On "Nanette" ambivalence

Everyone seemed to really love "Nanette." By "everyone" at this stage (there will be other stages), I mostly mean people I follow on social media: friends, acquaintances, like-minded writers. I had not, thus far, much-if-at-all noticed any reviews. But judging by word-of-mouth reception, the show, a Netflix stand-up special, seemed to have achieved the miraculous feat of seeming spot-on regarding feminism, across swaths of feminists who don't necessarily normally agree on much. There was a #MeToo angle! Something about mansplaining, but not heavy-handed-seeming! But also: performer Hannah Gadsby spoke about being a gender-non-conforming lesbian and not — as others would sometimes insist — a trans man, which pleased the contingent fearful that butch lesbians these days are under pressure to transition. (That is not my lane — I'm a cis woman not averse to menswear, but who, earlier this evening, booked something called "partial head highlights" — and nor am I any kind of outside expert; I bring this up merely to point out how branches of feminism I wouldn't have expected to were converging over "Nanette.")

Without giving much thought to how any of this would translate to comedy, I found myself with the requisite set of factors — an hour or so of free time, a limited array on Canadian Netflix — and figured why not?

It started out promising: We meet Gadsby with her dogs, and they're excellent dogs. Then, and more importantly, there's Gadsby herself, who's so charming, as well as just... original. Her stage presence, but also her well-told, unusual-for-stand-up life story (a gay Tasmanian woman with a background in art history, in an arena where "woman" can, on its own, suffice as difference). And maybe most of all, originality-wise, an unpredictable politics: unambiguously progressive but in-group critical. That's a tough line to walk, especially in comedy — how can this be done without making it seem like you're giving out-group members, aka the majority of the audience (and of society), permission to laugh at the group you're a part of? — but somehow she was managing it.

And then...

The second part of the routine is what critics (although the word "critics" seems the wrong word for near-unanimous adulation) have deemed the point. It's a monologue covering quite a bit of ground, all righteous, some cathartic, some more along the lines of a gets-it-right op-ed (or, as some have observed, a TED talk): Picasso was a sexist whose lover, during his own middle age, was a 17-year-old girl. Self-deprecation is problematic, you see, a self-defense mechanism of the marginalized. Comedy is problematic. Gadsby speaks about her own experiences as the victim of sexual violence; what she says is not funny, but who would ask this to be? She also repeats the refrain, "straight cis white men," I think in that order, in reference to the category of humanity without experience being the underdog.

Where did all this leave the viewer, or much more accurately, this viewer?

I came away as convinced as I already was — which is to say, abundantly convinced — that homophobia is a scourge which has lived on well past when some might imagine it's obsolete, if with more specific knowledge about Australian homophobia than I'd ever had previously. I was also — shockingly, I know, especially As A Woman — already opposed to sexual assault, as well as irritated at the thing where male geniuses (and a whole lot of not-so-brilliant men, under that cover) get a pass to do pretty much whatever. And yeah, I've experienced a bit of mansplanation in my day, even if my interpretation of it may be slightly different than the usual. (I think mansplaining is a thing, but a thing men also do to other men, only the dynamic's different in that context.) I may not have been precisely the target audience for "Nanette," but not far off.

But did agreeing with (most of) the arguments themselves mean liking "Nanette"?

According to The Moment, yeah, pretty much. Reviews and profiles in major publications (New Yorker, NYT, Guardian, etc.) tended to hit the same notes: Behold, a list of unassailable public figures who not only praised "Nanette" but declared it the most important work ever. Behold, Gadsby herself, someone whose relatively late, out-of-the-blue-seeming success, after numerous personal and mental-health struggles, feels not just earned but like justice being served. And then the third element: the cultural and political context, the ultra-solemn Now. "Nanette" feels like a response to Louis C.K., to all the bad men who've felt entitled to our bodies and our laughter. (Consider the New Yorker's choice to have Moira Donegan, creator of the "Shitty Media Men" list, as a "Nanette" reviewer.)

Failure to swoon over "Nanette" becomes a multifaceted misdeed: a dissent from the critical consensus; a personal-seeming insult against a performer who seems like an unusually deserving person (because, after all, the show is so personal);

While watching "Nanette," I found myself thinking of Woody Allen, not least because he comes in for some criticism in Part II. A straight cis white man, yes. Problematic, undoubtedly. (And who can forget that the journalist credited with #MeToo — even if, fine, two women journalists got there first — is none other than Allen's son? Woody Is Everywhere.) But I have trouble thinking of the self-deprecation of Allen's early years as coming from a place of privilege. I found myself wondering whether Gadsby, whose show so deeply rests on her own unequivocal underdog status, has reckoned with her own (best as I know) gentileness, when effectively throwing Jewish humor (yes, and other sorts as well) out the window.

I am not an experiencer of male privilege. I did not take the ugh-men turn remotely personally. Nor, somehow, was I cheering.

Far more than Woody Allen, though, the comedian I had in mind while watching was Ali Wong, a comic I also learned about via social-media hype leading me to a Netflix special. It's hard to argue that Wong's physical presence in "Baby Cobra" (which, for what it's worth, I watched and enjoyed well before motherhood was on the horizon for me personally) or "Hard Knock Wife" — Asian-American and heavily pregnant — is less outside stand-up norms than Gadsby's. Wong, too, broke ground, and addressed all manner of 'identity' topics, and also... was hilarious.

It helps that Wong's performances (and, as I recall, the critical and social-media endorsements of them) don't leave the viewer feeling like anything less than a heartfelt enthusiastic reception means you're an anti-Asian bigot, or unsympathetic to the challenges of life in a female body. Nor, for that matter, that any response other than This Is Important was akin to bashing a sensitive soul's artistic production.

But what I kept thinking was, are we meant to believe Ali Wong pandered to the patriarchy by doing stand-up routines that were funny the whole way through, addressing race, female sexuality, and miscarriage, but also, heaven forfend, making audiences laugh? More broadly: why is anything other than unsubtle, earnest outrage now viewed as being on the wrong side? Does someone like me — someone who (this is in the book) found much of "Master of None" cringe-inducing — simply not belong to this era?

(Is it too cynical, or worse, to remember that "Master of None" was only held up as this icon of Awareness until co-creator and star Aziz Ansari became problematic via an itself-problematic early #MeToo story, wherein he was reportedly gross while dating? To remember this, that is, and to wonder whether it's tempting fate to declare Gadsby — or any human being! — the epitome of pure, underdog goodness, when who knows what will surface, or as they say online, milkshake-duck?)

Sanctimonious entertainment doesn't drive me to the right politically. (Thus why you're getting this to-do on WWPD and not in a publication — I could see my view on "Nanette" being not just published celebrated on the right... but for the wrong reasons.) Maybe it does this for some, I wouldn't rule it out. For me, it just makes me think cultural consumption is something that effectively needs to happen in private, if it's to happen honestly. Not necessarily in the sense of alone, but among friends, or over direct messages.

To be clear, it's not about what can or can't be said, or not exactly. I'm well aware that there's a tremendous market for dissenting views from self-identified progressives. But that market is, or amounts to, the right. Or if not the right, exactly, then a subset of the center that has its priorities wrong, obsessing over progressive sanctimony while the right offers up one disaster after the next. It's certainly permitted not to like "Nanette." But where are you left if you like its political message but not its artistic one, or just found the whole thing a bit meh, despite rooting for the creator personally? Is this a case where it's best to say nothing at all?

The trouble with personal writing (yes, I repeat myself on this) is that it's impossible to criticize the writing without seeming to be judging the author, or making light of her struggles. A similar problem comes up with political art: If you care about Issue A, the expectation is that you'll love Work X, and conversely, if Work X doesn't do much for you, then it's clearly because Issue A doesn't move you. This approach to culture, which feels (and is!) so very now, isn't entirely new. It's just become ubiquitous. (Please, please read Lauren Oyler on "necessary" art, especially this part, but really, all of it: "When applied to bad art with good politics, 'necessary' allows the audience to avoid engaging with a work in aesthetic terms, which tend to be more ambiguous and difficult.")

"Nanette" falls squarely into both situations — it's personal and topical. To feel meh about "Nanette" is — unless you're really leaning into contrarianism — to feel as though you're wrong politically as well as contributing to the wrongs the performance's creator has already had to suffer. Which is... not great, I think, for art, or ultimately, for politics either.

Why 'Ban Men' is not the answer

When Dan Savage declares himself "done with men" in a recent column, it would be a stretch to take that literally. (If nothing else, he is a man, and can't be done with himself.) But when straight or bi or otherwise somewhat-into-men-identified women make declarations along those lines, this is taken seriously. (As in the letter Savage is responding to!) Being done-with-men is... it's not a thing, exactly, so much as an ambient mood. Every day, a new story emerges about another of those men. Men in positions of power being awful. The stories are so plentiful that today, a man I'd actually encountered, in person, in a professional situation, is on the list. (I'd thought I was sufficiently out of the loop that this couldn't happen, but a brief brush with media-stuff is apparently enough.) And if you yourself are not a man, you do have that option, in the abstract at least. No men, none, done with them.

The zeitgeist, then, seems headed towards a world without men - as a dream, if not, of course, a reality. As a millennial, feminist woman, one who has authored countless think-pieces, a New Yorker living in Toronto, a woman who owns a Glossier highlighter for crying out loud, I'm the target audience for women-only spaces, but also for a very modern sexuality that allows women to just sort of opt out of men. Ban men! Men are the worst. I know I should agree to this. And I don't lack for personal experience of certain men - men I knew personally, men in public spaces - being the worst. But... yeah.

That women - some women? most women? - seek out sex with men, seek out sexually charged interactions with men, find men desirable, have partners who are men (without finding their partner's gender a drawback) becomes this lost detail. That a woman would actually want men, and would admit to this, at a time like this, is... passé? problematic? It's an admission that can be made, if at all, with a regretful tone, with this sort of, ugh what a shame, this can't be turned off. That there's any sort of positive joy in attraction to men is taboo.

The "joy" aspect might seem like a side note: What does the female pursuit of pleasure have to do with the far more pressing concern of female victimhood? (Worse: it may come across as nostalgia for old-time office 'flirtation' of the sort that consisted of what is today rightly understood as sexual harassment.) This is why it's important to see that women's desire for men and sexist oppression are intertwined. The expectation of female passivity in hetero relationships is what gives us the rom-com narrative - repeated in real-life (if embellished) examples such as newspaper wedding announcements - where a woman was indifferent to some man in her life, until he pursued her and persuaded her to get past her apathy or even revulsion. Also the pick-up artist myth that every woman is a strategy away from consent.

Female heterosexuality is understood - as I've mentioned before, likely on WWPD - not as a sexual orientation but as a lack thereof. As conventionality. As basic-ness. As agreeability. Which, I mean, I see how it can look that way - the curious privilege, as a woman, of wanting the gender one is expected to want is that one gets to play-act that role - but a moment's reflection on how teen girls (who are for various reasons that would themselves be a post largely exempt from those expectations) respond to heartthrobs suggests that straight and bi women are, yup, attracted to men.

If we were to acknowledge that women want, and more specifically, that women have desires other than being thought hot and available while 22, by men at least two decades their senior, that would... well, that would be at least as dangerous to patriarchy as the conceptual banning of men.

While there may be differences in exactly how men and women - as well as those of varying testosterone levels - experience desire, it's a mistake to imagine (or to infer from the trans man's testosterone anecdote in Savage's post, a story I'd seen somewhere else recently as well - maybe The Rebel Sell?) that women could take or leave the people they're drawn to. It's a mistake - or a fantasy? to think of female desire as the desire for, at best, a very special friend. It's a dangerous mistake, because it leads to a mistaken understanding (see also) of exactly why it is that the villain in nearly all of these cases is a dude. It leads to imagining the reason there are male but not female Weinsteins is that men, but not women, want. As versus that societal power dynamics are such that (some) men are led to believe wanting=getting, while all women are aware that wanting and acting on it entails risk. Risks of all sorts - of violence, of unwanted pregnancy, of ruined reputations, this is all old news.

But there's another risk, which is of falling into the category of... undesirable. The Woman is meant to be constantly rebuffing advances, not pursuing and - some of the time - getting shot down. A woman who pursues is one who has made peace with the fact that not everyone finds her attractive. Whereas a woman who doesn't pursue? She can live in the belief that the world's straight men are divided between those who definitely want her and those who are simply too respectful (or intimidated, or busy with work...) to express their desires for her. If pleasure, for women, involves being thought desirable, then what joy could there possibly be in verifying that the hot guy who hasn't given you the time of day is, in fact, not interested? How could the slight chance he is interested make pursuit worthwhile, if the whole point is to be thought beautiful, which would rather have to happen unprompted.

All of this - and personal bias, fine - is why I think The Conversation needs to incorporate, and not brush aside as distasteful or irrelevant, the fact that many/most women desire men. If anything, we'd all be a lot safer if that were better understood.

The long-anticipated Defense of Stuff

The piece I wrote recently for the New Republic about stuff vs. experiences seems to have gotten some interest. Elissa Strauss put the ideas into context helpfully in Slate, while Rebecca Schoenkoff had fun with the topic at Wonkette. The Atlantic included the piece in a "highlights" roundup. Miraculously I can still walk through the streets of Toronto unnoticed, but it's only a matter of time until we're talking sunglasses-and-autographs territory.

And there's now even a Bloggingheads on it! I got to debate materialism with Aryeh Cohen-Wade, who made the case for experiences. I was... meant to make the case for stuff, but never quite got there. What I did instead was make the point that much of what's often viewed as worse about 'stuff' applies no more to stuff than to experiences. The case, in other words, against being anti-stuff.

Because I ramble (slightly) less in writing, here's a second attempt at the positive argument for enjoyment of stuff:

For some people - for whichever mix of we-were-socialized-to and we're-just-like-that - it's fun to buy and/or make new things. This is a broad category that includes clothes-shopping and cooking, home decor and book accumulation. It doesn't mean enjoyment of all these categories, or indiscriminate enjoyment of any one of them. I can't speak to what it means for all, but for me, it means having a particular clothing item/recipe/book in mind (not quite at the home-decor life-stage, she types from her it'll-do IKEA couch) and being pleased to wear/use/read it.

But to simplify matters, I'll stick with the big one: clothes. That's the one with some shame attached. No one is judging me for owning condiments (with the possible exception of a broker my landlord hired to rent out our place, who passed along the not-false information that clear surfaces in the kitchen would make his job easier), or calling book-consumption shallow. But just saying I like clothes makes me sound cretinous. It demands disclaimers, apologies. But I'm going for positive here, so I'm going to save those for later.

Here's what 'liking clothes' involves, for me: I think of things I want to wear, inspired by women I know, or who I've seen on the street in Toronto, or on the street elsewhere when I have a chance to experience elsewhere, or on TV shows (female detectives!), or on fashion blogs (such as there still are), or because - and here I'm thinking specifically of the cherry-blossom sneakers; no other example is coming to mind - because I've seen something in a store window and thought how fantastic it is that this item even exists. I don't just go and buy all of it at once, both because $$$ and because that wouldn't be any fun. (How many times can I refer to Kei's brilliant concept of a "wanty list"?)

Because it's not about wanting white Birkenstocks since seeing a woman in Toronto with roughly my build and clothing color scheme wearing them. It's about sorting out which I'm looking for, in which material. And all that only after thinking about what, of what I already own, I'd wear them with. While I don't quite still view my wardrobe in terms of different fashion personalities, there's nearly always a vision for what will be worn how. What look it's all going for. And I'm not really an impulse-shopper. If I go to a store without a specific item in mind, or with only a vague plan ('I will buy a summer dress'), I wander around with... exactly the attitude of someone who hates shopping, and leave without buying anything.

But I got the sandals, and wearing them is great. I feel more myself in an outfit that I like, more together. And conveniently for me, I'm not so fickle as to require constant changing-it-up in the clothing department. If anything, I make the #KonMari mistake of hanging onto clothes (shoes) beyond repair, simply because I totally would still wear them if they hadn't fallen apart (red patent ballet flats), and sometimes do because... red patent ballet flats! Yes, that's what 'liking clothes' can mean - liking what you own so much that when it falls apart or no longer fits, this is a disappointment, so you keep wearing things a little too long. How oddly... not-wasteful.

For me - and who else would I have the authority to speak for on my very own Weblog? - putting in effort in this area is a matter of self-confidence, or something along those lines. At times when I've felt sort of ugh, I haven't felt I deserved either new clothes, or, on some level, even to wear the nicer things I already own. For others, who knows? If you're someone whose "ugh" leads to purchasing the entire contents of the nearest mall, this is not your experience, and maybe liking clothes is not, for you, a positive force in your life. For me, it is.

In a sense, the positive case for stuff is very straightforward. People like it! I don't need to explain why shopping can be fun, nor that in the history of humanity, people have acquired objects without falling into a sea of debt and hoarding. Thus why the anti-stuff tirades are always framed as, you only think you like stuff, but it's a mirage. What if it's just... not a mirage? What if the things in life that seem nice - new shoes, catching a glimpse of Justin Trudeau at the Pride parade - actually are?

And now the handwringing:

To like clothes isn't to like all clothes. Nor is it necessarily to like status clothes, or the clothes of the moment, although I see nothing wrong with either of these factors trickling into the great unknowable that is why we like the things we do. Nor does it mean spending a lot, or too much relative to income, on clothes. Nor, indeed, does it mean owning more clothes than people who just wear whatever. It means getting enjoyment out of deciding what to purchase and, once you own it, how to style it. It's that simple. No great sin has occurred.

Or, put another way: Those who go out of their way to make sure everything they wear is either used or (definitively) ethically produced (as in, not just expensive and marketed as an 'investment') get to hold a moral high ground. Those who simply don't care what they wear and have closets full of clothes they're indifferent to don't get any good-person points for non-enjoyment of the mall.

Oh, and if this needs stating: To like clothes isn't to get tremendous joy in one's own reflection in the mirror. I'm 20 years past losing sleep over questions of whether I'm stunning or hideous, having too many years' worth of accumulated knowledge that I - like nearly all of us - am neither. I fall into the same category as most, which is to say that if dressed reasonably nicely, I look quite a bit better than I do in sweats.

I'm not clear where the line exists between stuff and experiences. Yes, a plane ticket is in one category, and a knick-knack ordered online, another. But rarely is it that straightforward. (Or nor even there: maybe the flight is to a shopping trip, and maybe knick-knack-browsing online is a wonderful experience!) In a sense, maybe that's where my beef with the experiences-are-better-than-stuff brigade comes from. So, so, so often, the things praised as "experiences" and therefore noble sound awfully... stuff-y, while the things derided as "stuff" are basically about the experiences involved in acquiring the stuff, or that the stuff reminds someone of.

As came up on the Bloggingheads... while lots of stuff-acquisition is about keeping up with the Joneses, so, too, is plenty experience-having. Why does "stuff" suggest debt, while "experiences," which can be at least as expensive and ostentatious, get a pass? Indeed, given that everything gets photographed and shared these days, it's incredibly difficult for me to see how the mountain vista on a vacation that someone surely paid for is any different than a handbag.

In other words, insofar as there is a dichotomy, but it's not stuff vs. experiences. It's between the things (material or not) you actually get some sort of pleasure out of, and the ones you're under the impression you ought to consume, and consume reluctantly but out of a fear of what would happen if you did not. (There's a name for the latter category: kale.) If you find you're spending too much money and time on things you only think you should like, then... that's probably the place to cut back. As in, sure, the money I put towards new sandals could have gone towards one of those exercise classes that women of my demographics supposedly enjoy. But having once dipped a toe into the world of paying to exercise, I get the sense that it's not for me, not now, at least. I'd rather have the sandals, so I chose correctly.

Tracy Anderson's glute(n) advice, and more

-The latest Slate Culture Gabfest takes on viral social-media shaming of public obnoxiousness. A topic near and dear to my heart. The more people who start questioning viral shaming, the better.

-The latest in parental overshare: a parent (with a distinctive name) provides an annotated version of his seven-year-old daughter's Christmas wish list, complete with photos of the "insane" (his word) list itself, kid-handwriting and everything. Given the number of places I've seen this linked to, and the stats visible on the post itself, I suppose it counts as having gone viral. Is it funny? Sure. Is it an invasion of this kid's privacy? Yes, that too.

Parental overshare comes in two forms: tragic-and-exceptional and humorous-relatable. Both are privacy violations, but it might be more obvious why the former would pose a problem. We're sympathetic to the extent to which a kid's problems can deeply impact a parent, but ultimately the information - the relevant medical records, juvenile-detention stints, abuse-victimhood, etc. - belongs to the child. (OK, we as a society are perfectly fine with infinite parental sharing; I, and like three other people, are not.)

It's less obvious why it's iffy to post about within-normal-limits parenting escapades. Lighten up! seems the obvious counterargument. And does tend to be good advice generally.

But imagine you're the kid. It's kind of terrifying to imagine being known for your brattiest/most ridiculous childhood moments. And children - on account of being children - virtually all act in ways that would seem, in adults, narcissistic, impatient, and lacking all sense of proportion. Thus why, when adults make the sorts of fusses that these days so often go viral, we refer to them as acting like children. But your age at the time whichever item was posted will be less memorable than your display of spoiled entitlement. It will be you who threw a tantrum over not getting the right jeans. You who saw it as the world's greatest tragedy when you weren't invited to that sleepover. Should this be exploited for material on a Gawker affiliate? Is it somehow OK if your decompensations were hilarious, or if your parents were clever writers able to make them sound more entertaining than they were?

-Usual suspects Mark Bittman and Tracy Anderson have come to the rescue this (eternal!) holiday season, with tips for not becoming too glutinous or whatever's the preferred euphemism this holiday season. Both advice columns are also, more subtly, efforts to distance themselves from reputations as (very different kinds of ) ascetic extremists. Bittman doesn't tell you to extensively research each ingredient, but rather to eat real foods. Simple! Anderson, meanwhile, manages to admonish without calling her audience fat. She advises against juice cleanses, and also endorses putting food into one's mouth should one be so inclined. Moderation!

Except not really, if one reads between the lines. Bittman's "real food" suggestion is not as straightforward as all that. We get this as an aside: "(Most real bread, for example, is water, flour, yeast and salt, with the possible addition of olive oil or a seasoning or two, and the possible subtraction of yeast. Yeast conditioners and ingredients with five syllables have no place in real bread.)" Yet in this day and age, bread is sweetened. It just is. Even the most basic-looking ones at Whole Foods. Because that's the issue, right? Bittman's audience isn't confused because it's thinking of food as nutrients - that's so 1990s. It's about what constitutes real food, and a Talmudic debate is needed to dig up the answer.

Anderson, though, starts from a place far less reasonable than Bittman does, and thus would have to do far more to soften her reputation. (Relatedly - why do I know this? - she's on a broader campaign to distance herself from a quasi-pro-ana image. It seems to involve juxtaposing insistence that women not focus on skinny jeans with advice on fitting into the same.) She insists on a minimum of "30 minutes, six days a week" for workouts. She finds it dangerous that parents feed their children excessive amounts of... fruit. And laments her own gluten allergy, which I suppose we're to generously assume isn't a convenient allergy to carbs. (I don't doubt all medical gluten concerns, just of those who've made a career of honing and critiquing Gwyneth Paltrow's "long butt.") How could Tracy Anderson not be allergic to gluten?

And then there's this: "If you’re hosting, make sure everything in your house is organic and nothing else." But of course.

"Lovers," mason jars, and internships

A weekend! No observations of Ivy reunion rituals, but fun all the same:

-Saw "Lovers and Other Strangers," a 1968 play (and 1970 movie I'm now dying to see - with Cloris Leachman aka Phyllis, and Diane Keaton's film debut) co-written by Renée Taylor aka Sylvia Fine. Fran's mother on "The Nanny," and thus the performer behind one of the best quotes of sitcom history, or so I thought in 2004. (Almost nine years have passed, but I still think it's pretty great.) I have next to no knowledge of theater - community or otherwise - but the acting was quite impressive. The sound technique that involved draping microphones over the cast's foreheads was somewhat distracting, but as if I'd know how one deals with performance acoustics, so all is forgiven.

Like I said, theater performance, I have no idea. The script is something else. The overall mood of the play was very much early-1970s sitcom. Which meant both the rhythm and world of comedy I know well (Rhoda Morgenstern could have popped by at any minute) and a certain dated-ness to the proceedings. Somehow one can look past that sort of thing when watching "The Bob Newhart Show" on the couch. But in public, in 2013, it becomes extra-salient. Things like a scandal over whether a woman will or won't spend the night with a guy she's just met, the obstacle being her commitment to second-wave feminism (and general women-are-like-so nuttiness). Or: a man furious that his wife has taken a job outside the home. The play is a series of vignettes, set - in this production - in different years, from the late 1960s up to the present. The "2002" vignette included a cake from "Whole Foods," but was otherwise set entirely in the "All in the Family" universe.

But most jarring, dated-ness-wise, was the casual homophobia of an era before Stonewall, AIDS, or same-sex marriage. In one vignette, a woman calls her ex-marine husband a "faggot" when he refuses to have sex with her that night. In another, it is debated whether or not a well-known performer from long ago was a "fairy." In neither of these cases are gay people being directly insulted - the characters are being (gently) ridiculed for these conversations. But in both, it's just... insulting in a way that wouldn't go over in 2013. Which brings up that WWPD persistent motif: the tendency of writing from earlier eras to be offensive by today's standards, and the question of what to do with that information. I'm used to looking at this question as it relates to novels (specifically 19th century French novels and their remarkably nasty representations of Jews, no matter the author - looking at you, Zola), but it's more complicated, I now see, when it comes to performing text written in a not-so-enlightened Then.

Here's what this production did with that information: They made the final vignette, "2013," one about cold feet before a wedding, about a lesbian couple. Because it's 2013! There are weddings with two brides! While the sentiment was admirable, the execution somewhat less so. It was a bit of men-are-like-so sitcom humor about male fear of commitment. While there are no doubt lesbians who fear commitment, this twist was so far beyond the sophistication of the script that it took a while to sort out that this even was a same-sex couple, and not a couple girlfriends-in-the-pre-enlightened-sense chatting about another wedding. As in, it's not that this was unrealistic, but that the universe of the play was one of clingy dingbat (R.I.P.) women and macho, philandering men.

Anyway, those who know more about theater than I do (Flavia?) can weigh in, if interested, about how such issues are generally/ideally approached.

-Went to Brooklyn Flea Philly. It did indeed seem much like Brooklyn Flea Brooklyn, which is to say, a lot of curated knick-knacks such that, if you're there to shop, you'd perhaps be better off at a thrift store. But the point is obviously people-watching, which was if anything better at the Philadelphia equivalent. Places other than New York just have space, so around the market itself were a large number of outdoor cafés. I had heard tell of Philadelphia hipsters - that Philadelphia had a Williamsburg/Greenpoint/Bushwick - but my prior experience of Northern Liberties brought me to what must have been the wrong edge of it. Wrong as in, there was just nothing much there, maybe two cafés over many blocks, otherwise just... residential? This time, though, I got a sense of the full scope of the area, and... I wasn't in Princeton anymore! I had a Mason jar iced Stumptown coffee and a lemon bar five times the size one would have been in New York. Fabulous.

-Less fabulous: Thomas Friedman's new thing where he promotes some start-up he has a personal family connection to, and somehow uses that as a springboard for advising Young People Today to take unpaid internships as possible, to do the lowliest tasks for no pay, and to "add value" to companies that can't quite get it together to pay you anything. This is going to be missed, because it emerged the same time as the more compelling you're-being-watched information, but it's still a big deal:

Since so many internships are unpaid these days, added Sedlet, there is a real danger that only “rich kids” can afford them, which will only widen our income gaps. The key, if you get one, he added, is to remember “that companies don’t want generalists to help them think big; they want people who can help them execute” and “add value.”

Interesting jump there.

This is also particularly delightful: "Internships are increasingly important today, they [Friedman's family friends] explained, because skills are increasingly important in the new economy and because colleges increasingly don’t teach the ones employers are looking for."

There's of course no evidence provided that unpaid internships provide any particular skills, or - more pertinent - that employers view them as work experience. By all means, work for free! (I.e., pay to work!) Why? Because it might mean you'll get a contact. (It would be altogether entitled to expect it to lead to a job.) Networking!

But also: when was the Golden Age of colleges as vocational school? I know this is supposed to be code for 'students today just drink, sleep in, and learn far-left drivel', but it's not as if the critical thinking and Great Books of a traditional liberal-arts education provide the skills needed to become a "product manager," let alone to know that such a job exists.

It just does seem awfully convenient to define today's college grads as uniquely incapable of entering the workforce without one or multiple stints in unpaid employment.

Pin money

Just finished Emily Matchar's Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity. It's great, but first, a story about my tracking down the book. It was noonish on a weekday, and I arrived at the public library in jogging clothes. That was because I'd jogged to the library.

After looking around for the book and not finding it where I thought it would be, I went to the information desk. I explained that I was looking for a book called "Homeward Bound," and the woman at the desk asked me if it was a children's book. And I realized that there was no possible explanation for my disheveled state, for the noon-on-a-weekday situation, other than children. (Except: dissertation. There is now a chapter eight. I tell ya...)

Anyhow, I said no, non-fiction. A grown-up book.

The woman helping me entered this into the system, and then said, or more like asked, "Why women are embracing the new domesticity?" And I all of a sudden thought, damn, this seems more personal than I'd realized.

******

Homeward Bound... left me with a lot to think about. Are women who earn less than their husbands dabblers who earn pin money? Am I that woman, and if so, why am I not better-accessorized? That even female journalists at the top of their profession can feel that way is not so reassuring.

Anyway, it's not often that I read a non-fiction book and think, my goodness, I agree with nearly all of this. Part of it is, as I've mentioned, that all the while, as I was critiquing the food movement, Matchar, though coming at the question from a different perspective, was arriving at many of the same conclusions. She's interested in the people who practice DIY extremism, whereas I'm more interested in consumers-as-researchers (the quest to buy the right stuff), and in the false impression perpetuated in certain articles that everyone college-educated is a DIY extremist. She's looking at the people who take this stuff dead-seriously; I'm more taking note of those who... let themselves flow with the greenwashing. The 'I try to avoid parabens, but because that's cool, who the hell knows what a paraben is' set. The 'I shop at J.Crew, not Old Navy, because I'm against fast fashion' contingent.

In other words, I'm interested both in the rising expectation that everyone's turning their shopping into a research project and the more blatant class-signaling variety. Not sure which is more common, though - my impression that the latter is more common than the grinding-of-one's-own-flour could just relate to where I live, or my tendency to read fashion blogs and not homemaking ones, or who knows.

Where Matchar's book is most especially spot-on:

-Yes, 100 times yes, the food movement ignores that women abandoned home cooking for a reason. Also 100 times yes, the calls for more cooking-at-home not only sometimes outright blame feminism for the decline of home cooking, but also - more universally - fail to properly acknowledge that asking "Americans" or "parents" to cook more is effectively asking women, mothers especially, to do so, because that's who ends up being held responsible if junior's living off Junior's.

-Yes, 1,000 times yes, the answer is an improvement in food quality on the whole - ingredients as well as convenience foods - and not an ever-greater list of demands on parents-i.e.-moms. (A personal request: the new-and-improved fast food shall be catered by Dos Toros.) The obsession with what individuals do in terms of feeding their family organic, etc., comes at the cost of movements to improve what all families are feeding their kids. She looks at this more as, individual families need to think of the greater good, whereas I see it more as, we have this movement promoting that (often consumerist but sometimes DIY) approach. But either way, yes, the idea that improving how "we" eat should be entirely about individual families making choices is a problem.

-This relates to the Sheryl Sandberg "don't leave before you leave" idea, and no, I have not yet read "Lean In." Perhaps when I jog back to return this most recent round of library books, that will be available. Anyway, according to Matchar, a lot of women see something noble and independent about rejecting the rat race, corporate America, etc. But, as Matchar wisely points out, their stay-at-home butter-churning enterprises are all being funded by their husbands' real-world jobs. Matchar, though, makes sure to point out that this isn't entirely about women choosing to be un- or underemployed, and is in part a case of, these are women having trouble finding work, who latch on to an ideology that says your baby has to latch on until it's college-age precisely because it gives them a sense of purpose. This, in turn, puts them in a still-worse employment position than they'd have been in had they stuck it out.

-On that note, I like that she's very clear, at the end of the book, about the specific social class going all homesteader. That as much as we all want to shout that these women's privilege is showing (they are, after all, being supported by their husbands, in an era when having a husband at all is a marker of fancy-class status) these are not the hyper-elites. These are women who don't have fabulous career options. Neither do their husbands, of course, but the men are still going to work.

Agreeing, adding:

-It seems to me like the underlying problem - the thing that gets women of this elite-but-not-Sandberg class into this bind where they're stuck choosing between perma-adjuncting, freelancing, and the stay-at-home chicken-coop mom option - starts far, far earlier than the point at which a husband or child enters the picture. Women are majoring in different fields, taking different paths, applying for less for-profit-ish post-college jobs.

More women might be going to college, but if they're not entering with the expectation that once out, they'll need to support a family, that impacts their outlook. Second-wave feminism, as much as it's been absorbed, has been absorbed as, you need to be able to support yourself. And women will get to a place where they can support themselves, or at least their 22-year-old selves who don't have all that many expenses.

So it's not that women are abandoning potential careers in order to be housewives. Often, they were never in a position to have such a career in the first place. But it kind of seems as if they were, because they have been to college. They are privileged. Except that when it comes down to it, when there are bills to pay, not so much. As I've said before, and as I will say again, knowing what kale is will not pay your rent.

Why do we keep missing this? In part because there is one small subset of women - and men - who can major in Medieval Tapestry Studies and be readily employable upon graduation. That would be the graduates of... either a certain number of elite colleges (some people I've discussed this with think UChicago counts, others are skeptical, and my personal experience is mixed) or really just Harvard. These are the people writing opt-out-analysis, and, often enough (although not in Matchar's case) this is whom opt-out-analysis articles are written about. And we're constantly hearing about how there are on the one hand privileged women, and on the other, underprivileged ones. When in fact, there is this one superwoman caste (the Sandbergs, the Chuas, the Slaughters), and then this other caste of women who are on paper not that different, but whose degrees in Basketweaving from Obscure College aren't quite the same.

So I think Matchar gets us part of the way there, in pointing out that this is sort of a lower-rung upper-middle-class concern. But we need to go further, acknowledging that not all women - or all men! - are going to go to name-brand schools, but also changing the mindset of women who are entering college, or even earlier, and making it clear to them that they, just like their male classmates at Obscure, will need to earn something more than pin money one day. 

Middle school and the neurosis of narcissism

As I sit waiting for commenter Caryatis's mystery "suggestion about" my "writing style" (about which I'm of course extra-self-conscious as the dissertation deadline looms), I will risk inflicting it, in all its passive-voiced, parenthetical-filled, insufficiently-concise-unless-I've-read-it-over-and-if-it's-on-WWPD-chances-are-I-have-not glory (along with whichever mystery quality everyone but me is aware of but that all until Caryatis, including professional editors, have been too polite to point out, gah!!!) on you, my constructively-critical readers. If you wish to put this post into a word doc and return it to me with track changes, by all means. (Consider me 15% serious.)

Self-consciousness is really the right state of mind to be in for this post, which is about middle school.

So. The book of the moment is Emily Bazelon's much-publicized one on bullying. (Will I read it? Will I get around to seeing if anyone wants me to review it? Or - realistically - will I be too focused on wrapping up The Thing, by which I mean a certain bloated research project which, if I de-bloat it, could theoretically culminate in an advanced degree.*)

Bullying, of course, has been topic du jour since Dan Savage launched the It Gets Better Project. What began as a sudden awareness that the rate at which LGBT kids are bullied (at school and online, but also at home and at church) surely relates to the rate of suicide and self-destructive behavior in that population has, it seemed, morphed into a more general sense that the cruelty of childhood is not something we should just accept.

And it used to be more than just accepted. Some of what we now view as bullying would, in the past, have been seen as character-building. We might have pitied home-schooled kids precisely for not having gotten made fun of by their peers, an experience that thickens the skin and prepares one for adulthood. But today, that view seems out of date. We must not only remember that there's nothing wrong with being gender-non-conforming, but also that the annoying kid perhaps has a disorder of some kind. The idea that one's quirks should be lessened via socialization... persists, but has become controversial.

I'm 29, and so the last of the pre-enlightened generation. Though born smack in the middle of the milieu that now does this, I was not helicopter-parented. I took the public bus alone starting at 10, the subway at 14. I hung around with friends after school in the pre-smartphone era, thank goodness. My cohort's first unsupervised parties, first romantic entanglements, remain - by contemporary standards - virtually undocumented. And - and this I'm not so nostalgic about - we were horrible to one another. Not in high school - either we were already too old, or I went to a weird high school - but middle school was the worst. The worst!

In conjunction with Bazelon's book, Slate, where she's an editor, is posting first-hand accounts of having been a bully. Thus far, all three have been accounts of middle-school cruelty. Middle school, especially for girls (?), is awful. Awful everywhere, not just in Manhattan, where it might be its own unique brand of awful. But is it awful because of bullying? Bazelon asks in her NYT op-ed that we not call all nasty behavior among kids bullying. And... thinking back to my own experience at that age, I remember immense nastiness, but not bullying. I remember what was effectively a class-wide low-grade eating disorder (and there's a "Seinfeld" reference about how this is the result of bullying among girls, as vs. wedgies for boys), but then again, this was the Upper East Side - those who didn't make it out are probably still removing the doughy part of their bagels and filling the shell with low-carb salad. I think that was just an initiation into a certain kind of adulthood. This was, after all, the same school Gwyneth no-carbs Paltrow went to.

In the spirit of delving into the dark ages, I tried my best to remember those years, and failed to recall any bullying - of or by me, of or by anyone else. I spent those years in or dramatically excluded from then re-included in a clique of the sort that, if I passed such girls on the street today, I'd feel vaguely intimidated. (Think that commercial - possibly for car insurance? - where a pudgy middle-aged dude is followed around by "the popular girls from the local middle school," who shame him into eating less.) I was middle-schoolishly narcissistic and felt it was all about whether everyone liked me, not realizing that everyone else was wondering the same thing.

These years weren't entirely awful. I made closer - well, perhaps not closer, but more intense - female friendships than I've had since. There were no boys at the school, and we were at any rate too young to be dating, so nearly all drama (yes, some girls like girls) centered on female friendships. And it was fun to kind of discover the world with peers, in a way you really can't once you're older and not as easily surprised. It was fun to finally emerge from the confines of my family and whichever parents'-friends'-kids were my 'friends' and actually make friends of my own, ones whose values might not be exactly the ones I was being raised with. But it was, for the most part, a miserable few years, with cruelty the norm. If it had been bullying, perhaps it might have been addressed. But it was just some combination of that age and a peculiar subculture. The school might have taught self-acceptance, for all I know (my memory of this time being thankfully largely repressed) they tried.

Did the nastiness build character? I'm not sure. I suppose I learned, in those years, about caring whether I was cool, and what I looked like... only to care exponentially less from high school on. My sense is that those who don't go through this at 12 or so end up facing it later in life, sometimes well into adulthood. I know it's supposed to be better to be a dork as a kid, and cool as an adult, but I think there's something to be said for not caring if you're hip, not worrying about being spectacularly good-looking, when you're 25, 45...

And much of the cruelty of middle school is simply a first glimpse at life's unfairnesses. Once you reach the age of making your own friends and not just playing with whomever, you're confronted with evidence that some people are better-looking and more likable than others, that some people you like won't reciprocate. But it's not just rejection. It's at this age that you first learn that people you don't especially like or give much thought to probably don't much like or think about you, either. This, when you first learn it, can be jarring.

Even if it isn't expressed particularly cruelly, dislike or apathy, when it's a new experience, stings in a way it never will moving forward. Not getting invited to a sleepover can, in the moment, feel like a tragedy. This makes middle-school students seem like horrible, neurotic people with no sense of proportion,** but if you look at as a developmental stage, you don't condemn the individual. And people do, as a rule, grow out of this. With age, certainly with Facebook, you realize that people are hanging out without you, that this doesn't mean these people hate you but rather that they give as little thought to you as you do to them unless prompted. You realize that the world does not end if you're not the most beautiful and most popular - that no one's attractive to everyone and liked by all. You will still have dates, friends. Maybe it's helpful to experience blunt rejection as a kid in order to be more easygoing later in life?

I am, you will notice, leaving this post with the essential unresolved: can/should middle school be non-horrible? I tend to think efforts in this area should be made, but am not sure a) that it's possible, and b) that a certain amount of pain - but not past whichever threshold - does indeed build character.

*Note that this post has two levels - the reliving of middle-school neurosis, and the current almost-done-isn't-done dissertation panic. I may not care (enough, alas) what I look like, but I sure do care what Chapter Seven does.

**This is one very important reason why I'm against parental overshare. Kids, till a certain age, lack perspective, and that's normal, but it's difficult to see that when reading an essay, and readers will come to associate that particular individual with vapid, selfish, massively neurotic behavior.

"Bitches be crazy"

A while ago, I mentioned that Simon Rich had written one heck of a misogynistic humor essay for the New Yorker. The well-known problem with misogyny intended as humor is that there's no way to call it out without learning that one is a humorless feminist for not laughing along. More on that in a moment. In any case, I'd kind of forgotten about this, until I was out walking Bisou, listening to this week's live-taped Savage Lovecast. Special guest, Simon Rich. Reading one of the stories from his new collection. And which one? The very same one as had been in the magazine, the one about God having a girlfriend. She works in fashion, she's gossipy, needy, diet-crazed, and doesn't like it when he works late at his job, which is creating the world in six days, and thus kind of a big deal. But she's all, why don't you spend more time with meeeee, because that's how the ladies get, y'know? A stale set-up, with an original conceit. But because that's how it goes when one walks a dog in the middle of nowhere, I kept listening.

Anyway, re: laughing along, I probably did some of that, but I'm fully capable of laughing if put in front of an old episode of "Two and a Half Men." The bad-sitcom chuckle. Put me on an airplane and the bar drops lower still. Because of this character flaw, I can laugh at a joke about how women enjoy "lo-cal yogurt," just not in the same way as I laughed when Sarah Haskins mocked the yogurt-as-woman-feed phenomenon.

(This is all of it a separate phenomenon from appreciating great art that happens to have been created by a bigot, or that expresses bigoted views, an issue that itself needs to be divided between an understanding that everyone from back-in-the-day would fail at modern-day political correctness and a possibly different standard for that which is contemporary/recent. Rich is obviously talented, but this is not the kind of literature where that sort of thing applies. Contemporary literature where you are compelled to at least temporarily overlook bigotry, to me, means some kind of new insights or style or something. I could go on, but will save that line of going-on for my dissertation.)

This was my typically longwinded way of saying that there was that story, on a podcast ostensibly about being at the cutting edge of gender-and-sexuality awareness. Which seemed just odd. A term like 'heteronormative' doesn't even begin to describe the piece. And yet, not odd - very much of a piece with Savage's frequent portrayal of women as prim or naive killjoys. Savage reacted to the story/essay thing by asking Rich if, after reading this story (part of an anthology dedicated to said girlfriend), the author's girlfriend still performs oral sex on him. (Savage-speak for, 'she hasn't left you yet?') As in, Savage got that it was insulting, but what he did with that knowledge perhaps wasn't so helpful.

The podcast also included the usual advice component, and near the end, there was a question from a woman who knew she was a lesbian but wanted a second kid, and wondered if it was OK to stick around with her husband and only come out after having said child. Easy answer: no. But Savage answered instead with some enthusiastic, "Bitches be crazy," adding that when "bitches" want a baby, they're crazier still.

Here, I'm afraid my ridiculously low bar for finding something bad-sitcom amusing wasn't even met. I may have cringed slightly on account of Savage's painful attempt at sounding young and hip (even if he was possibly riffing off a Stephen Colbert routine?), or his ironic pose as a straight-guy misogynist, which we of course know is hilarious because Savage is gay and enlightened and does so much good (and he does!). Was it supposed to be OK within the context of a live performance that included a female dominatrix demonstrating something that must have made more sense not in podcast form? Whatever it was about, the "bitches be crazy" ending was just gross. But yes, it fit with the choice to have Rich read "Center of the Universe."

More thoughts on what this all means soon, perhaps, when the haze of the head-cold lifts, or bring yours to the comments.

Sharing is caring

Normally, when I write something formal, and often informal as well, I include counterarguments. But when writing that post on parental overshare, I had trouble doing so, because I couldn't quite come up with what the arguments were in favor of the practice. All I could think of was that because the genre is dominated by women (but, as with all traditionally-female topics - see also: food - taken more seriously when the author is a man), it's seen as empowering to women that this option is out there. But otherwise? The argument seemed to be that there's a market for it, and that writers who have stories to tell about their kids are in great supply. Because parental overshare had so long run unopposed, there had hardly been occasion to defend it from any detractors. It wasn't clear to me what, precisely, I was arguing against.

But my post, if it did nothing else, led a bunch of writers and bloggers who share widely about their kids to speak up in defense of what they do. And it's actually been quite interesting to see the reasons they give, reasons I wouldn't have necessarily anticipated. It hasn't led me to believe it's ethically acceptable to write in this way about your own identifiable kid, even if that kid is 17-and-a-half and positively begging you to do so. Nor do I think any criticism of a parent's write to share would likely meet with anything but defensiveness from those most deeply invested (not necessarily financially) in this type of writing; even if I'd somehow anticipated these counterarguments and woven them all concisely into my post, I expect parenting-writers wouldn't have been thrilled. But reading over the response gives me a better sense of where these writers are coming from, and how better to approach the topic if I indeed have reason to approach it in the future.

So, from what I gather, the defense of parental overshare, complete with counter-counterarguments where necessary:

-By writing anonymously/pseudonymously about a difficult topic, you reinforce the idea that this topic can't be discussed in polite company. One of the Atlantic commenters wrote, "How does your argument differ from one that would demand the parents of a rape victim remain silent for no better reason than other people may consider the victim damaged goods in the future?" (Another responded, "It's up to a rape victim - not her parents, not her boyfriend, not her siblings, not her employer, not anyone - to decide whether she wants her story out there," saving me the trouble.)

But what's interesting here is the "remain silent." Is it silence to refrain from writing in the national press about your child? Which is, alas, how some appear to have interpreted what I wrote. Obviously parents have the right - obligation, even! - to seek help for their kids, be it medical, legal, etc., and obviously this means using the child's real name and explaining the details of whichever problem. What I was suggesting wasn't some kind of vow of silence on the part of parents, but rather that parents refrain from publishing private details about their kids. Which leads me to the next counterargument...

-Parents should be able to do everything within their power to advocate for their children. And if that means telling the entire English-speaking world about your child's weight concerns or undiagnosable off-ness, so be it.

Once again, however, I'm left wondering why getting help for your kid would require consciousness-raising on a national scale, in which your child's identity is revealed. I kind of understand why use of real names is thought to be of greater comfort to other families, who will read whichever article/memoir and find it reassuring that a family willing to be identified is talking about the same concern they have. (Somehow seeing one's troubles represented in fiction is no longer sufficient.) But best-case-scenario, this would seem to be sacrificing the one child's right to privacy, such that even if the kid gets whichever help he/she needs for the original problem, there's now a new problem.

-Parenting can be lonely, and stay-at-home parents especially can feel isolated, whether or not their children have special needs. The internet provides a sense of community. Being able to share is a lifeline for parents.

This strikes me as altogether reasonable. But once more, I fail to see why "mommy-blogging" (loosely-defined, and including daddy-blogging) necessitates a) using real/full names, and b) involving the national press/a published memoir. What's wrong with anonymous forums, blogs, or emailing friends? There isn't some kind of stark choice between Luddite isolation and going on a NYT blog to share your kid's troubles.

-Sharing is sharing, and there's no difference between pseudonymous, fictional, and confessional, given that it all points back to the same true story. While this notion is mildly horrifying to a literature grad student trained in being super-clear that a character isn't a real person, even if it's a protagonist who shares a first and last name with the author, I can kind of see this point. Lots of "fiction" is thinly-veiled ranting, and the names behind pseudonyms can get revealed. Similarly, children's stories could go public if an email ends up in the wrong hands, or if a parent inept at or sloppy with privacy settings writes something that gets picked up by one of the big gossip blogs.

But surely there is a difference between a story about a child that could theoretically reach the wrong audience, and one that is presenting itself as objective fact to be shared with a mass audience? Or is this my literature-grad-student bias speaking?


-Children don't have privacy.

This I'd be more inclined to accept from the "reputations" angle, if not the "relationship with parents one" - a child can definitely be humiliated. But is it true that anything said about anybody under 18 is magically struck from their record? Aren't children and adolescents constantly being told that anything they put on Facebook, anything they text, is headed straight to college admissions offices? If your father wrote a memoir about how you were a pot dealer from ages 13-15, this remains on the record forever. It seems clear enough that even if the law doesn't quite know how to protect it, common sense dictates that children do have privacy.


-There is a right to tell one's own life story, which almost by definition includes details of others' lives as well. Everyone has a story. It's snobbish and sexist to deny ordinary moms this right.

-Memoir is Art.

-The perennial 'lighten up!' argument, which by natural law must appear when anyone criticizes anything. So what if you write about your kid throwing a tantrum? There are bigger problems in the world, and the kid will get over it, or go to therapy, no big deal.

And, I believe that covers it. But I am, I suppose, collecting these, so if anyone thinks of others...

Whaddya get?

Miss Self-Important has included me in the category of "everyone who's anyone," which is flattering. But she's also included me in the list of people across the political spectrum who oppose meritocracy, and... I don't oppose meritocracy.* I'm not sure which reforms would best get it functioning properly, but as an ideal, I prefer it to the alternatives.

Meritocracy fails when we care more about grades and test scores (which predict achievement) than accomplishments. But it also fails when we try and assess the "accomplishments" of high school juniors. It fails when all it does is replicates generations of elites, when children of doctors and lawyers do better than equally-talented-and-hard-working children of Kmart cashiers. When, in other words, it creates the illusion of far more social mobility than exists, thereby getting hopes up in vain.

But the newest criticism of meritocracy - or maybe not so new - is that meritocratic elites are simply the worst. Why the worst? Because they have all the same power as elites ever did, but they, unlike earlier elites, a) see themselves as ordinary folks and thus don't own up to their privilege, and b) believe that the system that got them where they are is entirely fair, entirely just, and therefore that they deserve their power. They, you know, merit it. (See also, from the New Yorker denunciation of billionaires who don't heart Obama, "America’s super-rich feel aggrieved in part because they believe themselves to be fundamentally different from a leisured, hereditary gentry.")

I don't find this critique all that convincing, because even if social mobility isn't 100% - and it's not - there's a huge difference between privilege passed down effortlessly and panicking, tutoring, etc. All this helicoptering is of course about preserving status across generations, but that ought to tell us that preservation is not a given. This gets us back into luck vs. privilege territory - one can be lucky in life, but if one was not born with privilege, one is arguably not privileged, just rich/lucky/etc. Also: it's not as if members of hereditary elites don't feel entitled to their status.

There's an older criticism of meritocracy, though: that meritocratic elites are illegitimate. Not in broken meritocracies, but in functioning ones. Those making this criticism tend to be - or to identify with, however implausibly - members of some older elite. It's a pro-aristocratic impulse, in other words, that finds all that UMC fuss about tutoring and prep courses to be crass and grasping.

The pro-aristocratic critique of meritocracy is plenty old, but has shifted in form: These days, it disguises itself as progressive. As in: if you want to complain about a system in which Asians - it used to be Jews - are "overrepresented," you can present this as being about underrepresentation of blacks and Latinos, even if your real concern is that Asians are taking the place at the top from white people,** that the culture at whichever institution you hold dear isn't what it was in some Golden Age. Or maybe it always posed as progressive - back in the day, this would have been about the honest worker vs. the nouveau-riche. Anyway.

So my preference for meritocracy was challenged recently, when the Stuyvesant cheating scandal*** reminded me of the near-ubiquity of cheating at the high school, and of the Scantron-covered dark side of meritocracy. It's a high school famous, above all else, for being a meritocracy, or as much of one as possible. (It's free to attend, admission is by test only so connections don't count, etc.) The existence of prep courses (which not everyone who gets in even uses, and which cost a tiny fraction of tuition at a private school) garners as much rage as it does precisely because the expectation is that the school is pure, Platonic-ideal meritocracy. Those who want the cheating scandal to be about entitled brats who feel above the law will be disappointed. Stuyvesant is meritocracy in its shabby, unvarnished state: there’s no pretense of a nurturing environment that reaches out to the student as a human being. Not much pretense of learning for learning’s sake, even if learning occurs despite this. And not, it seems, much integrity. If Stuyvesant=meritocracy, it's not looking good.

The level of cheating - 80%, they say? - is not new. I - class of 2001, so pre-smartphone - remember having the sense that I was among the few who didn't cheat, and that I was screwing myself over grade-wise by having the qualms I did. That I didn't cheat was in part about my own coming-from-privilege-ness - I didn't need to strive to enter the upper-middle class, just to stay put, which meant going to class and doing homework but not OMG-Harvard-or-the-gutter panic mode. I did a team sport because College, but never bothered to join the honor society, if I even qualified for it. I could afford, as it were, to find the kids hollering "whaddya get?" tacky. But I also thought - and continue to think- cheating is just plain wrong. Caring intensely about grades is understandable, but cheating crosses a line.

The article about the scandal vividly brought back those four years, and left me wondering if I'd maybe my professed fondness for my high school comes from having conveniently forgotten what it was actually like, day-to-day, to attend.

But what is the broader message to take from this? There’s a part of me that really appreciated the no-frills approach, and that found this kind of meritocracy refreshing, after being at a school where some kids' parents had donated millions, and where maybe this didn't not impact how patient teachers were with them if they were not as quick as all that. (The parents' own merit may have gotten them where they were, but once it's your kids, it's privilege.)

A lot of what's used instead of, or to disguise, meritocracy is either silly or hypocritical - see "holistic" college admissions, which are meant to sound gentle, but which nevertheless leave ever-more kids sobbing into their thin envelopes, knowing that not their applications but they, as people, didn't make the cut. Meanwhile, 'learning for learning's sake' sounds nice, but is often used snobbishly to mean learning with no regard for the social-mobility potential of education, i.e. as a way of favoring kids from privileged backgrounds, and of ignoring the very legitimate desire for a higher income on the part of kids who are, say, the first in their families to go to college. I had a teacher in high school who would only write letters of recommendation for kids who wanted to go to college "to learn, not to make money," I paraphrase or maybe even quote directly, it's been a while. On the one hand, I saw what she meant, but on the other, it seemed even at the time something unfair to ask of kids who were commuting in from one-bedrooms in Queens that they were sharing with their extended families. And what does this even mean, going to college to make money after? If your family is poor, it might well mean graduating and becoming... a NYC public school teacher.

And - and this is less about social class - there's a sense in which kids aren't the best judges of their own educations. Stuvyesant's no-frills approach maybe isn't one that is going to appeal to that many kids as they're actually experiencing it. A well-written but somewhat misguided 2010 op-ed in the Stuyvesant newspaper demands more "critical thinking," less regurgitation of facts. It's interesting that some students see their cheating as a form of noble resistance against rote memorization, and I’m sure there’s busy-work, but I do wonder what happens when these kids get to medical school, law school, or even - yup - French literature grad school, and are required to absorb and analyze huge amounts of material, because this is what makes for professional competence. (Evidently the most cheating occurs in foreign-language classes. Well, as a foreign-language instructor, I'm curious to know what this new pedagogical approach is that engages students critical-thinking skills, but doesn't ever require them to go after class, sit down, and memorize the conjugations of être.)

In other words, sugar-coating the educational experience, pretending it's all about intellectual enrichment and not competition or material gain, isn't ideal. But there's a point at which grade-obsession drowns out everything else - ethics, but also, you know, interesting conversation. Why, if attending this school might well decrease an individual's shot at getting into a good college, if the teachers aren't unusually good or the classes unusually small, does anyone even attend this high school? Isn't the point that you're supposed to get something out of being with a bunch of clever kids? Shouldn't the collaboration be over something more useful (and ethical!) than cheating on math homework?

But I don't think the cheating comes out of the meritocratic nature of the place. Nor do I even think the problem is the just-a-number approach to teaching. No, it's something much more basic, and much easier to fix: rather than giving out letter grades, every grade is out of 100 and to the hundredths place. The stress from this makes a good chunk of the school not merely grade-obsessed but insane. And, while grades/GPAs do tell you something about a student, the difference between two A students is negligible, merit-wise, a difference in how each one's social-studies teacher happened to grade. I'm no great fan of "holistic," but if the Ivies had to choose between two A students from Stuyvesant on the basis of something other than which one had who had a 95.23 (this, as I recall, meant Brown) vs. 97.45 (the euphemistic triumvirate), or even just went and picked one of the names out of a hat, that might not be the absolute end of the world.

*The post she links to, which I called "The referendum on meritocracy," wasn't me providing such a referendum, but rather a description of what I believed was the unifying theme of the two national political conventions. Both sides both embraced and rejected meritocracy, but in different ways. The RNC had "we built that," but the case for Romney was basically, here's a 1950s sitcom patrician you can trust, a born leader who never was or will be distracted by petty concerns like the fact that a dollar tip is now expected in coffee shops, and shoe repair - just the soles and heels! - has gone up to $65. Romney's privilege is - at least according to his wife's final remarks - his main selling point. At the DNC, meanwhile, we were repeatedly reminded that self-made is a myth... by the absolute most impressive self-made individuals that could possibly be assembled.

**The irony being that in this country, "aristocrats" are just the recent-ish offspring of meritocratic elites.

***Secondary takeaway from the article: sounds like Stuyvesant may have an opening for a French teacher. I'm not not interested.

Premature aging UPDATED

Elizabeth Nolan Brown has an interesting new blog called "This Is 30," which thus far consists of celebrity photos of what 30-year-old women really look like. I'm 29, so I'm listening.

"This Is 30" brings to mind Kate Harding's BMI Project, which sought to show that women (and some men) whose BMIs labeled them overweight or obese looked otherwise. In fact, it showed that the medically overweight do tend to look overweight, the medically obese obese - a separate issue from whether the medical profession is overusing BMI. Affixing photos to these numbers may have helped to humanize the women with whichever dimensions, and to remind us that big doesn't mean unfit or unattractive. But unless one happened to be approaching this imagining that "obese" means an honest-to-goodness crane is needed to extract someone from their home, I'm not sure what surprises were in store.

I fear that the same will be true of "This Is 30, at least if real, non-Botoxed/airbrushed 30-year-old women start appearing on it. I'm 29 and my best guess is, I look it. I'm small, and not a candidate for premature wrinkling. I don't look 50, but I've seen photos of myself from the start of grad school and there's a definite if hard-to-put-your-finger-on-it difference. What I'm saying is, I don't think I've aged especially a lot, or especially badly, but I think virtually all of us would be fooling ourselves if we felt we hadn't aged perceptibly since reaching adulthood.

So it's really Elizabeth's third fact I'm not so sure about: "most 30-year-olds look more-or-less the same as they did in their mid-20s [.]" Aging is gradual, so yes, a 30-year-old doesn't suddenly look different from 25, and is still, given current life expectancy, quite young. While these are tough calls to make on an individual basis, I suspect that few among us would have trouble telling, for example, who are the first-year graduate students, and who's waiting nervously for the job-market info session to begin. (Or is it just that grad school ages a person?)

When it comes to women being 30, I'm reminded of the first episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show, where Lou Grant, oh-so-inappropriately, asks Mary's age while interviewing her for a job. She reveals herself to be 30, then asks, coyly, how old she looks. He pauses for a moment, looks at her, and responds, "30." And it's funny precisely because she-the-actress does, and because it's so clear, in that moment, that the possibility that she-the-character might not only be but also look 30 has not yet occurred to her.

My own realism on this front comes, indirectly, from my line of work: I teach undergraduates, and I've lived in France. Students stay the same age year after year, while their instructors only get older. (When you know full well what 19 looks like, you can't trick yourself into believing that undergrads are actually eighth-graders.) And when I studied in Paris at 20, I was "mademoiselle." At 26, definitively "madame." This before wearing any marital-status-signaling jewelry.

We always feel an age we once were, or maybe a bunch of different ones, but just not the one we are. We remain the same amount younger than our parents, and our peers age as we do. A number - or, more often, a detail - will get fixed in our mind as intrinsically part of our identity. As in: 'I am someone who gets carded. '(Maybe so at 24, but by 38, unlikely, except at places that make a point in carding even the elderly. Not that 38 is elderly! Not that there's anything wrong with being elderly! Gar!) Or - and this is for the laydeez - 'I am someone who wears a size six,', or, 'who takes an A cup.' We often think of our builds as what they once were, and fail to immediately hone in on the sizes/styles most appropriate for our current shape.

And this carries over to celebrities as well, especially stars we remember from their time as child actresses. If we think of Alexis Bledel as that girl from "Gilmore Girls," of course it's shocking that she could be 30. But if we look at the photo of the woman who is 30, not so much. She looks good - famous actresses do tend to manage that - but older than when she was playing a teen.

Thus - I suppose - the expression "premature aging" - it all feels premature.

So some of this isn't even about wanting to be/look young, but more of a pretentious musing on the passing of time. But we also want to look young - and this one's gender-neutral - for reasons not unlike scrappiness oneupmanship, reasons specific to living in a meritocracy. If you've achieved X before you started going gray, or before you noticed those lines on your forehead, then you're basically a child prodigy. For those new at any life stage, there's something amazing about the fact that you do the same thing as that real grown-up over there.

But the obvious one is that we - women, but not only - want to not look 30, or want "30" to look like something other than 30 because of cultural messages we've received about 30 being the official end of attractiveness. Which - as all the drama that goes on among the over-30 set should attest - it does not. All those people writing to advice columnists about their spouses having affairs with coworkers, well, not everyone working in an office is 22, and the 22-year-olds by and large want little to do socially with those much older.

Much like the BMI Project, "This Is 30" could be helpful in showing us that yes, 30 looks like 30, but looking 30 isn't a disaster. Anything that gets us away from images of the overweight as permanently gloomy and eating fries from a drive-through, anything that gets us past the idea that at 30, all women go from fun and lighthearted to haggard, worn-out from family life or, conversely, cougar'd up in desperate search of a man, I suppose can only help.

And I fully agree with Elizabeth's fifth point, especially re: 30-year-olds looking better than they did at 16. We-as-a-society seem incapable of comprehending that while the very prettiest of 16-year-olds are what our culture deems most attractive, most individuals at that age have bad skin and the wrong haircuts for their hair type or facial structure. Yes, young girls get more street attention than grown women, but this is less because men prefer the barely-pubescent than because that's who's most readily intimidated on the street, that's who one can get a rise out of.

(MucinexD-fueled) UPDATE

This was to be my response in the comments to one commenter, then another, then all, so I figured I'd throw it here. But basically, my question to all who say that they looked forward to turning 30, that 30 is really quite young and not so different from 25, etc., is what our goal is here. As in, is our point to say that our entire societal conception of age is messed-up and misogynistic? Or that while 30 isn't old, some other age is - be it 40, 50, or just 35?

Bringing up - sorry! - another sitcom reference: the episode of "Absolutely Fabulous" where Edina turns 40. Edina refuses to acknowledge this fact, and stays upstairs for most of her own 40th birthday party. Meanwhile, downstairs, the new, New Agey wife of one of Edina's ex-husbands is holding forth on how happy she was to turn 40. At which point Edina's mother (think a British Betty White) asks her, "And when will you be 50?" Which sends her into full-on panic mode, at which point the ex-husband dude says, "She hasn't started 50 therapy yet."

Point being, one way is a feminist rejection of social constructions of age, the other simply moving up the age at which a woman becomes "past-it." The latter isn't necessary anti-feminist, and is to a certain extent just common sense. 30 these days isn't, at least in some milieus, what it once was. Yes, yes, fertility remains fairly set, but a) not every woman wants to have biological children (or can, even at 20), and b) the vast majority of situations a woman will find herself in have zilch to do with her capacity to bear a child. But to point out that 30 still constitutes "youth" isn't exactly a feminist message, because it doesn't change the terms of the debate.

Takes all kinds? UPDATED

Long post, main point in bold:

This is going to be my third - and last - attempt at a post about the question of the wives of gay men who, for religious reasons, choose to marry opposite-sex partners, in reference to a blog post by a man named Josh Weed who, along with his wife Lolly, is in this situation. Is my post going to be about this couple? Yes and no. As I mentioned numerous times in the previous two attempts (which are both down, so you may take my word for it, seek out cached WWPD, whatever), whenever people spill about their personal lives on the Internet, specifically whenever they do so and solicit comments (there are over 3,000 currently on the post in question), they kind of relinquish the right to go about their business without strangers judging - not harassing, but judging - said business. Kind of.

However, the only possible way to read an overshare post* is as an example of a situation, and not as a full and complete assessment of the lives discussed. We might judge, but we're not really judging these people, so much as a situation they've described, which has so many nuances - perhaps key details - that aren't available to us. Because we're not judging them, precisely, it can't hurt to point that out, right?

Furthermore, as much as it would seem that people who put their lives on display, that a man who announces that he can't be attracted to women but marry a woman he did, that a woman who writes, "In a moment of honest reflection, I realized that Josh was everything that I wanted in a husband. (All except for the huge fact that he was gay.)," that such individuals are requesting commentary, they probably are not. They aren't (far as I know) public figures, aren't accustomed to having their business that on display, and, if the history of responses to overshares is any guide, could well take it very personally if any of the comments are anything other than, 'wow, what fine life choices you've made!' Actually, in this case, we don't even have to speculate on their feelings about being judged:

Also, generally, please feel free to use the comment section to discuss this matter if you wish. However, remember that this is our lives you are talking about. Please feel free to say what you need to say, but we would ask that you be respectful of our decisions and the decisions of others if you decide to comment.

What complicates matters further - and what came up in a conversation I had about the general outlines of this bloggy kerfuffle with a friend off-blog, so credit is due where no link is possible - is whether or not a 'this is just my story' really is just that. Rhetorical question not intended to derail: was the Tiger Mom's story a memoir and thus not to be taken as a parenting guide? Sometimes personal histories are meant as didactic, sometimes not. So here, the question was, is this about whether a gay man could, in theory, marry a straight and not-asexual woman? Or are these people telling their story as a model for others? My sense from the post was that it was the latter, but I never spelled out why that's how I read it, nor did I highlight the passage where the guy writing it basically says this. So, for your perusal:

Why have you decided to share this information?

We have several reasons for opening up about this part of our lives. First and foremost, my clinical work as a therapist is taking me in the direction of helping clients who struggle to reconcile their sexual orientation with their religious beliefs. I have decided to be open with these clients about my own homosexuality, and in doing so have opened the door to people finding out about this in ways I can't control. Therefore, we thought it would be wise to be the ones who told those we love about this part of our lives. Posting on the blog was the simplest way to make sure that happened as it would be impossible to sit all of the people we have known and loved in our lives down and share this personally.

The second reason is that the issue of homosexuality is not very well understood. We wanted to add our voice and experience to the dialogue taking place about this very sensitive issue.

Thirdly, I (Josh) feel the desire to be more open regarding this part of my identity. I have found that sharing this part of me allows my relationships with others to be more authentic. It has deepened my friendships and enhanced my interactions, and it has also helped me to feel more accepted by others as it allows others the opportunity to choose to accept me for who I really am.

The third reason is the only 'this is just my story' reason, and it's given last. The first two make it abundantly clear that this life choice is one this couple is attempting to advise to others. We learn from item one that this is a man who is providing therapy to men in his exact situation, and from item two that he's weighing in politically. If you believe that same-sex marriage is a civil right, or that it's what society needs in terms of stability, if you think therapy that urges gay men to marry women is dangerous both to those men and to the women they wed, you object to Weed's agenda, even if you don't object to his personal choices.

Forget the specifics of which issues are at stake. Is it ethical to use your private life as an example for others, indeed vast swaths of others outside your friends-and-family, and then to turn around and explain that your feelings will be hurt if others criticize your decisions? It's a sneaky move, because it puts your opponents in a bind. Rules of civility would seem to prevent arguing these points on the very terms in which they've been presented.  The temptation is to "discuss this matter" in a way that isn't "respectful of [their] decisions," even if you respect their decisions as individuals, if you do not, as a rule, respect decisions along these lines.

And personally, as I believe I made abundantly clear in a post I now somewhat wish I hadn't taken down, but down it shall remain so I'll continue, while I completely respect the choice of a gay man to decide that his socially-conservatism or religion means more to him than would a stable same-sex marriage or serious relationship, while I have no doubt as to the fact that friction is friction, that babies have been born to parents with same-sex attraction since time immemorial, and thus that it's entirely possible for a gay man to be husband-and-father in the "traditional" sense, I'm not convinced it's OK for such a man to marry a woman who is not in an equivalent situation herself.

There are - as I mentioned in that earlier post - certain risks, possibly physical but more-than-likely emotional, a woman takes in marrying a man for whom being with a woman, any woman, as opposed to a man, is a constant struggle. (If you think this struggle is anything like what any orientation-matching monogamous couple might face in terms of the vast world of other people, then perhaps you don't believe in sexual orientation, or that it is negligible in terms of finding a spouse. If you think this, I'm almost certain I can't convince you otherwise.) The fact that milieus in which gay men think to marry women also tend to be ones that encourage reproduction and/or discourage contraception doesn't help. If we think cheating and divorce are to be discouraged, we want to discourage unions that, while not doomed to go either route, certainly have an edge.

But even if such a relationship "succeeds," as in till death do us part and no infidelity, this still involves a man depriving a woman of the opportunity to be with someone she does it for. I don't only mean physically. While, in a typical marriage, the spouses might doubt that they do it for each other, in a marriage along these lines, that one doesn't do it for the other is known from day one.

What with the internal dynamics of marriages being unknowable, we might say that of course certain women will agree to this set-up, will even seek it out. But here, going by the facts we're given, this was not a case of a woman wanting marriage and kids without intimacy. What this didactic autobiographical snippet tells us is that it's not only acceptable but admirable for a gay man to marry a woman who wants the usual things out of marriage.

While we might say that if a man can repress his same-sex desire, surely a woman can repress hers to be desired, and while this probably does explain how some such marriages work, there are a couple reasons why, paradoxically, the wife in this scenario is in a worse spot than the man who genuinely prefers not acting on very real same-sex urges to acting on them. Most obviously, a woman in this situation likes men, and perfectly well might have ended up with one who desired her, and still followed the rules of whichever belief system they adhered to. By having a relationship with her, the gay man in this scenario - leaving Josh Weed in particular out of this - denies the woman the opportunity to meet and fall for men who aren't gay. And some women - especially naive and inexperienced ones - aren't able to grasp what it means to marry one's gay best friend. After all, a straight woman can be attracted to a gay man, and a gay man, insofar as he's a man, can provide the social and biological functions of husband and father, respectively. But even those who can, on paper, explain why this would pose a problem are in an awkward spot once they've already fallen in love with that person.

While indeed, nobody's perfect, and while it's certainly much less bad if, as Josh Weed evidently did, a man in this situation is honest from the get-go about his limitations, these are some immense limitations. Sufficiently immense that any kind of blanket advice along these lines to gay men, even ones who (at least at this point in time) believe themselves capable of marrying a woman and not straying/leaving, strikes me as borderline unethical. Unfair to the men for obvious reasons: while it's possible for a gay man to prefer his faith/values to his sexual orientation, this probably works out for only a tiny percentage of such individuals, the rest of whom, if they make it out alive, find another church - or none at all - and move on with their lives. So telling men that they can be gay, Mormon (or equivalent) and married to a woman is... problematic in basically the same way as any "conversion" case would be, except marginally more honest about the permanence of sexual orientation. But it's also unfair to the women who get roped into this, and for less obvious, but potentially at least as compelling, reasons.

*Announcing that you're gay is of course not overshare. Announcing that you're a gay man married to a straight woman might be, depending on how it's done, which is to say, depending on whether it's presented as an invitation to discuss how that works. I think, in life, if you suspect a couple has an arrangement along these lines, if you know or suspect a man to be gay and lo and behold, his wife, you'd simply assume these are friends who love each other, or that he's bisexual, or that he sets off gaydars but is straight, or that what they've arranged makes sense to them but is unknowable to you, and that would be that. Announcing that you're a gay man married to a straight woman, and that the two of you "have an extremely healthy and robust sex life," and going on to explain how that works, this most definitely counts, even if we aren't getting a play-by-play. This is already far more information than one has if a blogger reveals himself to have a sexual orientation, a partner, which are basic biographical facts, not a window into the bedroom.

UPDATE

Read this account from a Mormon woman whose ex-husband is gay. The coverage of the Weed post has virtually all been about whether it's OK for gay men to deny their true selves, as if by marrying, these men were not also including another party in their, for lack of a better term, mishegoss.