What punches up must punch down

When I started this blog, I was young. At 20, too old to be a runway model, but young all the same. Young, and in the grand scheme of things, a nobody. I had a column in my college paper, but no sense whatsoever of how to make it in the writing world off-campus, a world that, from what I could tell, seemed to require a mix of a trust fund to bolster unpaid internships and family connections to hire you into them. It just didn't seem worth the bother.

But I did enjoy writing, and would do so almost exclusively on WWPD. Whose audience, as best as I could guess, consisted of relatives; family friends curious about what someone they knew as a toddler was up to; ex-boyfriends curious about what someone they knew a few weeks/months/years ago was up to; and... that's about it. I remember being genuinely surprised when friends - friends! people I hung out with in real life! - would tell me they read my blog. It felt like writing into an abyss. I was very clear (note, again, the imagined audience) that I wasn't going to write anything all that confessional, so I wasn't opening myself up to the sort of thing where suddenly a future employer knows that you, I don't know, who even knows what I would have had to confess at 20, but it probably wouldn't have been all that interesting.

But here's where the abyss sense did enter into it: There are things I wrote earlier - and have sometimes found myself considering writing but deciding against more recently - that come pretty directly out of that sense I had that anything properly published was fair game for a wrong-on-the-internet. I remember mocking a NYT health column in a way that I can't see doing today. Not because I read the column any differently, and not because I've grown wary of criticizing lifestyle writing that I think is actually doing something harmful. (Such as, food writers advocating for unattainable locavore purity.) Just because I had no grievance with the column other than finding it smug.

Part of what's changed is that, having published articles myself, I've come to learn that those who do are not all-powerful entities immune to criticism, living it up on the cash their musings receive. I mean, some may be, but the fact that a thing has appeared in a place far from guarantees it. But the bigger issue is that I now have a different sense of where I fit into this system. That I'm not by definition - brace yourselves for the dreaded expression - punching up if I respond to something that's been published in a legit publication. Certainly not if I respond to it in a legit publication.

Which brings me to Mary Elizabeth Williams's Salon piece about Gawker, found via Noah Berlatsky. What Williams describes happening to her - Gawker repeatedly called her (published) writing hack-like, during a time when she was suffering from a serious form of cancer - is of a different nature than those other Gawker posts that involve revealing a random person's secrets, or teasing someone who put something hilarious on social media that they hadn't particularly meant for the world to see. Some of WIlliams's beef with Gawker - "They went full fury over a friend who wrote a lighthearted Styles piece" - seems a bit... I mean, that is so many miles away from, say, outing someone.

Hamilton Nolan, the Gawker writer in question, is standing his ground. Which... technically yes, published means fair game. If the line were simply set there - no more random "outings," no more combing social media for obliviousness - that would be progress, and putting a firm line anywhere beyond that does seem, as Nolan says, like a bad idea. But maybe the missing piece here isn't one of ethics, just one of good taste, or good sense.

Several items of varying importance

-The Big Essay about the new political correctness has been written and responded to at great length all over the internet. See Miss Self-Important, or see Chait's essay. I haven't been online as much as usual lately (more on that in a moment), so all I know is that this is now the topic. And... I know I once had thoughts on it, but I'm maybe a bit YPIS'd out. The problem with YPIS, PC, or whatever we're calling it is principally that it's an internal argument on the left. As such, it has no hope of convincing anyone on the right of anything, other than perhaps that the left is, indeed, ridiculous. I say this as someone on the left.

-Andrew Sullivan has stopped blogging. Obviously a big deal in terms of journalism, blogging, politics. A specific big deal to me as well, seeing as I worked at the Dish, but also as one of the many bloggers inspired by Andrew's example in those early blogging days. I wish all my former colleagues there the best. While I don't agree with every single political position Andrew has taken, I... got to post my own thoughts on Zionism, female sexuality, and more during the guest-blogging (now out from behind the paywall, it seems), so I can vouch for the Dish's openness to dissent firsthand.

-If my thoughts on everything are a bit fuzzy, it's because today was kind of all over the place. I went running in the morning and got... not lost, exactly, but went much further than I meant to, and ended up in some kind of surfing enclave. I'm not sure I'd ever seen surfing before, at least not surfing-culture surfing, the kind that involves blond dreadlocks, yet there it was.

But the big adventure was driving around alone on the freeway. The real one this time - the 101. I even took one freeway to another freeway at one point. Once I was doing this, it hit me that these are just roads, and that what I was doing was if anything less complicated than the driving I normally do. But it felt as if a whole world was opening up. I'd say I should have done this ages ago, but my sense is that while the driving I'm doing now may prepare me to take the NJ Turnpike alone to Mitsuwa, the reverse order wouldn't have worked.

Making a go of it

-David Schraub has a fascinating article about British anti-Semitism, the law, and more. Read it.

-Rachel Hills has a sweeping feature about female sexual fluidity. Read that, too. Yes, I arrived at the story with a few preexisting gripes about how the topic is generally covered, but Rachel addressed basically all the ones I might have come up with. Although I do have one remaining question - for Rachel, but also for WWPD readers: Why are the onscreen same-sex couples of erotic interest to straight women lesbians rather than gay men? It makes sense what Rachel found, about straight women being put off by scenarios that are demeaning to women or about enforcing gender roles, but this doesn't explain why two women, as versus two people of the gender to whom straight women are, by definition, attracted. I wonder if - and I realize this is a bleak interpretation - this isn't just a case of women being socialized to look at images of women's bodies, in the non-sexual realm. (Fashion magazines, thigh-envy, etc.)

-Obligatory self-promotion: Today was my radio debut. Veronica Rueckert invited me on "Central Time" on Wisconsin Public Radio to talk about undersharing. Given the number of public-radio podcasts I've listened to while walking Bisou, I figured I'd have some sense of how this sort of thing goes, but was still petrified for the first minute or so. I now have a newfound respect for everyone who goes on these shows and manages not to babble.

New material

-Trace Barnhill has brought frugality to Into The Gloss, a site whose usual influence is to make spending $40 on luminizer seem like a great idea. Barnhill makes an interesting point about there being two kinds of thrift:

Some people prefer to cut out personal, almost invisible purchases—things no one else will see but you. You get the generic panty-liners. The veggie Ragu instead of the Italian-import truffle-infused sauce. I’ve personally not had a headboard on my bed since high school, unless the wall counts. Switching to generic allergy drugs. [...] 

But then sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes you only want to spend money on things just personally, intimately for you. Your coat can be shabby-chic consignment (and you know it’s actually really ugly), but you’ve got Chanel in your bathroom cabinet. No TV, but unlimited HBO Go. Little secret purchases while on the outside, you’re a quiet, thirsty soul.

I'd never thought about it quite like that before, but it makes sense. I think I fall into the second camp more than I'd like to, but in principle would want to be in the first. I'll very often be found in a pair of $30 corduroys from five years ago, but my cupboard (and, ahem, hair-product collection) shows evidence of splurgy trips to Japanese supermarkets. There's probably some deep, psychological meaning behind which category one falls in, but what that is isn't coming to me at the moment.

-I've been thinking about Miss Self-Important's second resolution from last year: "Get some new ideas so I can stop infinitely repeating things I've already said in my non-academic writing." The appeal of one's old ideas - for me, at least - is that one has thought through every aspect of them. Figured out all the counterarguments. From an impostor-syndrome-ish perspective, this is immensely satisfying. Sure, there will still be the 'this is the dumbest thing I've ever read' brigade on Twitter, but they'll fail to convince the author of his or her (her) own idiocy.

The trouble with a new idea - and I've just given one of those a gamble - is that one hasn't spent months analyzing it. I'm still trying to sort out exactly what I think about certain aspects of the undershare question, and at this point think the most compelling thing about it is that it's even a question.

Reading and writing

All of my recent (and future) Dish guest-blogging can be found here. Photographic evidence, here. If you'd like me to write for your publication, maltzp@gmail.com is the place to go.

Requisite self-promotion out of the way, I'm going to share the entirely un-pitchable observation that the 1998 novel I bought randomly in Montclair (a day trip chosen similarly at random) turned out to be excellent. Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats is quite unlike any book I'd ever read. I'd say read it if only for the fireplace scene, but it's... I mean, ambitious doesn't begin to describe it. It's about classic Japanese literature, food safety, domestic violence, rural America, urban America, filmmaking... and so very much more. Yet it somehow works.

I was reading My Year of Meats on the train recently, and then just after that, while walking around in New York, I spotted a different Ozeki novel on the ground. Didn't seem like anyone was looking in it, and no owner info. in the book itself, so finder's keepers.

As for the earlier novel's conclusion... Spoiler alert here, I suppose:

Highlights

As something of a writing experiment, I decided to write quickly and succinctly about something I'd only ever tried to write about at length. I can already feel that I'm going to have missed some key point, perhaps a really key one that will mean that I've come across as saying the very opposite of what I meant. I feel that so deeply that I read the first-thus-far Twitter mention of this, my latest Dish guest-post, and assumed I was being called WRONG, when upon an extra second's reflection, it seems more likely this was someone agreeing with me.

In other news, I had a dream recently that I'd gotten highlights. Not something I'd done or seriously considered doing since I was, I think, 13, but in my dream they looked fabulous.

Dressing for one's fourth decade

Guest-blogging at the Dish was fun. If you're so inclined, check out my posts there, which cover the usual WWPD gamut - European anti-Semitism, shiny things, "privilege," and so on.

On a different note, clothes-shopping. Sort of. Let me start over:

I find it incredibly relaxing to look at clothes. Online or in person. I understand that there's a whole web of privilege-critique to apply to this - if I were black and thus preemptively accused of shoplifting, I might not enjoy poking around stores so much; so, too, if I didn't fit into straight-sized clothes, although that bit matters somewhat less, because I don't often actually try on any clothes. As someone whose career has been in the academia-and-writing realm, I've never had a tremendous shopping budget. If anything, I think the fact that I can't have all-the-clothes makes looking at them somewhat more interesting, but not so much so that I'd look around in a place where I truly could never, ever afford anything. (That, and little boutiques where it's just you, the salesperson, and the unaffordable clothes are not for me.) It's not that I never buy clothes - the Uniqlo receipts floating around various surfaces in my apartment suggest I do this sometimes. It's just that the looking-to-buying ratio is somewhat skewed. And I spend far too much time on the COS website for someone who's never going to buy these $100 Scandinavian minimalist dresses that would look reasonable - if on anybody - on a six-foot, broad-shouldered Scandinavian woman.

Offline clothes-browsing is not an activity easily indulged where I live. Less so, still, on a Sunday evening. But Urban Outfitters was open, so I figured, why not?

And it was a sea of... familiarity. All plaid flannel skirts and crushed velvet. Pre-ripped all-cotton jeans (the skinnies are on clearance; so last season). And then it hit me: I remembered when this was first in fashion. What an old-person thought, but there it was. What Tavi had been precociously nostalgic for a few years ago is now mainstream-hip. I guess that makes sense. (Self-promotional aside: NYMag linked to something I wrote about Tavi! Not quite the same as founding a magazine while still in utero, but it'll do.) Anyway, it occurred to me that if I can vividly remember crushed velvet dresses and Angela Chase-chic from the first time around, none of it would benefit my wardrobe.

That said. I know I should be thinking: 30s! Like those spreads in fashion mags, where they tell you how to dress for each decade, which seems so ageist when you're in your teens or 20s, but which, once you've seen yourself in clothes from 15 at twice that age, start to make sense. (There's an amazing bit about that, but as it relates to discussions of cosmetic surgery, in Roz Chast's new book.) As much as I might like the holographic oxfords I spotted on a recent looking-but-not-buying trip to a local mall, they'd do nothing for me. But what is 30s dressing, if not office attire for a corporate life I don't lead?

All that said: what do we think of these jeans, in Ultrafaded? So-very-now? Or yet another gesture in the wrong sartorial direction?

Lessons learned

Do not read work-related email near midnight. Why not? Because if you do, the caffeine from the previous day will somehow hit you around 4am, and you'll wake up compelled to write down your most articulate ever thoughts on anti-Semitism... or so those thoughts will seem at 4am. They will seem very obviously unedited and middle-of-the-night the following day. Sleep - and editing! - helped the end result. Please, entire internet, tell me why I'm wrong about Israel, in response to a post that isn't even really about Israel. I know it's coming. I'd say I'm exhausted just thinking about it, but I think the reason I'm exhausted has more to do with the lack of sleep.

Or, if you are going to do this, do not also make plans to go running in the evening. Or... maybe do? This at least meant being definitively offline the moment it went online, in nature with friends, not at the computer, passively awaiting the blood-pressure-fest. In any case, whatever comes of my writing future, I know this much: I will need to alternate between topics I care deeply about (and that others think I'm WRONG about) and topics that I care in a less deep way about (and that others think are too frivolous to be written about at all).

Self-promotion is labor

Buried deep within Teddy Wayne's Styles piece on social-media self-promotion is an aside that should be at the front and center: "And, to be fair, most artists and small-business owners must act as their own publicists or risk obscurity and bankruptcy."

Yes. That. Work-related self-promotion online is self-oriented, yes, but not in the ego-stroking, 'likes'-feeding-narcissism sense. Or, to be more accurate, the ratio as Wayne presents it strikes me as off. Obviously it's nice if people like the work you're proud enough of to share on social media. And some of it, if the thing you've written is about a cause you care about, may be about promoting that cause. But if the thing you're sharing depends on an audience for you to go on doing it for pay, you're sharing because sharing is - at least implicitly - part of your job.

Put another way: If I share something I've written on social media, it's not to make someone I went to school with, haven't seen in 15 years, who unbeknownst to me is an aspiring writer for that very publication, feel bad about himself. Nor is it to really show whichever English teachers or high school classmates may have found me less than brilliant that, see look, someone found my thoughts worthy of publication! It's not, to be clear, that I lack any neuroses in those or related areas. It's just that all of that is secondary to my understanding of how this aspect of my career works.

The best I've come up with is to save the more shameless share-share-share for Twitter, which is something I use more professionally than personally, and to save Facebook shares for things I think friends and family might want to see. (Pinterest and Instagram are just about pretty pictures, and, fine, my not-so-secret aspiration for Bisou to become famous in Japan; to then be invited to Japan to go on some kind of grand poodle tour; and to become host of my own YouTube channel, Blogging With Dog.) But this is by no means an absolute or deeply-thought-through divide, and... and basically anything posted to Facebook - positive or negative - is going to annoy somebody (some find all posting annoying, but are nevertheless on Facebook because it's their address book, which... I can kind of understand), so at a certain point, you just have to not worry too much about it.

Oh, and I wrote another thing. Which you already knew if you are my friend or follow me on social media.

Some attention really is bad attention

Pardon the bloggy narcissism, but when I saw Miss Self-Important's post on people who get overly outraged at those who make small talk with them, I thought of my own, on people who project hostile, judgmental thoughts onto strangers with whom they have the most minimal interactions. These are, it would seem, related phenomena. Her post also reminded me of the thing where people complain about a gift someone has gotten them, forgetting that the alternative to the unexciting gift was the person not getting them anything, with the symbolism that would entail. So I kind of see her point.

That said, I'm not sure I totally agree with MSI on this. There is, after all, such a thing as concern-trolling, which exists offline as well. While it's not my thing to take to the internet to express outrage at interpersonal relations, I can certainly think of instances of witnessing this phenomenon. Sometimes someone says something to you or a friend of yours and their intentions aren't friendly. Sometimes if they'd just ignored, that would have been the kinder way to go. This is especially so in cases - such as the one MSI brings up - that involve acquaintances questioning one's life choices. Such conversations very often manage to hit a nerve, and the just-being-friendly questioner may well be perceptive enough to know that. Not always! But, not never.

OK, I'll give one obvious, fairly generic example: Say you're studying something that doesn't sound very marketable, and someone asks you what you're going to do with that degree. This can be a genuine-curiosity question, but, tweak the tone a bit, and it's 'What are you going to do with that?' Yes, sometimes genuine curiosity reads as judgy-nasty because of the insecurities of the recipient. But sometimes bad attention really is bad attention.

As for appreciating catcalls... I suppose I differ from many other feminists on this, in that I think there's been something of an overemphasis on the too-many-men-are-looking-at-me plight and not enough on certain other issues. While I agree with the party line, as it were, about catcalling, and particularly object to the variants that cross the line into intimidation, I think we hear about it more than we might because it's a relatively easy conversation to have. The sisterhood of men-keep-calling-me-beautiful is quite simply an easier one to sign up for than the sisterhoods relating to abortion, rape, eating disorders, domestic abuse, not fitting into straight-sized clothes, etc. That doesn't mean it isn't annoying to be catcalled, or that it doesn't connect, in some broader way, to these larger issues. It's just... If I were the dictator of feminist priorities, I'd make it a lower priority.

Anyway! That digression was because MSI links to me as Exhibit A of the Feminist War On Catcalling. I just wanted to be clear that that I'm not the warrior she's looking for. (I'm also pro-stranger-chit-chat when there's no sexual component.) What she links to, though, is a post of mine where I call out a very specific kind of street attention, namely being asked to smile. I do hate this, and am pleased that being ancient means no one cares what sort of expression I've got.

But what's unpleasant about "smile" requests is precisely that they're not about someone being nice. They're the opposite of that! The man who tells the young woman to smile is not complimenting her! It's... I believe the popular expression for this sort of thing a while back was, it's a "neg." It is, in other words, an insult. The man is saying that the woman looks mopey, depressed. And let's say she is one of those things. She's supposed to get some joy out of having that pointed out? How does that interaction not end with the woman feeling worse?

So yes, stranger conversations can be convivial, and yes, I have them kind of all the time, considering I have one of those natural don't-talk-to-me expressions. I mean, I have a dog - there's no dog-walking without such interactions. But being ordered to smile, that I'd skip.

A basic placeholder

Having figured out what an Instagram is (a place to shamelessly spam anyone who chooses to follow me with whatever I see fit; mostly poodle photos and food photos), if not entirely how the site works, I was able to spend my weekend eating and documenting. All in the very same weekend, I managed a Viennese breakfast, Chinese/worldwide-chain hot-pot, and, at home, non-American pancakes (the thin ones that don't go with maple syrup), and yakitori. I thought about going running, but there just wasn't the time.

I was also going to write something about "basic" (followers of memes and Lauren Conrad will know what I'm referring to; posting food and pet photos on Instagram apparently counts, as - I can infer - does singing along to Bastille when it comes on the car radio), expanding on this, but then I realized everything I'm responding to (such as Daisy Buchanan's fabulous admission of basicness) happened more than five minutes ago, meaning that this topic goes back into the long-haul pile.

More Dish, and a bat

Anything I have written or will write for the Dish can be found here. 

I'm a little bit blogged-out for the day as you might imagine, but I will link to this Planet Princeton story, simply because, that bat. The local news has a tendency to make everything - storms mostly - sound apocalyptic (these are, after all, the big stories), but... that's a pretty scary bat. I doubt it's the bat that's terrorizing the residents of Linden Lane, but I also doubt if that bat - which we know to be rabid - is less frightening.

When not on WWPD...

This week I'll be guest-blogging, alongside Elizabeth Nolan Brown, at the Dish! Introductions here, gratuitous young-Keanu reference and more here.

Posts specific to Japanese from-scratch cooking and Pinterest avant-garde fantasy shopping may just appear here, but you never know.

Articles of the hot and humid day

-Apparently that thing I'd always had a sneaking suspicion about - that making it in the writing world is easier if your friends happen to be writers - is true.

-I think the technical, journalistic classification for the following link is wut.

-The scientist village where I live is not open to the public, I think, who knows. But there are always tourists coming by to look at it, photograph it, and... I can't quite figure out what they hope to see. Einstein doesn't work here anymore. The scholars who do are on their computers or at their notebooks in their offices. There's nothing to see, and tourists aren't allowed inside the buildings to see it. That doesn't stop them from trying. Sometimes, walking my dog in the area, I feel as if I'm part of some kind of real-life Big Bang Theory fantasy tour, in which I play the disheveled brunette Penny.

But that's nothing! As Shulem Deen explains, the Hasids of Williamsburg have become a tourist attraction. And the poor tourists are disappointed when the anthropological exhibition they've come to observe fails to greet them with the appropriate small-town friendliness. As Deen notes, the tourist whining about this happens to be a middle-aged man, who was trying to make eye contact with women and, more disturbingly, little girls. That they were squicked out and avoided him seems very much unrelated to their being Hasids, and very much about them being sensible female city-dwellers. Deen also notes that there are plenty of legitimate criticisms of the Hasidic community, but that the failure of their eight-year-old girls to smile at male tourists isn't one of them.

When "powerful words" fail

By the end of grad school, I was able to convey what my dissertation was about in anything from a sentence to nearly 500 pages. This is a potentially useful skill, but doesn't seem to carry over to Twitter, where, whenever I get into anything like a serious discussion, my first impulse is to move it off Twitter, either to email or just... anywhere, online or off, without a 140-character limit. So, @pronetolaughter, my reply to your recent tweets is here.

For readers who are not @pronetolaughter (whom I take to be a WWPD reader, because of the apparent response to something I'd written here), the issue was whether there's any advantage to using "racism" rather than "privilege" to discuss systematic unfairness based on race. @pronetolaughter argues that people don't react well to being called racist (true!), and that this is where the term "privilege" comes in - as a gentler (correct me if I'm misunderstanding) way to convey this point. @pronetolaughter also seems to be arguing, if between the lines (and again, feel free to correct), that because I question the efficacy of certain terms in calling out racism, sexism, etc., it's because I, deep down, support racism, sexism, and so forth, and am infiltrating anti-bigotry conversations to spread that message. Well, that's not it, I'm afraid.

My thinking, then, is basically this: The "powerful words" @pronetolaughter criticizes me for trying to get rid of are indeed powerful, but possibly too powerful, such that they're perceived of as overshooting the mark. I'm reminded of a course I once took, where the professor referred to various forms of subtle oppression experienced by marginalized groups (not in the U.S.) as "violences," a "violence" being anything bad, not merely anything violent. I think this may have just been the terminology of whichever subfield this was, but in any case, I found it confusing. I got the general idea - microaggression, more or less - but something about the term seemed forced. Yes, there are non-physical forms of violence, but to call everything bad "violence" ends up making it more difficult to discuss violence-violence, and makes it easier to dismiss non-violent, small-scale forms of oppression. While there is indeed a continuum between calling a black person "articulate" and purchasing a black person as a slave, or between a disproportionate obsession with Israel's flaws vs. that of any other country and holding Nazi sympathies, or between staring a bit too long at a woman on the subway and raping a woman...

I guess where I'm going with this is, you want terms that convey the entire spectrum, and that don't hone in on the worst-case-scenario. As much as it's a powerful argument to point out how low-level bigotry relates to more serious offenses, it them becomes far too easy to brush aside the lower-level stuff as not really counting because it's so plainly not the higher-level stuff. It's become just about impossible to discuss low-level anti-Jewish bigotry because "anti-Semitism" has become too powerful to use.

Bloggingheads, shorts

Readers of WWPD might be interested in watching me talk with Conor Friedersdorf for just over 67 minutes on a variety of topics, among them parental overshare. As it so happened, the latest truly egregious example of that phenomenon appeared after we recorded: a Slate piece in which the mother of a then-sixth-grader (this was in 2012) defends her daughter's right to wear some particular pair of shorts to school.

School dress codes are a perfectly legitimate topic for an article, and one I'd be happy to see addressed more often. By all means, discuss when they constitute slut-shaming, and when they're just about teaching children of both sexes to dress in a way that'll allow them to be taken seriously. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that I'm not a fan of school dress codes, for reasons I've explained earlier. (I do wonder, if the idea with uniforms is to shield girls from inappropriate male attention, who had the brilliant idea to make pleated miniskirts the uniform of choice. My recollection of being that age and having that uniform is that it didn't help matters.)

But! Why exactly must Slate's readership (2,400 comments - comments! - thus far) be presented with a photo of the child in the shorts in question? The idea being, clearly, that Slate readers are invited to give the photo a good examination and then provide their thoughts on whether or not the shorts are too short, whether or not the very young girl wearing them looks kinda skanky. Which... the commenters do. Obviously. This could have been anticipated. Surely it was anticipated, although whether it was anticipated that commenters would go into exactly what about the cut of the shorts made them revealing, in vaguely obscene terms, is anyone's guess. The mother's actual argument made sense. But why - why???? - would you subject your child to this?

On wrote-juvenilia-before-things-went-viral privilege

Someone (who may read WWPD, and if so, should feel extra-encouraged to respond) favorably linked on Facebook to Simon Waxman's plea that major publications leave college op-ed writers alone. Waxman - just like yours truly! - knows what it's like to have published less-than-stellar essays while still a student, for an audience of other students, or at most, profs who know full well that you're still learning how to construct an argument, etc. Back in the day, stuff may have gone online, but there wasn't social media, there wasn't this "viral" capacity. You could write nonsense, that nonsense might even make it to physical print, and Time still wouldn't hear about it.

Anyway. This is something I thought about quite a bit before - and after - deciding to respond to the Tal Fortgang debacle. After all, my objection to parental overshare is in part that a young person shouldn't be forever known for his or her most embarrassing moment. Isn't this sort of the same?

No, I ended up concluding, it's not. There wasn't space to get into all these concerns in my earlier article, so, here goes: A 20-year-old who writes and publishes an essay, and consents to its (and his) further promotion, isn't the same as an 11- or 16-year-old whose ostensibly private remarks are put into a major publication by a publicity-minded writer parent. Nor, for that matter, is this the same as the "Apple store lady" viral video, or the other, similar situations, where a low moment in someone's day, week, month, or even - apologies to that crap 1990s sitcom - year ends up surreptitiously recorded and posted online, so that the whole world can tell this person having an off day what an evil, entitled person they surely are. We're talking about adults, who are choosing to present views that are their own. There has to be a cutoff somewhere, and unless we go the whole 'the brain only fully develops at 40' route, most college-student articles are fair game. At least as much so as small-time blogs written by (presumably) adults of unspecified age and education level, blogs that will periodically find themselves ridiculed on Gawker or whatever. At least a writer for a student publication imagined some audience.

Yet, at the same time, it does kind of suck that this is now a thing. Not so much in Fortgang's case - he seems to have more than consented to the publicity - but that other, less confident, if technically adult students can now end up viral at what could well be their intellectual low points, students who may hardly even have a conception of what it means for their classmates to read their article, let alone the world. So? How to deal with this ambiguous category of text?

This, though, seems more an issue of etiquette than - as with parental overshare or turning private moments viral - ethics. Factors like how big of a platform someone has, or, if an item has been published, if it's a student publication, should play at least somewhat into whether or not something oh-so-outrageous gets a take-down, and if so, what form that takes. It's sort of... bad form, if you're someone with a tremendous platform and endless experience, to react to a piece in a college paper as if it were Kristof's latest. You also don't want to be patronizing and assume a student will think otherwise once older - chances are, the student will think the same but be better-able to articulate these thoughts. But maybe, if you are going to respond to one of these items, especially if you're doing so for a large audience, it helps to make it very clear that what you're responding to is by a student, in a student publication? It can't hurt.

The perverse pride of the pale

So, being ancient, and having devoted the bulk of my 20s to the 19th century, I'm not up on Tumblr or memes. It's possible that I actually said "the Twitter" the other day, although that one I sometimes use and mostly understand. Anyway, I only just now learned of the Me vs. Other Girls meme and associated controversy. It turns out that being pale, dark-haired, and literate is a meme! Or only if you're defining yourself in opposition to dim-witted spray-tanned bleach-blondes. Seeing as I live at a science compound in the woods, where I'm as much the Penny as anyone, I, at least, am not.

It's an interesting conversation, though, or the start of one. Some of this seems to be socioeconomic humblebragging - like, yes, you're pale and stayed away from the peroxide, and read Great Books, and don't fuss over status-y brands, but that's because you're an upper-class white person, not because you resisted temptation to go all TOWIE'd out. Yes, being upper-class means a certain degree of alienation from the mainstream, but if it comes from a place of feeling better than the mainstream, and if you sit around feeling superior with others like yourself, so what if a state-school sorority you're never interacting with anyway would have shunned you?

Some of it - because this also comes from people who really did grow up feeling like outsiders - really is about feeling like an outsider, but in that cringe-inducing adolescent way where one misses that everyone feels different. ("Daria" works because even pretty sorority girls feel like Daria.) If the "women" on Tumblr comparing themselves to others in an emo fashion are in fact girls between the ages of 10 and 16, fair enough. If grown women are doing this, I'd be more concerned.

Feelings revisited

But first, some more self-promotion.

With that out of the way, Gawker alerts us to a painful-to-read essay about what a black fellow-student in a white woman's yoga class might be thinking about said white woman, aka the author. We never leave the realm of the author's feelings, which are, as per the genre, projected onto another person about whose feelings the author knows nothing. All that's evident is that this woman is black, heavy, and not particularly elegant at yoga, thus possibly new at it. And yet, the feelings:

I was completely unable to focus on my practice, instead feeling hyper-aware of my high-waisted bike shorts, my tastefully tacky sports bra, my well-versedness in these poses that I have been in hundreds of times. My skinny white girl body. Surely this woman was noticing all of these things and judging me for them, stereotyping me, resenting me—or so I imagined.

It's a fine case of where to even begin. Is it, as someone just put on Twitter, "white privilege" that she's making this story about her? Or is it, as someone (else, presumably) commented on Gawker, a case of a young woman acknowledging her privilege, only to be berated for it? And with trendy, pseudoacademic privileged bodies and accommodating spaces jargon at that?

Or am I getting sidetracked - is this a story about Journalism Today, and how, if you want to go viral, it helps to say something both hyper-personal and wildly outrageous. 'That Time I Saw An Elderly Chinese Man Waiting For The Bus And Had a Feeling.' The essay can be about how the man is judging you for having just bought $500 worth of groceries at Whole Foods, for having gone to Vassar, for having come from Soul Cycle. You just know he knows this, even though as it turns out, he didn't even look at you. As it turns out, he's actually blind. As well as multi-generation Korean-American. You have no idea. But why stop this oh-so-fertile line of thought?

On the hazzing of sads

Silently judging your winter fashion choices.

OK, the riled-ness begins. I was impatient, expecting instantaneous fury. It can take a moment. So:

Some commenters defend teacher overshare on the basis of students who make mistakes deserving to be shamed. Also: students who make the kinds of mistakes that get shared are (apparently? huh?) the ones who don't care about school... which somehow translates to, who wouldn't care about being insulted by their teachers. Never mind how many of these mistakes aren't actual errors having to do with course-related material that's being examined, but random things/terms students themselves bring up without quite understanding. No! say these commenters (sometimes in all-caps). Being mocked by your teachers builds character!

More broadly, they're saying that to be hurt when insulted is to show weakness. If this were just a few commenters in one place once, whatever, but this is, in a sense, true of much online activity, from Gawker (well, the old Gawker) to the Petey comments here. The what-was-once-called-blogosphere seems split (somewhat but not entirely along gender lines) between hyper-earnestness and a kind of snark absolutism, where the greatest good is showing that one's feathers can't be ruffled. (Haz a sad, tiny violins, etc.)

It seems as though it should be possible to say that gratuitous hurt shouldn't be inflicted, without this in any way contradicting additional advice on what to do if you find that, say, your teacher has mocked you on Facebook. Yes, as life advice, 'choose your battles' is a classic, as is 'never let them see you sweat.' Unless you're going to go the full-on Outrage approach and all-out flip a snark conversation into an earnestness one, whatever it is, you have to laugh it off. (Are there any more clichés I might summon to address this?) Decompensation is generally a bad idea. That doesn't mean the initial nastiness was justified.

What strikes me in this case is that it's just so obvious nothing positive comes of knowing your teacher is laughing at you. Do you, the naive 18-year-old, suddenly become a well-read, world-weary 45-year-old? We can have a reasonable conversation about a certain amount of setbacks in youth - those early days of finding one's own friends, and the quasi-bullying that goes with that life stage - building character. Or about whether whichever newfangled whosawhatsit (grade inflation, hand-holding, the proverbial everyone-gets-a-medal) is perhaps detrimental to whichever pedagogical aims. There are times when the hazzing of a sad serves some larger purpose. But what aim is addressed by teachers acting unprofessionally?