I believe the expression is "subtweet"

Recently, a beer company you've almost certainly heard of, whose product you maybe last consumed at a frat party 1,000 years ago, had an ad campaign urging customers to use their beer to facilitate rape. Shockingly this didn't go down well - even the not usually outraged were all, what's that about? So the beer people apologized, leading me to theorize, on that great theorizing platform that is Twitter, that this was the marketing campaign - offend, cause controversy, apologize.

Maybe something similar was afoot when a newspaper you've almost certainly heard of decided to run an op-ed by someone identified in the headline as "Name-of-Sexy-Celebrity's Ex-Fiancé," about a beef between the two. This was a bad idea for so very many reasons (more on those in a moment), and the paper replied with a public editor's note about debate having been sparked, but with an admission that this was indeed celebrity dreck. That piece also allows comments. Given that the celebrity in question is among the few globally with a break-the-internet physique, her mere name is clickbait.

To be clear on what was wrong with this, it's first necessary to state what the problem was not. It wasn't that this venerable institution had chosen to cover something lowbrow. Yes, there are terrible things going on, globally and nationally, yet style coverage exists. As well it should - different sections serve different purposes. I've never understood the people who go to the fashion pages and leave comments complaining that they're not reading the front section.

No, the problems were a) publicizing a private dispute, b) giving one party only a platform, and c) choosing to intervene on a massively controversial topic through the lens of an absurdly biased observer. But mainly that first one. Did they consult the actress herself before running this? Has anyone in the history of op-eds ever come across worse in theirs as dude did in his? But there will always be sleazy, conniving people. Newspapers don't have to publish their grievances.

Because... what were they thinking with this? Was the idea to publish something in the mold of the Angelina Jolie cancer and genetics columns? As in, Big Issues, Big Celebrity? Because those were completely different - admirable, useful, and not about an interpersonal spat which many of us (including some of us who do read the occasional bit of dreck) had not heard of previously. That someone's in the public eye doesn't mean their relatives get to put their ongoing family drama in a newspaper.

Flounder

On the one hand, the most extreme example of parental overshare yet is in the NYT Magazine. On the other, pointing this out in an article would require linking to nude images of her children, and not just the long essay in which she defends her choice, so I think I'll pass. WWPD and no links is my compromise.

Anyway, the point of the essay in question is basically that what she's created is Art, and that her kids consented (impossible - they were children, and *her* children). But then if you question this at all, it's clearly that you're either a puritan who thinks babies should emerge from the uterus in full Amish/Hasidic/pious Muslim garb (how's that for a mix-religious metaphor), or - worse - one of those people who judges parents. She loves her children! Which... that's not even the question. It's entirely possible to love your children and to do make a very public ethical-though-not-professional mistake in your parenting, namely choosing to use your kids as your own nude models.

But the nudity's... not necessarily the least of it, but not all of it. There are also photographed having tantrums, etc. The text (especially the "pinworms" bit - why???) actually upset me far more than the images - images I wouldn't have otherwise realized were by these kids' parent, and that indeed don't seem particularly sexual. As in, if I were a guest at someone's house and their kids were running around like this, I'd probably think these were hippies, not child abusers.* The whole but-what-about-pedophiles?! angle seems like a bit of a distraction (although not completely, as the article gets into). A series of just photos like the one of a (clothed) child refusing to eat flounder would have also squicked me out, but again, for the usual parental-overshare reasons (giving kids lifelong reputations as brats; screwing up the parent-child relationship).

To me this is at least as much about these being her own kids as about them being children. She seems genuinely not to have put it together that just because the kids had the expectation of privacy when running around naked *at home* doesn't mean that photographs of them doing so wouldn't cancel that out. The issue is less the nudity specifically (although, yes, that) than the fact that the only reason she had access to the means to taking these photos was that these are her kids.

It's interesting that in the linked 1992 NYT article on this, so many years before viral articles and so forth, a journalist totally got it: "Can young children freely give their consent for controversial portraits, even if — especially if — the artist is their parent?" Also interesting: that it's only possible to have a conversation about the ethics of oversharing about kids if the specter of pedophiles is evoked in some way. Why can't the flounder photo have been enough?

*I love how, in the NYT comments, "Europe" is this place where everyone's naked.

Safe spaces, "30-something moms"

-Is there a "safe spaces" epidemic on campus? I'm skeptical.

-Via one of the parent-writers I wrote about in that overshare article a while back (and more on her post in a moment), I see that there's this amazing Emily Bazelon article about parental overshare from 2008 that I don't think I'd ever seen before. How had the internet not pointed me to it earlier? I'd first blogged about the topic in April of that year, and this piece was in June, but I guess I wasn't particularly glued to that beat at the time. It's an interesting piece because it gets at the professional-ambition/livelihood angle. There's a difference (if not an infinite one) between a parent who shares tantrum-stories for "likes" and one who does it to pay the bills. Sharing on Facebook... ideally isn't done in a way that humiliates a child, but is the modern-day equivalent of a family album, and 

As for her post, the gist of it is that her detractors, "30-something moms," don't get how tough it was for those a decade older to know where to draw the line regarding online privacy. This seems plausible-ish, and appeared, at first, to be leading to a mea culpa. Which... sort of? She says she's changed the way she posts and now shares less, but then adds that she doesn't regret outing her child's condition: "In the case of mental illness, or any illness, advocacy trumps privacy." She goes on to explain that sharing didn't hurt her son - quite the contrary:

Because I spoke up, my son got effective treatment and is now back in a mainstream school with friends who are totally fine with his bipolar disorder. In fact, they—and I—admire his self-advocacy and think he is brave for speaking out and sharing his story. We were also able to connect to an amazing community of mental health advocates. No one has ever approached us in the grocery store and said, “I know who you are. You’re that mom and kid who talked about mental illness after Newtown. You are horrible people.” It doesn’t work that way.

What she doesn't say is why it was necessary for her to speak up to such a wide audience in order to get this help. If silence and stigma are preventing you from reaching out... to doctors, teachers, friends, family members, etc., about a concern along these lines, then that's a problem. What I'm having trouble picturing is at what point it becomes necessary to reach out to the world at large.

And she also doesn't seem to grasp the harm people are worried about. It's not necessarily about being shamed at the supermarket. (Note that her theoretical example involves her being harmed, not her son.) It's about her son perhaps one day wanting to enter whichever social, romantic, or professional setting as someone whose full medical history isn't easily Googleable. There are a lot of facts about just about any of us - not just illness, certainly not just mental illness - that we have no reason to be ashamed of, but that might not want to lead with. Parental overshare doesn't leave these children with the choice.

I remember snow

-Thought I could be all smug about having missed the East Coast winter. Evidently not. It's somehow March but still undriveable. I'd been so eager to use my newfound highway-driving confidence for, I don't know, a spontaneous trip to Philadelphia. (Working from a Philadelphia coffee shop as vs. a Princeton-area one is a longstanding driving-ability fantasy of mine.) Instead it's more like, maybe it's not worth skidding off the road to go to Wegmans ten minutes away, even though they do have really good cheese. Now might, however, be a good time for me to hate-read articles urging people to investigate the provenance of their vegetables. Produce-wise, I'm working with one bunch of scallions here, possibly one blood orange as well. (I feel like I should be directing the implied recipe dilemma to Lynne Rosetto Kasper.)

-First instance I've seen of this: a journalist attempts to report on her own family, fails to get their approval. This seems, ethically, like a step in the right direction.

-When someone who "coordinates [...] a body positivity group started by fat queer people of colour" speaks out against privilege-checking, people (rightly) pay attention. Read Asam Ahmad here, although I found this via so many people who may well be reading this, so you've probably already read it by now.

-Via Aryeh Cohen-Wade, Lindsey Finn's list of "feminist humblebrags." The McSweeney's website isn't big on telling you when a piece is from, but it is - as they say in journalism - evergreen. Item 4 seems like it might be/have been a little controversial.

-Lisa Miller's anti-minimalist essay suggests that the Marie Kondo's neatness philosophy is the opposite of frugality. I'm not sure I agree, but she makes a good case.

The self demands promotion

-In the New Republic, I argue that professors shouldn't blog negatively about students, reacting to Conor Friedersdorf's piece and several others. I'd written in the past about instructors who make fun of their students online - the hilarious-error genre that will be familiar to you if you have friends who teach. While student mistakes can be the stuff of great comedy, it screws up the teaching environment if students who mess up risk not only low grades but mockery from the people supposedly helping them learn.

The case I talk about in this article is different - a tenured professor, John McAdams called out a grad student for a classroom-management decision she'd made. Because she wasn't his student, and because the behavior he was criticizing was her instruction of undergrads, he seemed to think he could take her on as a fellow college instructor, or as an investigative journalist, or as some bizarre hybrid.

-And for a video of me chatting with Aryeh Cohen-Wade about viral shaming, European Jews, and the "cool girl," click here.

Status updates: ethical imperative, signaling, or both?

-My thoughts on this day are already summed up in something I just posted to Facebook:

Yes, the NAACP attack should get more coverage. No, the fact that the Paris attack (killing 12, as vs thankfully zero, and with major international implications) is more in the news isn't unreasonable. Nor (ahem, Twitter) should it be interpreted as evidence that The Zionists control the media.

What else can I say? I could add that it's upsetting to me for personal reasons when the staff of a publication that takes a stand against political correctness gets massacred, seeing as I was working at such a place until recently, but I can't imagine anyone in their right mind not being horrified by this.

-Tangentially related: Some journalists responded to my article about Facebook's sharing imperative by asking for more information about where I stand regarding the ethics of refraining to speak out politically on Facebook/social media. I've been giving this a lot of thought, and here's how I see it, at this particular moment in time; thoughts may evolve, or become less rambling...

There's a certain impulse to dismiss political status updates as either smug or pompous, or, conversely, as evidence of a foolish lack of discretion (one never knows what might upset a current or future employer). Armchair commentary has never had a good name, but social-media activism somehow has a worse one, quite possibly because the people status-updating about how a horrible thing in the news is horrible aren't risking much, and may even be motivated by a desire to seem caring or plugged-in, yet may appear to think that they're somehow saving the world.  This had long, at any rate, been my own impulse. As I've believe I've mentioned once or twice before, I'm no great fan of personal-life overshare, and thus tend to be biased in favor of discretion.

But political status updates aren't the same as cover stories about one's own family drama. Yes, it may be "signaling" when people strive to seem plugged-in, but... people should be plugged-in. I'd rather live in a society that gently pressures people (at least those who can do so without losing their livelihood) to speak out, or just to share news stories, than in one that treats social media like a stuffy dinner party, where anything even mildly controversial is to be avoided.

I do feel strongly, however, that no individual should be condemned for withholding any sort of information from any social-networking site - or, indeed, for avoiding these sites altogether. Friend A isn't a racist for failing to post about Ferguson - I mean, Friend A may well be a racist, but that's not good evidence. Publications can be taken to task for ignoring a story, as - I suppose - can demographic groups. Not individuals.

-Also tangentially related: My Tablet profile of Corey Robin, which also deals with questions of social-media political speech, can be found here.

"Undersharing"

I was going to write something about that bizarre Styles article accusing married people of "undersharing about our spouses," but I think Flavia has it covered:

Most normal people don't think that literally everything needs to be shared or that it's pathological to consider one's marriage a private affair. But I was struck that there was no acknowledgment that those in distress might be turning to real, live, in-person friends for advice--or that those friends might be more valuable than several hundred virtual ones.

In my own travels through the academic internet, I often find myself wondering something similar: where are your real friends? Why are you posting for 500 people what should be a three-to-five-person bitch session over drinks? I'm not talking about catastrophic oversharing, or the merely mundane; I'm talking about posts that fall into that catch-all category, "unprofessional," which includes everything from the possibly-legally-actionable to the merely tacky. You know: using Facebook to snark about your department chair or other easily-identifiable colleagues; mocking your students; complaining about what a shithole town you're forced to live in.

This is something I've wondered about as well - what's happened to the middle ground between broadcasting something and keeping it secret, i.e. that thing where you speak to a few friends, relatives, or - if needed - professionals? Are we really now supposed to assume that because something isn't out there on social media, it's festering and altogether unaddressed?

As to Flavia's specific (if rhetorical) question, "where are [their] real friends," it got me thinking that, as convenient as it would be for the narrative if social-media oversharers were the real-life-friendless, that's not, at least according to my own anecdotal troves, the case. The same people who share with all on Facebook also share with some at a bar. Perhaps the issue is, in part, that nothing feels private anymore. All sharing can end up on social media. What may look like uninhibited oversharing may actually be a situation where the same crafted, guarded, curated self is making its presence known in public and private alike. The distinction is, increasingly, gone. Indeed, the only places it may live on are within marriage and a few very-well-established friendships.

Drivel

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

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

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

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

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

Outsourced overshare UPDATED

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE

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

What is "liberal" parenting?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes from the anonymous

One of the things about long-term blogging is that I can see an article about transgender students at women's colleges; think, I remember blogging about that topic!; and then find that I did... in 2005, in college, in a post written a) shortly before I'd met anyone (I knew to be) trans, and b) long before trans awareness had entered the mainstream. And, unsurprisingly, it's not the post I'd write today. (Presumably in 2023, everything in this post will seem similarly out-of-date and out-of-it.)

Anyway, what's great about Ruth Padawer's article is that she addresses why there'd be transmen at a women's college in the first place - something that may seem confusing if you don't stop and think about it, or haven't gathered the relevant anecdotal evidence. But here's how it seems to go: Masculine-leaning 17-year-old girls who haven't quite come out (perhaps even to themselves) as trans are applying as female applicants, and are going to gravitate to colleges known to be accepting of gender-non-conforming women. But then once they pass a certain threshold on the gender-identity spectrum, they have to either transfer or ask for the school to change for them. And... if this were just a rare occurrence, one might say, so be it, but because transmen especially gravitate to these colleges, the schools must address this.

And then there's this confusing problem of... what's the progressive approach? This isn't like the radical feminists who find themselves behind the times when they refuse to accept transwomen as women. The female students opposed to having transmen classmates at women's college are doing so precisely because they understand these classmates to be men. If they said, by all means, stay put, it's not as if you're real men, wouldn't that be worse? But if they say their classmates can stay and be accepted as men, the door opens for cisgender men to attend. Maybe. A policy of letting anyone who identified as female upon applying finish their degree seems the only sensitive way to go.

Here, though, is where things get interesting:

Many Wellesley students, including some who are uncomfortable having trans men on campus, say that academically eligible trans women should be admitted, regardless of the gender on their application documents. 

Others are wary of opening Wellesley’s doors too quickly — including one of Wellesley’s trans men, who asked not to be named because he knew how unpopular his stance would be. He said that Wellesley should accept only trans women who have begun sex-changing medical treatment or have legally changed their names or sex on their driver’s licenses or birth certificates. “I know that’s a lot to ask of an 18-year-old just applying to college,” he said, “but at the same time, Wellesley needs to maintain its integrity as a safe space for women. What if someone who is male-bodied comes here genuinely identified as female, and then decides after a year or two that they identify as male — and wants to stay at Wellesley? How’s that different from admitting a biological male who identifies as a man? Trans men are a different case; we were raised female, we know what it’s like to be treated as females and we have been discriminated against as females. We get what life has been like for women.”

Yes, I can very well see why the student in question wouldn't have wanted to attach his name to this. College students, though, as I can attest, say the darndest things.

*****

Also interesting: Another for the endless-childhood files, and perhaps the parental overshare ones as well. (In this, Randye Hoder refers to - and, I can only imagine, embarrasses - an adult child, but has evidently shown less restraint in the past.) Also a state-of-journalism angle - we learn that a recent college grad who's "an editorial assistant at a well-respected magazine" is a) receiving parental financial support after college, and b) the child of someone whose "articles have appeared in The New York Times, Time, the Los Angeles Times, and Slate."

I think this piece does that thing that journalist-types call burying the lede. The story is not about children of rich parents staying dependent for longer. It's about the mess that's out there for those without rich parents. It's yet another case of privilege being acknowledged but not even slightly grappled with. Here's what Hoder provides:

Extending financial help to one’s children in this way is, of course, a luxury. Many of my friends—as well as my husband and I—are upper-middle-class, and more than a few in our circle are one-percenters. The majority of Americans simply can’t afford to help their children to the degree that we are fortunate enough to be able to.

And - and I'm starting to think I'm part of the problem, showcasing what could well be clickbait, pitchfork-bait content - we learn both that the author treats her daughter to the odd "mani-pedi" and that the author's got this friend...

Another friend, whose 23-year-old works for a wealth management firm and earns a mid-five-figure salary, says she and her husband still pay their daughter’s car and health insurance and have kept her on the family’s cell phone plan. 

“She makes a good salary, but rent and expenses are high,” the mom says, adding that her daughter’s job requires that she look professional. “She has to dress well, get her nails done, and drive a reasonably nice car. 

Ms. Another Friend, too, chooses not to be named.

When the first-person person is a man

Nicholas Troester has (tongue-in-cheek) nominated a commenter to this very blog as "Commenter of the year," and with good reason. The commenter, who's chosen the discreet pseudonym of Anonymous so as not to be blacklisted by an op-ed-writing cabal, wrote the following, in response to my last post, on the women pressured into confessional writing:

Yes, but where is the demand coming from? This is a strictly by-for situation, but Hadley doesn't seem too keen to explore that angle (and neither do you, for that matter). The result is that demand for the "confessional" is put down to some non-specified blob of a demographic, even though we all know who is reading all this stuff. I'd also say that sociobiology/evopsych could explain this apparently perplexing phenomenon in about five minutes, but the op-eding class doesn't go in for biodeternism, so they'll continue to wonder why one half of society needs a visceral, emotional connection to the subject at hand. We really do live in an amusing world.

Between the lines, I think what Anonymous is saying is that women are the ones driving the demand for confessional writing, and that biological determinism explains why that's the case. And that if you don't agree, it's because you are part of, or have been silenced by, The Feminists.

Anyway, I was going to respond by pointing out that supply here is key: It's cheap (often free) to publish personal essays, and easy to get this content, because everyone can produce these, whereas not everyone can, say, analyze the subtleties of Cambodian politics. And you don't exactly need to factor in reporting costs - let alone international-bureau-type ones - if you're getting a 22-year-old's musings on the hook-up culture at her college. So even if the demand from men and women alike is greater for other topics, these are so much cheaper to produce that that's what fills the marketplace.

But then I realized I'd had enough Gender Angle for the moment, and will instead turn to two instances of personal-hook fails, where the authors are of the dude persuasion.

Here goes: Dude A wrote a piece about the downsides to prolonging life, Dude B, one advising parents not to leave money to their kids. Both reasonable topics, both pieces backed up with evidence.

But that's not enough in today's journalistic marketplace. We have to hear from Ezekiel Emanuel that he wants to die at 75, and from Ron Lieber that he doesn't want money from his parents. Why? Are we meant to believe that these authors are particularly representative of humanity, or that they, for personal reasons (as vs. professional expertise) truly get the issues at stake? What does it add to frame these topics in the first person? Is Kant's categorical imperative somehow involved? Is the idea that they're hypocrites until proven otherwise, and asserting that they'd do the thing they're advocating preemptively absolves them? Thanks to the personal twist, both articles end up reading smug-and-self-righteous in a totally avoidable way. The issue stops being inheritance or quality-of-life in old age, and starts being what sort of person we think Rahm's brother and this Lieber fellow might be.

And I'm not - as the way I begin this sentence suggests - an anti-first-person absolutist. What I object to is the first-person requirement. Or to this odd hybrid genre, where it's never enough that the writer feels whichever way (too subjective!), so you instead get a piece that results from how the writer feels, plus various evidence that supports whichever preexisting assumption.

A placeholder post

Hadley Freeman is always right. But sometimes she's extra-right, as with her column on the pressure on female writers to get personal. It's a variation of a point others (myself included) have long been making, but Freeman nails it:

The book publishing world has, for some time now, become wholly memoir-ified. Nothing gets a publisher’s chequebook out faster than a memoir, to the point that nonfiction books that are ostensibly about a specific subject (butchery, say, or George Eliot) are now styled and sold as memoirs (respectively Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession by Julie Powell; and The Road to Middlemarch, by Rebecca Mead.) Everything must be seen through the personal lens, the theory goes, and a personal story gives the reader a narrative to follow, because the disintegration of a woman’s marriage is far more interesting than some boring old butchery. Make the writer a celebrity and the book will sell itself – ta da! 

A book is not worth buying, it seems, unless the writer discloses something shockingly personal about herself – and it is, almost invariably, a her.

And!

[I]t is a thin line between the long overdue validation of women’s lives and telling women that the most interesting thing they have to offer, and that all they can be trusted to write about, is themselves.

What can I add, apart from go read it?

One thing, I suppose, is that there's a blurring that goes on, where women are urged to write about gender-related topics that aren't about themselves specifically, but that kind of lend themselves to that interpretation. Either to a personal hook (which sometimes works but sometimes feels tacked on) or, more frustratingly, to reader interpretations along the lines of, if she's writing about contraception, she's writing about her contraceptive choices! Or, if it's something the woman maybe can't personally relate to - a thin woman writing about plus-size fashion, or a woman without kids writing about parenting - then she lacks the authority to write something on the topic, in a way that having never been to China and not knowing Mandarin or Cantonese wouldn't stop someone from writing an op-ed about China. And... there's no way for me to proceed with this thought that wouldn't, ironically enough, lead to a personal essay. Which is what Freeman ends up with, but it is, it seems, inevitable.

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.

The "eating pant"

So many great articles, and no longer my official week of Dish guest-blogging, so you, WWPD readers, are in luck. We have:

-A Room For Debate I haven't yet had time to read, on parental overshare. Note that under my definition of the phenomenon, it's not about putting baby photos on Facebook, ideally with some privacy settings, but even if not, eh. That's... what a family photo album is these days, and I see no reason to be paranoid about hackers chasing after your baby photos for nefarious, baby-harming purposes. Parental overshare involves sharing the sorts of things that wouldn't normally go into some sanitized, public face of one's family. Parental overshare is "brave" and involves spilling the sort of info that's only actually brave if you're spilling it about yourself.

-Allison P. Davis's account of being a disappointingly slovenly-dressed daughter of a stylish mother. Another note: I totally own the J.Crew "eating pant" (there's no link or photo, I just know) and had given them a similar name. And had, of course, worn them to hot-pot.

-Monica Kim on eyelids:

Before blogs, makeup tips and tutorials did not cater to different eyelid shapes in the US. Even today, the issue of the eyelid is often swept aside by beauty bloggers like Michelle Phan, who like to remind people that Asian eyelids come in all different types. That may be true—my mom and sister were both born with double eyelids—but it’s unhelpful to us single-lidded girls, who must go it alone.

This is exactly what I was trying to get at re: Jewish-looking, and doubtless applicable to other '-looking' variations as well. It doesn’t do much good for those of us who are whatever-it-is-looking to be reminded time and time again that there’s no such thing as that-looking. We know that not all members of our group have exactly the same features, and can often point to people in our own immediate families who don't have whichever fraught traits we do. I have relatives just as ethnically Jewish as I am, who have completely straight hair, the kind that doesn't even frizz in the rain, as vs. my own, which does something different every day, depending the humidity. Does that make my own choices regarding hair-iron usage automatically apolitical? Does that make frizz-prone hair not a stereotypically Jewish trait, and one that's underrepresented in mainstream images of beauty? 

Even if one is delighted with one's single-lidded eyes (or frizz-prone hair), as Kim says, styling advice tends to be geared towards the less-'ethnic' way that even an 'ethnic' person may look. (And yes, I've read many times that eyelid and paleness concerns in certain parts of Asia are not about looking 'white' and predate any such notions. As for Jewish hair concerns, as a rule, they sort of are, although my own may stem from envy directed at the popular Korean kids at my high school.) Which is, in a sense, the issue. There's clearly an audience, if you will, for women of every ethnicity. The problem with not being 'mainstream' in whichever way really is - once one is an adult, and has gotten past the phase of imagining that the only people who ever find a boyfriend, ever, are blue-eyed blondes - one of figuring out which products to use in which way. 

Probably the most WWPD post ever

-Parental overshare for profit.

-So much YPIS: A woman - sorry, a "white lady" - was middle/upper-middle class, until some life events happened, and she was all of a sudden poor. A turn of events led to her picking up food stamps in a Mercedes, thereby outdoing a certain food-stamps applicant from a while back, whose only crime had been spending $1.50 on a coffee she might have made at home or skipped entirely. But the Mercedes-ness and whiteness of all of this seems to have caused controversy. Presumably because of the broke vs. poor obsession - as in, it's seen as so terribly offensive to claim poverty when you're merely broke that people who honest-to-goodness once had some money and now don't end up somehow getting classified as "broke," as if the cultural capital from having once been not-poor can fix everything.

-Tara Metal seems to have had just the same experience I did upon seeing an image of Jenny Slate. I saw an ad for "Obvious Child" on the subway and thought, huh, so that's what's meant by seeing faces that look like yours. My only disagreement with Metal is over the need to explain that this was the experience of women who "may be Jewish, or Italian, or just blessed with slightly unruly strands that cannot be dyed lighter or made straight without a significant amount of sturm and drang." While it's absolutely true that white people of various ethnicities (including super-Anglo - see British actor Daniel Hill, the oddly attractive villain on "Waiting For God") can have not-so-"white" hair, this has particular significance to people for whom that hair texture has political significance. I know that there's this compulsion, if you're Jewish, to make a point of not being parochial, to explain that whatever you're talking about doesn't just apply to Jews. And... hair politics certainly don't just apply to Jews, but I'm not aware of other ethnic whites having this concern. An Italian-American woman might straighten her hair, but is it understood to be about wanting to look less Italian?

-Miss Self-Important and I may have different politics, but we definitely agree on the fundamental issue re: elite high schools, namely that, as she puts it, "when a school becomes 'too Asian,' we immediately complain that it is not black or Hispanic enough." The "we" being society, not MSI and me, neither of whom are arguing this. My pet theory is this: Some offspring of rich white families regress to the mean (see the second item here, actually...), and this produces tremendous anxiety in rich-white-land. It's not guaranteed that those from any but the most established families will do just fine in the end. But! No one wants to say, outright, that the mediocre offspring of the rich deserve better. It sounds so much nicer to complain about meritocracy on behalf of the poor or underrepresented minorities.

Hyper-personal statements

Frank Bruni addresses a topic near and dear to my heart: the fact that college admissions essays are overshare basically by design. "The essay is where our admissions frenzy and our gratuitously confessional ethos meet," he writes, not inaccurately. Or, to (sorry!) quote my own piece, "Even students not the least bit inclined to confessional writing are asked to spill to strangers (and to parents who may be reading the thing over). You’re invited to show your truest self by sharing a story you might normally reserve for close friends."

But that's how it has to be - how can you demonstrate 'obstacles overcome' without spilling re: what the obstacles were? And you have to have overcome obstacles to be an impressive applicant - otherwise you're an example of privilege rather than merit, the sum of all the good fortune you've experienced (even if that fortune was something like having poor but devoted immigrant parents), as versus someone entirely self-made (at 17). It can't just be that a nice-enough home life and good-enough teachers crossed with sufficient raw intelligence brought you where you are today. It has to be that those As were despite some kind of profound difficulties. Not every 4.0 is equal. Students know this, as do the more involved parents. Keeping secrets no longer feels like an option.

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.

Tomboy overanalyzed

If a child explores his or her gender and his or her parents don't write about it for a major publication, did said gender exploration really occur? The latest: a mother telling the NYT readership every nuance of her 5-year-old daughter's tomboy-ness, poring over every detail. What does it all mean? Transgender is offered as a possibility; gay, somewhat bafflingly, is not, even thought he whole piece is on some level about its author's tremendous unstated fear that her daughter's a lesbian (see the Cinderella bit). Either way, why does this girl need a permanent record (this being, presumably, her mother's real name) of her gender identity aged 5, as perceived by her mother?

Given the tremendous likelihood that this girl (whether ultimately gay, straight, or bi) is not transgender (reason being, few are), maybe she doesn't want 'that time when mom thought I identified as a boy' etched in internet-accessible stone? Or say the girl does identify as a boy - maybe he, as an adult, isn't going to want such a public record of the first inklings of this as recorded by his mother?

From writing about parental overshare in the past, I know the counterargument - that there's nothing wrong with being gender-non-conforming, so why shouldn't these things be out in the open? Indeed - goes this counterargument - it's commendable whenever a parent publishes a tolerant (although this one's borderline...) essay about a gender-non-conforming kid, and, in doing so, models the right kind of parenting behavior.

All most admirable, but what I keep coming back to is, there are certain things only we may reveal about ourselves. Things that others shouldn't judge, but they will. One does not out a friend in a publication as gay or trans, or as having a particular medical condition, or has having been in a crabby mood three weeks ago. Your children are not extensions of yourself, but people in their own right. You don't get to out yourself as a parent-of unless your child (probably one substantially older than 5!) has outed him- or herself about whatever it is.