Barcelona market value UPDATED

Whenever I read a real-life account of romantic-comedy style pursuit, I can only hope that what I'm look at is a revisionist history of the early days of the relationship. That is, one that casts the man as the stubborn suitor, the woman as the gorgeous-but-passive object of his affections, rejecting his romantic advances until finally deciding to give the guy a chance. This is the most generous way to read such narratives. If you take them literally, they're at best objectifying (in that one-sided, woman-as-object way) and at worst borderline frightening. But if you read them as partial truths - presumably the man would have shown some interest along the way - they make more sense. For whatever reason, it's seen as insulting to a woman to speak of her relationship as having emerged from mutual attraction.

That is, at any rate, the best I was able to come up with re: UPDATE Arthur (thank you commenter Peter!) Brooks's op-ed intro here:

She was 25. I was 24. We spent only a couple of days together and shared no language in common. But when I returned to the United States from that European music festival, I announced to my parents that I had met my future wife. 

Of course, I had to convince Ester first. So I tackled the project as if it were a start-up. I began by studying Spanish. Before long, I’d quit my job and moved to her native Barcelona — where I knew no one except her — in hot pursuit. The market pressure was intense: Men would shout wedding proposals to her from moving cars. But I pressed on, undeterred. It took two years to close the deal, but she finally said yes, and we married.

As some of the commenters to the piece gently mention, what he's describing sounds like stalking. But I doubt that's it - I think it's about the narrative. A lot is left out - did he move to Barcelona for a woman he found attractive, or for one he'd already formed an intense relationship with (i.e. Ethan Hawke would play him, Julie Delpy her, in the movie version)? Were two years spent chasing her down, proposing daily, or, you know, dating her, during which time they probably both realized they were serious about each other, even if he's the one who eventually proposed? 

Then, of course, there's the rest of the op-ed, which is about how everyone needs to put down the smartphone and live in the moment (generic if sound advice), but also how one should apply the principles of entrepreneurship to romance. But I don't think the advice is aimed at women, entrepreneurial or otherwise: "This Valentine’s Day, don’t be a risk-averse wimp. Be bold. Treat love as if it were a start-up that will change the world. When you find your target, focus mindfully, and push through the fear." No one would ever refer to a man a woman was interested in, but who had yet to reciprocate, a "target." I might go so far as to say that no one of any gender should be referring to love interests as targets.

The narrative is meant to flatter women. Maybe some find it flattering. I can't decide whether I find it more creepy, patronizing, or silly, but I guess I'm not its target audience. 

At the end of the piece, in a final shout-out to outrage-prone feminists (and I'm including people who became thus halfway into his piece), he adds, of his pursuit: "Believe me, it’s worth it. After 23 years of marriage and three kids, men still shout to my wife from cars when we visit Barcelona." A marriage, you see, is a success if your wife doesn't let herself go, and if she continues to be catcalled in middle age.

Articles of the hot and humid day

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

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

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

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

"She looked like a ninny, dressed by rote, wearing what she thought made her look feminine rather than what suited her body and her job."

Behold: a man telling a woman not to dress for men. Jean Touitou, founder of the expensive French denim-and-more company A.P.C., thinks intelligent women who aren't dressed to his liking look like idiots... and somehow presents this as if it were a feminist observation. Women, he claims, dress in ways that "emphasise body parts that call out to men's sexual desire," which is wrong, he explains, because "these so-called sexy clothes are often hideous." Hideous... to him. And why on earth does she care what he thinks?

Women should dress for themselves, and eventually for other women, and only then maybe also for a handful of men. But they must step out of this outrageously sexed-up hell of signifiers; if they don't, this junk will make them lose their self-respect. 

Does he not see the irony? A man saying that women shouldn't dress for men? Or is he including himself in the "handful of men" women might aim to please? "I advocate understatement," he writes, which... I get that his business is selling gamine-menswear clothes, but is this some kind of political position? Does the Guardian want some kind of feminist hear-hear? If so, I'm afraid I won't oblige.

"Good quality children's literature"

-In principle, I'd like to be the sort of person who'd enjoy having lunch of roasted cubed acorn squash with arugula and farro, garnished with roasted seeds from said squash. (How frugal! How non-wasteful!) I'd like to be that person. But I'm not. Something about a lunch along these lines - its vegan-ness, or its absence of refined carbohydrates - made it feel like something that might go with lunch, but not be lunch. It tasted fine, but it was just sort of sad. It looked stunning, like something The Selby would photograph. Aesthetically, it worked. Nutritionally... I suppose it did, and that a grown woman with some modicum of vanity ought to enjoy something like this. But all I could think was how much better this meal might have been with a pasta-and-cheese component. Or something. It's not that I'm not someone who doesn't think it's a meal unless there's some meat, at least I don't think I am. But Nigella Lawson's chicken is now in the oven, and not a moment too soon.

-The latest in viral mommy-blogging controversy: a guide instructing non-parents what to buy or not as gifts for the children of friends and relatives. It's a pretty incredible piece of writing - intended for an audience, if not as large or critical an audience as it's received - in that it hits every possible hot-button note without the author's ever seeming aware of precisely why people are annoyed, this despite her active presence in the comments. Starting with her assessment of the two possible reasons someone might not have children: "Maybe it's because you haven't had them yet but plan to or maybe you like them when they belong to someone else but don't actually want your own." Or maybe... Where oh where to begin. (Fertility? Financial constraints? Not having found a viable partner nor wanting to be a single parent? Any number of personal reasons someone might not have shared with you, because they're none of your business? Gah!)

But then there's the premise itself - that rather than being unexpectedly surprised when random people who are not your children's parents buy them gifts, parents should feel entitled to this, and in a position to curate before the fact. There might have been a way to provide the same 'service' here - because it is baffling, to me at least, what to buy for young children, especially since moving away from Park Slope, where there was always a store within a few feet that specialized in this very shopping conundrum - that didn't involve chastising people for having the nerve to buy the wrong thing.

The list also demands a kind of hilarious time commitment on the part of someone whose children these are not. One is instructed to purchase "[g]ood quality children's literature," described as follows: "Go for award winners, classics or current bestsellers. Read it 6 times in a row and see if you still like it. Remember that we're going to be reading these books over and over and OVER again, so make them ones that every age will like." Time and pedagogical training that people simply don't have. And the suggestion that as a gift, you take someone's children "to a movie, or a museum, or an amusement park" is quite possibly why the word chutzpah was invented.

No overshare, though. Elsewhere on the same blog, yes, including the dreaded bath-and-potty realm, but not in the post I've linked to.

On Jewish women's miraculous capacity for asexual reproduction

David Schraub just alerted me to Rabbi Elianna Yolkut's op-ed, which is a response to Dennis Prager's, which is, in turn, a somewhat fish-in-a-barrel, stunningly out-of-date article blaming Jewish women (and decadent university life) for what Prager sees as an insufficient number of Jewish babies. What with WWPD's longstanding but underutilized "Jewish babies" tag, I must weigh in.

Anyway, the glaring problem with Prager's article, which Yolkut points out, is that he doesn't seem to realize that it takes two to tango, and by "tango" I mean produce a baby of the Jewish persuasion. Not necessarily two Jews, given that any child a Jewish woman gives birth to emerges in full Hasidic garb. But human reproduction being what it is, Jewish babies don't come from cultivating the tree clippings of a particularly fertile Jewish woman. That men also somehow enter into baby-making and baby-raising might seem relevant. Indeed, if the idea is that a Jewish woman can bear a child without having intercourse or otherwise involving male reproductive materials, I think we're looking at a festive December 25th chez Prager.

Prager blames fancy schmancy educated women for not wanting to be housewives, as if it's 1970 or who knows, and as if there are great numbers of men who want women with no outside income or ambitions. It's a big jumble of beyond-stale, beyond-refuted arguments about career gals and their wanton ways. But he does make one interesting, highly original point: female fertility declines with age. We women had never heard this before, so it's good he brought our attention to it.

Yolkut, meanwhile, gets it right:

We women are not our wombs. We contribute more than just children to the dilemma of Jewish continuity and growth. We are rabbis and teachers, we are synagogue presidents and we are the breadwinners and the primary volunteers.

And!

Mr. Prager, you want more Jews in the world? Stop chiding women for not having more children, and start finding ways to offer reasonable, paid and significant family leave in all Jewish communal organizations. Start working to find a solution to funding day schools and synagogues that are out of reach for so many. Try helping the rabbinical establishment figure out how to educate dynamic and engaging new leaders so they might draw more people close to Torah. But take your hands off women’s bodies. They do not belong to you, and neither do their sharp, thoughtful and complex minds.

Precisely. There are other conclusions one might draw - that we shouldn't be in the business of systematically influencing the number of X babies by any means, for example. But as an observant-Jewish refutation, it's spot-on.

Dissertation Pasta-gate

So a visiting prof at NYU, at the intersection of business and psychology and so not someone I'd ever heard of, tweeted the following: "Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn't have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won't have the willpower to do a dissertation #truth". This tweet has caused the internet to explode. It's unclear to me whether he meant applicants to the University of New Mexico, where he's otherwise a professor, or to NYU, although it's a safe bet he wants slender grad students nationwide.

In any case, I join the chorus: what the what? What is this man even talking about? It's offensive, yes, "fat-shaming," sure, and no doubt upsetting to many heavier academics. It probably does necessitate a bit of a dig into dude's role in admitting students - are ones he OK'd especially svelte?

It's problematic, then, but it's also bizarre. What would one thing have to do with the other? It's not like writing a dissertation is some kind of athletic feat for which physical condition would be relevant, and then there could be some kind of conversation about whether or not it's fat-shaming to suggest that those who weigh 600-plus pounds are unlikely to win triathlons. (I'm so far from doing so myself that I don't have any idea how those who win them are built.) It's not like PhD students are some caste akin to supermodels, known for our ability to meet narrow aesthetic specifications. To write a dissertation is to sit on your couch in your pajamas. There's no particular size requirement for that.

Anyway, a NYMag commenter has the winning response:

Technically, he isn't fat-shaming. Being on the Atkins Diet on a grad student salary in NY requires not only willpower, but the ability to create a budget and possibly write grant applications so as to fund your steak and salmon-filet habit.

Indeed. What's grad school without pasta? Without bagels, ramen, or rice? And pizza! And free bread and cheese at receptions! Grad students who stopped eating carbs would stop eating, and stop dissertating as well.

Out of one's comfort zone

The latest teacher to fancy himself Robin "Dead Poets Society" Williams is one in Albany who asked students to think outside the box (heh) and explain, from the perspective of a Nazi, why Jews are evil. (Via.) Because doesn't it just make you think? Aren't a bunch of bourgeois panties in a twist? Because that, you see, is the purpose of teaching - making students and their stuffy parents (never hip, like the teacher) uncomfortable. Obviously - and I say this as a sometimes-teacher - most teachers don't think like that. But, as a former high school student, I must say that a certain number do. Apart from truly evil (molestation) and incompetent (not showing up; conducting class by silently copying the textbook onto the blackboard; spending all of class telling off-topic personal anecdotes) behavior, this is my least favorite pedagogical approach. Proper teaching should itself be enough to give students a new perspective. But that sort of me-vs.-your-presumed-naivete attitude is irritating at best, and cultish at worst.

Anyway, what's challenging about this story is that once one gets past one's initial reaction (as a friend of mine put it on Facebook, and it couldn't be put better: "WTF?"), one is left trying to pin down exactly why this crossed a line. Because it wasn't that the teacher tried to demonstrate that Nazis were humans, not monsters. After all, 'why did Nazis/so many other otherwise ordinary people throughout history hate Jews?' is a valid question to ask. Much serious research is done on this topic, little of it by Nazi sympathizers. Lots by Jewish scholars. Historians and others will not ask why some essential They hated The Jews, but rather why a specific time and place was conducive to anti-Semitism.

But the factors tended to have little to do with real-life Jews. The ancient Hebrews are rather significant in Christianity, but Jews have tended to be a tiny minority if present at all in the West. And then of course there was the question of which Jews, if any, Gentiles had contact with. If we're talking mid-19th C France... financiers, prostitutes, yes. Village-dwelling peddlers, not so much. This led to a warped perspective. Point being, the question isn't 'what's so dreadful about Jews, now and always?' but rather 'how did Jews come to symbolize materialism, urbanization, secularism, or whatever else anti-Semitism functioned as at a given moment?' So the teacher's demand doesn't even make sense as a history lesson.

So that's one problem with the assignment - Nazi anti-Semitism was not some kind of rational response to Jewish misdeeds. Nice touch, btw, that the teacher asked students to look to their own lives for examples of... Jews' evilness? Anti-Semitism? Unclear.

But the bigger problem is hello, these are high school students. They're not history grad students being trained to teach courses on anti-Semitism. They don't need to really, intensely get what a midcentury anti-Semite would have had against Jews. They don't need to learn about racist strains of romanticism, about nostalgia for an agrarian past. (Not that this assignment would make sense for grad students, either - see above.) Since when isn't it enough to tell high school kids that Nazism was a racist ideology, to give whichever standard and not inaccurate explanations depending the level of the students (economic resentment ignoring the existence of poor Jews, longstanding religious intolerance, various factors unrelated to Jews making fascism appealing to many at that time)? And if one wishes to make the point that Nazis were ordinary citizens, one might bring up the "banality of evil" argument, toss Arendt's name onto the board, and be done with it. Students can - will! - make the leap on their own and realize that if they'd been "Aryan" in Nazi Germany, chances are they wouldn't have done the right thing, either.

Insisting they write essays on Jews' horribleness is... well, it reminds me of when they bring in a former bulimic to warn teen girls, and then half the class is like, 'huh, you can throw up after meals to lose weight?', and a quarter of the class goes and does just that. Americans in 2013 aren't giving all that much thought to Jews either way, so this is a case of dumb-idea-planting.

And yeah, Jewish students may have been in the class. (To quote my friend once more: "WTF?") There's a scene in Arnon Grunberg's The Jewish Messiah, a Dutch (translated!) novel I read recently, in which a young Jewish character readily agrees with a postwar Nazi sympathizer that the world would have been better had he - and all other Jews - never been born. This in the context of a truly out-there novel about postwar Europe confronting that era, one whose title character is - spoiler alert, nausea alert - a testicle in a jar. But back on earth, kids - adults! - tend not to dispassionately ponder their own extermination. An assignment that would remove all students (save whichever budding neo-Nazis?) from their comfort zone would be altogether traumatic, even incomprehensible, for Jewish kids. It's not a lesson the entire class would be able to complete.

Weekend excitement

From the newspaper:

-The awfulness of Penn Station is difficult to convey, but Lawrence Downes has done a fine job of it.

-One step forward, two steps back: parents are urged to tone down their bragging about their kids... and to do so by adding caveats, ala, "My son is on the honor roll (but still wets his bed)."

-When does a civil-rights issue get classified as "Styles"? When the rights-seekers in question are gay and French.

From the Whole Foods:

From my spam folder:

-"No risk Natalie Portman." Is there any other kind?

OK, so maybe I don't get fashion

Short of donating to an objectionable individual or cause, this - a clutch, which is always ridiculous, a bag without a strap or handle, and in a hideous, unclassifiable color that would be impossible to coordinate with anything, and no, I don't mean match, just coordinate - is easily the worst use possible for $16,750.

Equal-opportunity romance

Amber brings our attention - and Dan Savage brought our attention - to a post by Jos about why women who say they only date women or transgender men (for my stodgier readers, this means men who were born female) are a problem.

Jos makes two arguments. One is something barely comprehensible about how women with this preference are afraid of "trauma" (rape? the idea of rape? catcalls? the abstract patriarchy?) coming from The Phallus. Convoluted and obtuse.

The other, which is more straightforward, is that it's offensive (as in, basic manners, not simply a violation of PC) to imply that trans men are any less male than their biologically-male (cis, for my less stodgy readers) counterparts. Which it is. But does that mean everyone who dates trans men must also date cis men?

This is a sensitive topic not only because of the typically-assumed and true-in-nearly-but-not-all-cases relationship between sex-at-birth, current genitalia and gender, but also because not all trans people who wish to do so "pass" as the sex with which they now identify. So even in an ideal world of sensitive pronoun usage - which, it should be noted, we don't live in - some who are trans would continue to be referred to with the incorrect ones by acquaintances who didn't have the full scoop, and who, however apologetic the might be afterward, may have brought out whichever anxieties. (A policy of calling every narrow-shouldered, small-boned, short-haired, bare-faced individual "he" is going to end up offending a lot of women, who are no less women for not handing over X% of their paychecks to Sephora.)

On the surface, this seems like an incredibly complex and touchy issue. Is it OK for women who identify as "queer" (as vs. "lesbian") to date cis women and trans men but not cis men (what about trans women?) as though it's somehow "queer" to date someone who's changed sex? Doesn't this depend on how the trans man in question identifies - i.e., as someone who's transcended the stifling limitations of gender labels and wishes to remain active in the "queer" community, or, conversely, as a boring ol' straight dude who happened to be born in a woman's body and just wants to be done with it once and for all? Is a woman with a preference for masculine-looking individuals with female genitalia, who uses pronouns impeccably but who perhaps ultimately, in her heart of hearts, doesn't see a huge difference between a very masculine-presenting woman and a trans man who hasn't undergone much in the way of reassignment, in part because some of the people she's dated have been both, perhaps in the course of their relationships... is such a woman a bigot for subconsciously denying the female-ness of very masculine women and the maleness of the male-identified androgynous, and if so, what can she do about it? And what on earth would yours truly, a straight, cis woman, have to contribute to such a complicated discussion?

In fact, while these issues are certainly complex, the issue at hand isn't all that complicated, nor does it require any particular knowledge of gender theory, correct terminology (which doesn't hurt to know regardless), etc.:


When it comes to choosing partners for romantic relationships - which is a euphemistic way of saying relationships with a sexual component, without specifying which acts, if any, are taking place or might soon - there's no such thing as bigotry. By this I mean, if you wish to date only men or only women, or only Thai men and Finnish women, or only those with a certain set of anatomy, and that's that, so it goes. 

And there's no other way it could go, because we-as-a-society deem it wrong to force someone to be romantically involved with someone against their will. If you feel that all someones who meet whichever criteria are not ever ever ever of romantic interest to you, there's no ethical way for someone or some entity to intervene and ask that you become an equal-opportunity dater. It's fundamentally not like hiring someone, or running a country club, because of just how wrong we believe it is for someone to be forced into a romantic situation with someone they don't see in that way. Society impacts individual romantic preferences, but individual romantic choices simply aren't the arena in which justice in terms of beauty standards and the like is to be achieved.

Happily, society influences but doesn't determine desire, allowing the vast majority of people not attractive/conventional-looking enough to ever in a million years get paid for their looks to experience, at least at some point in their lives, a choice between multiple interested parties. But it's certainly possible to have preferences that are self-defeating, as the plain-looking, low-earning men who'd only be happy with a swimsuit model can attest. But dude doesn't owe dates to the women of the world who aren't swimsuit models, and is in fact doing them a disservice if he dates them out of the principle of the thing.

Now, what can be offensive is how one voices one's preferences. This is especially the case if you have preferences that happen to line up with something likely to hit a nerve. It's one thing to only date six-foot-five blue-eyed blonds (a pattern your friends may pick up on, or not, if you live in the Netherlands), another entirely to announce that you 'only date Nordic types.' One to only date those 30 years your junior (assuming you're at least 48), another to announce your unwillingness to date anyone closer to or above your own age. Along the same lines, evidently, it's one thing to only date cis women and trans men, another to make that preference known.

But what if you want your friends to help steer you to the right people? What if you're constantly being set up with the wrong ones - wrong for you, that is - and don't want to waste anyone's time? To stick with the original example, given that the vast majority of men were not born female, if those who were are the only ones you date, but you identify merely as "bisexual," you're... I suppose functionally not so different from someone who lives in a place with very few Syrian Jews, but will only date a Syrian Jew, but thinks her friends will find her closed-minded and so defines her romantic interest as "guys." Technically true, and enough information in many situations, but not an efficient way of finding a partner.

Where offensiveness really enters into it is less in what the preferences may be (because as much as society influences desire, there somehow ends up almost being someone out there who likes everything) than in their presentation. If you present your subjective preference as a universal, as in, 'only X are attractive,' this is offensive even if your preference is something as seemingly inoffensive and fixed as, say, preferring men to women romantically. If you hold forth on what screeching nags women are, then you've turned an otherwise innocuous announcement - that you're a straight woman or gay man - into something objectionable. Along the same lines, if a woman announces that she dates only women and trans men, and does so in such a way as to imply that these two groups are part of one category, if she elaborates that trans men are OK in her book because she doesn't think dating them makes her any less a lesbian, then this, yes, would be a problem.

At least I'm not dressed like Napoleon

Thank you, NYT, for tossing this WWPD-bait in my direction. Because my current environs don't lend themselves to roaming around Broadway and 85th Street with a dozen overloaded Zabars bags, wearing Naot sandals and mismatched socks, railing about the government, if I wish to be that kind of crazy*, my best bet is becoming one of those people who send letters to newspapers. The fact that this particular item was accompanied by an explicit "Invitation to a Dialogue" from the paper made this irresistible. When they don't print what I've sent in (although I was concise, so they might), expect the concise response, as well as my full, no, copious thoughts on the subject, here.

*Eccentricity enhanced, I might add, by the fact that my husband's away for a couple weeks, leaving me (for the most part) in in-person communication only with a poodle. My work, which can but probably shouldn't be completed from home, involves wrapping up a dissertation chapter on Napoleon. If that's not a recipe for furious letter-writing to newspapers, I don't know what is.

Making sandwiches, obvs

Sometimes, a college freshman whose far-right conservatism has not yet been honed into something palatable to mainstream audiences - or who's more contrarian than conservative - will decide that the entire campus wants to hear what he (always he) thinks about the world. Somewhere at the intersection of naive and overconfident (forgivable, for a smart kid used to being a Big Deal in high school) lies a certain type of right-wing writing by the very young. This is by no means what all young conservatives write, and it's not that there aren't left-wing variants. But it's this certain way of not hearing the tone of one's own voice, of mistaking misogyny and racism for courageous anti-PC argumentation. Of thinking, 'Hey, what if I were to say that women aren't as good as men! Now wouldn't that get everyone riled up! It must be that I'm hitting a nerve! Yes, an affirmative-action bake sale sounds like a wonderful idea!'

What's baffling, then, is that James Poulos is not a college freshman. How, given that he's not 17 or 18 and about to get some real-world 'splainin' from a barely-more-informed 19-year-old opinion editor, do we explain the existence of his article, "What Are Women For?," which positively drips of that genre? What, then, are we to make of his response to his critics, one that begins with the cringe-inducing assertion, "The wave of anger and condemnation that has come from some quarters is dramatic evidence that the column’s central contention is right"? I won't generalize from this essay's example and claim it gives us insights into what men are for, but it sure gives me flashbacks to my days as "Viewpoints" editor at the college paper. 

The problem begins with the headline, which is not merely a provocative title chosen perhaps by his editors, but within - and indeed, the gist of - the piece itself. If Poulos had simply asked, "What is gender for?," and concluded that its purpose is for men to invent things, for women to scrub toilets, division of labor and all that, no one would have cared. I mean, no one would have read it. The content is the usual conserva-rant something-or-other, much 'The Liberals are like so' without much substantiation. (For example, was the liberal response to Cynthia Nixon's "choice" quote unsympathetic? Not entirely.) Just... opaque, in a way that really reminds me of those "Viewpoints" days. We are, alas, living in a uniquely decadent age, hell, handbasket, wimmin, etc., etc., except he doesn't spell it out, but that's what's between the lines. If it weren't for the title, the bloggers Ned Resnikoff mentions wouldn't have linked to it, I wouldn't have found it via his blog, and so on.

But Poulos instead asked what women are for, and that question is a mess whatever the conclusion, even if the conclusion were more Grrl Power and less June Cleaver. It takes as a starting point that male is normal, default, while female is different, Other, etc. The mindset that speaks of on the one hand lawyers, and on the other, women lawyers or, for bonus reactionary points, girl lawyers. Even if whatever Poulos was driving at (and more on that in a moment) was all kinds of wonderful, the set-up is so bad that one simply must read on.

The concept is a problem not merely because it's unapologetically (proudly, mistaking-contrarianism-for-insightfulness-ly) sexist, but also because it completely misses that the place of men in American society today is plenty up for discussion. It's something conservatives are even quite worked up about. What is masculinity? What is fatherhood? Why have men, anyway? Do we even need 'em anymore? Even for super-duper-conservatives, gender is not and long hasn't been a "woman" question.

But Poulos begins, all high-culture-like, "In a simpler time Sigmund Freud struggled to understand what women want. Today the significant battle is over what women are for." But it isn't. If anything, the culture wars have for some time now been about men. It's no longer up for debate whether it's a good thing that women work outside the home. The question is whether men are also gainfully employed, or prepared to be stay-at-home dads. To even claim to be discussing "gender" by looking at the role of women - and from the assumption that men are currently involved in Great Work - suggests such a complete aloofness from the broader conversation that, again, it's hard to believe we're reading an established-ish conservative opinion writer.

The conclusion Poulos arrives at is, I suppose, anti-PC and contrarian for insisting on an essentialized womanhood, although it's not entirely clear what the point might be. We have two options: celebrate his courage for saying what virtually no one thinks anymore (because it's wrong; bring on the contrarians who think the earth is flat), or get into a feminist huff and prove his point by not agreeing with him. (I can think of certain advantages to having that level of confidence, but certain disadvantages as well.)

I will instead take a third route, let's call it a textual analysis approach. What is his argument? What, class, do we make of this passage?

Ironically, one of the best places to look for a way out of the impasse is the strain of left feminism that insists an inherently unique female “voice” actually exists. That’s a claim about nature. Much good would come from a broader recognition that women have a privileged relationship with the natural world. That’s a relationship which must receive its social due — if masculinity in its inherent and imitative varieties (including imitation by quasi-feminized males of quasi-masculinized females!) is not to conquer the world.

-"Ironically," OK, with him so far - it's ironic that the author of a conserva-rant is directing readers to liberals, feminists.

-What "strain," though, is he referring to? Specific authors? Publications? Scholars? Activists? Maybe such a "strain" exists, but the wording is such that one is meant to understand that if only one were informed, were in the know, the relevant authors and school would be obvious. It's not obvious to me.

-Poulos's message is that social decay comes down to our refusal to acknowledge that "women have a privileged relationship with the natural world." Sounds serious! But what on earth does this mean. Women are more 'earthy'? Women require Tampax? Women enjoy the natural bacteria found in yogurt? Women shun artifice? Women prefer to live in the country? Unclear, or more likely, intentionally opaque and ambiguous. It's a way of saying 'wimmin makes the babies' but sounding sophisticated. I think. It's my best guess, but I'm too busy rolling around in the mud to be sure. (OK, from his follow-up - "Relative to men, women have a naturally privileged relationship with the process of creating and recreating human life." - this assumption is confirmed, although that doesn't change its absence from the original article.) So let's proceed to the next sentence.

-What the "social due" bit is, my best guess is, if we are to assume "nature"=baby-making, Poulos wants society-or-the-government to limit contraception-and-or-abortion-and-or-choices-women-might-make-that-don't-involve-being-pregnant-whenever-possible. Maybe? Or to celebrate fecundity? Which means what, in policy or even abstract terms? It's tough to argue against Poulos's demand that women be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, because if that's the best possible interpretation of what he might be driving at, it's not spelled out.

From the response-to-critics installment, I think Poulos is being courageous and telling it like it is by letting us know that women, and not men, are capable of giving birth. In which case perhaps I had it all wrong - this isn't Contrarian College Freshman, it's incredulous seventh grader after first day of health class.

But it isn't. What it is is a demand for what either are or are not incredibly frightening policy changes directed at embracing the female reproductive capacity. The opacity is meant to read as Thoughtful Conservative, but is ultimately more unsettling than if there were an actual agenda, actually spelled out.

Out-of-context quote of the day

"Father Landry aimed his cellphone camera at one of the men and 'snapped a photo of his derriere,' he said. 'Because it’s exactly what I’m trying to do.'"

The 'ship has sailed UPDATED

Every so often, we must remember the unpaid interns. Accustomed to working for no pay as students (albeit working for themselves), it's an easy leap to working for no pay to benefit an organization. Accustomed to coming out behind financially (it's increasingly difficult for full-time students with jobs on the side to pay for their own tuition and living expenses, and extra good luck to kids who want to do this but whose FAFSA indicates well-off parents), what's one more setback? What I wrote in 2006, consider it repeated. Again.

While there are all kinds of fairness issues, legal issues, and so on, it would seem that an obvious problem with the unpaid internship is that it claims to be a "learning experience" in a way that a regular job presumably is not, when one of the most important workplace skills, if not the most important, is the money part. It's how to budget your paycheck. It's how to factor in what a job (or career path) pays when deciding if you want to pursue it. It's trying to get a raise or - more relevant for the college-student employee - negotiating to get paid at all by a boss who knows perfectly well you'd be easy enough to exploit, and that you don't need-need the money the way a 40-year-old does, or do but don't know how to complain, and won't make a fuss. It's your welcome into the grown-up world of bureaucracy and keeping tax forms in the right file folders. It's knowing that if you want to spend $3 of those $10 you earned that past hour on a happy-hour beer, that's your call, and you don't have to ask permission.

The whole unpaid thing, meanwhile, doesn't merely neglect to teach skills about money and the workplace. It ends up teaching something else, namely that it's crass and getting-ahead-of-yourself to demand any pay at all for your labor. That someone would have to be incredibly entitled not to simply appreciate having been given the opportunity to interact with the office staff in the form of  making copies and fetching them coffee. It teaches that if you want to get ahead, you have to show that you love your job and aren't in it for the money, and the way to do that is to take money entirely out of the equation. Meanwhile, the tough skill to hone is how to show your commitment to your job while also standing up for yourself financially.

As for socioeconomic unfairness, the usual charge made against unpaid internships, it seems that these positions by and large lead (if they lead anywhere, which they often don't) to mostly-low-paid professions (non-profits, journalism, publishing), and/or ones that were all about wealth and connections anyway, and now it's just that more obvious early on. As to the specific question launching the debate: Are fashion internships unfair? If we were to locate the "fair" in that industry, it would extend no further than the often-also-unpaid models' complexion. If it's tough for a poor kid to start working at Vogue, it's also tough for any kid who isn't a big-name heiress. Yes, a certain number of entry-level or administrative jobs in these fields have disappeared, and yes, this is irritating to those of us who'd have been interested in such work after college, but did not see working for no pay as an option. But college students looking to enter the upper-middle class through the usual channels (law, finance, medicine, engineering) might end up with plenty of student-loan debt, but are not yet, as far as I know, part of the unpaid-coffee-fetching system. I'm not sure how much the issue we should be concerned with here is social mobility, or, conversely, how much those concerned with social mobility should worry about the existence of unpaid internships.

Of course, one danger is that unpaid internships have begun to seep into the world beyond glamorous stints in the major cities. This is both the now-notorious "internship" that involves, say, flipping burgers or throwing oil-filled rubber balls out of Jerry's apartment (or, good grief, work as a real estate broker), and, more abstractly, the extension of the idea that unpaid labor is acceptable to populations not currently taking unpaid internships. Another is the whole "two Americas" argument - it used to be something of an equalizer that all young people took crap jobs for pocket money, and now, not so much. Yet another is the whole extension-of-childhood conundrum - it's already assumed that parents who can will pay for college, which, in turn, defines "college-age" as still childhood, even if some young adults that age are financially independent. Especially once unpaid internships reach over into the recent-grad population, cue the when-will-they-ever-marry-and-settle-down complaints. If you're old enough to work, are indeed working, and your parents still pay for everything (or would if they could), that's an interesting new life stage right there.

UPDATE

I was just drawn into a Facebook back-and-forth about what I'd written in Gothamist, and someone (not sure the etiquette of linking to stuff on Facebook, so will make grammatical choices that "deny agency" as they say in academia, whoever they are) brought up a counterargument worth addressing, which I will paraphrase: What if interns provide some service to the (for-profit, for simplicity's sake) organizations where they work, but do not contribute enough to the bottom line to merit their hiring at the minimum wage? (I'm going to hazard a guess that this isn't always the case, but my interlocutor works in magazine journalism, and seems to have more first-hand experience.) If this is an apprenticeship, why can't an employer use this period as an extended job interview, and only hire those who will help the company succeed?

One answer would be that if five interns produce the work of one admin, the company should forget about the fun and glamour of having the fresh-faced and unpaid in their offices and hire one experienced but probably not even all that high-paid employee to do the job. But the problem here is that by definition, some employment will always be entry-level, untested. The apprenticeship surely has its place. One option, then, would be to have a separate, internship-specific minimum wage (which I'd think is what already exists in some capacity when an internship comes with a stipend?), such that work is acknowledged, as is the intermediary nature of this type of work.

What also came out of this exchange, and the one below in the comments, is the importance of thinking of internships in terms of where interns actually end up. Much is made, in academia, of the fact that there are more grad students than (permanent academic) jobs. If you look at the ratio of funded grad students to jobs, it's probably less dire, but still grim. But at least this is time spent with some income, with health insurance. With unpaid internships - which individually take much less time than grad programs, but which, in a field like journalism, can become a string of unpaid stints lasting for years - there's both the uncertainty about what's on the other end and the continued full reliance on parents/loans/outside jobs. It would seem that if all internships paid at least something, there'd be fewer internships, but still plenty more internships than jobs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed.

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

"Jewish" as privilege

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

I have always had many advantages. I am: 

1) White 

2) Male 

3) Jewish 

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

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

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

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

A rude Parisian waiter UPDATED

One of my fellow grad students made a truly brilliant observation: the French Paradox isn't eating cream sauces yet remaining thin and healthy. It's the fact that ATM machines distribute only 50s, while nowhere, not even supermarkets, will allow you to pay with one. Granted I get around this by taking out 40 at a time, and by doing the bulk of my spending at Monoprix (aka groceries), which for whatever reason finds cartes acceptable.

But sometimes I do want to pay for something in cash, and I'm then reunited with the French (Parisian?) obsession with exact change. No question about it, wherever you're paying, exact change will be appreciated more than a tip.

Meanwhile, as someone who does not live in Europe permanently or have a European bank account or anything, I do not have a stash in my room of the heaps and heaps of coins that would allow me to pay exact at all times. I clearly have no business being in Paris.

This evening, I met a friend - another grad student, we're everywhere! - for a drink. The total came to four euros for his beer, and a rather steep five for my glass of wine. (Steep because this is France, and, though Paris, not a touristy or upscale neighborhood.) From the get-go, the waiter at the place made it clear that he was not pleased to have to seat two Americans. Maybe my NYU tote bag was a mistake. Maybe my friend and I - he's also American - dared utter a syllable one to the other that gave off a whiff of anglais. Whatever it was, even though it was a beautiful evening, and there were available tables outside, as well as virtually all tables free inside, we were led to a table inside and in the back. I asked if outside was possible, and lo and behold it was. Similar efforts were required to see the list of wines by the glass. Through all of this, our waiter threw in just enough English words to make it clear: he was onto us.

Then came the bill. We each just had a 10, and again, we're both grad students, and with the current exchange rate, these were not exactly happy-hour drinks, so something at least close to paying for our own drinks was ideal. I asked for change. Non. By way of an explanation, our waiter opened what looked like the book from the check some other table had just paid and showed that there was only one five in it. Meanwhile, this was a reasonably large café, reasonably mid-evening. Really, no change at all?

Suspecting that some misogyny on top of the anti-Americanness might be at work, I asked my friend to give it a go when the waiter returned, and he again insisted that there was simply no change at all, not even à l'intérieur. The fact that after this, we were not planning to tip, was not an issue, not because a tip is never given in this situation (it can be, but is by no means expected), but because it was more important for the waiter to make it clear how his little neck of the woods in Paris was positively ruined by having to deal with Americans, those horrible people who not only communicate with one another English but, as residents of a country with another currency and across an ocean, do not keep massive stashes of European change in their pockets.

UPDATE

In keeping with the theme of Franco-American relations, some recent photos. By way of explanation, most are of a pro-French-language protest. Then there's graffiti that might be evidence of Jewish (like, pro-Jewish) terrorism, and possibly something to do with Freemasons, in what's Paris's non-tourist Jewish neighborhood, that is, not the Rue des Rosiers. The driving-school one is a fun double-entendre, the Vietnamese restaurant one evidence of the extent to which Anglophone hegemony has not taken over Paris. The Alsatian latkes are Alsatian latkes, and strike me - good peddler/usurer-descendent I probably am - as rather steep at nearly 19 a kilo. The ad asking French folk to visit America is from a good number of decades before sneaker-shopping on lower Broadway became the Frenchperson's vacation of choice, before the euro changed everything. The dachshund is a rare example of a long-haired miniature in this land of wire-haired standards.

Comes full circle

I intended the title to this post as a humorous list of the key words that go into NYT-reader-bait articles. Due, no doubt, to the title, WWPD is currently #1 on the "Times Topics" page about yoga.

And with that, an end to the day's graphomaniacal extravaganza that, thankfully, extended to the dissertation as well.

Relationship advice pour les nuls

Dan Savage answers a letter from someone whose boyfriend doesn't want marriage and fatherhood just yet. The twist: it's a 27-year-old man. What's surprising is not that a gay man would want a family, but that one usually hears about this in the context of rights, of couples in which both men want to be settled down, and would but for societal oppression, they'd be the most boring couple on the block. Here, however, we have a standard-issue biological clock complaint, up against a standard-issue commitment-shy boyfriend. These people could not be more predictable, but for the one detail.

Where I'm not 100% behind Savage's answer is the bit about how the boyfriend, if they do have children, "won't be the first person who agreed to have kids under duress." This is not the realm of gender-neutrality. The nature of same-sex parenting - indeed, one of the points about it its defenders often cite - is that unless children are already present from a previous relationship, it requires above-and-beyond effort on the part of both parents to get that kid. Whereas since forever, men - and women! - in heterosexual relationships who are ambivalent about parenthood have had that decision made for them, or at least have reached a point where not having a child is what would take above-and-beyond effort. Indeed, above-and-beyond effort not to have children is the default in hetero relationships.

While it's a nice and romantic notion that the not-so-sure boyfriend would come around just to keep his partner, it seems unlikely, given that the letter-writer has already explained that he really wanted to marry his boyfriend, but would also be happy to just raise kids with him, and the boyfriend wants neither. This is a case where the imbalance of interest might shift if the woman got pregnant (accidentally or 'accidentally', and yes, the latter is bad news), and, as has historically been known to happen, the man decided to stick around and ultimately came to be pleased to have a family. But a gay man in this scenario doesn't have that option, and can't really play the 'oops I seem to have gone through the complicated and expensive process of adopting a child' card. I would have thought this would be obvious - to Savage, to the letter-writer, to anyone with a basic sense of what acts between which people can and cannot make a baby. Anyway.

****************

Sticking around, meanwhile, in the realm of the obvious, there's this fluffiest-of-all-Styles-articles, about how the Middleton-Windsor nuptials will include a gaggle of exes among the guests, and whether we the readers would attend an ex's wedding, or invite one to our own. The entire story, the entire conflict it presents, could be easily resolved by assessing whether the theoretical wedding guests are friends who are also exes, which is to say, more 'friends' than 'exes,' in which case the relevant question is whether the particular person is a close enough friend to be invited, or whether the subject at hand is people using Facebook to look up people they dated years ago and then lost touch with, and sending them invites to make some kind of neurotic point. It seems obviously tacky and a bad idea to invite exes as a category, like 'friends, family, and exes,' unless there are children in common... in which case the ex is being invited in the 'family' category. (And, as an aside, how much do we want to bet that Crowley's ex-wife does not, in fact, want him back, and is now or will soon be rolling her eyes at his new wife's assumption that she does?)

Pot, kettle

Charlie Sheen apparently accused Chuck Lorre of being "Haim Levine." Lorre did indeed change his name from Levine - I read it in the New Yorker between episodes of "Two and a Half Men" - but who knows where Haim is coming from. The more pressing question is why Carlos Irwin Estevez is getting himself tangled up in this nonsense.