Fauxbivalence revisited

Yes, I've seen the latest in fauxbivalence. My cohort is leaving the age of wedding fauxbivalence, and moving on to the early-middle-aged question of fauxbivalence within marriage. Or: Nona Willis Aronowitz remains fauxbivalent. Whatever the case, old age.

If this piece irritated me less than her wedding fauxbivalence one, it was partly because it totally does give people a different impression of you if you mention a spouse. It makes you seem like someone who'd prefer to stay home watching Netflix than going out, which (may be true but) is - and this I can attest - a slight impediment to making new friends, at least for a time, if you marry earlier than your peers. It's temporary, of course, but it's a thing. So if she was just saying that saying "husband" makes you seem old and conservative, well, it does. First-world-problems, but problems all the same.

Mostly, though, it was because at least with this piece, there was some concrete reason why Aronowitz wouldn't want to be thought "married." With the wedding, it seemed to be about aesthetics; here, there's a buried lede: "we are allowed to hook up with other people when one of us is out of town." Oh! That really is a different sort of "married" than is generally assumed. For all the talk of "monogamish," a ring or a reference to a spouse typically signals that someone is not available, so if you are, how on earth would you convey that? If, then, she'd left it at, it's awkward to say you're married when you're in an open marriage, fair enough. I bet it is!

But no! She doesn't leave it at that. She takes it in an appropriative direction, talking about "code-switching" and "respectability politics," as if her struggles as an open-married, by-all-accounts-straight white woman "philosophically opposed to what traditional marriage means" have something to do with those of African-Americans. And gay people - her plight is also like theirs. Or something. And then it came back to me why fauxbivalence bothered me in the first place: It's the conflation of one's own quirkiness (or quirks of the progressive subculture one was born into) with marginalization.

"Styles" peak outrage

Women are now getting cosmetic surgery for the express purpose of looking good in their engagement-ring hand-selfies! All women? No. Lots of women? No. A bunch of the author's friends? No. Two women. The Style section tracked down a sum total of two women got their hands altered (presumably both hands - symmetry and all that) so as to show off their rings. Actually, not even two - one is simply planning to do so. The rest is inferred: many women wear engagement rings (true), and of those, a good number take photos and post them to social media (also true). Meanwhile, cosmetic surgeons and dermatologists can be tracked down who'll confirm that hands are part of the human body, and thus that there are people willing to spend money to have these parts somehow improved. It's therefore possible that we've got a hand-selfie-surgery epidemic on our, uh, hands, but not all that likely.

That said, this was - and Miss Self-Important, I want your thoughts - the perfect Styles story. Engagement rings themselves, as a topic, elicit tremendous class-and-gender outrage. The cost! The ethics of diamonds! The problematic sexism of the "tradition" if we can even call it that, invented as it was by DeBeers, which has been written about a ton but which you, foolish woman distracted by shiny objects, probably somehow missed! The resentment of women who want these rings but don't have them! The assumption that all women want one! The lemme-see-the-ring that follows engagement! The implication that this isn't enthusiasm for a friend or colleague's news but rather an attempt to figure out how much money her dude has or is willing to spend on her!

But this latest story brings all that outrage and crosses it with existing fury about cosmetic surgery. The ring-oriented hand-lift - invented though it may be - is like an extreme version of painting the nail of your ring finger to highlight the rock. It's so infuriating that it might even manage to rile women who do wear engagement rings and aren't losing sleep over said rings being problematic. So much outrage! So much that there hardly needs to be a trend of women doing this. I mean, it's nice that they found the one woman who did, but really, it wasn't necessary. 

Potato-sack

The Jezebel ring-threads I find so fascinating now have a companion piece: the comments on a personal essay about one woman's journey from expensive Bergdorf's wedding dress to a somewhat cheaper Bergdorf's wedding dress. The essay itself is... as good as an essay on that topic is going to be.

The comments, however, are spectacular. Wouldn't you know it but NYT comment-leavers and their spouses/mothers/whatever got married in "a simple white drees [sic] that back then probably was a hundred bucks," "a $75 dress I'd found on the clearance rack," "a lovely regular length white dress (a hand-me-down given to me by another friend)," "a very inexpensive, non-wedding dress I got from an amazing little shop in Antwerp, Belgium," "a $35 vintage 40s black dress," "a very simple, white, almost 'peasant' number with flared sleeves and a scooped neck," "a beautiful used wedding dress at Value World for about $10," and however many more.

And it's very much like the ring competitions, except that here, the woman is actually deciding for herself what she wants to wear. The oneupmanship over who has the cheapest and most ethical and most original engagement ring are a big harder to take because many (most?) of these rings were selected for the woman in question. It becomes this pseudo-feminist competition over whose fiancé/husband is the most sensitive to his fiancée/wife's progressive, independent spirit. Unless there was a gender-neutral or gender-reversed proposal and both spouses got a ring. Then there can still potentially be sanctimony (as well as ignorance re: the provenance of gems that are not diamonds), but there's at least consistency.

The dress version is, for those reason and others (namely my subjective assessment of such matters), less off-putting. I mean, this is a dress you wear once (twice if you celebrate with family in two different locales, or this was my approach), and there is a huge markup on bridal-looking white dresses that are officially wedding dresses - one that's readily avoided either by just buying that kind of dress at a normal (even high-end) store, or by going with other formalwear. Or a potato sack. As wary as I am of fauxbivalence, the Cheapness Studies angle might cancel it out. 

Goes around, comes around

Maybe these things are cyclical, because this doesn't feel entirely new, but it seems we've rediscovered that middle school is awful. A parent writes (anonymously) to the NYT parenting/mothering blog that her daughter is in seventh grade and doesn't want to go to school. Should she transfer? We're told much about the school and her academics, not why she doesn't want to go, which would probably give us the answer. Bullying? Transfer. Seventh grade is unpleasant? Stay put - it'll be over soon enough. 

Also cyclical: the re-re-rediscovery that diamond engagement rings, rather than being an essential fact of human sexuality, are - gasp - a cultural construction. Rohin Dhar at Business Insider has penned the latest exposé, although in 2007, Meghan O'Rourke brought us to about the same place. Dhar begins with what I'm going to read as hyperbole: "American males enter adulthood through a peculiar rite of passage - they spend most of their savings on a shiny piece of rock." Jewelry aside, is marriage how men these days enter adulthood? And are they really rendered so destitute by ring-purchases? His point -- "Diamonds are not actually scarce, make a terrible investment, and are purely valuable as a status symbol." -- is a mix of true and eh. Is anyone buying a diamond ring - or a pair of pants, or anything other than a stock or similar -- as an investment?  

As a rule, I like the idea of telling people that things they think they must buy are actually optional. And there probably are men out there who need to hear that the world won't end if they don't go broke buying a ring. But these revelations always come up short. Yes, marketing is a thing; companies want us to buy their products; companies mark up prices to turn a profit; and if we knew where just about anything we owned/ate came from, we'd be horrified. This isn't diamond rings. This is capitalism. This is why we don't all go around in potato sacks. (Diamonds are probably worse than sneakers, are definitely worse than quinoa, but might not be worse than other gemstones. It's possible to win at unconventional and fail at ethical.) 

And, allow me to repeat myself, but these revelations inevitably inspire comment threads of individuals explaining how non-sheep-like they were or will be in their own formation of government-stamped heterosexual unions made official when the man offers the woman a precious metal band with a gemstone in it. 

Meanwhile, marketing isn't everything. The human interest in adornment isn't unique to capitalist societies. Nor the human interest in symbols. The value of a diamond (or diamond-looking) ring isn't necessarily status, at least not in the way Dhar suggests. Some couples want wedding jewelry that looks like what it is. And we live in the society we do, shaped by forces, marketing and more, that preceded us - a diamond or diamond-looking ring of a certain shape says "nuptial." The stone doesn't have to be any particular size or authenticity for that to be the case. 

Personally - fine, on this topic, why not the personal - I'm not interested in jewelry, can maybe get it together to wear earrings, but mostly not even that. (Shiny ballet flats, yes. Sparkly nail polish, yes. Jewelry, never saw the point.) The only jewelry I wear, 99% of the time, is the symbolic variety, so yes, I like that it looks like what it is. 

On 'weddings'

In my latest effort at sullying an otherwise fine publication with my ramblings, I wax ambivalent on bridal fauxbivalence.

As a rule, I do my best to incorporate even the trolliest criticisms of my writing into something positive. As a grad student, one can get used to all feedback on one's writing being couched in a great deal of positivity and support, so the harsh world of anonymous commenters can be - yes, really - of great use. It can be difficult, when, for example, the comments are along the lines of, ‘this is the dumbest thing I ever read,’ or are furious tirades based on misinterpretations of headlines I didn't even write. The lesson learned can feel like, more nuance! Always more nuance! Or someone will be upset that you oversimplified what is in fact a complicated issue! The addition of extra hemming, hawing, and cautiousness is probably the opposite of what would improve my writing, and yet.

But I want to take something from a comment at the Atlantic claiming that my latest post felt mean-spirited, although the commenter him/herself admits to not knowing why they have this impression, nor towards whom this alleged meanness is directed. This I can work with, even if I'm not exactly sure to whom I should direct the apology. When I reread my initial WWPD post on fauxbivalence, I found it far too snarky, although I continued to believe the basic premise. What I do in the more recent post, and hadn’t in others there, is position myself in the issue in question. I wasn't sure about doing that at first, but it didn’t seem right to pin it all on Jessica Grose and other writers who’ve put their fauxbivalence before a wide audience. (I have ample stores of anecdata on fauxbivalence, but prefer to cite publicly-available examples.) My own wedding involved a mix of good-feminist and bad-feminist moments - as I find they nearly all do. And I find myself playing up the good-feminist ones, playing down the bad-feminist ones, rather than simply owning (as another commenter puts it) the lot of it. I am not above fauxbivalence! If I'm hard on the fauxbivalent, I'm hard on myself. 

And... the following will address Caryatis's points in the comments there, which I'm reluctant to enter for fear of losing the week to that: I don't think the answer is to throw up one's hands and have the most 'traditional' wedding possible. We should all do what we're comfortable with, be less judgmental about what others feel comfortable with, and so on. Given that I got married at City Hall, I'm not about to tell people who get married in their backyards that they're not making a big enough fuss. We're all comfortable with different things. If you don't want a fancy-schmancy ring, more power to you. (My personal favorite in the non-traditional ring arena is this.) What I think is wrong is to turn who can be most low-key, most offbeat, into a competition in its own right. A wedding is by its very nature an unoriginal act, and I think there's a certain value to acknowledging it. Not acknowledging it by having a more 'traditional' event than you're comfortable with, but just, like, acknowledging it to yourself, in conversation, etc.

Today in judge-a-woman

I kind of loved Liz McDaniel's account of working as a temp at a bridal mag, just after being dumped by a fiancé. A darkly amusing premise, and well-told. It's a great first-person account, in part because the secrets of everyone but the author are left out. We know a dude left her, but not who he is, nor why things ended. If there's mockery, it's very much directed inward.

The NYT commenters, on the other hand, are up in arms. First off, why is this in the paper of record? (Why, I want to know, do opponents of lifestyle articles keep acting as though the one they've just arrived at is the paper's very first piece on something other than Mideast strife?) Then there are those who simply can't handle that a woman wouldn't express ambivalence (fauxbivalence) at the very idea of a wedding in the first place. This, eh. Just because this wouldn't be for you (and it wasn't for me, either - I got married at City Hall, in a short, white-ish dress from a non-bridal department store) doesn't mean anyone it is for doesn't deserve happiness. The author appears to be from the South. I don't know much about the South, but it is my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) that elaborate, "traditional" weddings just might be a bigger deal in South Carolina than among the Zabars set.

But then there are the really judgmental commenters, who accuse McDaniel of caring about the wedding, not the marriage. There's even this insinuation that she had it coming, getting dumped. A reiteration of the tired trope that a woman must show her worthiness of marriage by proving her utter indifference to the institution, especially to its trappings.

As for her not discussing the marriage,  it never happened, did it? We might assume that the author was very deeply mourning what must have been quite a close relationship, but maybe did not want to share the details of that with the paper. (As we know from Dan Savage, or common sense, the reason may have been very personal.) And what this job was reminding her of would not have been her ex's quirks, but the trappings of the wedding that never was. The details are there not to show that the author fetishized The Wedding, but because they show just how planned everything was, just how late in the game she got dumped. How is this not poignant? Do we need to translate this to something a hipper reader would understand? Like, imagine if she got dumped, and then a piece of bubble wrap reminded her of the dress she'd planned on crafting for herself for the casual backyard wedding she was going to have, that was going to be catered by the local taco place. Wouldn't that have counted?

Happy Valentine's Day?

-Do you have an engagement ring? Madeleine Davies of Jezebel probably hates you, but you may be an exception, or maybe your ring isn't as big as all that. Cue the responses: Suggestions that Davies must be jealous of women whose hands sparkle. Proud announcements that one's own ring is ethical, an heirloom, a crusty ponytail band. One really amazing complaint from a woman who unselfconsciously complains that her (ethical, she assures) ring is too big and unwieldy.

-Did you change your name when you got married? Jessica Grose of Slate did, except you may remember her as Jessica Grose - she still uses her maiden name professionally. She has invited you to use the Slate comments to tell her why she's a disgrace to feminism. (See also: why, the larger the audience I'm writing for, the less I say about myself. For any audience, I'm careful only to reveal what I'd be fine with the whole world knowing, and yes, that includes Facebook, but I'm reluctant to actively solicit comments on my life choices from quite so many strangers. If that distinction makes sense.)

-Are you a man? Do you ever approach women with romantic intent? Freddie asked for my opinion on a short film about a man pursuing a woman, and on the issues it brings up. And... I watched it, but it didn't make me think 'street harassment.' If anything, what was off-putting was that the man was entirely active, the woman entirely passive. Definitely interested, but exclusively the pursued. What Freddie writes here, and I'd emphasize that last bit, seems reasonable:

For me, it seems as though the current reality of street harassment, the culture of rape, and assumed privilege of heterosexual men to approach any women makes it clear that we need to be far more careful about approaching strangers, and to require far more in the way of demonstrations of attraction before we decide to talk to women we don't know, particularly when they're alone. Perhaps that means that women who are interested in being approached will have to be somewhat more demonstrative of that in this future culture.

I'd go further and say that we'd need to come around to the idea of women not just announcing approachability, but also approaching men. It's what I was getting at here - it's somehow both unacceptable for men to pursue women (creepy!) and for women to pursue men (desperate!) If he liked you, you'd know! Except if he let you know, he'd be sketchy! How does anyone ever get together? (Alcohol?)

In all seriousness, it simply doesn't work to have a culture of men not inadvertently bothering women who aren't interested in them and one of women playing "The Rules"-esque games. (Rape is another story, and is of course inexcusable regardless of game-playing or lack thereof. Same with stalking, harassment, etc. I'm talking about interest clumsily expressed, obliviousness, things of that nature.) As it stands, there's so much pressure on women to seem indifferent to the men they like that it no doubt can be confusing for men to know when a woman is interested. The whole hard-to-get thing is so ingrained that a woman's complete and utter lack of interest can be interpreted by an optimistic dude as an elaborate mating dance.

Let me repeat: this is not about women asking to be harassed. That's not it at all. It's about how the expectation of female passivity - the expectation that a woman will never actively want anything - is incompatible with it being abundantly clear when a woman isn't interested in a man, so that the flirtation or asking-out or whatever can come to a halt. And if it were more socially-acceptable for women to pursue, a man not keen on expressing unreciprocated interest would have the option of only ever accepting others' invitations.

The wedding not dreamed of since one was a little girl

On today's Savage Lovecast, Dan advises a mother (who's anonymous - this is not a post about parental-overshare) who thinks her 11-year-old daughter might be a lesbian. In the course of their conversation, Dan decides that the girl is a lesbian, and there's this neat aha moment where the expert convinces the parent of the truth right before her eyes. And... while I'm totally on board with Dan's advice on how to raise children who might or might not be gay (i.e. all children) to feel as though either is great, I'm not at all convinced that this girl is gay. For one thing, there's no mention whatsoever of the girl being interested in other girls, which, if there were, would be something of a giveaway. Why, then, do we think she's gay?

-She has announced she doesn't want to marry or have kids.
-She's closer with her father.
-She's bullied for something (unclear what precisely), but is the "queen" of the mostly-male alternative crowd.
-She's sarcastic.

She is, in other words, a Daria. A Liz Lemon. A brain rather than a princess. What I'm getting at is, when a boy shuns conventional masculinity, this might tell us more about his burgeoning identity than when a girl shuns conventional femininity, because much of conventional femininity is kind of unappealing to anyone with half a brain. She might turn out to be a lesbian, and it's great that her mother wants to be prepared should that be the case, but the odds are against.

As the owner of exactly half a brain, this has, at any rate, been my experience. Frilly clothes, squealing enthusiastically or being passive, 'just a salad for me', who needs all that? And I say this as someone who was never a tomboy. Just not a girly-girl. I mean, I'm not not sarcastic (heh), and boots like these (and not those dreadful Louboutins) are at the tippy-top of my curent wanty list, but... yeah.

(You can read more of my musings on male beauty here or here - how's that for discreetly-segued self-promotion?)

But back to this eleven-year-old. She doesn't want to marry or have kids - this is Exhibit A? In our culture, there is this huge pressure on girls to dream of adult female "desire" (i.e. for a husband, kids, a well-decorated home), to act out wedding scenarios, so that as adults, they can go on "Say Yes to the Dress" and talk about the wedding they've dreamed of since they were a little girl, and how if this one dress has an empire waist but not a sweetheart neckline, the dream shall never come true. Well, not all women who grow up and happily marry a man were the kind of girls who dreamed of weddings.

Indeed, the trappings and scripts of conventional female heterosexuality can be repellent not just to women who like women, but also to women who do quite straightforwardly like men, who will be expected to want not a man, but My Big Day. (This totally came up on the Lena Dunham "Fresh Air" interview that I listened to on the previous poodle outing.) It can all seem like a mockery of what one is experiencing, thus - as I've said approximately 10,000 times on WWPD, why many straight women claim, half-joking, to be gay men trapped in women's bodies.

Or, the short version: there are so many reasons a girl of eleven might find womanhood and what it seems to entail off-putting that have nothing to do with being on the LGBTQ spectrum that this seems a bit of a leap, in a way that it might not if the parent of an eleven-year-old boy came to the equivalent conclusion.

"You're schmoopy"

-Via Facebook, a truly amazing ad that was apparently in the Harvard Magazine. The hotel defended itself, kind of, by claiming this not at all the same photo as its inspiration.

-Via Prudie (sorry, JTL), we now know of a new trend in bridezilladom: you're-not-invited announcements. As in, rather than knowing you're not invited to an event on account of, you weren't invited to it (that is, if you're even aware of the event in the first place), the hosts will notify you, unprompted, that you didn't make the cut.

I agree with Prudie that if this is a thing (if! although as the letter-writer indicates, there's some evidence that it is), it relates to social media, on so many levels. If you get married, friends you haven't spoken to in years may still feel close to you, because they've been following your status updates or photos... even if there's no way they were going to invite you to their weddings, once actually sitting down and writing a guest list. And if you post photos of your celebration - and if there are 8,000 such photos, why not all? and perhaps in dozens of installments, such as to dominate the news feeds of everyone who hasn't yet hidden your updates - then by a certain point, even people who would have not wanted to go to your thing in the first place will on some level wonder why they were left out. (Not unrelated: the couples that get all lovey-dovey before an online audience, an audience knowing, on one level, that this is inappropriate and insecure, yet on another, experiencing a pang of irrational envy. The human psyche, never as straightforward as all that.)

In the past, there simply wasn't the same opportunity to feel excluded from events one had nothing to do with. But this mostly comes down to a more timeless and genre-independent fact of life: There will always be those who assume an invite from them is the most sought-after piece of paper imaginable, and that the kid who sat next to them in freshman biology will quite possibly never get over the hurt of having not gotten one. And there's apparently, via one such forum, a converse of this - invitees afraid to decline, for fear of hurting the couple, because a 'no' from this uniquely vibrant individual would in fact ruin what would have otherwise been a delightful celebration.

And yes, from these two items above, I'm starting to see where the women who want lifetime-monogamous-commitment-to-dude but not "marriage" are coming from.

Fauxbivalence lives on

Jezebel just posted Samhita Mukhopadhyay's "Ten Very Good Reasons You Aren’t Married Yet." The reasons that make sense are about why you're not in a relationship; the ones that don't presume a happy romantic relationship between two adults who could legally marry but are choosing not to do so. The latter are good pretexts for why you're not marrying someone it seems you ought to be marrying, if you think you could do better but aren't sure and are biding your time, or who knows.

One by one...

1. Yes, if you put your career first, and must be able to move halfway across the world at the drop of a hat, and do not have a waking moment to focus on the concerns of anyone but your employer, you should probably be single. But what you don't want to do is gratuitously perpetuate the stereotype that women (never men, just women) who are married have by definition dropped out of the career-not-just-a-job workforce. Married women who are also pursuing a career have to deal with enough grief about this as it is.

2. You haven't met someone you want to marry? This is an excellent reason not to get married. The implication that those who have married did so only by overlooking their spouses' major character flaws is a bit obnoxious, but the overall point is reasonable.

3. Not being able to afford a big wedding isn't a reason not to get married. It's entirely possible to go to City Hall. (Got the papers to prove it.)

4. You're waiting till everyone can get married? No you're not - you don't want to get married, and this is a convenient, noble-sounding excuse for cold feet. Dan Savage and his listeners covered this a while back.  If your actual concern is same-sex marriage, but you'd otherwise have a big ol' wedding, ask your guests for donations to Lambda Legal. (Just don't hold your bachelorette party at a gay bar.)

5. You're too much of a snowflake for marriage? We've already covered this. But I'll add: because marriage=/=wedding, you can perfectly well register your partnership with the state without going for any traditionalist trappings. Or (see 3) spending a lot of money.

6. "You've got a life and friends that you are happy with." The charming implication is that if you're in a relationship, it's because you're a loser. But there probably is some truth to the idea that if "you have 500 friends to call," you can give or take being in a romantic relationship, and that this will give potential partners a certain message about how much you'd need them in your life. Too much "need" is never good, and zero friends, zero going out, means you're not meeting people. But no "need" at all sends an I'd-rather-be-single message. Which is great if you do indeed want to be single. But it's not unheard of for a woman - or a man, but usually a woman - with a hyperactive social life to complain about being single. Sometimes these complaints are from the would-rather-be-singles, who feel social pressure to pretend otherwise. Sometimes not. 

7. "Monogamy just doesn't work for you." Yes, that's a good reason not to make a monogamous commitment. Savage, of course, would say that you can totally get married, as long as you're open about your tendencies. But given how many people are unexcited about monogamy until meeting someone they want to be monogamous with, this advice seems sound.

8. "You are sexually liberated." This one is also reasonable, if also phrased in unnecessarily insulting-to-the-coupled terms. It is irritating that a woman's desire for a dude/dudes is always interpreted as being the desire for a boyfriend or husband - sometimes a woman wants a dude for... other purposes. If you're at that stage of your life, or if that's just you, that is a fantastic reason not to get married.

9. "[Y]ou are dealing with your shit and getting ready to be in a serious long-term relationship." Good thinking.

10. "You legitimately just don't want to get married." Then don't! The justifications, though, are a whirl of snowflake nonsense: 

In fact, the idea of a wedding dress makes you break out into hives and you don't want a blood diamond, you think forever is bullshit and you have no interest in feeding into the romantic industrial complex. You have a hard time reconciling your politics with what you see as a deeply problematic institution. (Or, you're just an atheist.) 

Since when do you need to wear a wedding dress, a "blood diamond" or for that matter any diamond, or believe in a higher power, in order to get married? You can wear a burlap sack to City Hall, use a rubber band (or nothing at all!) as a ring, and ask for a moment of silence for Christopher Hitchens at your reception if you so choose.

In vain

-Life imitated art. Thick, lustrous hair is just very important to some people.

-Rachel Hills has a cool series about how to be a feminist, get married, do things you are in fact comfortable with as a feminist, but not get too bogged down by what it all means. Seems she and I agree re: fauxbivalence. The way to approach the issue, the more I think about it, is not to care what others think, in life, perhaps, but in this arena especially. Wedding-itself-wise, you will be judged for the things you do that are "traditional," as well as those that are not. You will also be judged for marrying at all, but you'd also have been judged for not making a relationship official, or for not being in a relationship at all. The real issue, as it looks like Rachel's about to get to in another post, is that women are always the ones being judged here. Kind of like that whole thing about employers frowning on massive diamond engagement rings, when of course the men who purchased said rings are in no way penalized professionally, because who would know?

-It still fails to make sense to me how unpaid internships ever make sense. Jobs, like the kind where you get paid, are educational. You always learn a mix of stuff specific to the line of work, Life Lessons about how to deal with people whose role in life is not to help you make it or enjoy yourself or whatever, and - and this is so key - about the importance of putting up with X in exchange for having the financial freedom/responsibility that comes with a paycheck. If you take away that last bit, the whole set-up doesn't add up. I mean, if you're fed, clothed, and housed, presumably money is coming from somewhere. It's not some oh-so-special reward you get at 45 and no younger to get compensated for your work.

-Isn't "'I’m twenty-five almost, but people think I’m eighteen'" the kind of thing one can't say about one's self? I mean, maybe she does look 18, it's unclear from the photo, but I'm not sure what the tragedy is of admitting that one both is and appears 25. I look and am 28, and I can buy wine (if I can make it into town, so this is largely theoretical) without ID. It's not so terrible. But yay putting expensive French chemical-water on your face?

-My favorite thing about my new life in Euphemistic New Jersey, other than the library access, oh and the free tennis lessons, is the dining hall, which is hauter than I'd even expected. Oh, and the coffee-cookie hour. My least favorite, other than the inaccessibility of grocery-shopping, of things beyond where I can walk-or-bike, or if I want to go somewhere with Jo, things beyond where we can walk, since he's still looking for a bike, and a car will eventually solve this, is the ubiquity (not in the dining hall! just outside, on the campus!) of dead frogs. They bring back bad memories of the year I both looked and was 14, when I "dissected" one, which is to say my (female - this was not a gender thing) lab partner did.

Fauxbivalence for job-hunters

Wish I'd seen this Historiann post before posting below. To summarize: A woman who "works for a non-profit that helps African women and children suffering from the effects of the conflict diamond trade" frowns upon interviewees who show up with diamond engagement rings. Other employers also look askance at such rings when interviewing candidates. Historiann, responding to the Huffington Post item, remains unconvinced that women who wear massive diamond engagement rings should be considered a protected class, classifies this as a First World Problem and then some, and notes that rings can (typically, although in this hot weather...) be removed. Others point out that men who buy said rings get off scott-free. A few different issues come up, and are somewhat conflated: the ethics of diamonds, the advisability of walking around with something that at the very least looks like an expensive gift from a man, and the right of women to reveal their relationship/marital status without fearing discrimination.

This specific case, however, is an easy one. It is, as one of Historiann's commenters and others note, like showing up for an interview with PETA in a fur coat. Even if the coat is fake or vintage, you might want to opt for cotton. And it doesn't even have to be that specific - unless you're applying for a very high-up position, or to work in a dabbler field, in which your employer will consider it a plus that you're totally OK with making $10k a year because your trust fund will cover the rest and then some, you probably do want to strike a balance between neatness/formality and modesty. Like maybe the Chanel handbag stays at home. And if you're looking for minimum-wage work, you might consider at least turning an especially big ring around.

But when it comes to employers that are neither supermarkets nor anti-blood-diamond non-profits, it seems nuts that a ring, however shine-ormous, would be held against someone in an interview. I mean, who knows the full story behind it? Maybe it's fake (and thus inoffensive for labor and expensive-gift reasons). Maybe it was an heirloom (same). Maybe the other fiancée/spouse is also woman (as in, now that same-sex marriage is not only a social fact across the country, but legal in several states as well as countries, including one bordering our own, ring=/=heterosexual privilege, and it would be a whole new level of ridiculous if we started to get hetero employers rejecting married gay applicants for "flaunting" their heteronormativity). Maybe some men/women for whatever reason want to give their girlfriends enormous engagement rings, people who can't necessarily comfortably afford said rings, and the women who receive them, moved by the sentimentality of the gesture (even if they'd have been happy with something much simpler or nothing at all) opt to accept and wear it, and to save their OMG-do-you-know-where-this-came-from outrage for iPhones or clothes from Zara.

Or maybe the woman wearing it wanted desperately for her dude to buy it for her, and when he did was thrilled, because she didn't know she was supposed to hem and haw about what it all means. As is often the case, I'm fully on board with Flavia's contribution to the discussion - knowing that you're supposed to seem ambivalent about the trappings of heteronormative femininity is itself a form of privilege. And this isn't some patronizing point along the lines of, 'those poor souls who never took a Gender Studies class don't know about feminism.' Some women from all walks of life are genuinely uncomfortable with gendered expectations. But it's only in this one subset of society that women who are totally comfortable with conventional femininity for themselves think they need to claim otherwise.

It's not inconceivable that, within certain contexts, a conventional-wrt-mainstream-society woman would be marginalized. It's like the call Dan Savage recently fielded from a woman whose friends are all more sexually adventurous (more complicated than that, but trying to keep things in the PG-R range) than she is, who bully her about being clearly in denial because she claims to be happy in her monogamous relationship with a dude. If you're marginalized in a situation from which you can't easily escape, it's of little comfort that in society at large, you'd get along just dandy. (This may have applications re: the question of whether it's possible to be discriminated against for not having enough of a tan. The subcultures that are big on fauxbivalence tend also to roll their eyes at artificially-dark skin.)

And... yes, it's an equality issue. Fine, in this one case, the ring-haver was rejected out of feminist principles and working conditions and all these great progressive ideals. (Tangent: is it the feminist way not to hire someone who wears a burqa or headscarf, because after all these can be removed and one can still be a Muslim without wearing one? A variant of this. Oh, and I now see, a counterargument that surfaced in the original thread.) But think about how this would normally go, under what circumstances The Shiny would be held against a woman in an interview. Isn't it far more likely that the ring-then-no-hire would be about an employer thinking that this woman has or is going to have babies and quit to become a SAHM (or stay and be a lousy worker) shortly after getting hired?

If the assumption is, big ring means rich man, engagement-ring-only means life stage at which kids are soon to happen, these women will be in more or less the same situation as the college kid home for the summer, looking for work, who comes across as UMC, who puts as his comfortable-sounding home address on applications, and who, it's suspected or known, will be gone again come the fall. And... just as that kid seeks a job to gain financial independence, not to put food on the table, the Suspected Wife of Man with Good Job perhaps only needs the job insofar as she needs not to depend financially on her husband.

When it comes to college students, it's maybe not worth losing sleep over, but with women, this is, last I checked, a pretty fundamental feminist issue. I don't remember reading in the Feminist Handbook that women have the right to earn a living, except if they're married to men who earn enough to support a family, in which case they should save the jobs for those who really need them and take up a hobby instead. I do remember reading in that handbook that the dynamics in a marriage are generally more equitable if both spouses work outside the home, and that marriages sometimes end in divorce, an upsetting outcome made all the more so if the wife hasn't worked in 20 years.