of making anything in the precious slow-cooker without leaving comments about it online in a patronizing tone. Some of us do not share your infinite tolerance for monotony and/or legumes.

Baking woes

2012-01-25T10:26:00.000-05:00

Got butter at Wegman's rather than Whole Foods. Land o Lakes rather than 365. Took it out of the wrapper and was inundated with that horrible fake-butter smell that was a sudden reminder of precisely what it was about butter I always found so nauseating as a child. An only slightly less intense version of the artificial butter that goes on popcorn, that's pumped into Penn Station, and that has the proven capacity to make me gag. As an adult, though, I've cooked/baked with (salted, Whole Foods store brand) butter all the time, and not found it to be a problem. It occurred to me that the one difference, other than the brand, was that this one was unsalted. But could salt impact the smell of something? That didn't seem likely, so I checked the sell-by date. Definitely still good. How could some butter smell so much more intensely like butter than other butter?

Then I noticed the ingredients. "Natural flavor" turns out to be a second ingredient in what I would have assumed was a one-ingredient food. I looked up what this meant, and to the best of my knowledge, it's the kind of thing that's unnerving to food purists, and that wouldn't necessarily bother me in, say, a candy bar, but a) with baking, you kind of want to know what you're working with, and b) I have this odd, visceral reaction to that particular smell, one that certainly does not encourage me to include it in more work-intensive pastry. At this point, the butter was already rolled out and partially folded into the dough for chocolate croissants. Or would have been, if the dough itself had formed properly.

After much discussion (and Googling) of whether, once cooked, the smell would disappear, I made the executive decision that if I could still smell it after chilling the dough in the freezer, I'd accept that loss of one egg, one cup flour, 1/2 cup sugar. And so it went.

Word-association: Princeton

2012-01-24T18:32:00.001-05:00

Popped collars. Tanned, blond, long-limbed young women, and young men with III or IV after their names. Lacrosse. Binge-drinking good-ol'-boys. When I moved here in September, to accompany my husband who's doing a postdoc euphemistically near the university, I'd imagined there'd be a preppy presence on the campus. I even remember that the university's... reputation had something to do with why, at my Ivy-obsessed but not-very-white-bread high school, HYP as good as didn't include the "P." I don't think terribly many kids applied, and of those who went, at least two were legacies.

Granted, the only bit of the campus I spend time at is the library, but if there's any demographic with a sizable presence, it's studious-nerdy-seeming young black women. After that, studious-nerdy-seeming young white women. After that, dandy-ish male grad students. So I'm wondering, is this just who spends time at the library? Are there all kinds of decadent WASPy happenings, hidden from view? Do the notorious eating clubs connect by tunnel to classroom buildings, dining halls, gyms, and emerging from the underground campus is discouraged? The what-you'd-expects are not at the library, or the coffee shop, or on Nassau Street, so either Princeton has changed (in, might I say, the right direction); its real essence is hidden from view; or I wear special Lacoste-obscuring goggles when I leave the house.

Choice, feminism

2012-01-24T18:01:00.002-05:00

Cynthia "Miranda" Nixon chose to be gay. Good for her? Not so simple!

The principle controversy here is that if homosexuality is or can be a choice, that's ammunition for homophobes. Why all the fuss about same-sex marriage, opponents will say, if the gay-identified could simply choose to fall in love with members of the opposite sex? But! In the interest of letting consenting-adults figure things out for themselves, why not fight for the right to be gay and not oppressed, however one arrived at that self-identification? And so on.

The Nixon quote has launched a discussion about sexual orientation (that you can readily find using the search engine of your choice), but it might be just as well-suited to one of female sexuality (which is what you'll find here).

It's difficult, I think we can agree, to picture terribly many men claiming they chose to be gay. This is in part because homophobia is arguably more virulent as directed against gay men and boys than lesbians. (And how perceived-homosexuality is dealt with. A girl who likes softball versus a guy who likes musical theater, regardless of their orientations.) This relates, of course, to the alleged female ambiguity in this area - to the popularly-held and utterly absurd belief that all women are bisexual.

The idea that all women could go either way can't be separated from the idea that men, but not women, are visual creatures. If Woman can find herself sexually attracted to a man once she learns that he's rich/powerful/Newt Gingrich, it's not a great leap to suggest that Woman could, with enough feminist notions, enough had-it-with-men, enough we-could-totally-go-shoe-shopping-together, who knows, become the romantic partner of another woman. And this is perhaps what it means for Cynthia Nixon to consider herself not a bisexual woman currently involved with a woman, but a person with this magical capacity to find a person of either sex attractive, because it's the person, not the gender, that counts.

These traits that seem to make women the darlings of progressive values - straight-identified women aren't limiting themselves to only "hot" partners! Women aren't limiting themselves by sexual orientation! - add up to something else entirely. It's about denying the basic fact of female sexuality, which is that it's a subset of human sexuality. Humans tend to find some other humans, but not all others, sexually desirable. This is true of the experience of women who are straight, gay, or bisexual. It's not that other factors - kindness, sense of humor, status - don't matter. It's not that clever pick-up techniques never persuade. It's that women, like men, divide the world into the potentially-sexually-appealing, and the not-ever-gonna-happen. It's that women, like men, will notice "hot" in its more salient manifestations. It's not that female sexuality is male sexuality, it's not "I'm a Samantha!" (SATC reference acceptable given news item inspiring post) or that women are, on average, as interested as men are in images of context-free nudity. It's that the two are not as different as all that.

OK, the counterargument: Sure, it's liberating, in a sense, that women feel less constrained than men do to find "hot" that which society deems "hot." Of course it's a good thing for women with same-sex attraction that they're not victims of a societal force quite as pernicious as the one aimed at men attracted to men. But it's not terribly liberating that female desire - homosexual or heterosexual - is popularly understood to basically not exist. It sounds all of it so lefty and pomo, yet we're as good as back with Caitlin Flanagan, learning that adolescent girls desire boyfriends, husbands, and merely put up with "hook-ups" as a (misguided! poor dears) route to that end.

So, my three readers, pardon the repetition, but this is exactly why you get so many straight women making the seemingly insensitive/clueless assertion that they are gay men trapped inside female bodies. A claim that would seem to make light of the oppression faced by gay men and boys, but that's at once offensive and about a couple legitimate things. One, there's no way to describe lust-for-man except in terms of that which gay men experience, because women are presumed incapable of fantasies that don't end in bourgeois homemaking, and two, straight women, much like gay men, are stigmatized for this attraction. Men, in our society, are not to be denigrated in that way, to be treated as objects.

I suppose that, by now, if this were a Feministe thread and not a WWPD post, I'd be accused of hijacking the discourse, stealing the virtual microphone from someone doubly marginalized (female and gay) and making it about, if not precisely myself because I'm ancient, married, etc., but about myself insofar as I'm a straight woman who was once a girl who got through many a boring high school class by "choosing" to have crushes on boys in my line of vision. So be it, but I'm confident enough in WWPD's relative powerlessness when it comes to discourse-shifting that this is a risk I'll take.

The forest and the trees

2012-01-24T10:53:00.000-05:00

I haven't had a haircut since August. In theory, twice-yearly haircuts should mean it's fine for me to spend a lot each time. In practice, it means that places that I remember as being in the $60-70 range will be in the $80-90 one the next time around, a problem when it's set in my mind that a good haircut costs $50, which it hasn't in NY for ages. (Getting a haircut here... no thanks for so many reasons, not least of which that anything that costs $X in upscale parts of Manhattan costs $2X on Nassau St. and is half as good.) It's certainly important for me to look glamorous, living in the woods, cuddling with a poodle, and every few weeks or so chatting with highly-focused academics. Self-deprecation (life-deprecation?) aside, $90 strikes me as too much for a trim I don't really need and maybe some bangs. So, DIY. It worked out OK the last time, and is Francophilic-beauty-blogger-approved, so why not?

But I had to decide what I was going for. Would it be:

-Charlotte Gainsbourg? Pros: her schnozziness and my own are more alike than not. Wispy bangs are less of a risk. Cons: if she got Gainsbourg's nose, she got Birkin's hair, and I'm not sure mine's WASPy enough for "wispy."

-Alix, aka The Cherry Blossom Girl? Pros: I know that hair texture personally, 'cause it's mine as well. Cons: those are some thick bangs.

-Rooney Mara's partially-grown-out Dragon-ness? Pros: perfection, not to mention a good photograph to use as a guide for how to part before cutting. Useful to see the look on near-black hair and near-white skin. Cons: possibly more useful as a makeup guide. Gorgeous lipstick, and an inspiration to figure out what to do with that Sephora-brand "smokey eye" kit - that is, to figure out how to put on eye shadow - if there ever was one.

I do not include other possible sources of inspiration along the lines of Natalie Portman or Olivia Wilde, because, as lovely as the above-examples are, there's a level of shall we say looks-capital that so transcends that one can never tell if it's the hairstyle that one is aspiring to or the rest.

The result is some combination of the above-mentioned examples. It will, I realize having slept on it, require styling. But the same is true for any salon-acquired version. Between this and the DIY pains-au-chocolat, I think I've figured out life in the woods after all.

*********

Off-topic, but perhaps not worthy of a whole post of its own: Dan, Dan, Dan, you missed the boat with this letter. You got distracted by mentions of trans identity and polyamory, as if these were relevant to the situation at hand (as if a man is somehow less dumped when the dumper's biological sex and gender identity don't match up?) when a statement like "'I can't prioritize one person above anybody else'" is about as clear as, and only slightly less clichéd than, "It's not you, it's me." It's a variant of "I'm not ready for a relationship." The letter-writer seems hurt, but also seems to get what happened. Savage, meanwhile, will have us know that it is indeed theoretically possible to be this variety of polyamorous. Forest, Dan! Trees!

Your pearls are showing

2012-01-23T13:58:00.002-05:00

In recent days, weeks, I'd noticed references to "pearl-clutching," and hadn't thought much of it. Slate's Torie Bosch, however, is on the case - turns out these references are very much a thing in the feminist blogosphere. Bosch's reference to how "Feministe used the phrase in a blog post about privilege and oppression" got me thinking. What is "pearl-clutching" if not a gender-specific variant of "your privilege is showing"? The clutcher-of-pearls is white, WASPy, conservatively-inclined, stuffy of morals, of-another-time, and, of course, female. It harkens back to notions of women as protectors of home and hearth, pious in eras when the men have grown cynical, fearful of taverns and fermented beverages and the fun the menfolk might have when out on their own. To hurl a "pearl-clutching" accusation is thus both feminist (the pearl-clutcher is fainting at the thought of women having filthy encounters with men or, horrors, other women) and anti-feminist (what if not the sexist norms in whichever part of society has led our pearl-clutcher to be so repressed?)

As with YPIS accusations, the person doing the hurling is not typically lacking the form of privilege in question. To stay with the metaphor, if the (female) hurler doesn't wear pearls, it's not because she didn't inherit a string or two from Gran. It's that she also benefitted from the privilege of attending a liberal-arts college, where she learned that "ladylike" dress is for strivers (i.e. those who enter the professions to escape a lower-middle-class future) and Republicans.

The symbolically-clutched theoretical pearls bring to mind another, more literal jewelry-based topic that came up here a while back: the workplace stigmatization of the woman with the (large, presumed-real-diamond) engagement ring. See also the tsk-tsking of women who alter their appearances (through surgery, makeup, hair extensions and implements) to look more conventionally attractive. These are all essentially, in many respects, the same idea.

There are many layers to dig through here. On the one hand, do we really want to claim that any choice a woman (who may well identify as anti-feminist) makes is by definition feminist, and by definition to be supported by feminists? Is a woman who chooses to insist that women submit to men acting in a way that feminists should support, insofar as she's female and expressing an opinion? It's better, from a feminist perspective, than a situation in which all women submit to men and don't even get to express opinions. Meanwhile, is the pearl-clutcher (or the carat-sporter, or fake-tan-and-weave-preferrer) really the epitome of unchecked privilege? Or is even thinking in these terms the more relevant sign of privilege - that is, is the person who knows to "check" her privilege the person who's so chock-full of every kind of capital, who has the down-time necessary to participate for hours in these truly epic-length threads, actually in a position of greater power?

Unfortunately - or, more accurately, fortunately - dissertation lunch-break is over, and it's time to make more coffee and get back to it. If, by the end of this comment, you don't find that you've swung several notches to the right, or begun favoring some kind of mandatory, Internet-free national service for all young people aged 15-45, I'm impressed.

Hags

2012-01-23T12:21:00.001-05:00

Yet again, the question of very young (think too young for middle school) fashion models is phrased in Think of the Children terms. Guardian writer Viv Groskrop at least offers, as an afterthought, a look at what it means for adult, female consumers that a model has to look 12 and if she also is 12 so be it.

Tucked away at the very end of the piece is, I think, the real story:

How young, then, is too young for fashion? And what's too old? "Sixteen is a good age to start," says [modeling agency director Carole] White. "Seventeen is the perfect age for a model, because most girls feel comfortable in themselves by then; 18 is good too, though, because then all their schooling is out of the way. If a girl started at 20, she would find it difficult to get work. Her agent would probably lie about her age and say she was a year or two younger."

As a 28-year-old full-time student with plenty of student friends my own age or older, I'm tempted to address the bit about all plausible "schooling" being finished by 18. But I will instead highlight the bit about what happens should "a girl" begin modeling at the decrepit age of 20. I will, at the risk of repeating myself, note that the very language of the industry assumes a grown woman couldn't model clothes. I mean, 20 is old for a "girl."

No doubt, the telling-it-like-it-is response would be something about how, for men, for the usual evo-psych reasons, a woman is past it as soon as she's no longer a girl. But it's not clear how this would relate to the preferred looks in images very clearly directed at women, not men. Even if men prefer 15-year-olds (and I'm not saying they do), they wouldn't be the same 15-year-olds.

It would seem, then, that having ever-younger models is a way to draw as many consumers as possible into the insecurity tent, to make even college juniors feel inadequate, and how else to address that inadequacy than by buying crap?

The week, it ended

2012-01-22T22:48:00.001-05:00

-Parchment-paper fish (cod fillet, in this case, with lemon, garlic, olive oil, dried thyme, salt, pepper) really is better. Whole fish is probably better still, but I cling to some shortcuts.

-Obedience class for dogs probably falls into the category of, humanity did just fine without it (if your dog isn't aggressive, and is affectionate with you, and knows the basic commands...), but it can't hurt. But a line must be drawn, and that will probably be at the extra $10 the trainer suggests we spend each week on some kind of "adolescent-dog" meet-up. The whole point of the class was to socialize our dog. That plus what occurs without special planning (today, she met a Westie, and might have met two supermodel Golden Retrievers, if their owner hadn't turned away; there are owners of a Yorkie who sometimes want it to meet Bisou, sometimes just need to go about their business) seems as though it ought to be enough, but if she doesn't get enough socialization, it seems, disaster might ensue. The slight problem is that she was super friendly to the trainer, and has taken to kissing the one friend of ours who'd initially, and for no real reason, frightened her. The techniques are quite useful, especially the tip about needing to "run" a dog, because walks are as good as useless as exercise to prevent naughtiness later. But I'm having trouble believing that our dog is as neurotic as all that.

"I'm like a mix of Alvy Singer and Alex Portnoy, with some George Costanza thrown in."

-But Bisou does still need walking, and that Irin Carmon - Caitlin Flanagan interview was pretty amazing. (Amber, if you haven't listened already...) It brings up so many questions. For one, why did Flanagan think "Irina" was there to represent The Youth, and not as a prolific, Harvard-educated journalist there to discuss Flanagan's recently-published book about today's young girls? Why should we care if Carmon - who does not seem to be at all of the demographic social conservatives claim was destroyed by the sexual revolution - had a high school sweetheart? "Creepy condescension" indeed.

But on a more practical level, how on earth could Carmon, 28, be expected to scour her own life story for meaningful information about Girls Today? Flanagan's idée fixe - well, aside from early-adolescent fellatio - is the great danger of Internet infiltrating the haven that is the adolescent girl's bedroom. If you're 28 now, if you had any Internet in your bedroom as a youth, it might have sounded something like this. Speaking on behalf of first-world 28-year-olds, I don't even remember if there was an Internet connection in my bedroom - a computer, yes, but if there had been Internet, I wouldn't have had any idea what to do with it.

I know that we're supposed to say, of Flanagan generally and this installment in particular, that she hits a nerve. I mean, maybe? If I'm going to rate controversial books about female adolescence that I've never read, I'm putting Amy "Tiger Mom" Chua's far, far above this, both because at least that was something new ("the hook-up culture," in 2012, really?), and because as someone who was too nerdy at 15 or whatever for either the sweethearts Flanagan advocates or the hook-up culture she denounces, with what Chua describes, I can on some level relate.

-Princeton has a Trader Joe's, but this is not something the shuttle route yet acknowledges, so it was only because we had a car for the obedience class that, after dropping of Bisou, we were able to investigate. This was not a store I'd been all that impressed by in NY. Everyone would always rave about it, and I saw the advantages, as a grad student, when it came to wine, but for the rest? If I wanted a store brand, why not 365, plus produce, at Whole Foods? Then we got the chips and salsa from "Trader José." The store now suddenly makes sense. It's everything you would want to buy at a normal supermarket, minus the excess. It takes a realist approach, doesn't fool around. Much smaller than Wegman's, so less selection, but also less time at the store. As 90% of this shuttle's ridership, I'm thinking of lobbying for an extra stop.

Excessive humility

2012-01-20T11:02:00.002-05:00

Flavia has a great post up about the phenomenon of (academic, in this case) high-achievers, already well-established in their professions, who cling to a self-deprecating grad-student persona. This isn't something I've much experienced, being very much still at the stage at which a self-deprecating grad-student persona is the only appropriate one, but it sure rings true, and has its equivalents at the earlier stages as well.

As for how it comes about, I think it's a few things. One is that the path from 'yay, I got into grad school, they pay me to read books!' to any kind of permanent job is not only long, but also filled with a great deal of internal competition, such that you've never reached the rung where you know that you may not be the Star, but you'll do OK, until you're, at the very earliest, 35. In academia, the competition isn't over whether you'll be a big shot, but over whether you'll ultimately qualify to get any permanent job of the sort that your years of training ostensibly lead to. It's like if anyone who went to law school and got a paid job as a lawyer, anywhere in the country, however prestigious, felt as though they'd won the lottery. If you've spent that many years feeling professionally insecure, giving it up would be difficult.

Another is that there's another way many successful academics approach self-presentation, which is to act, from the first day of grad school on, if not from the first day of high school on, as though it's part of some divine plan for them to one day have HY&P battling it out to see which one gets to appoint him Most Distinguishest Professor Evar. That "him" isn't a gender-neutral "him," as in a grammatical choice intended to indicate "him or her." But if you don't get too many women acting this way, it's not as if most men do, either. But enough do that it might actually pay not to come across as arrogant, entitled, etc., and self-deprecation is shorthand for humility.

One more, though, which might be the big'un, and which someone alludes to in Flavia's comments. In our society, the youthful prodigy is a celebrated figure. Imagine, how did X accomplish so much, and so young? (This made me, a 28-year-old who's never even aspired to be a fashion designer, question my life accomplishments.) So it sounds much more impressive if you aw-shucks got invited somewhere to give a talk, to think, they invited a mere speck like you, new at all this, still fresh from the assembly line, than if they invited you because you're a full-fledged member of the profession in question, and this is what the profession entails. Giving off an aura of youth - which is something different from actually lying about one's age - is a way to make even relatively minor accomplishments seem immense, accomplishments that would indeed be immense if the person accomplishing them was 12, notable at 24, nothing surprising at 46.

The Tracy Jordan of gay men UPDATED

2012-01-19T21:18:00.001-05:00

Defying what one would expect, going by stereotype, from a gay men who works in the fashion industry, Simon Doonan took a break from telling us that gay men only eat salad, to express his horror at women with large breasts, those fatty protrusions that ruin the line of clothes:

The larger boob became the norm around the turn of the century, and it shows no signs of deflating. Radical rack augmentation is now ubiquitous, and to hell with the consequences. So what if you knock yourself unconscious while running to catch the bus? So what if you can’t fit into any trendy clothes because your waist is a zero but your bazongas are the size and weight of cantaloupes? It’s worth it to be the focus of male attention. Right?

Hold up a moment. Women with large breasts, Doonan admits, can't fit into trendy clothes. Or, for that matter, classic/classy ones. Large breasts, even medium breasts, are, as it stands, unfashionable. Shouldn't this be enough indication that female well-endowed-ness is not in fashion?

But Doonan isn't content with the boyish build dominating the runway. He - a gay man - would much prefer it if straight men got aroused by what he finds chic. Find that offensive? Oh, you square. Don't you get that it's tongue-in-cheek? (Or as one Slate commenter puts it, "tong-in-cheek.") It's clever! Why? Because Doonan's British, Fashion, and Fabulous! Never mind that there are episodes of "Two and a Half Men" that reach more sophisticated levels of humor, that include wittier turns of phrase. Doonan strikes me as a good argument for scrapping the entire subset of humor known as "tongue-in-cheek," given how often this phrase is invoked to explain why we shouldn't be offended by something that's ultimately more unfunny than it is offensive.

If all of this would seem about as relevant as if a lesbian were to offer up praise to men with small penises (although the analogy would require lesbians to be prominent in a media-and-entertainment industry that celebrated the poorly-endowed man, making well-endowed men feel grotesque, but anyway), let us not forget that Doonan is merely - as the Friend to Women that all gay men inherently must be - voicing his opposition to the pressures on today's Woman to get her boobs did. Don't be offended, wimmins of bustiness. He's with us in our fight against the patriarchy!

The equation of large breasts with fake breasts - one Doonan takes for granted - comes from a fairly obvious source: the breasts under consideration are - unspoken rule - those of thin women. No doubt there are bra-purchasers headed for the triple-Es who got that way naturally, but - and this is the unstated if not entirely unreasonable assumption - these women are overweight, over 22, and thus not about to meet the standards of either high fashion or lowest-common-denominator that-which-men-find-hot.

The piece - which is probably more offensive to gay men than it is to large-breasted women - ends up eliciting yet a new level of misogyny. Rather than standing up for their right to like what they like, regardless of what a man who's not even attracted to any women thinks they ought to, straight men start weighing in on how large breasts, in their opinion, do not stand the test of time, and it's important to choose a wife on the basis of what will or won't sag. (Have these people not been to a beach? Everything on everybody eventually sags.) Then there are of course the kind of men who think that to be sophisticated and upper-class, they must express a preference for brunettes over blondes, flat-chested over curvaceous. A few women pipe in to mention that it's wildly obnoxious to discuss whether various naturally-occurring physical features are or are not in this season. But they, we must remember, are humorless females, unable to see that Simon Doonan is in fact medically incapable of removing his tongue from his delightfully British cheek.

UPDATE

OK, so two updates. One is that I think the way to banish the "tongue-in-cheek" defense for that which is gratuitously offensive and not even funny (even to people who like "South Park" and other genuinely funny but not-PC entities, etc., etc.) is to replace "tongue-in-cheek" with "head-up-ass." As in, "You're obviously missing that this column calling black people lazy, Jewish people cheap, was intended to be head-up-ass."

The other is that in the comments below, David Schraub points us to a lovely Kate Harding post, inspired by a Jessica Valenti tweet, that reveals that I was not alone in approaching the piece wondering how it would fly, so to speak, if women went about declaring small male anatomy the height of chic. But I still think the relevant comparison would be if there were an industry thought to be 'run by lesbians,' where lesbians - that is, women unaffected by the anatomy in question - were indeed well-represented, that sought to glorify modest endowment, and not in the name of making everyone feel OK about themselves, but rather of making the well-endowed feel crude and déclassé, as if they weren't merely formed like that, but had stuffed a large, phallic vegetable down their pants.

"Whenever a non-Jew uses the word 'goyim' to describe Jewish attitudes to Gentiles, look out."

2012-01-19T13:21:00.000-05:00

A thousand years ago, for a publication that may or may not still exist, I wrote up something about the Walt-Mearsheimer book. You know, the one whose admirers insist that anyone who thinks the work is anti-Semitic clearly never read it. Every last thread, W-M's critics are accused of having devoted insufficient attention to this fine entry into their collective oeuvre. Well, I did read it, and that was the conclusion I came to, from the book itself, as in the actual text contained within. Not from a sense that anything accused of anti-Semitism is automatically guilty. No, from the unequivocally anti-Semitic, classically anti-Semitic, book I sat down and read. I mean, the thing's not Ulysses. It does not include an early scene involving a madeleine, and meander from there.

For reasons I no longer remember, it took more time than expected for this to go to print, and my article received exactly one comment on the site itself: "Wow, this review is on the cutting edge of 10 months ago." Insightful dude was, it turns out, not as clever as all that. It turns out that Walt and Mearsheimer's "lobby" argument hasn't gone anywhere, and has in fact infiltrated the discourse about Jews in America. It only gets more relevant with time.

In Tablet, Adam Kirsch explains:

[I]f The Israel Lobby has not changed American politics, it has had an insidious effect on the way people talk and think about Israel, and about the whole question of Jewish power. The first time I had this suspicion was when reading, of all things, a biography of H.G. Wells. In H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life, published in the U.K. in 2010, Michael Sherborne describes how Wells’ contempt for Nazism went along with a dislike for Judaism and Zionism, which he voiced in deliberately offensive terms even as Nazi persecution of Jews reached its peak. “To take on simultaneously the Nazis … and the Jewish lobby may have been foolhardy,” Sherborne writes apropos of Wells in 1938.

The proper academic term for this is "yowza."

Kirsch also might have mentioned that Dan Savage - an otherwise progressive and brilliant sort who seems to have bought hook, line, and sinker the notion that the tiny Jewish minority has quite the grasp on American politics. Granted, Savage uses this as an example of how he wishes things went for America's LGBT minority, but I'm not sure what that changes.

The way the W-M book (that I surely didn't read, because I found it to be incredibly, nauseatingly, anti-Semitic) is written, it alternates between saying 'we of course aren't saying X,' and... saying X. It's sort of as if the expression, 'I'm not an anti-Semite, but' were expanded into book-length form. That's how they get around the accusation. The miracle for them is that most people just kind of nod along to that. But not Kirsch:

Walt and Mearsheimer, of course, fill their book with denials that they are talking about a secret syndicate: “The Israel lobby is not a cabal or conspiracy,” they write in the introduction. But the book itself, with its lists of Jewish organizations and journalists, and its tone of moral outrage, works to give exactly this impression.

This thing I'm writing here, it isn't a blog post, per se.

But this is where Kirsch really, really gets at the problem. This is his main argument, and what's worth taking away:

One of the central premises of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is that it takes unusual courage to oppose the Jews, since they use their power to ruthlessly suppress dissent in both the political world and the media.

This! This is what has become socially acceptable in recent years. Anything negative one says about Jews is OK, no, heroic, because after all, it only serves to cancel out their stranglehold. Never mind that not all Jews support the Republican approach when it comes to Israel policy. Never mind that most Jews don't even vote Republican. Never mind that, by this calculus, Jews who go on having the left-leaning politics Jews have always had are in fact heroically sticking it to The Jews. Once this notion is accepted, it becomes impervious to reason.

Here's where the debate after the book went astray. People - W-M's defenders, but also, to some extent, their critics - have acted as though the book's controversial angle was that it dared question the sacred friendship between the U.S. and Israel, thus ruffling feathers, thus shattering a taboo. When in fact, if that had been the point of the book, it's not a book we'd have heard of, unless we were political science majors. Contrary to how they present it, it wouldn't have been the biggest deal in the world to question U.S. Israel policy, if done in a way that didn't seek to explain current policy in terms of basically a massive claw. Maybe a few fringe types still would have cried anti-Semitism, but otherwise? There'd have been a vigorous but level-headed debate in seminar rooms and journals among the Dry Topics Analysis contingent, and a good deal of support among the various Jews - including plenty of, ahem, Zionists - who wonder whether American aid as it currently exists is the best thing for American, but also for Israel, for American Jewry. No, the reason we know about the book is the Jewish-conspiracy angle. But the authors successfully managed to spin their controversy into a 'not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism' story. When, ugh, that's both true and quite beside the point.

Murky pre-modernity

2012-01-18T15:06:00.000-05:00

January 31 is my self-imposed deadline for this chapter. This chapter, alas, is the one where I cover material that has nothing nothing nothing to do with my alleged areas of expertise. Specifically, it's the one where I cover such matters as: what the Bible says about intermarriage; what medieval Jews and Christians said about intermarriage; what happened, just prior to the French Revolution, when Catholics and Protestants married, which they apparently did, even though there was no civil marriage, because Christian-Christian was less problematic than Christian-Jewish. I'm feeling a mix of in over my head (of course the day Wikipedia's on strike is the day I need to learn about the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215) and the usual regret that whatever it is I happen to be researching at the moment isn't my area. Why don't I study the Middle Ages? What did it mean that marriages that were not theoretically possible were also banned? It's all so exciting!

But the further I get from that chunk of history bounded by the Revolution and the Dreyfus Affair, the more unwieldy things get. I have enough experience with this sort of thing that I can figure when a secondary source is or is not legit, but I have very little sense of the historiography. So, while I can immediately tell where an author of a work about 19th C French Jews stands, with the rest, the internal disputes will - and this I think I'm just going to have to accept, if I keep to the deadlines - elude me.

OK, one more genre: The "Bad" Jew, Redux

2012-01-17T16:55:00.002-05:00

It's like Philip Roth, Woody Allen*, that entire generation, that entire outlook, never happened, and it's still provocative - still fresh - for a Jew to be "bad." It's as if there are still secular Jewish parents who care about intermarriage, and that you finish your gefilte fish. Last month, a Facebook friend posted something intended to be edgy about how don't tell his ancestors but he was putting up a Christmas tree with his non-Jewish wife. I wanted to be like, dude, you're fifty years too late, but restrained myself. Mostly because I don't make a habit of leaving potentially inflammatory wall comments, let alone for acquaintances I haven't talked to in years. But also because this attitude is at once incredibly dated and so-very-now.

We are seeing a revival - and, I hope, a last hurrah - of the "unapologetically paranoid, guilt-ridden, self-loathing Diaspora kvetch." A touch of nostalgia for a time when "Jew" meant Ashkenazi, male, and with an overbearing mothah. ("Howwwwahd, somebody's at the doaaahhh.") It feels stale, yes, but motifs are persistent.

The mystery, it would seem, is in how the "bad" Jew can persist, when it's not as if anyone's secular Jewish parents care if they stray in this or that capacity from traditions the parents probably never even observed. We need to remember that if multigeneration secular Jews are not interested in being "bad," there are always going to be the newly-secular children of observant Jews - and lots of them, what with the observance-babies connection. Another source would be our friends the former-Soviet Jews. Thanks to them, we have a new cohort of Ashkenazis prepared to talk about the intersection of the immigrant and Jewish experience. We have, that is, Gary Shteyngart.

And because we're living in a women-are-like-so moment, and because it's probably easier for men than women to defect from orthodoxy, do not expect to hear much about secular Ashkenazi Jewish women's particular concerns. (Didn't you know? We're all either nagging our Jewish husbands or complaining to Mary Richards about our perpetual singledom while engaging in futile battles with our inherently Jewish weight problems.) So by all means, expect more and more NY-centric fiction (sorry, Amber) by neurotic male protagonists preoccupied with blond or East Asian women; the Holocaust; and their own inability to fix things around the house.

A note, for the sake of clarity: This kind of "bad" Jew is something else entirely from the kind of Jew whose Jewish identity compels him or her (remember l'Affaire Benedikt!) to become a serious critic of Israel, or an enthusiastic supporter of the Palestinian cause. (On the distinction, presented in different terms than I'm using here, see Marc Tracy on Matt Gross as versus Philip Weiss.) These are not the "ASHamed Jews" of The Finkler Question. No, the "bad" Jew is proudly non-observant, proudly unaware of what's going on in the Middle East, and thus incapable of being a supporter or harsh critic of Israel. The "bad" Jew doesn't simply marry out (as many of us secular Jews do, because there isn't much compelling a non-believer outside of Israel not to do so), but inscribes his (always his) marriage to a non-Jewish woman (the "bad" Jew is heterosexual, the revival of a "type" that came about before LGBT issues were on the mainstream agenda) into a pre-set narrative.

*Trivia of the day: the Mariel Hemingway character in Manhattan was based on an affair Woody Allen had with a Stuyvesant student. Shteyngart's alma mater! Seinfeld's fling with a Nightingale girl, fair enough, but geez!

Two new genres for 2012, two examples for each

2012-01-17T13:55:00.000-05:00

-Defending the Glamorous:

We saw this with the pains a former prof of James Franco took to insist upon the movie star-scholar's academic serious. But we saw it again when Nicholas Kristof stood up for known underdogs like George Clooney (!) and Angelina Jolie (!!!), the latter of whom Kristof confesses, in an aw-shucks-intellectual-version moment, he did not recognize.

-Offending the Target Audience:

It's a safe bet that Matt Gross (see the post below, and his response - ! - in the comments) knew his article about Jerusalem would tick off religious Jews, Zionists. He may have guessed that in simply agreeing to fly to Israel as a travel writer and not a Rachel Corrie, he would win the ire of some on the left. (And he did!) But he also managed to offend the kind of left-of-center Jews who do get involved in learning about and criticizing the treatment of the Palestinians, the growing power of the not-so-progressive ultra-Orthodox, other "iffy" aspects of Israel. Gross's problem seems to come not from the genuine problems (myriad and well-reported) with Israel, but from a sense that the place is kinda Jewy, and that which is Jewy induces a cringe. Thus even his ostensible fan base - the readers who praise every Roger Cohen intervention - did not give him his hero's welcome after all.

Then there's Alex Gallo Brown in Salon, who, along with his girlfriend, grew tired of being hipsters with "privilege" and left Portland of all places to become volunteer organic farmers in the South-loosely-defined. (New Mexico?) All they wanted was to see the country, get out of their parochial "blue state" environment, and make the world a better place! Yet pretentious turns of phrase, a remarkable lack of self-awareness, a bizarre grievance against "blue-state" women who do grocery shopping, all of it hits the wrong note, and wins them all kinds of YPIS-hurling enemies among Salon readers and, inevitably, Gawker. The angry horde is of course made up of those very much like the writer (that is, in favor of owning privilege, and demolishing regionalist parochialism in its snootier forms), and not Mexican farm workers or poor Southerners. But oh, they're angry.

"But Israel was like Christmas: something I’d never do."

2012-01-14T16:11:00.001-05:00

Last night, midway through my one and only drink of the evening, a gin martini from which I am recovering today, I got into a discussion with a couple friends about the state of liberal Zionism. It was two against one (and despite my contrarian tendencies, I was with the majority) that any self-identification as any kind of Zionist these days means you've announced yourself to be a Newt-loving, universal-health-care-fearing, DADT-repeal-opposing, sweater-vest-wearing, you get the idea.

My own thinking is, while there are indeed more and less liberal subsets of organized American Zionism, the liberal end of things (J Street comes to mind), especially among younger adults, tends to be more focused on differentiating itself from the AIPAC end of things than on emphasizing why Zionism comes out of left-type ideas, postcolonial-ish, even. Israel, though flawed, is the home of the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. This is kind of important, I'd think, for the message. But liberal Zionism these days is always defensive, about how Zionism isn't necessarily incompatible with being left-of center, about disavowing any connection to a Republican party that, especially lately, is laying on the this-is-a-Christian-country rhetoric rather thick.

Group shot from last night's First Annual Meeting of the Liberal Zionists, Mid-Atlantic Division.

NYT travel writer Matt Gross appears to have what is both a complex and incredibly common approach to his Jewish identity, and indeed cannot discuss his recent trip to Jerusalem without prefacing it with some "Now ve may perhaps to begin, yes?"-style self-analysis:

As a traveler, I am not a particularly choosy person. I will go pretty much anywhere, anytime. Wander on horseback into the mountains of Kyrgyzstan? Why not? Spend the night in a sketchy Burmese border town? Sure! Eat my way through Bridgeport, Conn.? Loved it. Once, I even spent four consecutive Sunday nights in Geneva — in midwinter — an ordeal to which no rational adventurer would willingly submit.

In fact, of all the world’s roughly 200 nations, there was only one — besides Afghanistan and Iraq (which my wife has deemed too dangerous) — that I had absolutely zero interest in ever visiting: Israel.

This surprised friends and mildly annoyed my parents, who had visited quite happily. As a Jew, especially one who travels constantly, I was expected at least to have the Jewish state on my radar, if not to be planning a pilgrimage in the very near future. Tel Aviv, they’d say, has wonderful food!

But to me, a deeply secular Jew, Israel has always felt less like a country than a politically iffy burden. For decades I’d tried to put as much distance between myself and Judaism as possible, and the idea that I was supposed to feel some connection to my ostensible homeland seemed ridiculous. Give me Montenegro, Chiapas, Iran even. But Israel was like Christmas: something I’d never do.

Readers, resist the (inevitable) urge to psychoanalyze. To bring up terms like "Portnoy's Complaint" or "Jewish self-hatred" or "oy the neurosis." Take note, if you're up for a digression, of this prime piece of evidence for Jewishness-as-non-celebration-of-Christmas. Gross is so ambivalent about his Jewish identity that he, a travel writer for the NYT who can go anywhere and wants to go anywhere, a Jew who's not merely secular but deeply so, refuses Christmas. Those new to questions of Jewish identity, if you can make sense of the stance of this author, you move straight to the advanced class.

But mostly, don't be thrown off by the fact that Gross presents his uneasiness about Israel as something that separates him not only from his parents, but also his own friends - it's very much a thing for American Jews critical-to-the-point-of-skeptical of Israel to present themselves as utterly alone in this regard. That this self-presentation is so common certainly gives the illusion that there's this large and influential group of secular American Jews who are rah-rah Israel, who make life uncomfortable for the lone dissenters. But where is this majority? There's... me, there's David Schraub, and we have some British fellow travelers. The "iffy burden" contingent, meanwhile, is made up of virtually every secular American Jew under, what age shall we give here, 60?

Like a good Birthright participant, albeit not on that program, Gross, we'll be relieved to know, learns that Israel is a real place, with real-life people, who do things like drink beer and listen to music. He even has a "here, we're the WASPs"-type revelation: " Here I was, being seen not as a Jew or as a non-Jew, an American or a tourist, but as a mensch: a good and honorable man."

Adam Gopnik Petstoregate

2012-01-13T22:42:00.001-05:00

It is now done to mention, even in your standard here-are-cute-dog-photos Internet posting, that a dog has been rescued. As Rescue Culture goes, this doesn't strike me as a problem. All things equal, by all means, people should adopt. I think it's important to remember that all things aren't always equal, and that not every dog purchased is in fact - as is often asserted - a pound dog killed. But something like semi-gratuitously sticking a dog's rescue origins into conversation? It gets the word out that this option exists and is something to be proud of, without explicitly insulting those who, for whatever reason, purchased a dog. (It did stand out that WWPD's New Yorker Writer of the Week Adam Gopnik, in his sweeping New Yorker essay about dog ownership, mentioned his daughter picking theirs out at a pet store. He says he didn't know that this issue at the time, and if a writer who basically epitomizes Our Kind of People yuppie coastal elites didn't know, maybe the answer is to educate and not after-the-fact judge.)

But I do think it's interesting, worth pointing out, that this - "s/he's a rescue" is now something people tell you, unsolicited. It's of course an option, as it's always been, to be indifferent to the socially acceptable and unacceptable. But if you do opt to care, let it be known that if you acquired your dog in a way that didn't involve saving it from horrible circumstances, you will be asked to account for your process.

Insensitive Knick-Knack Week

2012-01-13T12:07:00.001-05:00

Your Tucson coverage continues. It's a safe bet that any of the well-shot dramatic landscape photos were taken by one of two astrophysicists. Close-ups of poodles, cacti, these I can take some credit for.

In honor of Insensitive Knick-Knack Week, I will return to the earrings-and-racial-insensitivity topic. Because I sure do like them, I hope it's not somehow offensive for me to go around wearing these. (Cheapness Studies note: at the store where I got them in Tucson, they went for about $20 less than indicated here.)

For the link-averse, they are a pair of lab-created (that is, faux) white-opal drop earrings, set in silver not-quite-filigree, but kind of like that. They are this fabulous mix of space-age, iridescent, and geometric, yet, even with all that going on, non-clunky. They are also made-in-the-USA-by-Native-Americans, which is either Good or Bad for the community in question - good because it's supporting them economically, bad because it's the appropriation (see more posts than I could possibly link to here) of their styles by pale outsiders. Styles that come from peoples displaced so that my peoples could, in turn, displace on over from whichever pogroms. (Banality of the day: the history of oppression is complicated.)

While this particular pair of earrings does not look (to me, at least) distinctly Southwestern or Native-artisan enough to be identifiable as such, if they did, they'd be on-trend. Various forms of "cowboys-and-Indians"-inspired fashions have been so-very-now for a while. Thus Tavi's "Twin Peaks" motif, thus all the designer-collab Pendleton... and thus the (mildly NSFW) "Navajo panties" scandal, wherein trendy chain stores sell undergarments and less racy attire as well, using the Navajo name, without, needless to say, Navajo approval. My earrings are evidently genuine Navajo-produced. Less problematic than a "Navajo" thong made in China, but not entirely OK.

But it's iffy when it is and isn't OK to take fashion inspiration from groups other than your own. I don't want to usurp anyone else's traditional dress, but on a certain level, everything is appropriation. Even dressing generically "American." If I wear pearl studs, and not for a need-to-look conservative occasion, I feel a bit silly, because my family wouldn't have been, still wouldn't be, accepted in a Lilly Pulitzer world. (And it would sure piss off Simon Doonan.) Anything preppy will come across as social-climbing, in a Ralph Lauren-né-Lifshitz kind of way. And it's similar with "heritage" fashions. And of course, any hip-hop-inspired anything, on someone as pale as I am, presents obvious awkwardness.

But problems arise if I dress "Jewish." I have the ethnicity for Hasidic garb, but not the piety. Dressing "Israeli," when I've only ever lived in New York, Chicago, Paris, and Princeton, and have not served in the IDF, doesn't sit right. And even if I went for the look derogatorily labelled as "JAP," this would not be authentic, because that's more of a suburbs-of-NY aesthetic, and is not something I actually grew up with. I am not from Ugg-North Face-French manicure country, not that there's anything wrong with that. The only authentic option is for me to wear a lot of black, or to wear whatever the street-fashion blogs dictate, because that's "very New York."

The answer, however, might be less complicated than I'm making it out to be. If you're conceiving of your personal style, it's best to do so in terms that have nothing to do with ethnicity, because head-to-toe of any culture or subculture's look, even your own, will, at best, look costumey. There's no not borrowing. Just stay away from symbols that you know evoke specific racist histories, and, if alerted to the fact that something you're wearing does, send it to the landfill, or better yet, donate it to the relevant museum with exhibits on intolerance of the group in question.

Where every teacher is above average

2012-01-12T17:04:00.002-05:00

Teaching (as in, elementary-though-high-school), like any other profession, has pros and cons. Summers off! Low pay. A chance to shape the minds of the next generation! Grading. Not having to sit in a stuffy office all day! Not getting paid to surf the Internet like your friends with office jobs. And so on.

But the aspect of being a teacher of younger kids that strikes me as the most frustrating is the (understandable!) vilification of the Mediocre Teacher. Not merely the teacher who's a child molester, a drug dealer, or otherwise unfit to work with children. Not even the teacher who comes in late and unprepared. The teacher who fails to inspire, who just... teaches, but does not create that magical, Dead Poets Society spark. The teacher who's mocked a bit during the semester, then promptly forgotten. (I'm thinking of a high school science teacher I had who'd been assigned to a branch of science she knew nothing about, who lectured and graded just fine, but who answered every question that went at all beyond the material telling you she'd check after class, and I think we're still waiting.) Often, what "bad" means isn't spelled out, but it's clear enough that what's meant isn't restricted to situations in which children are in any kind of danger.

With the possible exception of open-heart surgeons, in no other profession is someone who does the job just OK viewed as not merely mediocre, but evil. Think of the children! (Thus why this phenomenon doesn't really impact college profs/adjuncts/TAs. In some situations, too much interest in teaching is stigmatized, but in none is so-so teaching viewed as a near-criminal offense.) No one wants to be bad at what they do, and everyone should strive to do the best they can in their field. But the idea of being in a field in which the stakes are so high, in which if you fail to be among the best, you are the very definition of a social problem, where the reward for being one of the good ones is not much financially, the stigma attached to being not that great immense... not so appealing.

Because of teachers' unions, it's generally assumed that teachers are if anything excessively accounted for as workers, and that the right thing to do is to overshoot the mark in the opposite direction, and to think of them not as human beings with jobs, but as out-of-the-goodness-of-their-heart born nurturers (is this gendered, you ask? you bet!) who, if they really cared, would always give 110%. If poor performance doesn't - as it does in other fields, including all but tenured higher-ed teaching - mean risking getting fired, it ought to at least mean being the recipient of a unanimous, indignant tsk-tsk from society.

Everyone wants all kids to have the best teachers, but teaching is, like any other profession, going to have a range of performance. Fire the worst 5% of teachers, waiters, or accountants, and there will be a new worst 5%. As the graduate of a public high school (and Stuyvesant may be special in other ways, but teachers were placed there, we were led to believe, according to seniority, not how likely Robin Williams was to play them in the biopic), I'm sympathetic to the idea of making it easier to fire the truly inept.

And I don't know enough about this issue to begin to guess what could improve teaching - more pay? less job security? new pedagogical approaches? - only that whatever reforms take place, there will still be some teachers worse than other teachers, and unless at the end of every school-year, the lowest-performing half get the boot, but even then, there will always be some classes taught by teachers who are not, by definition, better than average. And I'm not sure the think-of-the-children approach to the mediocre-teacher question is making the profession more appealing to more potential entrants. Given that one obvious way to up the average teacher performance would be to make the field more competitive to enter, that's worth taking into account.

Hidden gems

2012-01-12T12:21:00.005-05:00

In the Gawker comments, of all places, is perhaps the best retort to an anti-Semite... ever? Huh!

Backstory: it's in a thread responding to a post about swastika earrings that aren't technically swastika earrings but that sure look like swastika earrings, that are being sold in the traditionally-Polish-now-spillover-from-neighboring-Williamsburg-hipster Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn.

So. First we have: "That's an ancient Indian symbol, you dummies. The swastika looks similar to that unfortunately. History and the world does not revolve around Jews, sorry."

The retort: "I suspect that your inner life does, however."

Flawless. The "however" is necessary to make it clear that there is agreement that not everything revolves around Jews. That no one was making this claim. Yes, the "backwards swastika" has significance in various cultures, with zilch to do with Germans, Jews, or the 1930s. But in Brooklyn, which is not some randomly-selected spot on the globe, which is not some part of Asia where Modern Ashkenazi Jewish history is remote, but rather a place with a significant Jewish presence and history including but not limited to Holocaust survivors, something that looks like a slightly off swastika poses a problem.

It's awkward being a member of a group that has a long history of being thought to be at the center of everything. While Jews themselves are not especially interesting (not more or less so than anyone else), the Jews have been all kinds of significant, even in settings where actual Jews were few, far between, and powerless. It's bound to give some Jews a sense - unearned, but understandable - of being born into something important and special and chosen if you will. It's bound to be off-putting to others (the majority, I'd bet, and this is where I fall), who find that in being disproportionately interested in Jewish matters, in the same way that gay people are disproportionately interested in gay matters, Jamaicans in Jamaican matters, etc., we are viewed as not merely parochial, but some twisted kind of parochial that's about wanting to be at the center of the universe. And then the only way to refute this becomes to claim that one has no particular interest in things Jewish, or to apologize for having such an interest. Jews are blamed for the fact that others have long been disproportionately interested in them. Jews are held responsible for somehow canceling out that interest by being less interested in their own story than any other subset of humanity might be. And when Jews falter, when Jews reveal themselves to have parochial concerns, they are interpreted as being narcissistic beyond reason.

Venerable magazine reveals: women are like so

2012-01-11T00:16:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure if Simon Rich's recent "Shouts and Murmurs" is offensive to women who work in fashion, but if you remove "who work in fashion," it strikes me as a reasonable - the reasonable - interpretation. Oh, yes, of course, it's in fact witty commentary on the kind of men who think they are more important than everyone else, who inevitably find themselves with women in the fluffy-and-low-paid-yet-respectable-and-readily-ditchable-upon-marriage professions. It's not meant to be demeaning to those women, or to women generally, but as a gently self-deprecating (this "Simon" being a dude, and New Yorker writer) jab at the kind of men who see themselves as Big Deals. It's skewering that attitude, not celebrating it, and only a humorless feminist - only an intellectual-lightweight woman, oxymoron alert! - would miss that level of nuance. The essay is a riff on God's creation of the universe, but God has this pest of a girlfriend who demands attention, and is into stuff like clothes and bitching about other women. But God has important work to do! A dynamic that might strike you as familiar from life, or perhaps from "I Love Lucy."

Read the delightful romp of an essay alongside the same issue's (subscribers-only) fiction, and you may find yourself wondering how the New Yorker came to devote its January 9th issue to the pressing issue of Men's Rights. John Lanchester's story about a banker (the protagonist Is The One Percent, it's so timely!) with a wife who's spoiled, parasitic, lazy, vindictive, entitled... you get the idea. He's expecting a huge bonus, she's expecting him to get this huge bonus, he doesn't because 'in these economic times' it's not happening, etc. Ah, but the story is in fact a searing critique of capitalism! Capitalism gets critiqued, whereas Woman isn't so much critiqued as dismissed outright. A frivolous, unpleasant nothing. The wife craves the finer things in life, and who complains that her husband doesn't get how hard it is to order around servants all day. Ah, but you want fiction to challenge, this is a story, and it's missing the point if you read it with an eye for the PC! To which I'd respond, if the New Yorker copied and pasted a long-ish rant from a misogynistic blogger, tightened up the language, and ran that, calling it fiction, would we give that the "art" out?

This could be the segue to other thoughts on feminism. On how the shift towards referring to "spouses" when what's really meant is "wives" both does and doesn't help matters. On how the feminist issue for upper-middle-class give-or-take sorts these days is less that women are kept from reaching great heights and more that women are spared, for better or worse, the sense that doing so is the only option.

But I will let you ponder this yourselves, and will instead add something entirely unrelated, tied to the above only in that this is also from stuff I read travelling to and from Tucson. Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Manor, which turned out to be such busman's-holiday in terms of the ol' diss., as well as too short to fill the amount of flight time I needed it for, includes a reference to a Jewish child in late-nineteenth-century Poland owning - get this - a pony.

Class evasion

2012-01-10T19:27:00.000-05:00

Amber links to an interview with comedian Louis C.K. (of whose work, disclaimer time, I'm a fan), and points us specifically to his opinion of Hahvahd:

If you go to Harvard undergrad, you’re a spoiled brat, and you probably got in through some legacy, and you’re not even getting that good of an education, most Harvard people, but Harvard grad school is where serious professionals get their degrees and licenses.

The context here is that Louis C.K.'s parents met while grad students of some kind or another at Harvard, and - and this is what comes right before the passage Amber cites - this fact has been brought up to delegitimize his claims to a working-class persona. He's being intentionally imprecise, I suspect, with the identity of Harvard undergrads - who are of course not all legacies, and of course the legacies are often enough multigeneration school-nerds who benefitted from an extra leg up - because he's trying to prove that he's no child of privilege.

That interview's easily the finest (written) example I've ever encountered of the kind of picking and choosing that I've heard since high school from those who grew up some form or other of definitively-not-underprivileged. Even rich kids have biographical details that make them sound ordinary, just as even working-class kids have biographical details that give the opposite impression. There's generally an overall answer, albeit one that can be evaded by highlighting the details that cut against the greater truth. C.K. worked crap jobs as a youth, for pocket money his parents weren't giving him? Who among us did not? The relevant class signifier is, did his parents work at the KFC too? Lots of upper-middle-class parents who did not grow up that way themselves live in utter fear of having bratty kids, and - whether through explicitly keeping allowances low, or subtler forms of persuasion - make it so that their offspring feel obliged to work well before college-graduation-age. Lots of parents with cultural-educational capital lack equivalent economic capital, which sounds as if it may have been the case with C.K. This does not, I'd think, amount to blue-collar authenticity, but a relative lack of capital in either direction can be spun as such.

(I'm thinking also of how New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, in a recent interview with Leonard Lopate, responded to Lopate's remarks about how his own family never went to nice restaurants because they didn't have any money by admitting that he - Gopnik - went to some, on special occasions, but that he also didn't grow up with much money because his parents were academics, as if they were adjuncts in the hinterlands. Two parents who were both McGill professors - this isn't the same as two parents who were both hedge-fund managers, but... yeah.)

And this seems to be a common factor in revisionist histories of socioeconomic upbringings: mentioning that one's own parents were born poor or working-class. While this can, as I've said, have an impact on how their kids, in turn, are raised, if you're the child of parents who've socio-economically reached whichever point, you yourself do not get to somehow atavistically claim their childhood experiences. Your parents may get to claim self-made-ness, but even they don't get to claim underdog status past a certain (admittedly hard-to-pin-down) point. They probably don't, and their offspring definitely don't.

Where arugula and terrorist-hunters collide

2012-01-10T11:44:00.000-05:00

Why does Mexican food, more than any other, inspire online reviews for each and every establishment that center on the place's inauthenticity? As if "authentic" or not matters more than if whatever it is tastes good? This comes up with every cuisine, but for some reason, inauthentic Mexican food is a crime against humanity, whereas inauthentic Thai food, sure, it's inauthentic, but you can just add some more hot sauce and stop worrying about it.

I'd always figured, in NY, that you're so far from Mexico that the ingredients themselves will never be right, and because of a vast uninitiated consumer base (recent arrivals from the upper Midwest, from parts of the world further still from Mexico) there's less demand for exact replicas of what's in Mexico, and while there are of course Mexicans and Mexican-Americans living in New York, there's not really a New York Mexican "authentic" fusion, as with Tex-Mex, Californian Mexican, etc. The complaints (I was, after all, reading stuff in English, not Spanish) seemed to be coming not mostly from those of Mexican heritage, but rather from those dealing with the culture shock that comes with moving from a part of the U.S. where there's good produce year-round to the mealy-tomato-and-yay-a-local-turnip Northeast. The real deal, I accepted, meant heading southwest.

But after doing my usual I'm-going-to-be-somewhere-for-two-days-and-might-as-well-be-prepared half-hour or so of Chowhound-and-such research... I learned that Tucson "Mexican food capital of the U.S." Arizona is filled almost exclusively with inauthentic Mexican restaurants, bland, overpriced, and aimed at "gringos."

Part of the issue, it seems, is that there are different Mexican regional cuisines, and if you're familiar with one, another (especially if it's a cuisine that involves heaps of melted cheese, which seems as though it must come from the neighbors to their north, and which indeed seems to come from a part of Mexico likely to be extra culturally influenced by the U.S.) will come across as inauthentic, even if it is in fact identical to what one would get in the region whose cuisine it's meant to be. And, food intended to mimic what's served at a restaurant in Mexico is not going to taste like Mom's home cooking, nor is it intended to.

And, there's clearly no answer, because what's recommended as the alternative to inauthentic by one self-proclaimed expert is, the next will insist, a tourist trap. I mean, everyone on Chowhound or Yelp could eat in rural Mexico, in someone's home, eat the food that family's been eating since forever, and deem it "Taco Bell meets Chipotle."

Well. Whatever this was, I enjoyed it, and can't vouch for its authenticity. Jo and I disagreed about where it stood relative to the gold standard, but it's also true that, as it happened, he'd ordered wrong. I, meanwhile, will just have to accept that I can't recreate this at home, and am unlikely to find it on Nassau Street.

The waitress seemed to think this would be too much food for one person.

Wrong she was.

Oh, and this was unexpected: the best croissants I've ever had in this country. Also, alas, the most expensive (think over $3 for a pastry sold at a market, not a brick-and-mortar café) but you won't regret it. I know, one doesn't go to Arizona for croissants, but maybe one should reconsider?

And there was, of course, non-food-related excitement as well, with my husband and others who either research what he does or are married to that world. Mt. Lemmon and the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum (see photos below) were both pretty spectacular. So many cacti! And owls! A whole village of prairie dogs! Such landscape! Snow so near the desert! Both of these excursions presented an opportunity to wear my new boots and newish sunglasses in settings that actually demanded them. (My boots are covered in dust from the desert. How's that for authenticity?)

And I even ended up with a couple souvenirs - arugula seeds from a poodle-filled farmers' market in what I later learned is the posh part of town, supermarket (but superior to what I can get around here, I suspect) white corn tortillas, and opal earrings allegedly made by Native Americans and definitively the Shiny I'd long been trying to track down. Because we are fools, we didn't buy the thrift-store hat that said "U.S. Immigration."

Spouse of astrophysicist emerges from Mars-like landscape.

Stripes in both directions. Alternative explanation: I stayed put in NJ, but opted for a backdrop like those great-great-grandparents of mine, who left behind some amazing altered photos from the Old Country.

Hi! We're desert poodles.

Tucson struck me as a city of extremes. There's some unwritten rule that one must be either incredibly fit and biking up a mountain I found a bit steep as a passenger in a car, or obese at the level that the Daily Mail would do a story on your difficulties getting out of the house. Politically, going by bumper stickers and the like, it seems split between neo-hippies and "terrorist hunters." (Also: something along the lines of "Criminals Choose Unarmed Victims.") Signs tell you where you can't bring in a gun, providing a ready opportunity for visitors hailing from New York and Western Europe to reveal how out-of-touch they are with Real America. I'd been to Real, and have spent ample time in - and indeed grew up in - Fake, but had never seen that-which-is-Blue and that-which-is-Red so thoroughly intermingled. I've also never been to Austin, which I'd imagine might be similar.

Yuppie amenities - an espresso bar and, across the way, a food co-op, coexist with the presumption that one is armed.

I wanted to go into what I thought might be a Western-wear store. Then we saw this in the window.

This was an odd time to visit Tucson, though, given that it was exactly a year since the notorious shooting attack on Giffords and others. We ended up inadvertently catching part of a sermon about it, here. I suppose, given my own background, I'll never understand gun culture. I'll do what I can to atone for other parts of my parochialism, but this I'm OK with clinging to.

Anyway, now I'm back, one unimpressive DIY attempt at huevos rancheros behind me, one hefty (but well-earned) check to the poodle-sitter to mail, and one chapter whose self-imposed deadline is January 31st.

Gaminology

2012-01-05T14:28:00.000-05:00

I must confess that I rolled my eyes when I saw that the latest Target designer collaboration "takes [...] direct inspiration from French New Wave films and the actress Jean Seberg." Which fashions of the last half-century haven't taken their inspiration from French New Wave films and the actress Jean friggin' Seberg? Sure, sometimes we hear instead of Gainsbourg, Birkin, and their two effortless, nonchalant, insouciant, insert-other-word-used-to-describe-generic-young-rich-Frenchwoman daughters. Sometimes it's Audrey Hepburn. But the Breton-striped shirt, the pencil-fit slacks, the dainty flat shoes, this we've been hearing about I'd think continuously since the 1950s or early 1960s, when gamine as we now know it first emerged.

There's a strong case to be made for the gamine look, and I, your massively fashion-hypocritical blogger, lean on "gamine" as my go-to uniform. I often insist that nothing is "classic," and I maintain that "investment piece" is overused and used as a way of justifying high-end purchases headed straight for the back of the closet. Yet gamine never seems to go out of style. Dress as you imagine a Parisienne would have in 1962, and you're all set. You will look all of the following: conservative, classy, chic, feminine, adult. Yet you will not look: stuffy, preppy (aka Ralph Lauren, fantasy WASP lifestyle), trendy, frilly, girly, matronly. You will be underdressed if going to a formal gala or a corporate job, overdressed if biking through mud, but otherwise, you're good.

Sure, there's the obstacle of no one in the States is built like a "gamine." There are thin women in America, yes, but not gamine thin, a look that can only result from that special combination of having gobs of money and hand-me-down Hermès but also having been an underfed chain-smoker since age 11, traits not typically found in the same children in this country, not these days, at least, but altogether normal in the finer Arrondissements. But it is a minor deterrent - the secret genius of "gamine" is that it actually works on more robust-looking women as well. Consider the stripe-happy What I Wore blogger - slim, yes, but in a wholesome-Midwestern way. Consider the direction taken the last few years by Jenna Lyons at J.Crew. Lyons's specific genius was to ignore the (mostly) unspoken requirement that any body fat whatsoever ruins the proportions of French-sailor-chic. Not being proportioned like the Birkin-Gainsbourg heritières hasn't stopped me from risking horizontal stripes. Sticking with one inherently put-together look means you buy less new stuff, and that you look un-slob-like even on days when you put in no effort. Nothing wrong with that.

My ambivalence towards gamine-chic comes in part from the fact that even if it's relatively accessible, it's fundamentally yet another case of fashion as denial of how most even slim women, even French women, are built: for gamine-chic, it is traditionally optimal to look like a little girl, or better yet a little boy. But I also find it unexciting, in this day and age, to define "dressing well" as "dressing French." And this is what gamine-chic is about. That eternal question - why are Frenchwomen so stylish? - could be readily answered: Because we have defined "stylish" to mean "Frenchwoman-like." It's a construct, folks! Anyway.

What ought to replace gamine isn't, I think, a silhouette that outright celebrates the womanly form, both because women with "curves" don't necessarily want to go out dressed like Snooki, and because some women do have the "gamine" build. The goal isn't to switch over to excluding the only women fashion currently includes. And there should be a place for androgyny, without "androgyny" being code for "yay, let's cast skinny men to model womenswear, finally a way to avoid those pesky hips and breasts, all while giving the industry a reputation as progressive." We need to rethink this. Gamine had a lot going for it, but we can do better.

Despite being utterly unqualified to do so, I'm in the process of coming up with what this new look might be. For starters, some inspiration. My own plan is to build a look with these as a starting point. To be continued.

Of Santorum and Camembert

2012-01-04T22:38:00.001-05:00

In much the same vein as the post below. Dan Savage is apparently incapable of condemning the readily condemnable homophobia driving much of right-wing American politics these days without bringing Jews into it. It's an age-old tradition, bringing up The Jews when trying to argue some unrelated point that has diddly-squat or near-diddly-squat to do with Jews. And I come at this as someone who agrees with Savage about Santorum, and also - as a Zionist, in my case - prefer the Democrats' stance on Israel. I'd just rather not see this:

[...] America's religious conservatives/extremists [...] argue that the LGBT community is so tiny – just 9 million Americans, according to the Williams Institute – that our calls for civil rights protections and full civil equality shouldn't be taken seriously. Rights, they implicitly assert, should be awarded only to minority communities that have attained some sort of critical mass. [....]

This is a curious argument coming from the same people – evangelical Christians – who seem to regard Israel as the 51st state in our union. There may be "just" 9 million LGBT Americans – but that number that is greater than the entire population of Israel (7 million). And if we are "just" 3.8% of the US population, the LGBT community – a figure that includes hundreds of thousands of LGBT Jews – is still more than twice the size of the total Jewish community in the United States (1.4% of the population), to say nothing of the Mormon community (1.7%).

All of which would be a neat little argument if Greater Israel nonsense were to Jewish Americans what same-sex marriage and the repeal of DADT is to gay Americans. Slight problem with that.

Evangelical and evangelical-vote-seeking politicians do not have the stance on Israel they do because they want Jewish votes. I mean, sure, they want all the votes they can get, but it doesn't add up. Jews are not voting for a Santorum, a Huckabee. Even the last remaining American Jews under 80 who care about Israel don't want for Israel what those politicians want for Israel, and tend to want the opposite as they do for America (reference is to the Rick Perry video, which Flavia is criticizing as a Christian, but I can't imagine too many Jews had a more favorable take). And what's the point of speculating about how many Jewish Americans are LGBT? Even the vast majority of American Jews who are straight and cisgender, are voting Democrat. It's not as if LGBT Jews are so conflicted in the voting booth, feeling that as Jews they must pull the lever for Santorum, but their sexual orientation or gender identity gets in the way. And last I checked, Republicans aren't even claiming their Israel stuff is primarily about honoring the wishes of America's Jews. Isn't it about allies in the War on Terror, Israel as "Western," and all that Bible stuff?

Put another way: there's no cabal above Zabars maneuvering Santorum via puppet strings. We would not let Santorum that near the really good (so runny and delicious I suspect it has to be raw-milk, whatever claims to the contrary the label bears; yes, intentional) Camembert.

And are we really to believe that Republicans are competing against one another - and the primaries are Savage's concern here - to please Israelis? What does the size of Israel's population have to do with Republican pandering? It's questionable that they're primarily pandering to American Jews when discussing Israel, but preposterous that their target is Israeli Jews.

It could be that Savage is pandering to the British left (or much of it, not all), in choosing here, yet rarely elsewhere - and I've read/listened to a whole lot of Savage - to allude to U.S. Israel policy. It's a kind of roundabout quasi-anti-Semitism, I suppose, all the assumptions his claims here rely on, and I doubt Savage is even aware of it. Whatever the case, the concern is that "Jews" are now this stand-in for whatever the opposite is of progressive. Jews can of course be bigots, but it would be a tough case to make that Jews are more racist against African-Americans, more homophobic, than average. Yet, such are the perks of being a long-preferred Other. Whatever point one is trying to make, if one wishes to raise the blood pressure of one's (vast-majority-non-Jewish) audience, to excite them about an issue at hand, one may toss in something about Jews.

"Jews were slaves too. You don't hear us complaining about it all the time"

2012-01-04T18:19:00.000-05:00

I just ended up finding this video via a link on Twitter, and I'm entirely sure anyone who watches it will guess what follows. But I'm also thinking no one likes clicking on video links (I don't as a rule), so here's what it is: "Shit White Girls Say... to Black Girls." It's a response to a quasi-misogynistic comedy video series (I can tell you from having put in the requisite one minute here) called "Shit Girls Say." The original is a man in a wig, pretending to be a "girl," and saying the kind of "girl" things that provide the humor in "men are like this, women are like that" comedy. (Women: bad with computers, kinda into shopping.) The response is a black woman in a blond wig, saying things that begin with, "Not to sound racist," and then proceeding to sound racist. Clueless-racist. Think can-I-touch-your-hair, inappropriate use of "ghetto," etc. A clever idea, and for the most part well-executed.

Except for this one bit, that comes early in the short segment, and half ruined the rest of it. The "white girl" says, while shopping for a quilted (skit stand-in prop representing designer) handbag:

"Jews were slaves too. You don't hear us complaining about it all the time."

Hmm. Why, so early in a segment about white privilege, do Jews get singled out? Where have we seen this before? Why is white privilege extra worth calling out when it comes from Jews? Or is this an accusation of a specifically Jewish privilege?

Caveats, disclaimers, preemptings of theoretical commenters: Yes, if a Jewish person made this remark, it would be tone-deaf and idiotic. (If nothing else, if Jews are going to play the competitive-victimhood game, which would itself be tone-deaf and idiotic esp. in this context, wouldn't they bring up the Holocaust, not ancient Egypt?) No, Jews have not had it and do not have it as bad as blacks in the U.S., by any standard other than the have-we-had-our-President-yet one, and heck, France had Leon Blum in the 1930s and we all remember what a great sign that was about that country's goodwill to Jews in that era. Sure, there probably are Jews walking around who would need that explained to them. So we're clear, the point of this post isn't to provide moral support to the "Jewish" character's preposterous assertion. Nor is it to join forces with the touchy, (presumably) white You-tube commenters who are crying reverse racism, saying, we're not all like that, when that's obviously beside the point.

In principle, the video is about the behavior of white Americans, white privilege, the cluelessness that comes from whiteness. Can-I-touch-your-hair privilege, and I'm kind of doubting terribly many Jewish girls make this request. (On one somewhat humid day in high school, a definitively-unhyphenated-white classmate asked me, as pale as they come, if I was black. Or, if anecdotes don't convince, consider the expression "Jewfro.")

Yet in the video, Jewishness is held up as somehow exemplifying white privilege. It's saying that Jews who speak out about anti-Semitism are not only similar to or even a subset of defensive White Rights types - as opposed to, say, a subset of Victim Olympians of all minority groups - but the very epitome of that behavior. Woven into one anti-racist message, there's this other... straightforwardly racist message, albeit directed against a different group. The JAP, perhaps using daddy's credit card to buy the latest Chanel, playing the victim. Rich, whiny Jews. And their women especially.

Shorter and mathematically iffy version of the above: It's not that Jews altogether lack white privilege, and Jews (Jews who are not black, that is) certainly possess not-black privilege. It's that given that Jews have on average maybe 85% of the white privilege possessed by whites generally, certainly not 100% of it, it's problematic to attribute 150% of white privilege to Jews.

December tomatoes

2012-01-03T14:47:00.000-05:00

Once again, we're hearing about the nefarious consumer demand for out-of-season produce, specifically tomatoes. Once again, I'm going to ask why we frame things in such terms. The individual consumer is not demanding that the supermarket stock tomatoes in December. The individual consumer goes to the supermarket in December and finds tomatoes. The individual consumer, in order not to demand-in-the-economic-sense tomatoes, would need to boycott those tomatoes. The question then arises: in favor of what? Apples and kale do sound like things one should be able to eat in gray weather in the Northeast without offending anyone's sensibilities, but those are shipped in from Washington State and California, respectively.

I know I've blogged this sort of thing before, but as I can't remember what the offending produce item was the last time around, I can't properly search for it. But I will go on repeating myself on this until the food movement decides what, precisely, is an acceptable and feasible way to get groceries, for those of us who aren't about to grow their own fruit-and-veg all summer long and freeze it for the winter in some kind of industrial-size freezer that everyone but me apparently has in their home. Until they work on fixing things higher up, and let up on asking individual consumers to turn what are already substantial demands (cook at home more, eat more fruits and vegetables) into all-consuming research projects.

Another "enough" is that I'd like to see an end to demands that "we" eat local, that come from people who a) live in/around Berkeley, and/or b) travel so much that they get an exciting, varied diet by eating locally in a wide range of locales, perhaps where they've jetted off on book tours to promote some treatise on how important it is to eat local. The issue isn't so much the hypocrisy of jet travel and environmentalism (sometimes a message needs to be spread, and someone's got to do it), but the fact that to truly eat local, and in only one locale, would be bleak to a degree that food writers couldn't even imagine.

Writing projects

2012-01-03T14:12:00.001-05:00

For The Chef at Heart with No Time

We set up your kitchen like the set of your favorite cooking show. Shop for the ingredients of your favorite recipes. Prep the ingredients (chop, dice, flour, bread, tenderize, measure, get proper pans out etc). Set your table, empty the trash &; have the dishwasher ready for use. When you come home, you turn on the flames and off you go.

This, Talbots, Lululemon, and shoppes of all kinds (if-you-have-to-ask cheese; fine silver; eco-friendly gifts; a high-end dress shop I don't dare enter, that storefront-wise seems to be ripping off the Barneys Co-op aesthetic) is what it's about in these parts. I must find a way to spin this into a sweeping 19th-century-style novel about These Times, or stop fussing about it.

In the mean time, my new semester's resolution (although I'm not entirely sure, this being a fellowship year, and on account of living among those following not one but two different semester schedules that may or may not be in sync, when one ends and the next begins) is to churn out the rest of the document. It's very much at churn-out stage - the fun part where I thought through the ideas, the materials, is most done. Now it needs to emerge in full, in discrete 40-50-page components. Manageable yet daunting. That classic advice - "it doesn't need to be perfect," trust me, I know.

I was struck by Philip "Social Q's" Galanes's claim that one is forever hearing about people's dissertations at parties. I find that hard to believe. When asked, in social situations, what I do, I have this hierarchy of answers such that I provide the least possible information, both so as not to busman's-holiday and, more to the point, so as not to bore others with it. "French." If pressed, "French literature and history." If pressed, "19th century." If pressed, "Jews." If an author is requested, "Zola," not the obscure 19th-century French-Jewish-press journalists whose writings my dissertation is far more centrally about. Rarely do we reach the point of "Jews and Intermarriage in Nineteenth-Century France." You, my fellow grad students, surely know how we're all supposed to have a one-sentence, elevator-ride description of our projects? That's well and good, but in purely social settings, or with the colleagues of one's significant other, even that is, as they say, TMI.

And this is for the best. Dissertating grad students do not go to parties in order to talk about their dissertations. We go in order to get our minds off our dissertations. If someone's genuinely interested in the topic, as in, if someone works on a related field (or, in the case of my diss., personally identifies with it), and it's abundantly clear this isn't a matter of someone being polite, of someone approaching social situations by asking questions of others about themselves, then sure, I'm not ashamed of my topic, I am interested in it, after all. And I'm certainly not offended if someone, out of social graces or genuine interest, asks about my work. Nothing wrong with social graces! The more, the merrier.

But the combination of Social Asker and Burnt-Out Dissertater (redundant synonym of Dissertater) is a tough one indeed. Yes, as a general rule, the humans like to talk about themselves. But unless you happen to meet a grad student still working on the dissertation proposal and in that this is so exciting! stage, consider asking them about something else, or better yet, talking about yourself and what you've been up to. If what you do happens to be in the field of air-conditioner repair, maybe pass along info. regarding possible job openings for otherwise unemployable humanities graduates.

Something resembling a pain au chocolat

2011-12-30T11:27:00.000-05:00

Chocolate-chip cookies were so terrible as to have to be thrown out. Croissants edible but brioche-like and thus a failure. Cannelés: convincing, if unevenly cooked. Pains au chocolat, however, a success. This, despite my record-breaking, shameless refusal to follow the recipe's directions (from this book), combined with the imprecision inherent in bringing grams and centiliters and Celsius into a NJ kitchen, not to mention having halved it. I most certainly didn't have any "farine de gruau" number 45, or "levure de boulanger." I used all-purpose flour, instant dry yeast, regular sugar not powdered, skim milk not whole, salted butter, and so on. Where the recipe called for the delicate kneading of dough, the careful, ingredient-by-ingredient additions, I tossed everything into a bowl, used the trusty hand mixer, and when the result looked far too pancake-batter-ish to be right, added flour until the consistency struck me as plausible. Dough-chilling happened in the freezer, not the refrigerator, and ended when I deemed the dough sufficiently workable, not when it was in any technical sense ready. I folded... enough. Somehow the end result was flaky (!), utterly convincing, and because I'd made them myself, no doubts about them having been pur beurre. The chocolate I used - semisweet chips from the Belgian gourmet shop - did not do it for the household Belgian, and while I agreed that this wasn't quite what a French bakery would have used, I'm thinking it was as close to that as can be found in Central NJ. The result was not Le Boulanger des Invalides Jocteur, but not as far off as one might expect, and unequivocally better than what the two places in town that sell this sort of thing have on offer.

The first batch were consumed too instantaneously, but looked much like the second, except half the size. This second set are (well, two are, two were) more the size of bakery chocolate croissants. If you're squeamish about realizing that your breakfast included a quarter of a stick of butter, this is not the recipe for you.

"That's why men hunt and women nest."

2011-12-29T20:01:00.000-05:00

Amanda Marcotte asks, "Is there any facet of life that can't be filtered through the bizarre belief that men and women are fundamentally opposites in every way?" She proceeds to take apart a Chicago Tribune article about how the sexes approach grocery shopping, but more material might come her way soon: a NYT Styles story (it's not the new year yet!) that goes like so:

Women shop, men stockpile. That’s one theory, anyway, of how men buy clothes differently from women. If women see shopping as an opportunity, a social or even therapeutic activity, the thinking goes, then men see it as a necessary evil, a moment to restock the supply closet. At the risk of perpetuating sex stereotypes, [...]

The piece takes that risk, and goes on to perpetuate sex stereotypes, or something. A bunch of successful if not altogether famous men are asked whether they buy a lot of the same thing, and turns out they do. Absent from the article is any evidence whatsoever that women don't do this. Women, let it be known, totally do this. (Witness the stack of identical white tank tops from the Petit Bateau sales.) Are we really meant to believe that women don't buy things like socks and underwear all from the same place and in large amounts? That women squeal with delight at a chance to go to the mawl every time a sock has a hole? If anything, stockpiling means you like to shop, or at least that you care enough about what you wear that you consider things like, what if the brand stops making this item? (Which, in this age of fast fashion, it will.) Or, at the very least, that you're sufficiently concerned as to want to make sure that when your current clothes wear out, you won't have to just replace them with whatever's around. Stockpiling ala Steve Jobs and the turtlenecks (an example provided) is hardly evidence that someone is unconcerned with self-expression-through-dress.

In a new, gendered twist to the Styles Style norm, here we have a piece that's ostensibly about how hypermasculine the dudes profiled all are, too busy, rugged, and important to give a crap about their clothes. But then you have Paul Sevigny (who has a slight up-to-no-good-Peter-Sarsgaard thing going on, am I right?) telling us that he can only buy his underpants in Frahnce. (Nice underwear, by the way!) There's even a style blogger (!) who explains:

The store Epaulet — there’s one on Orchard and one on Smith Street in Brooklyn — has these pants with a perfect silhouette and fit. They are cut slim, but not skinny. A few years ago I tried on a pair of mohair ones that fit so well that I bought three pairs — in navy, camel and olive — and a pair of gray cords in the same cut.

Indeed.

A couple of the men make a play of insisting that they hate to shop, before casually tossing off a list of their favorite designers, but for the most part, this is a bunch of men who are arguably bigger fans of buying clothes than are most women. But they're super low-maintenance because they don't get special AW 2012 socks, like women do. Or something.

A December to Remember

2011-12-27T19:13:00.000-05:00

-Homemade bread. A lovely idea, especially for those of us who live far from supermarkets let alone these mythological establishments called "bakeries." And a fine way to pass time on Christmas day. But, recipe author who shall remain nameless, "at least three hours" doesn't sit right when, if you add up the time of each of the three rises, plus time in the oven, you arrive at "four hours," with the kneading, prep, and so forth surely covering an additional "at least."

-On "Millionaire Matchmaker," one of Patti's "millionaire" clients said he wanted a woman who was a cross between Tina Fey and Anne Hathaway. Hello! (Yes, I'm married, and no, even if I were not, the "millionaire" in question was sort of eh, and didn't even have the decency to be a fallen Austrian aristocrat, a wild-eyed psychopath, or otherwise memorable.) The relevant fact here is that Patti responded to his request for a woman of that type as if he'd expressed an almost unspeakable fetish, something even Dan Savage wouldn't know what to do with, and proceeded to set him up with a Vegas cocktail waitress.

-Contemporary Jewish Demography 101: at the Chinese restaurant on Christmas, everyone else (aside from the usual Chinese-grad-student clientele) was of the Hebraic as well as geriatric persuasion. The only other Jewish festivities I was aware of involved the Israelis on campus assembled for a child-centric Christmas-night-of-Chanukah celebration, presumably with the goal of passing along some of their warm-weather culture to their children who, as it happens, reside in chilly New Jersey. (The Palmer Square tree is huge! And in the wealthy suburbs, people don't just have a Christmas tree. They have at least one big one inside, but also a few outside for good measure, sometimes wrapped in lights that are themselves miniature Christmas trees.) Presumably some Jews were off elsewhere being too observant for Szechuan Park. Vibrant, vibrant secular cultural Diaspora Judaism might thrive somewhere, but not in these woods.

-We saw Cornel West in the Radio Shack! Public intellectuals, they're just like us!

-Car? Yes? No? On the one hand, where we now live is one of those places in America where one needs a car. On the other, we live here because of my husband's work, and they provide a shuttle service to nearby supermarkets, and aside from that there are such options as taxis, car-sharing, and biking, listed in reverse order of how often we avail ourselves of them. So we might live where cars are needed, but we don't need a car. Plus, cars are expensive! Insurance is expensive! Driving lessons are something you're supposed to have your parents pay for when you're 16, and seem especially expensive if you've already paid for a bunch of them and failed two NYC driving tests! Princeton parents can probably afford to pay up, and their kids really want and need to learn to drive, so lessons here probably cost more than anywhere else in the country, no, world! But it's definitively too cold to bike anywhere comfortably. As grating as the "December to Remember Sales Event" commercials and magazine ads and otherwise ubiquitous presence may be, I'm leaning towards "car," but we'll see.

America, 2011

2011-12-24T10:53:00.000-05:00

I decided to trade sleep for a quicker, earlier train into New York. As you might imagine, it’s more popular to spend one hour getting into the city than two, so the train was packed. But more packed than I’d ever seen it – this was rush hour plus Christmas shoppers-and-tourists. Car after car, there were either no seats or families who managed to take up so much space with their stuff and food (who’d have thought fast-food bagels could have such an odor? I guess in a closed space, most food does) that the occasional one seat available would have meant crashing a jovial early Christmas party of perfect strangers with whom one has nothing in common other than living in but wishing to spend time away from New Jersey, and asking them to move their stuff to space that simply wasn’t there. Stuff ought not to take precedence over people when it comes to seats on trains, what with people and not stuff spending $33 on tickets, but it’s one of those things where you can make a fuss, but then you end up at the bottom of the avalanche of American Girl dolls, and standing starts to look like the way to go.

So car after car, same deal. I joined the horde of preppy types looking for seats, figuring that if a horde was looking, I wouldn’t find anything. I then see one prime aisle seat, not one of those no-window spots, facing the right way. I asked the man in the window seat if the aisle was taken, he said no, I sat down.

Now let’s think for a moment. Why was this seat free? No one in the general vicinity smelled or was eating anything. No one was projectile vomiting or visibly struck with a skin-eating bacteria. Yes, the man in the aisle seat was wider than he was narrow, but this is ‘merica, so was almost everyone else on the train. Yes, some of the horde was made up of families who wanted to be seated together and were holding out for a group of empty seats, but others were just the regular businesspeople. So what on earth could it have been?

Any guesses?

I’m going to speculate that the fact that this one seat was available has something to do with the fact that the man in the window seat was, unlike the others on the train, black. Dark-skinned, with dreadlocks in a ponytail. Otherwise utterly unremarkable, maybe 30, maybe 35, and spent the trip playing with his iPhone like all the other yuppies.

********

In other, less depressing, news from the world beyond the woods, my mother and I met a dog that was like a tiny Bisou - a dark gray toy, whose tininess really drove home that Bisou's on the gigantic side of miniature, the "medium" size poodles come in. As inevitably happens when dog owners connect, the question of provenance arose. No doubt because of this dog's similarity to Bisou, my mother asked if it came from a breeder. "We wanted to get a rescue dog," the owner began, and I figured, here it comes. Instead, what came was a "but." But, she and her family live in a very small apartment, and were not approved for one. Instead, they went with a "reputable pet store," and we learned what that means, and no, I'm not convinced it means anything in particular, but she seemed to have her story straight. I am convinced, however, that there are rescue promoters who take their work so seriously that they're going around telling people their apartments are too small for a toy poodle, a breed it's hard to picture existing anywhere but a small apartment.

Case closed

2011-12-22T15:04:00.004-05:00

Perhaps in an effort to win over the Unsolicited Character Witness To Glamorous Person award from a certain Ivy League prof, Garance Doré has decided to take a stand and defend a young model against charges of anorexia. That anorexia is a mental illness or, in the modeling world, an occupational hazard, and not a crime, might be worth pointing out. But anyway, Doré, who does not appear know the model in question except as someone who's photographed her, and is a fashion blogger, which last I checked is not a kind of medical professional, has this to say to the accusers:

That just doesn’t match the image I have of Karlie Kloss at all. She’s one of the healthiest, happiest models I know – this photo I took of her on her bike* on her way from one show to another during Fashion Week in September is much more in sync with what I see as the real Karlie.

Well that's certainly definitive. A model projects a wholesome image (the American ones always must), and is not the absolute most emaciated of the bunch, so health clearance here! (Never mind that plenty of girls and women with anorexia are a whole lot larger than this model, or that "orthorexia" - basically anorexia plus working out too much - is by now women's-mag old news.)

But it gets more absurd. According to Doré, Kloss can't possibly be anorexic because she reminds one "of a ballet dancer." And she even is a dancer. Case closed! Ballet dancers are famously immune to eating disorders, as we all know, if not from growing up with girls who did ballet, then at least from "The Black Swan." In other words, Doré somehow manages to make claiming that this model doesn't have an eating disorder more ridiculous than the also-ridiculous claims from strangers who couldn't possibly know that the model does indeed suffer from one.

Meanwhile, the question of whether a model has an eating disorder is a) unknowable to outside observers, and b) hardly the main issue. If it turns out that 0.00002% of girls and women between the ages of 14 and 22 have a certain build naturally (whatever that means), that's still the one build the fashion industry promotes as acceptable, a build that the rest of the population could only obtain through dangerous means. What's ick about Doré's response is that it's wrong to claim this model is anorexic, not because it's wrong to diagnose strangers, but because rather than looking skeptically at these images, we should be celebrating them.

All of which brings up yet another issue, which is whether a celebration of the appearance of "health" is actually such an unequivocal improvement. Counterarguments being, a) health is not necessarily visible externally - e.g., on some, pale skin and eye circles are a skin type, not signs of illness, and b) do we really want to be telling those who are and look ill that they're also not beautiful, and telling those who look less than robust but are in fact healthy that they are unattractive? But I digress.

*I reacted to the photo as someone who has a lot of near misses getting hit by cars while biking in traffic, and was thinking headphones plus no helmet, living on the edge. But if Kloss is a dancer, and able to walk the runways, she's probably someone a bit better-coordinated than I am.

Gifts that keep on giving

2011-12-21T13:35:00.000-05:00

The latest in the NYT do-gooder-gifts series is from Mark Bittman. While it's closer to reasonable than the last installment, it has its own problems. Removing obstacles to home cooking sounds good in theory, but are "gifts" the way to approach this? As with all self-improvement-type gifts, there's a certain awkwardness. The famous luxury-anti-wrinkle-cream conundrum.

In terms of Bittman's list, it's hard to picture anyone responding well if you told them that not only are you going to take them to the supermarket and show them how to buy groceries, but this is your "big gift" for them for the holidays. If this is unsolicited - and of course if it's solicited, it's a lovely gesture - it's just a teensy bit patronizing. And the "Rice and Beans Pack," again, how would it not be offensive to receive this? It's a gift that says, 'not only do I suspect you're too inept to figure out how to cook really basic foods, and perhaps overweight from all that fast food you eat, but I also think you're too poor to make anything less feed-ish on a regular basis.'

And the CSA membership, that would be a gift that keeps on giving. It's entirely possible to like to cook, to go to farmers' markets, but not to want to be stuck with turnips for months because that's all there is. What if the crop the CSA has in great bounty is a food you don't even like? Wouldn't the end result be food waste or, if the recipient found a way to donate or otherwise pass along the turnips, massive inefficiency and likely resentment? Adults who don't cook don't want to cook. Adults who are not members of CSAs don't want to be members of CSAs.

Then there's the elephant in the room: gender. Under what circumstances is it not problematic to give these "gifts" - unsolicited - to a woman? A woman who's expressed no interest whatsoever in putting on an apron?

Bittman introduces the column in a way that makes it seem - and I'm sure this isn't true - that he never considered where gender enters into it:

Americans spend less time cooking than anyone, and the amount we “cook” — some people count microwaving a pizza — has been on a long, slow decline. The reasons for this decline are varied and complex, but an increase in the average of both hours worked and television watched, coupled with the marketing of “convenience” foods, have turned cooking from a sometimes-pleasurable necessity into, for many people, an ominous-seeming choice.

Gar! It's not that Americans are cooking less than we used to. It's that American women aren't cooking so much these days. No one ever expected this of American men. It's just like when we hear about how these days, "people" are premarital sex like it's no big deal. When it's really that these days women are doing so - men have always done so, without this being much of an issue.

Potatoes big and small

2011-12-21T12:07:00.000-05:00

The academia story of the moment is about the professor who may or may not have been fired for giving an actor and known academic Renaissance Man a D for a class that the student-actor-writer-"Freaks-and-Geeks"-heartthrob may or may not have skipped for most of the semester. Let it be known, before I go any further, that I've never had JF in any of my classes, never so much as glimpsed him on the street, nor, to my knowledge, did he ever take a course in my department, or even in my school. I would estimate that maybe five of NYC's eight-plus million are in some way affiliated with the university in question, so it's not so surprising that our paths never crossed.

When I first read the story, in the Daily Mail of all places, I figured missed class is missed class, students who miss too much get bad grades, often according to departmental policy and independent of an individual instructor's feelings on the matter, and it seemed like there was more to the story that we weren't hearing. Again, I know as little about how the school in question operates as anyone, but... yes, it seemed like there's more going on, things of a small-potatoes-except-for-those-involved academic-politics nature, and the star's name has brought it all into the public eye. I couldn't begin to guess what's going on behind the scenes, let alone who's in the right.

The angle of this that interests me is that now another former professor of the actor in question is weighing in on Slate, in a way that kind of makes me lose faith in the entire enterprise. But, but, the second professor interjects, JF is so a good student! Now, as anyone who's ever been a student knows, sometimes you do well in one class but not another. Maybe some classes you find more engaging than others, for whatever reason, and in the others you're relatively zoned out. Maybe one class's requirements you find much simpler to meet than another's. Maybe you've been unfairly maligned by one instructor and unfairly lauded by another, who knows. The end result is that one instructor would say about you isn't what another would, which is why, come letter-of-recommendation time, you ask the instructors you impressed. It's not that individual students become radically different people in different classes, but it's also not as if there's this constant Student X, with identical performance across all courses. It would seem, then, that one instructor couldn't say much about how a student comes across in another instructor's class, in a different department, at a different institution. Yet that's precisely what Slate has published.

Isn't there supposed to be something like student-instructor confidentiality? Or is it totally OK to use a big-name student to garner sympathy for yourself, whether casting yourself as the adjunct crushed by the star-struck big-city university (when, if there is a larger story, there's no way that too will be brought to light), or the serious (if also pre-tenure) professor so devoted to his students that he dares take a stand and defend an especially famous one, and if this ends with his own name in a big mainstream publication, that's the price he must pay?

Rhoda scholarship: a staycation post

2011-12-21T10:35:00.000-05:00

Hulu provides only the first three seasons of the "Mary Tyler Moore Show," and the volume on my computer doesn't get very loud, so I've missed a lot, even of the part I've ostensibly seen. The show continues for a couple more seasons, I think, but I'd already lost interest. Mary had begun to evolve into less of a pushover, but the overall strangeness of the show doesn't go away, an ambiguity that doesn't make the show more interesting so much as less-thought-through-seeming. Is Mary this feminist, modern heroine for choosing to be single? Is she really choosing to be single if half the episodes are about her futile quest for a husband? So I let Hulu be my guide and moved along to spinoff "Rhoda," with low expectations.

Contrary to what I'd have expected, Rhoda is almost... pleasant in "Rhoda." This is because the Rhoda persona gets shifted over to Rhoda's younger sister, Brenda, so Rhoda can't be the show's Rhoda anymore. In Brenda's hands, the self-deprecation is at least coming from an actress who actually looks (or is made up convincingly to look) how MTM's Rhoda is described (and endlessly describes herself) as looking: slightly overweight by 2011 standards so no doubt strikingly so in the 1970s, and frumpy. There isn't that same frustrating disconnect that usually comes up in these situations (see also: Liz Lemon, Grace Adler).

Also important: Because Rhoda and Brenda are sisters, there's less of a sense that Brenda is the way she is because she's Jewish and speaks with a New York accent. By default, on account of there's the two of them plus their mothah, the show presents more than one way of being a Jewish woman.

Rhoda doesn't become Mary, so much as she becomes... a non-grating version of Rhoda, appealing to men, but because they like her sassy tell-it-like-it is quality and exotic-lite good looks, not because she's like this free-floating potential wife who has yet to affix her stereotypically-feminine (crying easily, afraid to assert herself) self to any one man. So eager to please, so passive, Mary allows a man who's stalking her after one failed blind date to handcuff her to him at her office and leave with her for a restaurant where, the man claims, someone has the key. Was sexual violence not yet invented in the 1970s? Abduction? And this was meant to be a cute plotline? Oh, Mary... Rhoda's still self-deprecating, but she doesn't lay it on so thick. The way to look at it is, the MTM Rhoda gets split between Rhoda and Brenda, and each half, on its own, makes sense as a character in a way that the original sad-sack Rhoda did not.

********

It's not necessary to see further seasons of MTM to catch on to the startling fact that Rhoda gets married before Mary. If indeed Mary ever marries in this evidently extensive spinoff universe.

Earlyish in MTM, haughty neighbor (and, in my view, best character) Phyllis expresses, to Rhoda, her bafflement that Mary isn't married. Rhoda asks her if she's also surprised that she, Rhoda, is single, and she says no. Rhoda responds that Phyllis should go explain why Rhoda's still single to Rhoda's mother.

That Rhoda is single is treated as so inevitable as to be almost scientific fact. How could a Rhoda ever snag a man? Whereas with Mary, being single is a tentative (I say tentative, because she still ostensibly wants nothing more than marriage, but to the right man) feminist step. It means something - it speaks to Mary's own "agency" - that she's not married. Rhoda's just like that. The one time (thus far) a man - scandalously, Phyllis's brother - who's set up with Mary ends up meeting and preferring Rhoda, he's gay. Phyllis is delighted to learn that her brother likes men, because this means he's not going to marry Rhoda, her greatest fear. But what concerns us here is that Rhoda is, in MTM, the "fag hag" cliché, even long before this episode, so by the time the big (and no doubt shocking in 1970-whatever) reveal is made, it's not all that mind-blowing. We know, from her non-stop ogling of good-looking men, that Rhoda isn't single because she's gay.

So on her own spinoff, Rhoda gets married, but she doesn't go about it in a passive, Mary-like way. She asks out and, a few episodes later, proposes to her husband who, far from being a pushover, is this super-assertive, hyper-masculine dude with a ton of chest hair, as 1970s fashions don't hide. Everything, I mean everything, is dealt with in what I suppose is a pre-Reagan America way that comes across as modern and progressive to me, in 2011, more so than anything on TV lately. Birth control and premarital sex? Not non-issues, but not danced around nervously. Rhoda's dude isn't Jewish, and this kind of matters but kind of doesn't to her parents, in a way that seems totally true to life. (Although if he isn't Jewish, what are we to believe he is instead? He looks like 80% of the youngish men on the beach in Tel Aviv.)

Most of all, when Rhoda tells her dude she wants to marry him, rather than just live with him, she's both determined and, well, frank. There's no neurosis, there's no ultimatum, there are no tears. There isn't even quite fauxbivalence. She explains that she doesn't see herself as someone who'd care about this (not because she's a snowflake, but because it's the 1970s and she's in her early 30s, which in her world makes her very much feminist career woman or, depending who's asked, "old maid"), but she's discovered about herself that she does.

That Rhoda, not Mary, gets married makes me think of the Man Repeller personal-style blogger's recent announcement that she's engaged. Leandra Medine, also discussed here, blogs using a persona that's oh so Rhoda-then-Brenda. Medine is Jewish, young but well over 18, and lives in New York with her family. The ostensible point of the blog is that Medine embraces fashion not despite trendy outfits' lack of overlap with what straight men find sexy, but in full celebration of that, which is still, of course, defining dress in terms of, well, the male gaze, but which is a fun response to the irritating sort of straight man who asks why on earth women would wear things that men don't like.

On that blog, there's a great deal of Jewish-humor-inflected self-deprecation, even though Medine is, to phrase this as an understatement, conventionally attractive. If that stance makes sense coming from Brenda, some sense but not much when coming from Rhoda or Liz Lemon (not a Jewish character or actress, but what difference does it make?), it makes approximately zilch when coming from Medine. But presumably that stance alone, the choice of self-identification as hag, is enough to repel.

Competing theory: do coy self-deprecators get men not despite being like that, but because this behavior is appealing to heterosexual men? Or at least more appealing than women who are a) indifferent to their physical appearance (something men might think would be their preference, but that in practice amounts to indifference to dating men or women), or b) openly confident about their looks? Is a veneer of half-faked insecurity, ala Rhoda, ala Liz Lemon, a trait that signals a woman isn't too confident and thus threatening/universally-sought-after, but also that she isn't too pathetic, because she is amused, rather than in a funk, about her imperfections? Is this persona, assuming the right note is hit, basically the personality version of the sexy woman in a men's dress shirt and nothing else?

Teacup violins

2011-12-20T11:28:00.000-05:00

I think the NYT heard me claim that I wasn't going to read any more of its lifestyle articles beginning Jan. 1, and decided to do whatever the newspaper equivalent is of when tobacco companies increase the dose of nicotine to keep addicts from abandoning ship. They are providing these bloggable delights that I mustmustmust read and respond to. Resolutions, alas. I have until the 31st.

First, there is the couple that decided to turn its wedding into a celebration of every trendy do-gooder variant of smug. My mind, it explodes. They hate stuff! They sell t-shirts! Sample quote: "During the reception, Mr. Friedlander asked his guests to please recycle their cups, 'because we’re really in a serious situation with climate change.'" Those writing novels set in present-day yuppie NY milieus are now kicking themselves because they did not come up with this line. It's also a "Styles Style" first, in that the journalist actually lets on what she thinks of the people she's covering.

Next, the paper actually asked readers to provide their thoughts on issues at the intersection of dog breeds and Manhattan real estate. Maybe readers would have opinions on this? Maybe! Opinions such as:

-It's imprisonment to have a dog in any apartment of any size, any breed.
-Dogs experience "horror and humiliation" if forced to defecate on cement.
-It's dog abuse to have dogs without 300 acres for them to roam on.
-It's wrong to ask which breed goes best in an apartment, because rescue! (Never mind that there are breed-specific rescues.)
-It's wrong to ask which breed goes best in an apartment, because there are so many wonderful pit bulls in NY shelters.
-Dog breeds are like races, and to make distinctions among them is racist.
-If you have a preference re: dog breed, you should instead get a cat.

My own take is that, while I still don't understand the logistics of initially housebreaking a dog in a high-rise (everything we read explained that you need to scoop your puppy up and outside quickly in that initially stage, which we did, and now she's housebroken), I'm not sure how living outside the city would be better for a dog. Yes, it's a problem to leave a dog alone all day in an apartment, but are dogs left alone all day in a house or yard so much happier? The yard solves the "bathroom" question, but doesn't mean there are other dogs to play with, or that there's anything much to do, or that the owner's around.

If anything, suburban owners probably feel that because their dogs get enough "outside" time, they don't need specific exercise or socialization. Dogs in the city can go to dog runs, meet lots of dogs and people, have quick and easy access to emergency (and routine) vets, dog sitters/walkers/day care/grooming, etc. And yes, I'm aware that actually owning/leasing/something a car would make the suburbs more manageable, and if all goes according to plan, soon, but the convenience of city life seems like a good thing for dogs as well as for people. I know that the muck through which I walk Bisou is meant to be "good for dogs," but I kind of think she'd prefer things in the city, with better access to croissants and Uniqlo. Or am I projecting?

Finally, there's the requisite cue-the-tiny-violins discussion of privilege. What, in this "Occupy" age, should rich parents tell their kids? This from, of course, the parenting blog. And just as every post with the word "dog" in it leads to scolding about rescues, here it's a predictable enough response about how rich people should really be giving to charity, as if there's some reason to believe that the rich people in question are not already doing so.

The official WWPD assessment: It would seem the answer depends on the age of the kid, etc., but that what would need to be explained is that "rich" means two separate things. One is intangible, cultural, educational, etc. privilege, which is there for rich kids virtually whichever choices their parents make, simply by virtue of raising kids in wealthy surroundings. The other is the question of whether the child is wealthy, as in whether the child has much of the freedom that comes from having money to spend. For adults, one big perk of having lots of money is, it can be spent on this, that, the other. A child from a super-rich home, with a minimal allowance or (in less quaint terms) no credit card might have all the cultural privilege, but doesn't have the independence that comes from actually, personally, having access to money.

Of course how much money a family has available matters, but among the population not experiencing genuine need, it doesn't matter as much as one might think. There are plenty of kids with the "wrong" jeans because their well-off parents don't want to be buying $100 jeans for their kids (b/c of the values that promotes, b/c it seems like a waste, etc.), and plenty of kids in the "right" ones as a result of their parents' sacrifices with that particular goal in mind. (Growing up, the kid in my class who had the toughest time of it, clothing-wise, was from a very wealthy family, and her parents no doubt spent gobs on her clothes, but made her wear those little-girl smocked dresses when everyone else was wearing flannel in emulation of Kurt Cobain. What "privilege" that must have been for her.)

And, unless a family is so rich, and is 100% confident about passing along that wealth to the kids, it would seem that there's a danger in passing along an idea of noblesse oblige, "we" are so very very lucky, let's give thanks, blah blah, when the kid could perfectly well grow up and not have these advantages, and needing to do such radical things as clean his own bathroom and check what things cost at the supermarket. Nothing will change the fact that a kid grew up rich, but any number of things can happen later in life. I mean, when a kid from a wealthy home gets a typical teenager job, this is in part to "build character" and to make him less of an ass to food-service workers in the future, but it's also giving him life skills should he need to be at the mercy of bosses in not-glamorous situations in the future. Social mobility isn't the well-oiled machine it ought to be, but it's not entirely non-existent, and cuts both ways.

So I suppose I don't think it's being refreshingly honest to tell a child how rich "he" is, when the relevant fact is how rich his parents are. Which is still a very relevant fact in terms of his life experience, but which isn't the same as his being rich.

Early New Year's Resolutions*

2011-12-17T13:08:00.000-05:00

-Write The Small Dog Workout Book. Inspired by this NYT reader comment; socialite, reality TV star, and incredibly tall woman Kelly Bensimon's choice of tiny maltese as workout partner; and my own half-hour jogs with Bisou, the ones that tire her out for a couple minutes and me for the whole day. The jogs are really for her, and for me only insofar as it means maybe she'll require less chasing around the apartment afterwards. But I'm sure that as with any exercise, poodle-jogging makes a person fit and Gwyneth-like. This book would sell in the States, I think, but could even become a hit in Frahnce, where it would be marketed as a way of combatting cellulite. Either way, Bisou goes on the cover.

-Or, co-write the satirical cookbook my friend and fellow woods "housewife" and I have been discussing, based on our non-existent café serving the woodsy academics. Think Bravo meets Alice Waters. Think "Big Bang Theory" from the perspective of Penny crossed with Daria. But those are all the clues you're getting for now.

-Stop reading the NYT, NYMag, or anything else with NY in the title, except for hard news and op-eds. No Styles, no Well, no lifestyle commentary, no restaurant reviews. No reports on shoe sample sales where the shoes look like ones I might potentially be able to walk in. Nothing about how one simply must go to the Greenmarket fishmonger for the latest catch. Yes, it was nice being able to get good fish, as opposed to whatever's shrink-wrapped at Wegman's, or displayed in a fishmongery way but often foul-smelling at Whole Foods. Yes, there's a boutique fish store on Nassau St., but it's at the far end of Nassau St., and days when it's cold enough to take fish that far by bike are days it's too cold to bike there. And my guess would be that if it's anything like the boutique everything stores on and near Nassau St. (like the cheese shop without prices on most of the items! like my recent $14-plus-tax-and-tip hamburger!), if you have to ask... No! I must tear myself away, away from fish stew recipes and the even more delicious comment about how wrong the recipe author is to suggest using canned tomatoes, when in this day and age, with all we know about BPA...

-Pitch some kind of earth-shattering "how we live now" article to the Atlantic. Something about the food movement or rescue culture. Something about how "we" only feed our dogs local and sustainable kibble.

-With husband, purchase car. Learn to drive car. Wean self from shuttle.

-Maybe I could have my own talk show? I like horses.

*Academic goals not included, because they're what they are for every other humanities PhD student, namely finish it, publish part of it, and graduate already.

Some ID

2011-12-16T23:05:00.000-05:00

This was, all told, a crummy day in non-tragic but still-frustrating respects. But one particular highlight was that at Wegman's - remember how pro-Wegman's I was? - I got carded for a bottle of wine. For context, this was one bottle of wine, amidst groceries adding up to just over $100, and no individual pricey items, but a bunch of really mundane stuff, not quite the makings for a rager. A week's worth of meals, give or take, plus dish detergent. Also for context: the wedding and engagement rings. The weary, 28-year-old face that says, "My husband's at a conference, so this week groceries are all me."

Ah, but getting carded is so flattering! It's like the opposite of being called "madame"! Except not really. It's store policy, they take it very seriously, and you could be in the Guinness Book of World Records as oldest person alive and you'd need to show ID.

But I'd come prepared. Because my new learners' permit has no photo ID, but is just this piece of paper with a barcode or something, I brought along my shiny new passport. I mention that it's new because that means a) a current photo, and b) the name matches up with the one on my credit card.

"Can I see some ID?"

I take out the passport and open it to the photo page.

"I can't accept this."

And so we went back and forth for a while. In a bid to make the two hours the shuttle drops you off at the strip mall go by more quickly, I'd already gone in and out of, oh, everything on that side of Route 1? Not Chuck E. Cheese, so no, not everything. I went to Target without needing or wanting anything in the entire store, but overheard an older woman telling a young child that she should stop talking about football because she's a girl and football isn't for girls. I saw a pair of Converse at Famous Footwear that had been $45 but were reduced to $49, and yes, you read that right.

I'd tried my best to make Wegman's itself take the hour and a half or so I had left once I got there. I stared at the olive oil section, thinking of the Terry Gross interview I just listed to while walking Bisou with the latest author of some book about how olive oil labeling is all BS, except that you need to get the good stuff. Is Wegman's brand the good stuff? The Greek one? There are problems, it seems, with Italian, yet another case of dubious "made in Italy." How low am I on sugar? Enough to merit adding a five-pound bag to an already-packed cart? Domino's or Wegman's brand? I wonder what shampoos are sold at Wegman's? And so on. By the time I was at the register, I had under ten minutes to make the shuttle.

It was only as I was pleading that this was a US government-issued ID that I realized that, due to incompatible missing pieces of cultural capital, the cashier had never seen a passport before, just as I did not possess the only form of identification any adult who has it together enough to make it to Wegman's might possibly own. I'd never had this happen before, in part because in NY carding is strictly for those who look underage, and even then kind of lax, but also because those doing the carding, if they didn't have passports themselves (often enough, on account of having come from another country), had at least encountered them when carding an international and largely non-driving population. I explained that I don't know how to drive, thus no license, thus the thing I was showing. (And shouldn't the not driving make me the ideal purchaser of wine?) I didn't explain what it was, because what if she did know perfectly well what it was, but was giving me a hard time?

Eventually, the cashier summoned a higher-up, who, without looking at the part of the passport that has my date of birth on it, saw what kind of document it was, saw that I'm a bit of an ancient vintage myself, and told her that it was fine. What he meant, though, was that the document was fine, but she still needed to check my birthdate on it. I had no idea what she was doing with it, inspecting it so closely that an El Al security guard might want to learn from her, but eventually she said something along the lines of, "Oh, there it is," and moved on to the eggs, milk, bananas, and so forth.

I feel as though this story ought to end with my drinking that wine, but ever since becoming ancient, I find that I get hungover but not tipsy from even small amounts of alcohol. This bottle is basically for, next time we have people over, now we'll also be able to offer them red.

Two before their time

2011-12-16T10:16:00.000-05:00

Sad news. Re: Christopher Hitchens, I assume readers of WWPD have read at least as much by him as I have, and judging by Twitter perhaps gone carousing with him as well, whereas I'd only ever heard him talk, so I won't make specific recommendations. But I'll remind everyone again to check out Paula Hyman's Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History. Also, of course, The Jews of Modern France.

"[A] commercialized selfish jewess"

2011-12-15T12:57:00.000-05:00

The Christmas thing. As I've explained before, and will need to do each year, there are a whole lot of Jews in this country (hi!) who were raised, perhaps inadvertently, with the understanding that non-celebration of Christmas is the central tenet of Judaism. You can explain to such individuals that Christmas is pagan/secular/commercial, or that there are far more important facets of Official Judaism than not celebrating Christmas, if that even ranks at all, or that there are far more positive ways of promoting being Jewish than making it about not having fun when everyone else is. But it's useless. If this is where you're coming from, if this is your experience, you can be neck-deep in Clams Casino on Yom Kippur and aghast at the idea of your halls being decked come December.

The seemingly bizarre notion that Judaism=non-celebration-of-Christmas isn't that strange, really, and is rooted in childhood. Because you're not engaged in theological discussions with your classmates, the way you know their religion, assuming a secular-ish, mixed-faith environment, comes down to one question: Christmas or Chanukah, or more essentially, Christmas or not. If this has always been your identity, it will not strike you as odd.

In the past, Emily "Prudence" Yoffe has sympathized with Jewish partners who aren't so into the Christmas thing. So the following letter-writer might be forgiven for thinking - mistakenly, it turns out - that Yoffe would find her approach to the holiday something other than insane:

I am Jewish, my husband is not. We were married by a rabbi, attend synagogue, and have a Jewish home. Our son, born this year, had a bris. My husband's parents live in a rural town across the country and know no other Jews. They have been open and welcoming and traveled at great expense and difficulty to our son's bris. But we have run into a problem with the upcoming Christmas, which we will spend with them. We intend to explain to our son that Christmas is Grandma and Papa's holiday, and accordingly we asked my mother-in-law to wrap any gifts for him in Hanukkah paper. My mother-in-law insists that Christmas has become a secular holiday and cannot understand why our son should not enjoy Christmas as her own son did. We see them rarely, so I do not want to taint the holiday with a stern message to them. I think our suggestion is a good compromise that allows their grandson to celebrate the holiday with them with minimal confusion and is consistent with the decisions we reached. How can I help my mother-in-law respect our wishes?

Mom, in other words, has a touch of the nuts. If you marry someone who isn't Jewish and hasn't become Jewish, you relinquish your right to raise your children in full non-celebration-of-Christmas. Mom could explain to the in-laws about Judaism-as-non-celebration-of-Christmas, but who's to say a) that she could articulate it as precisely as I have on this here blog (and her wrapping-paper idea suggests not), or b) that they'd know what on earth she was on about if she did. But she is now a part of a family that is not entirely Jewish. This is different from being a citizen of a country that is not entirely Jewish. These rural folk who've never seen another Jew are her relatives, and what she needs to respect isn't any "Christmas is a secular holiday" nonsense, but that Christmas is a holiday celebrated, for whatever reason, by some of her relatives. She doesn't get to pretend that the entire family is Jewish when it isn't, especially when some of the relatives expected to join the masquerade have only the faintest notion of what "Jewish" is.

The Slate commenter responses to the nutty mom, however, are just as off as she is. Oh how cruel, that the Jewish mom isn't embracing diversity! When this is a pretty clear-cut case of a tiny minority's ways up against the mainstream culture. If the in-laws celebrated something that was also unusual and particular, but not Jewish, if Kwanzaa or the Chinese New Year were at stake, that would be its own matter. (One can read, in another recent Slate "Life" column, about some of the Christmastime traditions I married into but have not, alas, embraced as my own. A meta-diversity-issue if there ever was one.) But here, between Real American Christmas and its Jewish shadow holiday, there's a whopper of a power imbalance. To the commenters who thinks it's the same as a Christian kid being exposed to Chanukah, that is, to put it mildly, missing the point. It's all well and good, if your culture is that of the majority, to "tolerate" others. It poses no particular threat to your way of life. (The absurdity of the "war on Christmas" being, of course, that Christmas isn't going anywhere, but is in fact beginning earlier and earlier each year.)

It's not that minorities shouldn't tolerate the majority, but that what ends up being asked is that they thank and thank and thank the majority for tolerating them, and hold forth at any opportunity on how lovely they find the majority's traditions. Mom should, for the reasons mentioned above, accept that her in-laws celebrate Christmas, but her reaction, if nutty, is rooted in something sane.

But the responses that interest me most are the ones that latch onto the gender of the Jewish parent:

You come across as a control freak as I read over your letter. How very sad for your son. I know a few people who left the Jewish faith because they had mothers like this and of course had little to do with their mothers once they became of age. Is that what you want?

And:

Reread the letter in the voice of Howard Wolowitz's (sp?) mom from Big Bang Theory. Can anyone else imagine how much of a pain the LW will become if her kid grows up and ends up dating or marrying outside of the Jewish faith?

And!

It's paper and that LW sounds just like a commercialized selfish jewess...putting such restrictions on paper and confusing the holiday...her husband is spineless.

Got that straight? The problem here isn't this woman, it's Jewish women, as a "type." Pushy, castrating, insane.

Truffles Quarterly

2011-12-14T22:04:00.000-05:00

Jennifer Steinhauer is appalled that other moms in her well-to-do West Coast milieu are not bringing home-baked goods to bakesales. She mentions that "moms" are the culprits, with wording that might suggest she'll have a more egalitarian approach, but then doesn't question that moms and moms alone need to step it up. Not once are "fathers," "dads," or "men" brought up. It's strikingly unapologetic wimmin, kitchen, argument, with the notable caveat that this particular wommin is a journalist for the NYT, and thus not a housewife.

As someone too old to be bakeselling (or is that how to fund humanities departments?), too young (in my academic milieu, if not biologically) to have school-age children, this isn't an issue I give much thought to. If I didn't reflect on it, I'd probably agree with Steinhauer that "bakesale" implies something that was, you know, baked by the person (or a parent of the person) bringing it in.

I'm blogging the article in part because in one part of one of the sentences, the principle flaw of the food-movement approach is (inadvertently) as clearly laid-out as I've ever seen it:

"Some pull out the 'lack of time' card when it comes to baking (though in truth, Rice Krispie treats take less time to make than going to Safeway for cookies) [.]"

Unless you have a marshmallow tree in your backyard, you're going to the store. Either on a special trip, or picking up bakesale goods while doing the rest of your shopping. If you have to do something with what you bought at the store, i.e. if you must then cook, like with ingredients, this is in addition to the time you spent shopping. Cooking takes more time and energy than not cooking. This may seem obvious, but rather than pointing to the other factors that compensate for this (i.e. home-cooked is often tastier, healthier, cheaper), food-movement sorts feel compelled to claim that from-scratch is effortless. Those who think cooking is exhausting, that there are better uses of free time, are, they want you to know, mistaken.

Writers like Steinhauer completely misconstrue what the "'lack of time' card" is about. It's not that there is literally no time, that in "times like these" everyone's working from literally when they wake up to when they go to sleep. It's that the time is, as determined by those whose time it is, better-spent doing something else. Yes, that "something else" might be recuperating from a long day of work in front of the TV for three hours. But that doesn't mean those are three hours that could perfectly well be spent whipping up a meal. I mean, they could and they couldn't. It might mean being more exhausted at work, or (because guess what, the person being asked to make this tradeoff is a laydee) this sentiment known as resentment. After a long day, I have to work more?

Note also the arbitrary divide between prepackaged (bad!) and homemade (good!). The dessert in question - which I myself have never been known to turn down - is made from ingredients that are about as food-industry as it gets: a Kellogg's cereal (if one of the least-offensive ones) and marshmallows. This is super-revelatory, as it shows is that the key "ingredient" for food-movement types is kitchen labor. Were you just on your feet in the kitchen when you might have been reclining on the couch? Then there you go.

Much of the article might have come from a food-movement-piece generator. From-scratch is better! Let's emulate our grandmothers! It also hits the usual notes regarding socioeconomic class. There's the usual food-movement scorn for those whose reason for not cooking is something other than the most abject poverty. As always, there must be a disclaimer about how some families are so poor that they can't afford a baking tin, a nod of sympathy for those families, and then a quick switch over to romanticization of those who are not quite as poor, but still too poor (or, in this case, too gloriously Old Country) to buy premade treats:

No question, some people cannot afford the equipment needed to bake, even if they wish to, though flour and sugar are cheaper than Chips Ahoy. And in my observation in the four American cities where I have lived, income does seem to be the underpinning of the problem.

Indeed, I have witnessed the reverse: the more upscale the community for the bake sale, the fancier the store-bought cookies. (Sprinkles Cupcakes may be the single biggest supplier of bake-sale goods in West Los Angeles.) Lower-income parents, especially first-generation immigrants, often turn up at school parties with the best-tasting homemade treats.

Bad yuppie women! You correctly assessed that your time and energy have significant value in your society, and chose an extra hour at the firm over one over the stove! Meanwhile, note also the YPIS-worthy conflation of those not rich enough to spend $3.25 each (say) for cupcakes for an entire class of kids, and those so poor they can't afford the raw materials to bake from and don't have access to an oven. Speaking on behalf of those who buy flour without a second thought, but who often gasp at the price of upscale pastry (and imagine buying enough for 20-30 kids!), we're out there, and we're not "lower-income" except insofar as our incomes are lower than... I don't want to resort to OWS lingo, but you see where I'm going with this.

Then things get baffling. Steinhauer also conflates a host of foodie concerns that are rarely found in the same individuals:

It strikes me that all this bake sale corner cutting and potluck shrugging-off are odd anomalies in our ingredient-obsessed, locally sourced lima bean eating, organic milk swilling culture. We objectify food with our smartphones at restaurants, sticking photos with sauces slithering off the plate onto our blogs, and with fancy journals devoted to a single ingredient on our nightstands.

We stick up our noses at out-of-season blackberries, and compete over the brands of our stoves and dishwashers. We moralize about the family dinner, outdo one another by killing and plucking our own turkeys and plan vacations around a dinner reservation.

Are "we" food-movement post-hippies? Jet-setting gourmands? Yuppies whose high-end, pristine kitchens as good as announce that we don't cook? These may all be well-off predominately-white coastal sorts with some proclaimed interest in food, but they're not the same people, not at all. The fancy-cupcake-bringers aren't an anomaly. They're merely the fancy-unused-oven-owners.

The more I think about the food-movement issue, the more I think its flaws come primarily from the near-unspoken assumption that the "we" who aren't cooking as much as we ought to (and thereby causing the downfall of Western civilization) are women. A movement that's ostensibly progressive, and that's spearheaded largely by men who do in fact cook (Bittman, Pollan, Oliver...) and women who've become so rich and famous from food that they're about as far from housewives as they come (Waters), in theory addresses men and women alike, but in practice, not so much. The question, then, is whether we should ask that these articles at least claim to be addressing men and women alike, or whether when they do just that, they're covering their bases but ignoring the reality of who, precisely, is being told to feel bad about not spending more time in the kitchen.

Inadvertent outdoorsiness

2011-12-14T15:42:00.003-05:00

I'm going to take the opportunity to brag-complain (bragplain?) about having biked to Wegman's over the weekend, which is to say very far from where I live, to a shopping center that is definitively intended for cars, a shopping center where if you arrive in a regular car and not an SUV, you're already an eccentric. (The only others who'd arrived via bike were my husband, whom I'd biked with, and a colleague of his we ran into at the nearby Target.)

Wegman's is at least not across Route 1, but that's like saying that California's totally bikeable because at least I wouldn't have to cross an ocean to get there. We took the lovely canal path, which meant not risking getting run over for most of the trip, but also very nearly swerving in mud or gravel and into the canal. That much was averted, but I'm still not sure how to get the mud off my coat (specifically, the... seat of my coat, it isn't pretty), because it's one of those coats that doesn't go in the wash, but isn't dressy enough to dry-clean, and there's be no way to get it to a dry-cleaners' without getting yet another coat muddy in just the same way. (Seinfeldians, this is a "the very pants I was returning" situation.)

Then, because this wasn't inefficient enough, and nor was spending three hours on Wednesday afternoon getting groceries at Whole Foods via shuttle, I went allll the way into New York and somehow ended up not with a haircut, as I'd imagined I might, but with a bag full of Zabarsness (they have Camembert that tastes like the real deal in France, for less than $7 a container! I had to stock up! and Amora mustard! I'm starting to wonder about my sanity! or was, when I arrived at Penn Station at 5:18 for the 5:17 train...).

Yes, yes, a car, I am aware, I'm on the case, or as much as I can be without yet being able to drive one unaccompanied. A car would not turn Princeton into Tokyo (and I've never been to Tokyo, but merely imagine it as the anti-Princeton, at least the anti-woods-outside-Princeton, thus the many Japanese tourists taking pictures of exotic Nassau Street), but it would solve the dilemma that is grocery shopping. Lucky, lucky Bisou, content with cans and kibble.

Her little den

2011-12-14T15:07:00.000-05:00

Took Bisou to the Dinky station to see Jo off (the astrophysicists are conferring). Walked her back. This is a half-hour each way. Does Bisou walk in a straight line? Hardly. And she even had the added excitement of running into not one but two of the other "housewives" (i.e. women who typically do have careers of their own, but who have moved to the woods with their husbands) and managed to get cooed at in Hebrew and French, respectively. (And I even got to use my French! Hebrew-wise, I understood the cooing...) This was, finally, sufficient exercise for the world's most energetic dog that looks like it would be a lap dog. There's hope for the day!

And where is she asleep right now, you ask? In her crate. I did not lock the crate, nor did I lead her into it. It is finally, as the dog books assured it would be, her den. The secret? We have not put her in the crate in ages. If she's not with us, she's in the (fenced) kitchen. How anyone gets a dog to voluntarily enter a crate while still crate-training that dog remains a mystery.

Where Nice Guys meet That Guys meet PUAs

2011-12-13T13:10:00.005-05:00

Found this gem via Facebook: "A Girl You Should Date," advice, presumably, to the young man who fancies himself an intellectual. To a sort of Nice Guy crossed with That Guy. And the author's a woman (or so the name Rosemarie Urquico implies)! And it's possibly a response to a mildly misogynistic essay! It's intended as kind of... feminist, and has been interpreted that way by various Facebook friends-and-acquaintances, but "girl" is used where "woman" might have sufficed! Where have we seen this before?

"A Girl You Should Date" contains so much wrong that I'm not sure where to begin, so I'll begin with the beginning:

"Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books."

It is of course mutually exclusive to care about clothes and to read books. That's why students in literature PhD programs, male and female alike, tend to be so badly/carelessly dressed. Except, wait a moment... This is, as WWPD readers know, a case of too-brilliant-to-bathe, but with a slight twist. It's about penalizing women for having stereotypically feminine interests. Meanwhile, is dude going to notice the woman, reading or otherwise, if she's not good-looking? Dude may think he's noticing the Nabokov, but it's really the carefully applied highlighter makeup. Regardless, it gets irritating how "clothes" are this stand-in for materialism, when the same men who take such pride in their indifference to matters sartorial almost inevitably turn out to be interested in something just as pointless (expensive wine, food, electronics, sports...). The problem with "clothes" isn't that they're not books, but that this is a non-book interest associated with women and gay men.

Then there's the fetishization of books-as-objects:

"You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow."

I know the love of books' smell is meant to be this great big stand-in for an interest in books' content, but it always strikes me as one step away from being one of those people who buy books by the foot at Strand. I'm like way into texts, and that's the case whether it's a PDF, a microfilm, a crisp new hardcover, or one of those yellowed tomes that Bisou likes to munch on when she runs behind that one chair. (And I do wish she'd leave Les eaux mêlées well enough alone, and not mix them further still with whichever mix of wet and dry feed is passing through her digestive tract.)

But the main ick factor comes from the premise, which is that until proven otherwise, women are vapid airheads. Vapid, money-grubbing airheads: "It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries." No need to go to Zales!

The whole thing reeks of male entitlement, of this idea too many men have of themselves (like dude on NJ Transit recently who wouldn't shut up from the moment he got on, telling his friends what a great intellectual he is, how he loves curling up with a good book, how he hopes to read "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" sometime soon, and held forth so continuously and at such high volume that those of us trying to, you know, read books on the trip were out of luck.) that they are Great Minds. Minds brought down by the horrid, moronic females they're forced to interact with on account of their sexual orientation being what it is.

So they look for women who are exceptions or, rather, who give off the vibe of "different." They feel special if they hit on the (conventionally-attractive) brunette, not the blonde, the skinny, flat-chested young woman rather than the D-cup. (Fact: having large breasts makes it physically impossible to read great literature.) The "manic pixie" retort is apt. This is about many things, none of which is finding an intellectually-compatible mate.

Give a dog a cone

2011-12-09T10:25:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Isabel Archer (the blogger, not the protagonist), I have yet another reason to feel dog-guilt: after Bisou was spayed, she wore for nearly two weeks straight the regular vet-issued plastic cone. I had not even realized that a superior alternative existed, but seems it does.

In my defense, Bisou seemed for the most part indifferent to the cone, same as after she turns our living room into a gymnasium in ways that inevitably culminate in banging her head against corners of furniture or slipping off the couch and onto her back from a not-insubstantial height, it's as if nothing happened. Same as how she apparently spent the time her paws were being trimmed licking the groomer's hand. Same as how she demands that the vet - the great source of needles and surgery in her life - give her belly rubs. I'm not sure our dog has any conception of pain. I mean, some conception (she's not keen on being brushed, and on the rare occasions we've so much as begun to step where she had, unbeknownst to us, put a paw, she's squeaked in agony), but not human-level.

But I totally get what Isabel means when she mentions trying to figure out her dog's "inner ethnicity." Bisou is a pet of intermarriage in the Jewish sense as well as international marriage, so ethno-culturally she could be either a New York Jew or a Flemish Catholic. She's been cooed at in (Flemish) Dutch, (Canadian) French, Russian, and Hebrew. Going by her taste in food, she's from a cold part of Europe, what with her willingness to do anything for smoked salmon, which could be my background or Jo's. But she may have origins on a different continent altogether. Her "Afro" has been admired twice in such terms by black and interracial families, and when we've taken her to New York, her biggest fans have been Japanese tourists. But the poodle is a German dog with French connotations.

The only conclusion I can come to is that Bisou is a cosmopolitan. Unfortunately, unlike the cosmopolitans of turn-of-the-century French literature, she isn't also a financier, in which case she could have bought herself a more comfortable cone and, more importantly, paid the associated vet bill.

Cannelazy UPDATED

2011-12-08T21:21:00.001-05:00

In the spirit of pro-kitchen-gadgetry, I might mention the great success that was finally making cannelés, months after my mother got me a silicone cannelé-mold-thingy and... fewer months, but still months, after buying the mini-bottle of rum, equally one-purpose as far as I was concerned, as I don't like to drink rum.

I first tried one of the little baked-custard cakes in class, when Lauren Shockey, a college friend, former French major, and now celebrity, brought them in. And it was like, one does not find the likes of this in Hyde Park. And I kicked myself for not being on the path to a career in anything (officially) food-related.

So the one-purpose device that is a silicone muffin-tin-type thing for cannelés sat in a drawer as these things do, until Jo asked me, half-sarcastically because of the time not long ago when we had brownies and shtetl apple cake at the ready, why I didn't make cannelés. And I thought, that's a really good question!

But there were two reasons. One, the recipe called for leaving batter in the refrigerator overnight, and I have a rule about this: I will not make anything that needs to be started the day before, because that's going down a road I'd rather avoid. Two, the recipe (in here) calls for whole milk, which, as someone who prefers skim and is not accustomed to buying two types of milk, I'd forget to pick up. Oh, and Reason 3: after a failed attempt at from-scratch croissants, I was thinking this notoriously challenging dessert would be beyond my capabilities.

Not so!

Not so, because not so challenging, after all, thanks to our good friend the electric hand-mixer. A few simple ingredients, a few minor improvisations (the recipe called for a vanilla bean pod, so I tossed in some vanilla extract, and "blond" sugar, so I mixed some brown sugar in with white... and rather than breaking out the food scale I brought back from Paris for this purpose - recipes generally, not cannelés specifically! - I went to those measurement-conversion sites and approximated), and completely ignoring the recipe's advice about gently folding in whichever ingredients, instead electromixing away (but staying true to all the waiting-related instructions), I ended up last night with a bowl full of what looked like pancake batter but smelled distinctly like cannelé.

After the requisite at least 12 hours in the fridge, plus one of returning to room temperature on the counter, I risked the possibility of the silicone thing sticking to the metal baking sheet it, for lack of a better option, was propped up on in the oven, and it worked. The great thing about making your own cannelés is that if you prefer yours medium rare, that's an option, so if the one pictured strikes you as underdone, let it be known that this is intentional, and that if you don't hear from me for a while, it was the undercooked egg.

In any case, the result was absolute, straight-up, this-could-be-Paris. Taste and texture alike were flawless. (The shape, as Jo pointed out, would be right whatever I'd poured in, what with the molds. So the photo doesn't tell you much.) Which suggests that there's no need to wax copper molds, to weigh ingredients, to have extra-fresh eggs (not for taste, at least) or to purchase a vanilla bean or special sugar for the occasion. (Or "farine T.55," which I don't think is sold at the Wawa.)

Adapted from Magnier-Moreno, Mon Cours de Cuisine: La Pâtisserie:

Makes 15 cannelés plus some extra cannelé batter.

2 cups whole milk
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3/4 cup white sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar
just under 1/2 cup flour
2 eggs and 2 egg yolks
just under 2 oz butter, in pieces
4 teaspoons rum

Day 1:

1. In a saucepan, heat the milk and vanilla.
2. Put the sugars, flour, and eggs into a bowl, and mix (here, the hand mixer is perfection) till it's mixed.
3. While still mixing, slowly pour in the heated vanilla-milk.
4. Add the butter while still mixing.
5. Once the mixture reaches room temperature (or just after a little bit), pour in the rum.
6. Cover and refrigerate over night.

Day 2:

7. An hour before you're going to bake them, preheat the over to 520F and take the mixture out of the fridge.
8. Just before pouring, mix a bit once more, but this can be done with a spoon.
9. Put the silicone wobbly "tin" on a baking sheet (not non-stick, I'd think) before you begin pouring, or be an idiot (oops) and pour first.
10. Ideally, you're pouring from one of those Pyrex things with a spout, but ours is holding the 1/2-cup scoop for Bisou's dry feed (don't ask), so you can make a mess with a ladle. What matters is that you don't fill the cups up all the way, but very close is fine. You just don't want it spilling everywhere (oops).
11. They stay in the oven for 11-12 minutes at 520, then, without removing them, switch the temperature down to 350, and wait an hour, or more if you prefer "well done."

UPDATE

So the ones on the edge came out just right, but the middle ones are kinda on the raw side, so much so that they stick to the mold. Not sure about making breakfast (don't judge) out of a pastry with what tastes like not-cooked-off rum, not to mention near-raw egg that's been sitting on the kitchen counter overnight. So I put them in at 350 for a while more (15 mins?) and we'll see...

"Pluck your own chickens."

2011-12-08T11:44:00.001-05:00

Via Nick Troester, I see that Megan McArdle and I are on the same page when it comes to kitchen gadgets. I also now see that McArdle came up in the post in which I provided a glimpse at the not-so-romantic realities of communal-kitchen, saucepan-for-everything-yes-including-coffee life in Paris. Back then she was more like guiltily admitting to liking and owning gadgets. I think she's moved in the right direction. Her checklist for how to decide if a gadget is worth it strikes me as sound. If it's something you'll actually use, and it doesn't break the bank, and it may well mean cheaper and healthier meals in the long run, why not? It's not as if not owning gadgets means you automatically spend the necessary five hours of nightly food preparation a slower method requires. If I didn't have a food processor or dishwasher, I'd... not eat at home so much, or now that I live in the woods, would switch over to the all-frozen-tortellini diet.

But what McArdle misses, and what I failed to hit upon precisely when first writing this, is that this isn't about rational calculations of which gadgets make sense for you. It's that the obsession with authenticity is more than just aesthetic romanticization of great-grandmother cuisine. It's intricately linked to the idea of inclusivity. Advocates of home cooking, from-scratch cooking, and so on are not merely miffed but obsessed with the fact that they're often accused of speaking only to the rich and well-educated. No, no, no! they reply, what they advocate is accessible to all, because not only does it not require expensive gadgets, but those would be counterproductive.

The list McArdle offers as an example of "ridiculous" - "Buy whole nuts and crack them by hand, picking out the meats and hoping you don't accidentally get a bit of shell. Throw out the powdered gelatin and use calf's foot jelly. Make your own confectioner's sugar with a food grinder or a rolling pin. Pluck your own chickens. Render your own lard." - sounds not at all extreme by the standards of articles and recipes with less than two degrees of separation from Alice Waters / Chez Panisse. That more or less is what they suggest. (But don't just pluck your own chickens, breed and raise them first! In Brooklyn!) They suggest the sort of endeavors McArdle correctly labels "ridiculous" not because they want to make home cooking more of a snooty or fringe pursuit, but because they think - and I think they really do think this - that if what they advocate worked for our impoverished great-grandmothers, surely it's accessible to even the poorest folks today. They haven't, in other words, entirely thought things through.

"A little misogynist"

2011-12-08T11:23:00.001-05:00

"Girl" or "girls" appears five times in this groundbreaking Styles piece about socialites who are also beauty-industry entrepreneurs, or who consent to having their names and images stamped on the marketing materials in exchange for profit, same difference. This is not, however, a story about how Spence and Chapin sophomores are really making a go of it. The "girls" mentioned specifically are (or claim to be) 27, 34, 34, and 36 (making them 37, 44, 44, and 46, respectively).

And there I was, claiming that "girls" only ever referred to adult women in the case of sex workers or fashion models. Seems if you're rich enough, spending enough on anti-wrinkle creams that claim to target not only lines but also rides, your girlhood lasts forever, across however many well-calculated marriages.

All of this would be standard Styles fare (note that "girl" and "girls" are appearing in quotes, leaving open the possibility that the reporter finds this preposterous), except that it gets a touch meta, with one of the "girls" preemptively defending herself:

She is bothered by the title “socialite.”

“I always find the term somewhat funny, and in this day and age, a misnomer,” she said. “I just think of myself as a girl who works and who likes to go out. Especially in New York, most of the women I know from that scene also work. Sometimes it’s a little misogynist.”

Let's get this straight. The "girl" in question is (or claims to be) 34, married to a man who's been divorced, and has a 12-year career in finance behind her. "Socialite" is "misogynist," but "girl" is not?

Second attempts

2011-12-07T18:22:00.001-05:00

-Sometimes I write a whopper of a post, and it will then occur to me a few days later that what I'd meant to convey could have been done far more efficiently. Case in point: what I was getting at here, without realizing it, was that the food movement is fundamentally about romanticizing poverty. Which is why, on a superficial level, its goals can often seem entirely compatible with having nothing. They romanticize not having a dishwasher, so it can seem as though of course what they're advocating is universally accessible. After all, they're not demanding that you go out and buy heaps of yuppie kitchen equipment. Meanwhile, what they are asking is plenty inaccessible - not just to the proverbial single mother barely making ends meet with her three full-time jobs, but also to run-of-the-mill middle and upper-middle class Americans who have been given no compelling reason to give up TV (tsk tsk!) or reading or staring at a friggin' wall in exchange for time with mortar and pestle.

-Case in point, II: The typical reaction to the anti-Israeli-American-Jewish-marriage (or anti-Israeli-emigration) ads has been a diasporic nuh-uh, asserting that there are vibrant Jewish (and culturally Israeli!) families and communities in 'merica. This is on the one hand true, and on the other hand missing the point. The point, that is, of Zionism. (I am, of course, especially curious to see David Schraub's response, so David, if you have a moment...)

All along, the point of Zionism (and the reason I consider myself a Zionist) was to make the world better for a) Jews, and b) the Jews. Which is to say, it's on the one hand about making life more pleasant (or, circa the 1930s and early 1940s, feasible) for those who happen to have been born Jewish, and on the other, about Jewish continuity, which is to say, the perpetuation over generations of Judaism and of individuals who consider themselves Jewish.

Which is to say that it's entirely in keeping with Zionism - just ask Herzl! - that some Jews won't want in on the Jewish state, and will make use of the freedom that the existence of a Jewish state in the world helps provide them to not care an ounce about their Jewish identities, and to blend unnoticed into whichever mainstream or not-mainstream population they see fit. Why is that fundamental to Zionism? Because one of the problems Zionism was and is (or ought to be) about resolving is the idea that Jewishness is a) externally-defined, and b) fate. Jewish? That's going to be the central fact of your life. Zionism's about letting it be that if you want, and really making something of it in that case, and if not, not. Others who do care can certainly do their caring in the diaspora, but if their principle interest is continuity, they might want to head on over to Israel, where "Jewish" is the default. Given this dynamic, it's not so surprising that one would see a great deal of back-and-forth migration between Israel and the Jewish diaspora.

The point here, though, is that Zionism ideally isn't about forcing anyone to be more Jewishly-involved than they'd like. So things like these ads, that use negativity as a tool, don't fit with its mission. Israel either offers something positive for you, in which case great, live in Israel, or you wish to embrace your freedom as a human being (without being in any way impeded by being a Jew) to be a fashion blogger in L.A., a taxi driver in NY, a receptionist in Mississippi, etc.

On looking as stylish as possible while writing a dissertation in the woods with a poodle and some scientists

2011-12-07T10:42:00.001-05:00

Need a change of hairstyle, and considering a return to one of the old standbies: bangs or ombré. Bangs have the advantages of, I could still look conservative if need be, and I'm fond enough of my natural hair color and 28 enough to have a sense that time with it without gray is finite. Disadvantages: they're a hassle to maintain, a potentially expensive hassle, so I'd end up trimming them myself and looking less than professionally (glances over at Bisou) groomed. And then there's the day-to-day maintenance of them - even for the most "natural" of looks, they need to be styled (think hair dryer and flatiron), whereas my hair in its current state does not. Ombré, meanwhile, would be all kinds of crazy expensive to have done professionally, but why would I do such a thing? After the initial investment of $11.50, there's no particular maintenance involved, other than going through a bit more conditioner.

In defense of mannequins

2011-12-06T15:34:00.001-05:00

As I've mentioned on this blog before, it's eerie, if you stop and think about it, that in this day and age, there's a profession called "model," one in which under the best of circumstances, even after whichever theoretical but never-to-happen industry reforms that would open up the field to the less-white and less-skeletal, the ideal, the point, is to be judged on the basis of one's looks. It's perhaps because of that fundamental aberration from that which would be OK in any other (licit) profession that models, of any age (even if they tend to be 17 or so) are referred to as "girls."

Yet as long as things need to be sold, and, more specifically, as long as fashion needs to be marketed, what other choice is there but the human form, and on what basis are we to be selecting these humans, if not their ability to get others to buy stuff?

I don't think the answer is to take a religious-fundamentalist approach and ban female images. Nor is it practical to expect "models" to be selected at random from the population. What interests me is that the usual (feminist, right-thinking) approach is to condemn artificiality, specifically digital alteration of the human image. Photoshop and, as friend-of-WWPD Ned Resnikoff alerts us, human forms that are entirely fictitious, but with real heads attached, because H&M is apparently that particular about how its bikini models appear.

My own take is a bit different. (Contrarian, dare I suggest, but I argue in all sincerity.) I say bring on the Photoshop, bring on the plastic-like computer-generated torsos. The closer "models" are to mannequins, to literal clotheshangers, the less personally anyone could possibly take it that they don't measure up. Isn't it better for the preposterousness of the whole thing to be upfront, than to have to look at an authentic image of a lithe 15-year-old and hear the self-righteous fools' refrain of how totally unfair it is that it's not OK to mock the obese, yet it's OK to be mean to the poor models - all of whom are, let's remember, naturally thin - by suggesting they need to eat a cheeseburger? (Paired, of course, with the simpler fools' refrain that involves suggesting a young woman who gets paid for being thin go eat a cheeseburger.)

I mean, I get that the point is that people (specifically adolescent girls) don't know what's real and what's fake, and thus strive to look like women in photos whom the women photographed don't much resemble. And I'm all for awareness campaigns that make it public knowledge how artificial these images tend to be. But rather than including in these awareness campaigns a call for an end to artifice, why don't we ask for more of it? If we're going to look at these images, better that we imagine the entire thing to be made up than that a few key zits and leg stubble are left to remind us that the 15-year-old in question really does look that way in clothes.

Forage for your porridge

2011-12-05T10:23:00.000-05:00

I can't seem to get that "food" issue of the New Yorker our of my head. Growing one's own tomatoes on Cape Cod. Shucking scallops in Nova Scotia. Beginning the summer at one's summer writing abode in Umbria and then moving on to forage across Europe, culminating in Denmark to forage with a chef the author admits has been forage-profiled already to the point of cliché.

I mean, it's great to know that the wild asparagus that one can jauntily pluck in Italy is as far from what one gets at the store as a truffle is from a normal mushroom. And I'm sure that a tomato lovingly grown at a summer home tastes better than the ones I purchase year-round - fresh and spray-painted red by exploited workers, or packed in BPA-lined cans, after being spray-painted red and bearing text that misleads re: country of origin stamped on them by, one can assume, modern-day slave labor. I don't doubt that the great trough from which I ladle out my weekly feed is less succulent than what's being described.

But this move towards food so slow that it takes a New Yorker writer with a work-vacation home in a charming part of Europe (and I promise I'm endlessly charmed that this part of Italy is so local that oregano is considered foreign - how fun and variety-packed that must be for the residents who don't spend the rest of the year in New York) approximately a decade to forage across "bleak" Scandinavian beaches, not for the non-plot of a movie with the yellow subtitles to be shown at Cinema Village, but for the contents of a small salad.

The food movement has this way of veering off to its extremes. (And I'm not convinced this "Noma" isn't a parody endeavor.) Either you have to fly to one of your many homes where you are a free-range, pesticide-free intellectual and pluck individual wild asparagi from distant corners of your property... or you're being gently chastised about lentils. Being informed that you can totally abide by food-movement rules on any budget, as long as you devote your every waking minute to eating like a yuppie. Being preachily preached the virtues of great-grandmother-emulation, without regard for the tradeoffs this entails in terms of quality of life. In other words, the problem is that the food-movement retort to accusations of snobbery that things like the sound of Alice Waters pronouncing "Frahnce" or that issue of the New Yorker elicit is to swing far the other way, and earnestly discuss the plight of those for whom lentils stretch the budget.

It's nice that food-movement sorts are concerned with inclusivity, and understandable that they approach this by reaching to the opposite end of the spectrum from themselves. But the movement ignores - or maybe just rolls its collective eyes at - the vast swath of not-impoverished, not-undereducated America that has yet to be converted. People who could afford daily arugula and have the cultural capital necessary for knowing about Michael Pollan, but aren't interested. The movement pretends that the only possible reason someone wouldn't be eating slow-roasted garlic scapes is that they're too needy to have access.

This leads to odd choices. Such as, it's very food-movement to speak ill of newfangled kitchen gadgets. And not just the silly one-purpose ones (a pear-slicer!), but even things like food processors. All you need is a good knife and a hot-plate! Try a mortar and pestle, it worked for your ancestors! As I've said before, that's technically true but misleading. Some newfangled devices save time and, in doing so, vastly increase what's feasible to make from scratch. (E.g., were it not for the food processor, I'd never make pizza dough.) There's no hard-and-fast rule for which are sensible, because it of course depends what you cook. But the fetishization of the premodern kitchen marches on, because it seems like a way of killing two birds with one stone, of returning to "real" food while at the same time making cooking more accessible. Don't have the money for a kitchen remodeling? Don't have enough for a knife and fork? Fear not, you can still make a ten-course meal!

Also such as: if you can cook, you're in on this cool secret: you can turn unexciting ingredients into feasts. Food-movement sorts kind of get this, but also kind of don't. They're not insisting on truffles or caviar, but they waver between wanting a return to home-cooking and "real food," even if that means canned or subpar ingredients, and celebrating heirloom produce, farm-to-table, and so on. Eat your vegetables, they insist, but be sure to write a letter to your representative if you see asparagus from Peru in New Jersey in November. Eat whole foods, but anything not-local, not-seasonal doesn't count. No market nearby, or the only one there is just has turnips? Deal.

If this issue gets me riled up, it's because I'm basically a food-movement supporter. Better produce ought to be available, and more meals should be produced at home. It's only the approach I find troubling. Perhaps, rather than focusing on getting consumers to "know where their food comes from" as a way of knowing where/how to shop, they should focus on having this come "from above," and on having individual home cooks shop from what's available and devote their limited time and energy for food to cooking, not research. And perhaps, in their quest to make it clear that you don't need to have a summer home in Nice to eat right, they could more respectfully address not just the poor, but also those who know about what they're advocating, but shun it for not-unreasonable reasons.

Polar opposites for the holidays

2011-12-04T11:28:00.001-05:00

Maybe it's that I saw the "Human Fund" episode of "Seinfeld" in my formative years, but I've never fully understood the idea of giving someone a charitable donation as a gift. I mean, of asking for that as a gift, sure, why not? But of providing one unsolicited?

Nicholas Kristof wants you to feel guilty, not for buying yourself crap you don't need, but for buying stuff for your grandmother that maybe she didn't want. Because the elderly of course are all wealthy, and at any rate deserve no gratuitous fun in their lives, you should really be "buying" your grandmother a donation to an anti-sex-trafficking charity.

If I had to guess, he chose this hook because it's less likely to bring up a defensive 'but what about the economy?' that it would have elicited had he directed this at, say, trips to Sephora, or the Apple store. Tell people to give up the material things in life that give them pleasure, and they're not going to be pleased. Also in his defense, there's a case to be made for keeping most gift-giving to cards and the like, and letting people choose what they want and buy it for themselves.

But still, I'm not convinced that "a donation has been made in your name" is the answer. It seems so much more problematic than just, you know, donating to a cause you believe in without the "gift" framework. What if it's a charity the recipient doesn't agree with, which could be true for so many things that wouldn't necessarily seem controversial? What if maybe you don't want a gift that makes it seem as though the giver thinks of you primarily as someone who suffers from a given ailment, or is a member of a particular marginalized group? What if it unintentionally (or intentionally) sends a message that you think the "recipient" is a rich brat who already has more than he could possibly use, and that you yourself are, unlike the recipient, a Good Person? While your gift may help the needy, it has also ruined your relationship with the recipient. I mean, perhaps curing malaria is more important than whether two first-world inhabitants play nice, but if the point of gifts is to cement relationships, why complicate things?

Is the idea that people give more if it's incorporated into not just "the holiday season" but also gift-giving specifically? If so, is my objection to this unfounded, because it's fundamentally an objection to the behavior of those who need to do good ostentatiously (and if possible while making others feel bad) in order to do good, and not coming from a sense that good isn't, ultimately, done? Because this behavior may lead to good things happening far away, but brings about unpleasantness closer by. You can get givers who really are so rich that no "thing" exists that they'd be happy to receive but that would have found too frivolous to get for themselves, who cluelessly assume that everyone else in their lives is in the same boat. A sort of "we must remember how lucky we are" that fails to take into account the sharply varied degrees of privilege that "we" contains.

********

On the other end of the spectrum, the now-quasi-notorious Vogue gift guide. The suggestions (aside from many seeming oddly more appropriate for a rap video circa 15 years ago than for a socialite in 2011, which is neither here nor there) are exactly the kind of things one might receive and think, how unfortunate that a sum worth how many weeks' worth of groceries is sitting in my apartment in the form of a clutch that looks like ornithological roadkill. And, as cited elsewhere, the Chanel towel (and, evidently, cotton pad) seem to serve no purpose other than to provide a convenient example for "stuff people who can't burn through their money quick enough would buy."

But it seems unlikely that someone would be angry to receive a Chanel towel. It could always be sold on ebay, the proceeds donated to the charity of your or Kristof's choice. The dead-bird purses, though, I think you'd be stuck with.

Country dog

2011-12-04T10:12:00.001-05:00

Bisou has been cooed at in Uniqlo, shied away from miniature dachshunds at a dog run, and very nearly entered a shop that makes its own mozzarella. But what she really likes is a romp through the woods.

"[S]he could not even get a job that did not pay"

2011-12-01T10:51:00.001-05:00

Articles advising college seniors and recent grads not to go to humanities grad school lose me when, if they present alternatives at all (and they never present concrete alternatives - it's always that one might have instead found 'a job'), they offer up some fairytale existence in which unemployment exists only among PhDs, and in which the literarily-oriented 22-year-old could up and reverse a long series of decisions and inclinations and become the sort of person who had double-majored in engineering and air-conditioner repair. In other words, my beef with the genre isn't that humanities grad school in fact leads directly to tenure-track bliss, but rather that the alternatives for the people who are considering humanities grad school are, by the time they reach that point, kinda limited.

Behold, the alternatives.

Checking one's privilege at the first-class kiosk

2011-12-01T09:52:00.001-05:00

Katie Roiphe has discovered, recently, it seems, that the Internet is not the utopia of kindness and goodwill she might have hoped for. On the Internet, there are these "angry commenters" who, using iffy spelling and grammar, hold forth emotionally on how wrong some article was, and take this out on the writer.

If her entire point was that there are trolls on the Internet, that might be worth noting because it's rare to see someone who writes for an online magazine discovering this for herself in 2011, but I don't have enough angry-commenter in me to point out things like this for their own sake. Rather, I'm interested in the YPIS ("your privilege is showing") angle. Roiphe notes, correctly, that furious responses to articles often take the form of a YPIS:

There are several common fantasies about the writer that fly through comments sections. One is that the writer is “privileged,” and/or getting rich off of their insipid and offending article. The confidence and specificity of this fantasy is interesting. One commenter claims that a writer “typifies the white, middle-upper class man who attends Harvard. … This is because of his race and class privilege. To him, no one really has access to the "old boys' network" or is thinking too much about jockeying for social position. That's because he is a de-facto member of the old boys’ network and already has his social position.” One Slate commenter asserts that a writer “can afford to work only sporadically”; another asserts that she “pulled herself up by her manolo blahnik bootstraps,” yet another that the article is enabling her to put more polish “on her Mercedes.” Assuming the commenter does not live next door to the writer and is not the writer’s sister or best friend, one wonders a little how the commenter is quite so confident about the content of the writer’s bank account. Especially since most freelance writers for places like Slate are not exactly paying the rent on the penthouse off their efforts. If the writer has come from a place of privilege—and as in the rest of the world, some have and some haven’t—they are most likely frittering away whatever they do have by entering an insecure and unlucrative profession like writing. These demographic realities, though, make little impression on the angry commenter, who, one notes admiringly, sticks to her guns.

We are clearly in a season of class war, and one can understand the class war against a hedge fund guy, but a writer?

Roiphe, understandably for someone who thinks the "angry commenter" phenomenon is new (I was getting angry comments back in '04!), has ignored the existence of something called "Google." It is possible to find out, in under 30 seconds, a great deal about people you don't know, things that tell you, if not the precise status of their bank accounts, the extent to which they come from privilege. If Barbra Streisand starred in a movie based on a novel your mother wrote, this is maybe somewhat relevant to how you came to have a platform not accessible to others. Commenters often hurl less-than-nuanced YPISes, so if what they're really miffed about is that Roiphe writes for Slate and they don't, they may phrase this in terms of luxury items they imagine Roiphe can afford, when that's not really the issue. They may have not much sense of what the compensation is for one freelance article, and how that matches up (or doesn't) to the price of Louboutins, but I'm not sure that's important.

Obviously, that Roiphe did not emerge from poverty or anonymity doesn't discredit her as a writer. The problem is that on Slate especially, but elsewhere as well, writers are producing one "overshare" or, in neutral terms, first-person autobiographical account, after the next, and then revealing themselves to be surprised and hurt when readers respond not to the piece, but to its author. Writers who choose the personal as subject matter have to realize that they're asking to be Googled and judged. They also have to have thick enough skin, not for genuine threats (which should be condemned, dealt with, prosecuted, etc.), but to realize that the angry commenters have it in not for Katie Roiphe the woman, but "Katie Roiphe" the character about whom they have limited knowledge.

Furthermore, in the course of this personal writing, the author will so often reveal herself (wait, do men also write these things?) to be the kind of person who'd be really sad if a YPIS were hurled in her direction. Once a writer lets slip that she's touchy about this issue, it's a safe bet that a commenter will let her know just how necessary it is for her to check her privilege ASAP. Roiphe has opened herself up to if anything far, far more of this than she'd been receiving up to this point.

What Roiphe is saying makes sense, however, if you're talking about angry responses to strangers about whom it's tough to know the full story or close - non-famous bloggers, that is, or fellow pseudonymous/anonymous commenters. The truly virulent YPISes get hurled among Jezebel commenters, for example, who can't possibly know anything about one another. There is often a great deal of certainty about the wealth, whiteness, thinness, able-bodiedness, maleness, etc., of avatars. YPIS, as typically employed, is about silencing others, not the evening of any playing field. YPIS is most dangerous when hurled at those who don't have much of a platform, or much "privilege," for that matter. It deserves condemnation, but cases that involve well-known writers whose privilege (in some key areas, at least - we don't know Roiphe's full life story) is not exactly the subject of speculation seem on the less pressing end of the spectrum.

Doglemma of the millennium

2011-11-30T20:52:00.001-05:00

All dog toys bear labels warning you to supervise your dog while playing with this or any toy. Yet the point of toys (barring the few toys marketed as "interactive") is to keep your dog busy while unattended. Why is this reminding me of the proverbial stay-at-home-mom who hires a nanny? (Yes, CW, dogs bring out parenting discourse, however much or little one thinks of one's dog as a human child.) Meaning, I guess the idea could be that you're home but not actively playing with your dog, so (because what else could you possibly be doing with your time?) you are watching the dog with your full attention as it entertains itself. Or it could be (and I suspect it is) a liability issue, a cousin of the phenomenon of vendors with bongs on display "for tobacco use only." As in, it's a given that the point of a (rhyme unintended) Kong is to give your dog something to do when you go out, but they don't want to get sued if your dog manages to find a hazardous use for the thing. Whatever the case, it bothers me that there's obviously some answer to how to keep a dog busy when it's alone for, say, three hours, something to provide a dog so that it doesn't sit there all depressed, but also doesn't snake-like manage to down some enormous object left with it intentionally for its own amusement.

Jewish-Jewish intermarriage under attack

2011-11-30T15:48:00.001-05:00

Jeffrey Goldberg has brought our attention (and Helen Rosner, via Facebook, my attention) to an ad campaign, sponsored by the Israeli government but being shown in the States, urging Israelis to... divorce their American spouses, Jewish or otherwise, and return home? Presumably asking them not to marry Americans and settle in America in the first place, but then there's the fact that they're being aired here, not there.

Analyzing these ads properly would mean writing (yet another) dissertation on the question of Jews and intermarriage, but I'm thinking one, for me, is enough. So you're getting this in blog-post form, complete with tangential musings.

-Anti-intermarriage arguments - including ones against international but same-faith marriage - are doomed to failure because intermarriage is a symptom (or, in more neutral terms, a result), not a cause, of whichever feared demographic or cultural shift. In this case, Israelis are living in the U.S. anyway, because this is where they've found work in hummus, New York real estate, theoretical physics, or something else entirely. Once here, they meet Americans, often American Jews. Often, Israelis arrive here already married to other Israelis, in part because of the IDF, so if they're arriving for grad school or a postdoc (sorry, my anecdotal evidence tilts towards academia), they're a good bit older than the rest of the cohort. But if they do marry Americans, it's because they were already in America for reasons other than the theoretical allure of theoretical American spouses. Individual and structural forces unrelated to marriage were at work. But it's easier, simpler, and more emotion-tugging to discuss complex issues in terms of marriage and family, so that's how we get to these commercials, and anti-intermarriage discourse more generally.

-Herzl's notion that Israel's existence would normalize Jews, making them a people like any other, may have failed in international-relations-and-perceptions terms (Israel as the Jew of the world, and all that), but it did succeed in one area, which is in how American Jews perceive of Israeli Jews. Israeli women are somehow immune to negative stereotypes about (American, but potentially also British, French...) Jewish women. It's not precisely that they're "shiksas" (although, Bar Refaeli), but more that the salient thing about them is that they're foreign. That, and because of the different ethnic mix, while they certainly look Jewish, they often don't look Jewish in American terms, which is looking Ashkenazi. Israeli men, meanwhile, are imagined to be physically stronger and less intellectual/neurotic than their American Jewish equivalents. Again, it's related to a much older (and also socially constructed, etc., etc.) Sephardic-Ashkenazi divide, but it's also something relatively new.

And my understanding from the approximately ten trillion Israel-American Jews (varying degrees of each identity) I know is that it cuts both ways, but especially in terms of American Jewish women having not the best reputation among Israelis, the "JAP" stereotype being if anything greater among this set than among American Jews.

-The ads themselves are despicable, or would be if they weren't so ridiculous. The "Christmas" ad - and I say this as someone who periodically holds forth on why Christmas shouldn't be a national holiday in the U.S., and who's long tried to explain to the mystified why non-celebration of Christmas is such a big deal for some Jews, and as someone who's a big ol' Zionist who periodically threatens to up and move to Tel Aviv - makes Israel look a whole lot less appealing as a destination. If this is my takeaway, what would others' be? Its message is ostensibly that America is the dangerous land of assimilation, but it ends up reading as, Israel is a dying country, Judaism a dying faith, and the vibrant future requires Jews to stop worrying and learn to love Christmas. I mean, is the ad targeted at the nostalgic elderly, and if so, why show it in the States if it's aimed at Israeli grandparents?

And, it's a bit like when the grandfatherly Israeli man who led my Birthright Israel brigade ordered the young men assembled to note how attractive the young Jewish women around them were. In that it immediately makes one think the reverse, or else why would this need to be so painstakingly pointed out? That there need to be ads telling Israeli expats/emigrants to get misty suggests that Israelis are on the contrary delighted to be living abroad.

-It's maybe kind of refreshing - and I say this as someone who's incredibly against natalism, that is, government policies that interfere with individuals' childbirth decisions in order to increase, decrease, or alter the nation's demographics - that Israel isn't taking the straightforward "Jewish babies" approach, and is specifically concerned with the production of Israeli babies. But, as Goldberg notes, the idea is obviously that American-Jewish babies are as good as Episcopalian anyway.

-Everyone loves a good story of Jews opposing sweeping categories of Jewish-Jewish marriage. Like with the Syrian Jews, who apparently consider other Jews unacceptable marriage partners. Why does everyone love this kind of story? Because there's something in it for everyone. Think Jews are insular? These stories tell you nothing you didn't know. Think Jews get lumped into one box too often, and that the immense diversity of "Jews" needs more attention? These stories show that Jews are not one unified bloc after all.

-But are these ads even about the dangers of intermarriage? It seems like they could just as easily be about the threat of emigration, period. After all, an Israeli couple that moves to the States will send its kids to American schools, where those children will hear about Santa Claus, whether the parents like it or not.

-I know that the proper, politically-correct response here would be to say that there is of course vibrant Diaspora Jewish life, and that Israel needs to respect the existence of non-Israeli Jews. My own thoughts are... this, but not entirely. It seems possible - probable? - that over the course of who knows how many generations, the only Jews left will be ultra-orthodox or in Israel. If this bothers you, do something about it, but that something shouldn't be telling those already in committed relationships with non-Jews - or in milieus in which the default is a non-Jewish spouse - to marry in. If nothing else (and I could think of some other good reasons), because this approach is futile.

-While my overall stance re: Zionism - which I was reminded of by David Schraub - hasn't much changed since I first began thinking about this issue, my understanding of Israel has somewhat. No, not in terms of realizing that the Israeli government does icky things, or that religious extremists over there have too much power. This much I've long since understood, so I never had some kind of idealized vision of Israel. Rather, I've become increasingly aware through my own daily life of how thrilled so many Israelis - even ostensibly rah-rah-Israel Israelis - are to get out. To move to New York, to be academics in America, etc. They want out, but who wants in? I keep thinking that Israel would work just fine if those who believed in it (including yours truly, blogging from the Whole Foods, where the shuttle has dropped me for two hours, time I might have spent tilling the kibbutz fields) actually lived there. But it takes a big catalyst to up and move there, so if those whose default is to live there are moving here? For Israel to work, Jews don't merely have to live there. They - we - have to want to live there, and follow through.

-What with having stolen away a man from a foreign country myself (and never mind that he'd in all likelihood be living in the States regardless), I'm trying to picture a Belgian ad warning young Belgians of the dangers of moving to America and marrying an American. I could totally create this ad. It would show a Belgian at an American supermarket, looking at the sad bread selection, then going on Skype and watching his or her family tuck into a fresh loaf from the bakery. That's all you'd need.

Rich Jews refuse gaudy attire, confuse Simon Doonan UPDATED

2011-11-29T16:25:00.001-05:00

I think the gist of Simon Doonan's latest at Slate is that he doesn't like it when Jews dress WASPy. (Surprised?) Or something, with a forced "99%," OWS tie-in. It's obviously not new that "new money" tries to dress "old," nor that "old money" in fashion terms is about subtlety and nondescript clothes whose details only give the full story. ("Old" and "new" being, of course, constructs, as you can learn from Edith Wharton novels or common sense.) The comments about Ruth Madoff, her accent, her "shekels," and the great crime that is a woman of that background has the audacity to wear preppy outfits and is not going around dressed as "a long-nailed, tarty Long Island arriviste" make it clear enough how Doonan, at least, is defining "new money."

We're presumably meant to insert our own 'it's tongue in cheek' disclaimer, because Doonan refers to himself, a Slate columnist but more to the point a big-shot at Barneys whose memoir is on or will be adapted for BBC television, part of a famous fashion couple and general fashion-world-and-a-bit-beyond celeb, in lil' ol' me terms. But forget being offended. (Or, be offended. Because he comes from a working-class non-Jewish British background, he's forever the underdog, whereas American Jews with their unpleasant-to-his-ears working-class accents who make it big are gauche? A Slate commenter comments, "There was probably a way to write this without the subtle undertones of anti-semitism." But was there? Isn't anti-Semitism - and not all that subtle - integral to what he's saying?) Where's the originality? What new phenomenon is he pointing us toward? (OK, I could be blamed for the same - anti-Semitism is many things, but "new" isn't one of them.)

And I don't think you win any points in this contest if you're in favor of dressing like Sylvia Fine and you're from England. He doesn't have anything to prove in this area. He doesn't have any reason to dress up like an authentic British person because he is one.

UPDATE

What, short of a 10,000-page manifesto written in clear terms about how much you despise Jews, all Jews, even anti-Zionist ones, counts as anti-Semitism these days? A Slate commenter presents what I'd like to call the worst denial of anti-Semitism of all time, except that it's so typical. It goes:

I'm Jewish and leave Simon the heck alone. He's written an article on how grateful he is to Jewish people and how he hates anti-semitism. And I'm not sure if it's his husband or not legally, but his partner of many many years is Jewish. [...] Jews know better than anyone who runs the schmatta industry. If Simon was anti-semitic, he'd have been cast out just like Galliano was.

So if you're Jewish, or your partner is (and yes, Doonan's husband is Jewish), you can't possibly have written something anti-Semitic? It gets a bit meta, with the commenter defending Doonan while claiming himself (it's not herself, I suspect) to be immune to anti-Semitism on account of being Jewish, while claiming that the Jews "run" an industry. Doonan's piece is thoroughly anti-Semitic, but not in the Galliano, expressing-love-for-Hitler, beat-you-over-the-head-with-its-obviousness sense. I can't understand denying this, unless you are in fact Doonan or Doonan's husband. Or a Jew who thinks it shows you're enlightened and such if you nobly refuse to call out anti-Semitism.

Peter Pan (ducks head)

2011-11-29T14:43:00.001-05:00

I need to add another fashion personality. It's one I'm ashamed of, because it doesn't say anything original or creative about my approach to dress. If anything, it implies that I am a slave to fashion, or at least overly suggestible. So I hereby announce Fashion Personality # I've lost track: Alexa Chung.

I came to this realization when I found myself craving, desperately, a Peter Pan collar. But not one of the big round ones that were on the hideous blouses of my youth. No, a refined one, more like a regular collar, but rounded. I used to hate rounded edges on clothing, especially collars. This was a constant across my multiple fashion personalities. But I couldn't help myself. Pointed collars started to seem blah, if not outright wrong. So much so that I went to two Uniqlos to track down the shirt, and bought a size too big because they still had (but now discounted to an acceptable $30 - $50 had seemed steep for a dress shirt for someone who works at home or in libraries) the +J platonic ideal.

And I began connecting the dots: ombré hair? Not currently happening, but it did happen, so, check. Breton-striped shirt paired with army-green whatever and rain boots? Check. Shrunken fisherman sweater? Check. Shorts with tights underneath? And so on. While I can't say for sure that Chung herself has worn each of the things I've bought with this fashion personality in mind, nor can I rule out all other influences (shorts and tights having been very much the thing when I was last studying in Paris) there is, more often than I'd like to admit, a subconscious WWACW decision process taking place.

Aside from the embarrassing fact that I am buying things because a "fashion icon" or "it girl" or whatever is wearing them, making me the worst kind of consumer of all (even if I'm not precisely buying more than I would otherwise - it's that this is guiding purchases I'd make either way; I'm if anything buying less than usual for the simple reason that I live in the woods and don't do much online shopping), what bothers me about this is that the Alexa Chung thing is precisely what I'm always advising against, namely taking fashion inspiration from people who'd look good in whatever they wore. E.g. the "off-duty model" trend in style blogs.

Alexa Chung is, in part, a model, but that's the least of it. She looks like the prettiest girl in my high school class, but elongated to runway model height. I... found out at my annual checkup that I'd gained three pounds and half an inch of height, and left beaming because this makes me 5'2" and a half. The main social component of my life in the woods is going to a 3pm coffee hour for academics. (And I'm not knocking the coffee hour! It's just not a very "it girl" activity.) No matter how ombréd, no matter how daintily rounded my collars, I will never be confused with Alexa Chung. But some part of my shopping-and-styling-that-which-I-already-own brain can hope.

Dog ownership: you're doing it wrong

2011-11-28T09:44:00.001-05:00

Bisou celebrated getting her post-spaying stitches out (and more to the point, not having to wear a cone, and being allowed to move around beyond the kitchen) with a bath, which was for the best because we had people over for Thanksgiving and, after her first long walk in two weeks, she was in her sleepy-cuddly mood with our guests. She appears to have enjoyed her long weekend - more exercise than usual, and the odd piece of croissant. Fine, so being around so many people on Saturday in NY got her in that weird mood when she prances around on her hind legs (a spectacle on crowded Nassau St., but hardly less so in Manhattan), but at least she met some other dogs. Or was nearby some other dogs. I don't know what it takes to let Bisou know that she is a dog, and meant to socialize with her kind, and had hoped this could just be done by introducing her to her fellow canines. We've trained her on our own (housebreaking and basic commands, and the gradual-ish process of phasing out the crate), so obedience school had started to seem not so pressing. I'm starting to think we will, however, have to fork over money to some entity that does for dogs whatever it is regular school is said to have over homeschooling. Given that even the closest dog run has an entry fee, this starts to seem inevitable.

Oh, and I wish I didn't know (but I now do, thanks to Gawker commenters) that the dog run we took Bisou to in NY is a place where dogs pick up parasites. I'm not too worried, given that Bisou spent most of her time at the "run" sitting under our bench, not eating or drinking anything on the ground, but this does point to the eternal doggy dilemma of the animal's mental and physical health being mutually exclusive.

********

I'd never thought about it this way, but I'd agree that "the bulldog’s aesthetic opposite [is] the poodle." I've always liked (and, if possible, gone out of my way to say hello to) basically all cats (but, severe-ish allergies) and dogs, big and small, with the exception of dogs in the pug-bulldog-pit bull-boxer-bull terrier family. So the exposés about how these dogs (or some of them) are unhealthy under the best of circumstances have made me relieved, I suppose, that my aesthetic preference matches up with what's best for dogs. (Not so with my favorite large-dog breed, the Bernese Mountain Dog, that couldn't be cuter or sweeter but apparently only lives for five to six minutes.)

The response to the article, predictably enough, brings out the my-opinion-on-matters-canine-is-the-only-correct-one-and-if-you-think-something-slightly-different-you're-evil-incarnate contingent.* As a newish dog owner and newspaper-comment aficionado, I can, unfortunately, report back.

-There's the usual Rescue Culture intervention. If you purchase any dog - bulldog or not, breeder or pet store - you are a dog murderer. This makes reading comments to anything about dogs like reading those to anything about the Middle East - the set who pick up on key words, present their template rant, then (if ambitious) quickly attempt to connect their rant to the specific issue at hand. So sure, one could read as the broader message of the article that purebred dogs are part of a corrupt system, and that's just one more reason to go with a mutt (or save an abandoned fancy dog). I'm not sure that was the point, but hey, the article did not make the "responsible breeder" sound so fabulous.

-Many think it's wrong to care what a dog looks like. Lookist, or something. While I agree that it's sinister that bulldogs are being bred to look a way that is inherently bad for the dogs, I'm not sure what the crime is in choosing a dog you think looks cute. And the anti-lookism comes from all sides - those who think if you won't take the saddest dog at the pound, you don't deserve a pet, as well as those who think you need to have extensively researched breed temperament before making the decision of a lifetime. When it's like, when it comes down to it, dogs are dogs. They by and large need to be taken out for bathroom-time and exercise, they like to chew on your slippers, and (god willing) when they're older than puppies they calm down a bit. Having a dog is, especially at first, a lot of work, so you might as well start out with one of a sort that, if you weren't constantly monitoring its bowel movement schedule, you'd be squealing with delight every time you looked at it.

-Many think this "breed" thing is unnatural. Fair enough, if we're defining anything that comes from human intervention as unnatural, as is the usual definition, but is a mutt "natural"? Human interference brought you your scraggily unclassifiable fluffballs, too. Note that they do not resemble wolves. Consider how this may have come to be. Do you think some wolves up and decided to get perms, bleach their fur, and become Bichon-mixes?

-Many think preferring one "breed" to another is akin to being a racist eugenicist. Now, given that anyone who cares about dogs advocates sterilizing most of them, and anyone with a dog is feeding it meat products, and that dogs get "put to sleep" in a way that people, ideally, don't, it shouldn't but does require noting that non-human animals aren't people. (Except for Bisou, who walks around on her hind legs to drive the point home.) As far as I'm concerned, if humanity can channel its interest in purity and the color and texture of hair onto non-human animals and keep it there, that's for the best. So, while I find it creepy that in this day and age, there's a profession called "model" in which humans are judged entirely on the basis of their looks (although I'm sure Tyra would say there's more to it), I don't find it at all unsettling that there's such a thing as the Westminster Dog Show. I'd rather people make a fuss about perpetuating Golden Retrievers than going on all Norwegian-murderer-like about how the world would end if blondness in humans disappeared as a trait.

-One commenter (and I hope just the one) thinks he or she "rescued" her dog from a pet store... by purchasing it from a pet store. And then, to make things worse, notes that this does fund the problem, but the dog looked so pathetic. This is upsetting in part because it's so idiotic if the person really believes this, and bad for dogs if this view is generally shared, but also because it suggests "rescue" perhaps is now considered the reason to own a dog, however the dog was acquired. Speaking of...

-Many of the commenters rail against those who own a dog for the wrong reasons, and no this isn't an unfortunate call to Dan Savage. The wrong reasons are wanting a dog that's like a teddy bear, or that flatters one's vanity, or something, I don't quite get this gripe. My only guess is that it hints at the idea that the only correct reason to own a dog is to preserve an already-existing life, to do one's small part to keep dogs from suffering. And as noble as it is to help already-existing dogs, it seems wrong, or at least unnecessary, to make that the point of dog ownership. The point of dog ownership is that it's fun to spend more time with a dog than you get just seeing them pass by on the street, and to have a dog with whom you and your family in particular have bonded. It's selfish, yes, but in principle at least, the much-beloved creature is well-treated and gets something out of it as well. Of course owning a dog is about responsibility, about not deciding a year or ten in that you're bored with having a dog, about (in the more immediate moment) getting up to walk the dog at all hours and in all weather. But these are things you do in order to have a dog, not for their own sake.

*This is true at Gawker as well. Somewhere in that thread, there's a heated debate about whether Great Danes (Whitney, this one's for you) are apartment dogs. One commenter holds forth smugly about how it's basically dog abuse to only give your dog one or two long walks a day, because this breed needs to run free daily for hours. Then someone who actually owns this kind of dog explains that they take their dog to a place to run around and the dog just sits there and isn't interested in that, and is thus a perfectly fine dog to have in an apartment. Others chime in to point out that people have a tendency to overexercise these dogs. In other words, you can rest assured that if you own a dog, whatever your approach, you're doing it wrong.

Reunification

2011-11-22T16:55:00.001-05:00

My ten-year high school reunion is coming up, and my apathy towards this means that if I were to opt in, I'd now have to pay the non-early-bird fee of $75 (or even $100) to attend. Plus the usual $33-plus-Metrocard-fare to get into the city. On the one hand, I suppose I'm well-enough-situated to go to this sort of thing, in that I am married, near the end of a PhD program, and not substantially worse-looking than I was at 17. Movies and sitcoms tell me that I ought to go to my high school reunion given those conditions. (Although I suppose being single would be an extra reason to go, in that you might meet an old flame. Especially with a math-and-science high school, I can't imagine anyone would go to a reunion to show off "accomplishments" like marriage or kids. Of course, not too many had high school sweethearts, either...)

I have not gone on to make a lot of money (to put it mildly), so there's that. But I'm a Stuyvesant success story by association, what with my husband's astrophysicist-ness. (That I've gone on to a grad program in the humanities probably owes something to my delight at a version of school that doesn't involve back-to-back periods of science.) Point being, I could go with my head held relatively high, and the normal reason not to go to reunions is a sense that you're not where you thought you'd be/imagine others would be at whichever age.

But the main reason not to go is that the main reasons to go are absent. I only just now left my hometown, so unlike the five-year reunion, which was fun because most had been away for college, this time around I've had years to keep in touch with, see at parties, or awkwardly run into, my classmates. NY is funny like that. Most of the class - those who made a go of some career and those in the proverbial parental basement alike - probably lives there.

But more to the point, there's Facebook. Not only has Facebook told me, over the years, everything I've wanted to know and more (thank you, "hide" function) about said classmates. I can see, on the event page on Facebook, who's attending. I can see what each of those people have been up to, what they now look like. And this is a high school whose grads (and, no doubt, current students) are all on the site. One of my classmates is even employed there and in Zuckerberg's inner circle, which I know thanks to guess which site. On account of Facebook, there are no surprises.

So, readers who have faced the reunion-in-the-age-of-Facebook dilemma. Is it still fun to go to one of these things when there are no surprises? Or are there surprises, because online everyone's putting their best selves forward? I have until Friday to decide.

Do gay men love women?

2011-11-22T14:29:00.000-05:00

There's a burgeoning genre possibly worth paying attention to: advice (at times explicit) to straight women on etiquette in their friendships and interactions with gay men. And it amounts to the following:

-There is, evidently, a substantial subset of hetero women doing things like having bachelorette parties at gay bars, imagining that gay men exist to fulfill "Sex and the City" shoe-shopping fantasies right there at the local DSW, etc. Or, there are gay men who imagine that such women exist in great numbers, and the very idea of this horrifies them. As well it should. But I'm still not convinced that very many women who are not characters on sitcoms are giving gay men the "my gay" treatment, like so many handbag chihuahuas. Whereas the handbag chihuahua trend is apparently legit. So I'm not sure if gay men have beef with media representations (and I'm A-OK with having beef with media representations, not equating that with imaginary problems) or with real-life women.

-There are some women convinced that if they so much as leave their homes in anything less than a burqa, they will be hooted-and-hollered at continuously. Or, the women who love love love going to gay bars because it's such a relief not to be objectified are in fact insecure (a trait easily confused with too-secure) and actually prefer gay bars because at such establishments, there isn't a question of female sex appeal, of one girlfriend getting hit on more than the others. If a gay guy isn't into you, you can rest assured it's because he's gay. I think it's indisputable that this phenomenon exists, both from anecdotal evidence and from the Jezebel commenters who express this sentiment.

-It is inherently offensive to gay men if we, straight women, attempt to set them up on dates. Doesn't matter if for whichever regional/professional reasons most of the men we know are gay (ahem). It sends a message that we think "gay" means "sex" and that we can't conceive of gay friends except as gays (never mind that single-and-looking friends tend to bring up this status themselves, regardless of gender, of sexual orientation) or there's some implication that women are in fact always just setting up the only two gay men they know (again, SATC is at fault - never did see it, but heard the last/most recent SATC movie opens with the two "my gays" marrying). Whatever the case, even if in an ideal world, friends would just be friends, blind dates just blind dates, in the world we live in, this hits a nerve, and gets interpreted as, "You and Jim are both gay, you'll have so much in common!"

-As gay men (as represented by those giving this kind of advice) see it, straight women see them as accessories. From the latest installment: "Fawning over couples as being 'soooo cute' comes off as condescension at best and overcompensation at worst." Gay men - unsurprisingly, insofar as they are men - thus imagine that straight women do not have this thing called "sexuality," or rather that their sexuality consists of fending off advances from menacing hetero dudes. What if, crazy I know, women at the gay bar are the chasers and not the chased, and just as straight men find the idea of two women... hehe... you know, straight women experience the equivalent? What else was the point, on SNL, of Paul Rudd just showing up and gratuitously smooching Jason Segel?

So the appeal of the gay bar to the straight women to whom it appeals isn't necessarily that it's hillarious or trendy or "I'm a Carrie" or teacup-chihuahua-in-Louboutins to see men with men. Ideally straight women are not into gay men who are their friends, and are not at a gay bar looking for men to have relationships. And it's totally reasonable if gay men would be as skeeved out/annoyed by the presence of straight women who think "two men" is hot as are lesbians by straight men who same idea. But it would be nice if, in their analysis of straight women-gay men interactions, gay men interested in this issue would remember that straight women are not mere "breeders" devoid of hormones.

-This genre is meant to be about gay men sticking up for themselves, defending their rights as marginalized Others. And it has elements of that. But it's also straight-up (sorry) misogyny. While there's this cliché (as has been established at this point) of gay men as preferring to be around women for all situations other than sexual ones, there are also going to be some gay men without much interest in or exposure to women outside their family (work being, often, a gender-segregated environment), without many female friends. Why would we expect such men, who've been exposed to the same anti-woman stereotypes as the rest of society, but lack the potentially mitigating factor of a sexual orientation that compels them to get involved with real-life women, to be especially progressive in their idea of women, to think of women as anything other than handbag-chihuahua-collecting shoe-shoppers? My point is not that there's anything inherently misogynistic about gay men - of course there isn't - but that there isn't something magical about gay men that makes them immune to misogyny.

"'Seasonal fruits'"

2011-11-21T17:48:00.001-05:00

"At midcentury [18th] a bailiff commented that the Jews in his district lived 'quite badly' and that 'a large number' ate no more each day than 'a piece of bread or some apples, pears and other seasonal fruits.'" - from (if not especially representative of the main arguments of) the brilliant book Obstinate Hebrews.

Seasonal! Vegetarian! Small portions! What my great-great-great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food, even if my own family came from a different stretch of Ashkenazville than the Alsatians in question.

Things I'd rather be tested on than NJ driving regulations

2011-11-20T18:31:00.001-05:00

-Important and not-so-important dates in French-Jewish history.
-Which foods are and are not poisonous to dogs.
-The most frequently cited reasons not to get a PhD in the humanities.
-How to make pizza from scratch.
-How to get from Point A to Point B via MTA.
-What Dan Savage or Emily "Prudie" Yoffe would advise re: a given situation.
-Anything. Anything at all.

Yet after much studying (including memorizing rules specific to the under-17, under-18, and under-21, which can indeed appear on the test even if you're ancient), I am now permitted to drive supervised in NJ with the appropriate real driver next to me. (Longtime readers may recall that I failed to make the most of this permission when I had it in NY.)

It still seems odd to me that there are fewer restrictions on my driving at 28 than on the early driving of a teen, someone who probably spent lots of time in cars, growing up where they're needed, and hasn't yet settled into slow-learning old age. No one at the place could believe I wasn't being sneaky and already in possession of a license from some other locale. Meanwhile, if they'd taken me to the road test area, I could have shown them. Oh yes. It's find-a-huge-lot-to-practice-in time for me, the key element that was missing when I brilliantly opted to take lesson's in Manhattan's Chinatown.

The only things that will possibly save me on the road test is the ample recent experience biking on the road and, also biking-related, the thought of the two huge hills I need to go up in order to do anything whatsoever. I picture that agony - and if it got easier after the first few times, it never got easy - and all of a sudden I feel something akin to what the 16-year-old does: must. drive. now. As opposed to in NY, where it was kind of like, yeah, driving would be a good skill to have, and licenses are neato. I'm now something akin to qualifying-exam-level motivated to get this done.

The more complicated procedure was undoubtedly my husband's switch from fern driver to ferner with 'merican driving creds. And he, unlike me, can drive, eliminating what one would imagine would be the major obstacle. Whatever the case, we're now both well on our way to getting the most out of country living. Or driving to Philadelphia or something. That works too.

True passions

2011-11-18T22:18:00.001-05:00

"Baked goods, not books, are where Farrier’s true passions lie." - best line from a profile of a literature PhD who, despite finishing her dissertation at one of the few universities that reliably gets people tenure-track jobs these days, went with macarons. I like the wording, as if a change in career means this woman who has a doctorate in literature was never really all that into books to begin with.

I don't know what the larger message here is, but what literature grad student doesn't periodically think of dropping everything and selling the pastries she's perfected while on study breaks/procrastination from the diss. The only surprising thing is that this Princeton grad student lived in Manhattan at the time, where a) there are lots of good places to buy pastries, and b) a million fine ways to procrastinate that don't involve staying home and trying one's hand at from-scratch croissants, as might, for example, an NYU grad student living in Princeton. Theoretically speaking.

Moving from big city to smallish town, I'd expected to have to go without certain cuisines, ingredients, and so forth. To stock up every so often, to dine out on trips to NY, to expand my cooking repertoire to include things I used to have the luxury of getting on the outside, etc. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that within biking distance loosely defined, there are Chinese restaurants, sushi places, an Italian grocery, a quasi-Greek grocery, etc., etc. It's not that I didn't think such places existed outside of big cities, that I thought as soon as you leave the five boroughs it's all thatched huts and Wonder Bread. I just didn't know which would exist here, didn't have a real sense of how big the town was before moving, and so on.

What I hadn't considered was that in a big city, one can get into the habit of becoming a regular, only to cease going somewhere abruptly. Sometimes because it's not what it used to be, but often - most often - for a pest- or upset-stomach-related reason. And I have a pretty high tolerance for this kind of thing, and have gone back to places with known problems in both of those categories because sometimes pad gra prow really is that good. But I will eventually draw an admittedly arbitrary line.

And you can't really do this in a smaller town. If you want X, you either return to the place with X or go without. This no doubt contributes to the... problems one finds so often in these parts. What incentive will a place that stocks otherwise unavailable X have to clean up its act? (Every place, even the most problematic, has a certificate bearing the word, "Satisfactory.") One by one, the places I was so excited to discover a month or two ago become the place where the woman handling food had a terrible cold and that doesn't believe in using gloves to handle the food. The place where we opened the bag of flour from there and it was very much alive. The place where one employee sneezed into her hand and then my new all-time favorite soup had a bug floating in it.

The list keeps getting shorter. And the only consistently good places are run under the "Soup Nazi" model - they know they provide something above and beyond, so they make a point in making the brief interaction one must have to get X as unpleasant as possible. Not in the sense of hipsters-make-your-food, where you want to be seen as cool by the staff. More like you could very well never have X again if you don't follow their rules.

I'm of course not naming names, because I will of course return to each of these places repeatedly.

Quote of the day

2011-11-18T15:12:00.001-05:00

"And though ancient at 28, she may still have some of her own teeth." - Philip Galanes, from a Social Q's in which a mother is horrified that her 23-year-old baby met an older woman in grad school.

(But mom still shouldn't have to figure out tempeh for them last-minute. Let the vegans cook it themselves or have one meal without as much protein as usual, they'll survive.)

On "heritage": or, don't wear anything your grandfather wouldn't have recognized as clothing

2011-11-18T12:58:00.001-05:00

Fashion is always about a mix of old and new. But heritage-chic combines old and new in a different way than we've seen before. I will begin by explaining what "heritage" is not, then move on to what it might be...

Retro: Fashion is cyclical. And sometimes - typically - it cycles back to eras less PC than our own. Sometimes much less. But is buying the "Mad Men" line from Banana Republic, or putting together a more time-intensive early-1960s look, a way of saying that you wish to return to a time when (apologies to Archie Bunker) goils were goils and men were men? Not really. Everything you're wearing was in fashion 30 years ago. Everything you wore 10 years ago was in 50 years ago. Etc. The only ones fooling themselves are those who think what's worn today is something other than the patched-together combination of that which was worn in the past. And does anyone even think this? We can analyze why we're now dressing like it's 1979, or 1994, but we're going to have to pick something, and what we pick will generally be a look from the 20th century and no earlier.

Preppy: Retro can mean looking back to any time, any subculture. "Preppy," however, is about how prep school kids used to dress, still dress, and will dress for all eternity. This seems exclusive, but it's not terribly. Reappropriation is almost inherent to this style. Its patron saint, after all, is Ralph Lauren-né-Lifshitz. And the "urban" or "hip-hop" spins on preppy are now so mainstream that they are preppy as much as the WASPy variety is. Preppy isn't about what people wear at prep school. It's about the outsider looking on enviously. See Isabel Archer. See, maybe, this novel I've never read. William Arthur Philip Muffington III can pop the collar of his pale-pink polo, but so can anyone. It's always about playing with the idea of authenticity. Maybe it wasn't always, fine, but it has been for ages.

Heritage: "Heritage," to the uninitiated, is by now something of a cliché. It's old-timey Americana-wear, leather and natural fibers, things like this, this, and this. This blog is devoted to the look.

"Heritage" is, to borrow Michael Pollan's endlessly-repeated advice about food, about not wearing anything your great-grandfather wouldn't have recognized as clothing. It's not about the revival of an old look. It's about "timeless."

Never mind that "heritage" is by and large produced no differently than flashy garb from Forever 21. (My L.L. Bean fisherman sweaters are half-acrylic and, I believe, 100% made in China.) Furthermore, remember that "timeless" will look dated soon. It's a trend, and that's how it goes with trends.

Why "heritage," why now? The economy, presumably - people want durable and classic, and they're aesthetically drawn to the idea of made in America, if not enough so to boycott goods made elsewhere. (My neon t-shirt from American Apparel may have been made in America, but it's not "heritage.")

But there's also a nativist edge to it. I mean, whose "heritage" is dressing like you're about to go fishing at your family's estate in the Adirondacks? Just as not everyone's grandmother had the dietary good fortune to live on the Mediterranean, not everyone's heritage was, aesthetically-speaking, much related to "heritage." It's white people, white people with a connection to the land, but not poor farmers. Gentleman farmers.

"Heritage" may one day arrive at where "preppy" now hovers, but as it stands, it's about moving on from preppy because preppy is now readily available to all. "Heritage" is about moving to Williamsburg or Greenpoint after college, congregating exclusively with other white non-ethnics from towns and suburbs far from New York but taking pride in Brooklyn's "diversity," and quasi-ironically embracing farm-to-table. Maybe growing a beard, maybe producing something artisanal.

And it's about not just white landowners, but also male ones in particular. Unlike most trends, "heritage" is principally about menswear. It's in part about giving men an excuse to play dress-up, to primp, but in the name of something very masculine and of course not at all implicating homosexuality. One is dressing so as to insist that one is a lumberjack and that one is OK.

*********

This is why, even though I like some "heritage" items, and think most men's wardrobes could only be improved by a shift in this direction, the look makes me uneasy.

Socialite economics

2011-11-18T09:58:00.001-05:00

On one end of the philanthropic spectrum, there's voluntarily living like a grad student. On the other, there's Muffie Potter Aston. The money she spends on handbags alone - or, I should say, the handbags she mentions wearing in one week - could [insert charitable goal here].

And I normally don't go in for that kind of argument. If the delightfully-named socialite is helping legitimate causes, why shouldn't she have some fun? Isn't it better for her to put money back into the (French luxury handbag) economy than to just direct it towards keeping future generations of Astons in the upper class? And maybe this is like a business expense, maybe to do good, to get rich friends to contribute, she needs to maintain her image, and that means head-to-toe ostrich-leather. And I don't think that people (men, typically*) who never much liked "stuff" to begin with get extra good-person points for staying away from the mall, which they'd do whether they were generous to causes or not.

But this woman is wearing the GDP of several first-world countries every day of the week. Is the problem that she's doing so while also claiming to be a philanthropist? The entire "charity circuit" concept, in which however much goes to whichever causes, some no doubt greater amount is going to the galas and the primping for said galas?

Or is it (also) that if I had that kind of clothing budget, there would be closets-full of galaxy dresses, custom-made Yves Klein blue Repetto Zizis (because this Jil Sander version is close but not quite), and each of the fluourescent satchels (except for the orange one)? Her clothing budget appeals (although I suspect my wanties wouldn't make a dent); her selections not so much.

*I showed my husband the article and had to explain that "Birkins" are not related to Birkenstocks or burqas. Although there's no doubt some woman, somewhere, sporting all three.

Fertility and the window of opportunity

2011-11-17T14:15:00.001-05:00

Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes:

We generally think it’s a good thing that women start having children a little later, and portray young moms as foolish.But then suddenly—it’s too late. It’s like there’s a magic window between—what, 26 and 34?—during which all women are supposed to have all children. Before that, you’re irresponsible or unrealistic; wait until after that period, and you’re clueless and vain. In some socioeconomic classes, the window of acceptable baby-making time is even smaller: When I got pregnant last year, at 28, a significant portion of my peers acted like I was nuts for considering having the baby at my age (I ended up miscarrying). But if I give it three or four more years, I’ll likely be hearing lectures left and right about my ticking biological clock. Realize this, Gen Y ladies: You’ve got a window of about five to 10 years (at most) during which you should be ready, financially and otherwise, to have all the children you want to have, and in a stable relationship within which to do so, or society is going to frown on you hardcore.

What she's describing is the fertility-specific angle of the Window of Opportunity problem. (See also the tag.) While the exact age varies subculture by subculture, women go from being too young to settle down to too old within a matter of minutes. I mean, the way it actually operates is, most family and friends are saying "too young," and gradually the shift tilts to "too old." What's important is that there's never a case of it being just fine to do what makes sense for you, in your life as you're leading it. A woman who's met the right person and settled into her career at 24 is still a child bride. A woman who's 44 and not even interested in marrying or having kids has missed her chance.

Still, I think the window of opportunity issue and the fertility angle shouldn't be conflated. The latter has more of a rationale than the former. Fertility really does decline; pretending that this decline is a conspiracy invented by misogynistic evolutionary-psychology popularizers gets us nowhere. (But I agree with Elizabeth that women know fertility declines, and that when women fail to reproduce by 35, it's not to be all "I'm a Carrie" but because very real factors like the need for a career/a partner got in the way.) And women who (not unwisely) wish to reproduce only once partnered have that many years on the earlier end of the available biological window to contend with.

Cultural construction only enters into it insofar as young women are discouraged from considering the men they date potential serious boyfriends until whichever key age, at which point every unattached man must be considered for husband potential. The window of opportunity thus only enters into it insofar as women who are ready to have kids in their early 20s - who've fully settled into their adult lives, or fully enough - are under social pressure, not only not to have kids, but not to make serious commitments to a partner just yet, because 22 is so young.

Meanwhile, the window of opportunity more generally is about commitment to a partner. Specifically, a male partner. Women go almost instantaneously from too young for a serious boyfriend to too old to find a husband. But where are these husbands supposed to come from, if they are not the serious boyfriends of yesterday? And biology is not as central as all that - a woman might, at 22, be 100% ready to commit to a particular man, but not ready to have kids. And, if by 45 a woman is unlikely to be able to get pregnant with ease, she does not suddenly lose her capacity to partner with a man. Not everyone wants (more) kids, and not all kid-acquiring is biological.

So, in sum, we can on the one hand not deny such factors as, fertility declines, and all things equal it's for the best to have kids only once partnered. And on the other, not conflate women with female reproductive organs.

"Jewish" as privilege

2011-11-16T12:19:00.001-05:00

Your regular programming (you were to be getting a post on personal-style blogging) is interrupted to bring your attention to this pile of whoa. I think this guy might be someone who lived in my dorm freshman year (sweatshirt logo suggests yes), but he kind of looks like a lot of people, so maybe, maybe not. That is not our concern. What is our concern is that this 1%er who stands with the 99% writes:

I have always had many advantages. I am:

1) White

2) Male

3) Jewish

4) Son of Wall Street bankers who never had to worry where his next meal was coming from or how to pay rent.

And I have a trust fund valued at over $1 Million.

WTF, WTF, WTF re: "advantage" #3. Emphasis mine, but really, this ought to have leapt out at you even without the font-fussing.

This... relates to my mulling, I suppose, about how trustafarian self-hatred and Jewish self-hatred (sorry, commenter Dan O. who hates the term) are intertwined. But do not bog yourself down with my links back to related discussions here at WWPD. I want to know what it means that dude here is listing his being Jewish as an advantage. How that is not redonkulously anti-Semitic?

In tepid defense of "fashion"

2011-11-15T11:17:00.001-05:00

-Hello from the great outside world, namely the closest big city by train, where I ran errands and ate a burrito as per usual, and am biding some time before more NYU, again, just to shake things up. I also bought a neon-yellow t-shirt at American Apparel, to partially satisfy an unmeetable wanty (Kei, your term remains useful as ever), and was reminded that clothes-shopping is not so great actually. Fine, maybe it's especially not-great at the establishment I chose (chosen on the basis of, where else sells t-shirts in fluorescent shades?), which requires an ID for the credit-card purchase of a t-shirt, and where there are gratuitous pictures of butts on the wall.

But even under the best of circumstances, blech. The dressing room, the taking off and putting on and taking off and putting on of layers, does anyone enjoy this? If I "like shopping," it's that I like walking around a busy area, and those tend to be commercial areas, and I do enjoy some window-shopping, occasionally walking quickly through a store, etc. Actually shopping for clothes, with intent to purchase, is tedious. And there's not much point in doing so in person, now that there are no stores unique to specific locales, and everything can be purchased (and returned) online. I will remind myself of this the next time I express anything less than full enthusiasm for living in the woods.

-Refinery29 does its fashiony best and pleads with college women to stop the North Face, Uggs, and (evidently - what happened to Vera Bradley and Hervé Chapelier?) Longchamp combo. Fine. But this! "A college wardrobe must be classic — funds are limited, so long-lasting pieces reign supreme for a smart shopper."

One bit of that statement only - the "funds are limited" one - I agree with. But if you're not going to experiment with dress (or, wear weird stuff) in college, when else? You're not going to an office, your choices can't be (as easily) vetoed by your parents, and you're more likely to still be the build that wacky clothes are designed for. You can dye your hair and paint your nails however you'd like. You couldn't before, and soon, you once again won't be able to. You may or may not one day have a job in the corporate law environment whose strict dress code PG sometimes pops in to describe, but you probably will have responsibilities - to a family, to a demanding poodle - and fun trips to H&M will stop being such a central part of your existence.

And whatever you may think, however fast your metabolism, you will be fatter when you're older than you were at 19, so remember especially to steer clear of any "investment pieces" with a waistband.

-Hadley Freeman of Ask Hadley fame responds to a man who wants to know, no offense or anything, what the point of fashion is. And here, readers, we have an example of a cousin of the Mansplanation. Dude does not want Freeman to explain fashion to him. He is telling her, in the form of a question, that he thinks it's dumb to care about fashion. Nothing she can possibly come up with will convince him otherwise.

Freeman's response is the classic and WWPD-approved sports comparison. Scrapped of nuance, said argument goes: men, you like this dull thing called "sports," so you have no place telling us that we're silly for finding shoes compelling. I've tried this, to limited success. Because one aspect of fashion - a rather large aspect of it, if we're using "fashion" to mean "high fashion" and not using the term to also encompass "style," "street fashion," and "self-expression-through-dress," as colloquially everyone does - involves the rich and thin showing off for one another and being judgey, "fashion" gets a bad reputation. Think - again, regular readers - of how Quinn on "Daria" is part of the "Fashion Club," which isn't about avant-garde Antwerp designers or creative arrangement of thrift-store finds so much as being a small dress size at the snootiest store at the mall. Think Anna Wintour. Someone with no body fat and a limitless bank account is laughing at you behind your back. To care about clothes beyond neatness and appropriateness is to sympathize with the bullies. Meanwhile, "fashion" is as hated as it is largely because it's a world/concern associated with the feminine, with women and gay men. Hmm.

What the what?

2011-11-14T00:01:00.001-05:00

If America's best croissants are indeed a mere two big uphills on the bike away, how is it I have yet to try one? OK, it could be that when we went in, they'd run out, croissants being a morning thing. Some morning soon, this will happen, and I will most definitely report back.

Utmost discretion

2011-11-13T22:33:00.001-05:00

Every night since the spaying, Bisou gets a special treat: a painkiller "dumpling," which involves the half-pill the vet prescribed her hidden in a piece of cheddar. It does not appear that Bisou is in any more pain, and she's back to her usual hyper self... only to become a sedate, affectionate lap dog after the cheddar-drug combo. It does start to become clear why they say that young children are over-prescribed anti-hyperactivity drugs. I hope that when we may finally bring Bisou to socialization classes, now that she's all vaccinated and once the stitches are out, we learn some opiate-free methods of getting her to something approximating this state.

*********

So a big part of having a dog is that which can only be alluded to discreetly. That for which we are forever accumulating baggies - the purpose-specific ones we purchased, but that we're trying not to run through, along with newspaper bags, produce bags, and the like. Anyway, just before Bisou's operation, despite having just gone near our apartment, we'd arrived at the office early and we did what people with a puppy do before entering a building if time allows, which is we took her to a nearby patch of grass. And sure enough.

But what do you then do with this? A vet, you'd think, might have a well-marked receptacle, but no. Then the office opened, and we asked the very nice tech - discreetly, of course - what to... well... here... bag... And he seemed happy to take care of it, but asked us a bizarre question: "Is this from yesterday?" And we were thinking, gee, yes, because we keep weeks' worth of the stuff with us, then load it into a rented (yes, dog permitted in carrier) vehicle just 'cause? We were tired, nervous for Bisou, and I mumbled something about how it was from just now, apologized, I think, explained that Bisou had gone before we'd headed out but these things... yeah.

Turns out we'd been too discreet. At her checkup, a different tech told us cheerily that Bisou's sample had been negative. What sample? Normally with the vet, if a "sample" is required, this is a whole procedure pre-arranged. As in, they ask for one for a particular reason, and provide a container. Neither of these conditions had been met.

It was suddenly clear - well, less unclear - why the first tech had asked that question about the, uh, vintage. But do people just spontaneously provide unsolicited "samples"? I mean, "negative" is what you want to hear, but this wasn't a test she needed. And given that dog ownership is already kind of expensive, especially the week of the spaying, especially the month of the spaying and grooming, we were not looking for add-ons.

At any rate, the vet's office, to their credit, paid us back without any fuss. I mean, I think they may have been slightly annoyed, as if there's some small chance that we in fact run an elaborate scheme to have our dog's waste tested, then not pay for it, then find out the results and go ha!, or more likely they were just embarrassed, or miffed that they'd wasted their time and resources. A miscommunication that could have been entirely avoided if I'd been like, "There is a huge turd in this plastic bag, comically so I realize given the tininess of the dog. Where's the trash?"

The little things

2011-11-11T22:42:00.001-05:00

If your only access to the outside world is by bike, the key to your bike lock is a not-so-great thing to lose, especially after locking your bike. Luckily it was a false alarm (key was in a different pocket than I'd thought), but I'm now inclined to go to a locksmith and get one copy for every pocket I have.

Assorted distractions

2011-11-11T14:50:00.001-05:00

-Saw a car with three stickers and three only: Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Seems like this would be a faux pas, like you'd need some more humble sticker to counteract this. Meanwhile, if we had a car, we could, thanks to my husband, put something possibly still more oh-la-la on it. Problem is, we're not oh-la-la enough to have a car.

-It turns out that if you need a garbage for what your dog produced outside just before getting spayed, your dog that you had indeed walked to completion prior to heading to the vet, but that sometimes needs to go twice in the mornings, the vet may assume you are, unsolicited, dropping off a stool sample. No, we did not specify "garbage," because we'd thought that was implied, what with it being not shall we say sample-size, and in a plastic bag, as opposed to a vial from the vet's office. We did find it odd when the tech asked, "Is this from today?," like we carry bags of Bisou's poop from various points in the past week or so around with us at all times, but then it was like, surprise, the reason the spaying cost not merely a ton, but a ton plus, was that there had been this additional test. The people at the office were, for the most part, mildly amused, and to their credit they paid us back.

-I feel as though I must have read the abbé Grégoire's essay on the "regeneration" of the Jews, the famous one from just before the French Revolution. I perfectly well remember reading Alyssa Sepinwall's wonderful book on Grégoire, and looking at the text itself, but if there aren't notes on it anywhere, I as good as haven't read it, so I'm on the case. And it turns out the "essay" (French for 200-plus-page book, complete with s-as-f, a-as-o, and other delights that I wouldn't have had to contend with if I'd stuck with the Dreyfus Affair) is far more relevant to my dissertation than I'd thought. I am once again sidetracked by my own dissertation. I know this doesn't sound possible, but trust me, it is.

"[T]hey turn thrift into a guilt trip"

2011-11-10T13:30:00.001-05:00

Felix Salmon is, once again, onto something:

I blame farmers' markets in general, and the Union Square farmers' market in particular, for the way in which this phenomenon [ingredient origins on upscale menus] is reaching endemic levels in New York. When you see a farm named on a menu, you might never have heard of the supplier in question. But any name next to a listed ingredient is meant to bring to mind those piles of super-expensive veggies, and tales of organic farmers struggling mightily to make ends meet.

The genius of farmers' markets is that they turn thrift into a guilt trip: Anybody looking to pay less money for a pound of carrots must also want to cut the income of hardworking farmers! And when menus name their suppliers, even unto the purveyors of broccoli or scallions, they're effectively trying to make their diners as price-insensitive in the restaurant as they are in the farmers' market.

He adds that even if restaurants are indeed doing what they claim and paying a lot for, say, an especially carefully-farmed turnip, it's still a turnip and not a steak, so they still profit from this trend.

Salmon's writing about food is basically what I wish mine were, and what mine would be if I had more of a brain for economics, and more of a capacity to summon contrarianism without counterarguments that may add nuance but also weaken the argument.

If I were writing this, I'd have pointed out that there are real differences between, say, a summer strawberry and a foamy giant winter one at the supermarket. That "taste" is complicated, such that some people really will experience more pleasure from consuming a turnip they know to be farmed nearby, either because this fits with their ethics or because they're full-of-it yuppies or because faux-scarcity makes food taste better, it doesn't matter, the point is, the objective physical difference between supermarket and Sustainable Farms turnips isn't the only thing we're considering. Diners are not overpaying if one turnip is really worth that much more to them than another. And yeah, maybe it isn't such a terrible thing, for health as well as the environment, if we-as-a-society decide to get excited about turnips and to treat them like steak. I was kind of surprised Salmon didn't mention Alice Waters when describing the food trend that he sums up as: "Take inexpensive ingredients, do very little to them, and sell them as premium products worth savoring in their simple purity," but I suppose he's looking at the trend as it currently exists, and not aiming to trace its origins.

What Salmon correctly picks up on is the irritating conflation of thrift (yay, an opportunity for the much-neglected Cheapness Studies tag) with... for lack of a better term, assholishness, the corollary of enlightened consumption as the path to righteousness. Even absent any knowledge of how whichever product is produced, the consumer is blamed for "demanding" low prices. You may have no reason to think the more expensive t-shirt or tomato was produced more ethically, but the mere act of choosing the cheaper one is a way of announcing one's utter indifference to the hard work it takes to produce whatever it is. Think of the farmers! Don't dare think of your own family's need to pay bills or have money for emergencies. If you can't afford the expensive tomato, maybe you shouldn't be buying tomatoes in the first place.

This particular brand of hypocrisy reaches its height with the phenomenon "farm-to-table" tourism, something I've mentioned here before, but that seems to be going strong. Given that "local-sustainable" is about taste, yes, but also about it being tragedy of all tragedies for a truck-full (plane-full? am I supposed to keep track of this?) of asparagus to makes its way up from Peru, how exactly is it more efficient or eco-friendly or admirable or brag-to-the-neighbors-ish for individual travelers to fly in commercial airlines packed tightly, but not asparagus-tightly, just to get a taste of the asparagus in its natural habitat?

Sad, cone-wearing Bisou

2011-11-10T13:09:00.002-05:00

While getting Bisou spayed was the right thing for dog-kind in a broader sense, and is certainly the way to go for us personally - two novice dog-owners in a one-pet-only apartment, Bisou is not super thrilled with having had her internal organs yanked out yesterday. Her attempts at bypassing the cone and biting at her stitches looked to us like a limp last night and this morning, so we called the vet, so we went to the vet, so we spent yet more money at (and of course on getting to) the vet. (You are allowed to complain about how expensive it is to own a dog even if you knew in advance that it would be expensive, and even if you think it's worth it, right? Thought so.)

Bisou, whose specialties are marching around on her hind legs, sprinting across the back of the couch, begging for cheese, and medical false alarms, is just fine. Her legs are still in good strutting-around order. But she is now giving us the sad-dog look, her head poking out of her cone as if to ask why we had for so long pretended to be nice, then done this to her. Sorry Bisou! Just under two weeks of not being your naughty self. You can do it!

Finger-painting with Derrida

2011-11-09T21:13:00.002-05:00

For your perusal, the CCOA of the Day, a Conservative Critique of Academia that scores well on the test I have for 'em. But because I study something with "studies" in the name, I can't tell you what percentage we're talking. Math is hard! Anyway, it's about how the tweed-and-elbow-patch set have arrived at Occupy Wall Street, and how this is bad because the overeducated, underemployed humanities-types protesting should really be angry, not at banks, but at the profs themselves, who are evidently responsible for tricking wide-eyed undergraduates into majoring in things that aren't practical, or the Classics, because majors need to be practical or else what's the point, but also conservatives like Great Books so let's throw that in there without really justifying it. I mean, it's not as if even a single example is given of a professor visiting OWS.

Early in the piece, the author, Chris Tessone, inspires confidence when he reveals confusion re: who college professors these days are:

Professors and wannabe academics have flocked to the protest sites, welcomed with open arms by the poor, downtrodden BAs-turned-baristas and out of work MFAs at the movement’s core. Yet no one bears more responsibility for the dashed hopes and dreams of these overeducated, underemployed youths than America’s professorial class.

First off, who are "wannabe academics"? Is this some caste we're supposed to recognize? More likely these academic-types who are not in fact professors but want to be that are, oh, adjunct instructors and advanced grad students, or alums of grad programs now filing stuff while yearning for what might have been. Yes, the system's screwed up. Tessone gives us no reason to think anyone "academic" participating in OWS is even on the tenure track, if we are to give him the benefit of the doubt re: the presence of academic-types there. (And, thanks to Facebook and not Tessone, I know that plenty of grad students are indeed involved.)

Tessone, as per CCOA usual, mixes valid criticisms with knee-jerk and proudly ignorant attacks on academia. Does college cost too much? Yup. And maybe, as Tessone says, the "resort" aspect of some colleges is part of the problem.

But it's just a right-wing version of those coming after Joan Didion for her "privilege." He may be coming from a place of reasonable, but can't stay long, or he'd be expelled from the genre. Tessone has to be sure to gratuitously condemn "such disciplines as the performing arts, creative writing, and a myriad of 'studies' majors exploring narrow questions of ethnic, racial, and sexual identity." He has to, or else it's not a CCOA.

I am almost entirely certain Tessone has not even the slightest whiff of a clue what happens in a "studies" class. ("Decision Sciences," however...). Maybe if you make it abundantly clear you don't know what something is, you don't get to denounce it?

Anyway, as a triple offender - my dissertation is about Jews (particular!) and gender (fluffy!) and I'm in a joint program half of which includes the word "studies" (toenail-painting!) - I'm intrigued to know that what I do is "undemanding." Never mind the piles and piles of Great Books I read and was examined on to get to this point. Never mind that said Books of course inform my work. Never mind that whole doing research in a foreign language and contending with microform-induced nausea. Anything not entirely about white, Christian men, the only beings ever to walk this earth who represent The Universal, is by definition nonsense.

And it continues. Tessone informs concerned readers of "the cheapening of 'liberal arts' to mean 'any subject of study divorced from considerations of practicality or good taste.'" Kids these days! Not like in our day, when they'd all memorized all of Shakespeare, backwards, barefoot, and in the snow! "The liberal arts were once about studying how to live, informed by literary, philosophical, and historical accounts of how others conducted their lives. Students took a coherent set of core courses and immersed themselves in the Western canon.

OK, so coming from UChicago means my undergrad experiences don't count. But high school and grad school friends who went elsewhere somehow managed not to major in Silliness Studies, somehow managed to emerge having read a whole heck of a lot of "dead white males." Ah, but these were typically students at other good schools, public and private, big and small alike, fine, but not representative! Perhaps so, but where, precisely, are undergrads these days majoring in Nonsense Studies? At less-prestigious schools, undergrads may study something like "fashion merchandising" and thus not get much in the way of Great Books, but at what institution of higher ed are anyone but grad students and faculty devoting much of their work-time to the kinds of topics that inspire CCOAs? Is something like "fashion merchandising" CCOA-friendly, on account of it sure sounds vocational, or is this yet another example of college-as-fluff?

Tessone, no doubt under some kind of cosmic contractual obligation to make it over-abundantly clear how anti-"studies" he is, explains that his beef is with "programs catering to teenage sloth and narcissism, giving kids and their helicopter parents whatever they want for a buck, regardless of quality or rigor, reluctant to miss out on the student-loan-driven bubble now inflating." And if a program has "studies" in the name, it lacks quality, it lacks rigor, as rigorously demonstrated by Tessone. Oh wait, why would he waste time with that - CCOA audiences are long since converted! Does he go on? Yes, and where he goes is a place that's super-contrarian mixed with telling-it-like-it-is mixed with rah rah capitalism and banks and stuff crossed with anti-intellectualism. Well done!

The villain is not the lenders who played an incidental role in providing capital to creative writing majors, however. It’s the tenured bozos who gave them Derrida and finger painting in their formative undergraduate years instead of Plato and Aristotle (or a good course in computer-aided drafting).

Man oh man oh man. I graduated from college in 2005. I may be married and live in what may or may not count as the suburbs, but I'm in my 20s, a full-time student, and thus still "kids these days" loosely defined. And in my day, I've been assigned Plato, Aristotle, and - though it was utterly wasted on me, as it seemed to be on nearly everyone at the math and science high school where I took it, thus casting doubt, as far as I'm concerned, on its usefulness for the general population - drafting, one semester with computers, one without. No finger-painting and, more surprisingly given what I've been in school for for the past hundred years, no Derrida either.

I read the newspaper comments so you don't have to

2011-11-09T11:00:00.000-05:00

-A woman who doesn't live in Park Slope, doesn't even live in NY or CA wakes at 3:30am, panicked, asking herself, "Am I green enough?'" Amazing.

Like I said, like I know others have said, like I wish more would say, the so-very-now ideal of buying only pure/clean/local/seasonal/sustainable/organic is a modern-day version of the expectation that surfaces require dusting. It's about giving women busy-work. If all the truly offensive crap were removed from the shelves, if lotions didn't need to be checked for parabens, if broccoli didn't have to be checked for place of origin (but also be sure to feed your family lots of fresh produce! no canned/frozen! remember that cans have BPA!) what would women do?

Oh, and because I do love online-newspaper comments, I will note that one commenter to the Mommy Insomnia story wins smug-of-the-year.

-Because I can't stay away from newspaper comments (even my dissertation is in part on the 19th C version thereof), dear Roger Cohen commenters: Wow, you [OK, there are more, but I'm tiring of the exercise] really are dreamers, you who ask why no one-state solution. If only everyone in the world were as tolerant and wonderful as you!

What you're missing, however, is that the problem isn't that there's so much hate in the region, or that The Jews are such a stubborn bunch. It's not because for all eternity, The Jews and The Arabs have been mortal enemies, and these two swarthiest of peoples fail to behave like Scandinavians and make nice. It's not that such a state couldn't function. It's that there's an awfully strong ethical case to be made for there to be a Jewish state in Palestine. There's not a particularly strong case to be made for it having any particular borders. And there's also, at this point, one heck of a case for there being a Palestinian state as well. I, from the relative comfort of the NJ woods, want there to keep on being a Jewish state, not because I think Israeli Jews should be spared the horror that would be living alongside an Other, not because I think both peoples are simply incapable of getting along, but because I find the case for Jewish national self-determination convincing.

Jews then, Jews now, Jews shopping

2011-11-08T13:15:00.000-05:00

-Working on the "background" chapter of the diss. In other words, the not-so-much-in-the-way-of-original-research one. Also, the falls-well-outside-my-area-of-expertise-time-period-wise one. (The Bible? The Middle Ages?) But still, it's very important for framing the rest of my (I promise utterly page-turning) project. But there's something kind of relaxing about summing up that which has already been done, and it's great fun to learn about things I haven't been reading about and taking courses on since forever, but that are actually quite central to the bigger questions I've been trying to address all this time.

-OWS, a left-wing movement with the word "occupy" front-and-center, has, shock of all shocks, embraced the Palestinian cause. Everyone's been mulling over the Jewish angle to OWS basically since it started. Do the now-famous Yom Kippur, uh, festivities clear OWS of all possible charges of anti-Semitism? Not exactly - Jews have been members of not-so-Jew-friendly movements in the past, and hatred of Jews hasn't been about hatred of Jewish religious practice since approximately forever. But yes, the great enthusiasm of so many Jews for the movement suggests it is not, in fact, the new Nazism. If it were a thoroughly anti-Semitic movement, then no, there probably wouldn't be such a great big space for Jews in it.

My own mulling has consisted in part of making a mental note that a good number of the 1%ers standing with the 99% struck me as expressing a particularly Jewish (even though not all are Jewish! plenty, I think, but not all!) kind of rich-person self-hatred. The kind that comes from being the offspring of New Money, a sort of guilt that comes with comparing one's own zillionaire parents (who may seem stingy, not on account of being Jewish, but on account of having grown up poor, and having all their current status deriving from their bank accounts) with the more noblesse-oblige, philanthropic, charity-gala parents of one's prep-school classmates. The kind that comes from having a lot of money, but having never fully integrated into rich-people culture (such as the evidently all-white country clubs some of my non-Jewish private-school classmates seem to attend at each of their many vacation-home locales - thank you, Facebook, for keeping me posted!), and thus finding one's self socializing largely with those well outside the 1%. If you're a part of an of-course-we-own-all-this-crap-for-it-is-our-birthright landed aristocracy, it feels natural to you that you have the place in life you do.

Again, let me emphasize that Jews are far from the only group with this pattern, that if anything these days other groups experience it more, and - and this ought not need stating - plenty of Jews (ahem!) do not face the moral dilemma that comes with waking up one morning with a million-dollar trust fund. But this did strike me as being one rather salient Jewish angle, one that explains the involvement even of those who've experienced this dynamic, without coming from families that are, technically-speaking, anywhere close to the 1%.

And Israel kind of does enter into it, insofar as when experienced by Jews, this guilt manifests itself in part as feeling ashamed at the parents' generation for supporting the Jewish state - basically an ethnicity-specific version of the equivalent generation in any group cringing at its parents' voting Republican. Problem is, there are some very good lefty reasons to think that Jews ought to keep on having a state. But this is only a problem if there are terribly many young, lefty Jews who think that.

-Admiring, wavering. It comes down to whether or not we are, in fact, buying a car any time soon. If so, no frivolous purchases allowed. If not, it's not as if I do any spontaneous shopping, dining out, meeting friends for drinks, etc., etc., etc. now that I live in the woods, so I probably could afford these. But to wear... where? Walking Bisou? To a nearby library? What is this thing called "attention to dress," and how does it relate to my current life?

In which WWPD gives in and becomes a dog-blog

2011-11-08T11:04:00.000-05:00

-Isabel Archer is back, with thoughts on, among other topics, Rescue Culture. And, um, such a reminder that Golden Retrievers are adorable!

-Googling around over breakfast (of two-day-old reheated pancakes) this morning, I learned that affordable (as well as not-so-affordable) hotels in Paris that allow dogs are clustered around Le Boulanger des Invalides Jocteur, which is to say, the center of the universe. There is a soft and affectionate gray dog that hangs out there for Bisou to be friends with, whose owner gives it a bit of bread from the place as a treat. There was also this gray fluffball-type in Jardin du Luxembourg. Such possibilities for socialization and pastry! The photographs below are of my dream life.

-Tomorrow, however, is a momentous day for little Bisou - the day she is rendered incapable of producing littler Bisous. I'm nervous, and I suspect on some level she is as well. The main thing with spaying, it seems, is for us to keep her from jumping for two weeks after the surgery. Well, Bisou's favorite thing in the entire world, after cheese, is jumping like a cat, to heights you wouldn't think she'd be capable of reaching. (Also doing this thing at the kitchen gate where she stands, looks over the gate, and lifts one paw straight up and out, all serious-like, as if to summon a sea of followers to do the same. Very fascistic.) So I took her on a 1.4 mile jog (was going to be 2.1, but she seemed beat), calculating that she sprints at least this each day in loops around the apartment on a typical, three-long-walk day. Surely jogging at my unimpressive pace would exhaust but not over-tire her. On past walks, when I've switched to a jog, she basically walks a tiny bit faster, seeming disappointed that I couldn't keep up with her own running pace. Well, exhausted she is, rehydrated but completely conked out on the kitchen floor. How to keep her in this state for more than half an hour remains to be seen.

Acknowledgement

2011-11-07T18:12:00.002-05:00

Jacob Levy points me to a gold mine of YPISdom - YPIS being the acronym I use for "your privilege is showing," the preferred insult of a certain sort of (typically plenty privileged) person. (Banal example: you can tell someone who finds it sad that some must buy their pink polos at Banana Republic and not Lacoste that his privilege is showing.) Writer Joan Didion's privilege is, evidently, on show, and everyone - a Slate writer (David Haglund), Slate commenters, the pieces Haglund links to - is enjoying a good hurling-of-YPIS at the evidently oh-so-aloof author, who evidently responded, in her latest book, to those who've criticized her as being unaware of her privilege.

If I was reluctant to post about this at first, it's because of those "evidentlies." I have never read anything by Didion, and thus have no thoughts on whether or not she comes across as defensive about her privilege. (Didion is not among the authors on my pile of books about the history of the Jewish family I need to read for Chapter One. Sorry.) I had to Google her to see what the privilege in question was referring to, beyond that she's a writer with name-recognition.

But there is a whopping YPIS angle here, and one that has approximately zilch to do with Didion's writing.* What we can glean without knowing how much brilliant and/or snooty the relevant original texts convey:

1) Privilege-showing is now ranked among the offenses a writer may have committed such that you have to ask those difficult 'but does the Great Art mean we can still appreciate this evil person's writing?' questions, like you would of a Céline. As in, insufficiently-apologized-for socioeconomic privilege is now akin to having been a Nazi sympathizer. This is not entirely new - remember the stuff about "dead white males"? But what's at stake now isn't Didion's identity - rich, well-connected, white, and what the Daily Mail would enviously call "worryingly thin" - but rather her apparently failure, by the standards of some, to apologize for, at least, the wealth. An accusation she made the grave mistake of addressing. Why a mistake? Because it's no fun to hurl a YPIS unless it's going to sting, and evidently sting it did.

The problem here is that what's under attack isn't the unfairness inherent in privilege, but rather aloofness, as though aloofness itself should be our main concern. The alternative is rarely presented as, let's open up the field to writers of a more diverse set of backgrounds. Well, lip service is paid to that possibility, but instead, we get privileged sorts writing from a place of sensitivity. Privilege going acknowledged, accusations of aloofness preempted. As if it's fine to have writing be the wealthy taking on the wealthy, as long as privilege has been acknowledged. As if it's indeed more progressive to hear the privileged yammering on about their privilege than to not hear so much from them, period. (See, for example, this piece, linked from the Slate one.)

2) It makes sense, on a population level, to speak of certain categories of privilege and lack thereof. Not necessarily when it comes to individual cases. Some individual rich white men really do have worse than the average working-class Latina, even if these men would be in a still-more-problematic boat (yacht?) if they did not have the various privileges in their favor. In Didion's case, YPIS is being hurled at someone writing about her daughter getting sick and dying in her 30s, because (from the perspective of the hurlers) call the waahmbulance, break out the tiny violins, and remember how much worse it is to be young, ill and uninsured, and not the daughter of famous people. When it's like, fair enough, but think how much better it is for tragedy not to strike, and to live happily to 90 without ever experiencing Didion-level glamor or wealth. Think how much worse it would be to have whichever problems in the developing world. Think of this, think of that, or maybe just accept that what went on with Didion's daughter was indeed tragic, even if they could afford to pay their medical bills.

Basically, there are forms of Bad that are unequivocally worse than growing up without a lot of money (even if these forms, plus not having much money, are worse than these forms with). And these forms tend not to be obstacles as readily-acknowledged as socioeconomic status. While ideally, of course, no one would, some do feel shame at having grown up poor or working-class. But in a meritocracy, it can also be advantageous to remind others that your parents didn't go to college, that you've paid your own way since 15, that you didn't have everything handed to you, etc. Whereas non-socioeconomic forms of disadvantage - health, mental and physical; abuse; drug or severe emotional problems; that which is family-specific and unclassifiable; etc. - are less likely to be casually evoked. For this reason, I don't see the point in responding to tales of suffering not related to socioeconomic status with, 'ah, but think how much worse things are for those dealing with individual-case suffering and systematic suffering.' I think everyone gets that that's the case. But it doesn't follow that individual-case suffering in all cases is waambulence in comparison to a broader form of underprivilege. Or, phrased differently, sometimes "poor little rich girls" actually have it rough. Having gone to school for nine years with girls from families for the most part far wealthier than my own (solidly UMC) one, I'm going to have to say that some things some individual families went through would without a doubt qualify. Not rich-people-problems, just problems that being rich couldn't solve.

3) The Slate commenters coming to Didion's defense seem genuinely confused about YPIS, if they think claims that Didion is out-of-touch are coming from those jealous of Didion on account of being poorer/less famous than she is. It's not "class envy." It's coming from upper-middle-class sorts. It's always about sticking up for those who could, in theory, find such cluelessness offensive.

4) Anyone who's actually read anything by Didion, or anyone else for that matter, have any thoughts?

*There is no doubt, as Levy noted when passing this along, a writing-about-children angle here, Haglund alludes to at the end of his piece. But if the "child" in question was an adult and is, at the time of publication, deceased, I'm not sure the usual issues are at stake - and again, being as far from a Didion expert as I am, I have no idea whether Didion was ever writing about her daughter's SAT scores or first crushes or similar in real time. But for those focused on that sort of topic, this is probably of interest.

A comprehensive guide to used-clothes-shopping in Princeton

2011-11-07T18:04:00.001-05:00

I'd been saving the best for last, or not quite the best for hardly the last: that is, I'd waited until November to look (again) at what is to my knowledge Princeton's only thrift shop. (There is also a "consignment" establishment, which on a past visit I decided was not worth the bother, but I'm willing to reconsider.) Somewhat depressingly, entirely predictably, it sells pilled (but much cheaper!) versions of what's available on Nassau St. I'd never been in a Talbots, but I now have a very good sense of what people buy there and then tire of. The strength of the shop - which is for the most part just clothing - seems to be cashmere, with a great range of sweaters in the $10 range. Not necessarily a better deal than the $50 ones new at Uniqlo, but once you factor in the extra $33 to get to Uniqlo, not bad.

Neither of the two items on my if-I-ever-do-in-fact-go-shopping-where-there-are-in-fact-stores-this-is-what-I'd-buy list - short, low-heeled, pull-on black or gray leather boots with buckles; gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses - were anywhere to be found, which is like saying that Nassau St. is not, in fact, lower Fifth Avenue or the Boulevard St. Germain. (There were, however, red-soled stilettos by Nine West - paging litigious Louboutin!) As in, I was not expecting to find either, but I needed to do something on my way to do work at Small World, because it's always just Small World, and I'm more than set for library books and Italian groceries. I thought I'd like the cast-offs of wealthy suburban women (and their taller/chubbier children), that this would go with at least one of my many fashion personalities. But I guess these ladies hang onto things like their navy quilted jackets, their camel capes, their equestrian-chic get-ups, and what they donate, they donate for a reason.

Wild goat no more

2011-11-05T19:07:00.001-04:00

That's today, in a nutshell. First four good-length walks in the morning/early afternoon, so she'd be too exhausted to get hyper at the groomers', where, now that she's been vaccinated for rabies, she could finally go. Then dropping her off, crossing our fingers. Then a trip to the very disappointing Market Fair mawl. Then a spur-of-the-moment stop by the aptly-named Small World, where we ran into the three people we know in this town... but then just as we were relaxing, the momentous call came - almost ready! So off we went, and somehow the wild goat we'd dropped off was transformed into an elegant specimen indeed, ready for things like strutting around the Bon Marché or relieving herself in the grassy area behind the Petsmart. We did not ask for her to have bows, but she's a poodle who now actually looks like a poodle, so why not? She was evidently very well-behaved during her makeover session, and is now fast asleep, relieved, no doubt, that the prodding is over.

"Bad news"

2011-11-04T11:37:00.002-04:00

I went to what's probably the nation's best-known math-and-science high school, went to college "where fun comes to die," and am now living in a tiny, closed-off community primarily for mathematicians and scientists. I have been to numerous "apartment parties" where I was one of very few guests or the only guest. I have pained many an interlocutor by forcing them into ten seconds of small talk. So of course when Arts and Letters Daily linked, I read this Nature article about science-types and the autism spectrum (pull quote, from a scientist: "'I do think that when these geeks marry each other, that's bad news for the offspring.'") with interest.

Most of the time, when one thinks about the high-achieving couple's offspring, one thinks about regression to the mean. Or in layman's terms, the possibility that two former supernerds will produce a popular, well-adjusted B or C student. Amy Chua did her part to make it socially acceptable for parents to treat this outcome as one to be avoided at all costs, perhaps by trying to create a striving-immigrant atmosphere right there in your own UMC native-born household; the more typical writing on the subject is a thinly-veiled lament, a parent saying how wonderful it is to have a kid who's so athletic and outgoing, but who, alas, will never go Ivy.

But one does also think about another possibility, one that also may result in no-Ivy-for-junior, but that's a great deal more upsetting, namely that the kid will inherit an extra dose of awkward, minus whichever talents might lead to success as a computer-programmer or whatever. I'll confess that it does not take Borat's cousin to tell me that this possibility exists (see above), but it stands to reason that this of all issues is one that someone would be looking into quantitatively.

I have precisely one million thoughts on this (watch as I reveal my humanities-person-ness in my use of numbers), but the one I'll put in this post is that I wonder how much of the propagation of spectruminess (or whichever medically-recognized subset thereof) goes not through two-math-person couples, but through mothers who seem neurotypical and have no diagnosis otherwise but are... grown-up Darias, basically, who over the course of their lives have learned not to seem all that out-there. I have a zillion tons of anecdata, but nothing, alas, quantitative.