Snowed in and all caught up on outrage

Thank you, p.c.-indifferent, telling-it-like-it-is menfolk of the Internet, for keeping me entertained. This is going to be the genre now, I guess - the flagrantly outrage-baiting personal essay by a man. Not that I was able to get through it in its entirety, but Knausgaard's "saga" - in which he white-male-privileged his way through Canada for the New York Times - might count. Sensitive, well-meaning essays get criticized for not being sensitive and well-meaning enough. Essays by people from marginalized groups conclude with the privileges the author does have being checked. The only way out of this cycle, it seems, is for men to write essays coming from places of unapologetic privilege.

-Exhibit A: Ryan Boudinot's rant about MFA programs, in which he takes a courageous pro-child-abuse stance:

Just because you were abused as a child does not make your inability to stick with the same verb tense for more than two sentences any more bearable. In fact, having to slog through 500 pages of your error-riddled student memoir makes me wish you had suffered more.

-Exhibit B: Brendan O'Neill's ode to having sex while trashed, in which he takes a courageous pro-rape stance:

We've gone from punishing those who rape to casting a vast blanket of suspicion over anyone who has sex. But the fact is—and please don't hate me—sex isn't always 100 percent consensual. Especially after booze. Sometimes it's instinctual, thoughtless, animalistic. Sometimes it just happens. It's sex without consent—that is, without explicit, clearly stated, sober consent—but it ain't rape. It's sex.

-Exhibit C: Jeff Wilser's self-pitying but brilliantly clickbait-ish humblebrag about being a late-30s straight man who's too lost to settle down, in which he confesses to an inability to take women's phone calls. No pull-quote - the more relevant fact here is that the piece rides the wave of the news that Tinder will be charging more for the over-28s. This news was generally received as upsetting by the wider over-28 community, even those in relationships or otherwise not using the hookup app. 30 isn't old! Except it kind of is - ask anyone in their early 20s, or perhaps the teenager at the supermarket who called you "ma'am."

Still in search of a name for this genre, though. Lumbersexual Lit? xoTarzan? The quest continues...

"Bambi legs"

So. What is this? Humblebrag-the-article? ("With pale skin, red hair, gangly arms, and clumsy legs, I’ve been told I look like either a manga character or a high school senior. There is no mature beauty about me. [She is 30 and has a baby.] Rather than mourn that fact, I dress to embrace it.") Trolling? ("What grown woman wants to risk looking childish in an expensive designer dress? That would be me.") Something in between? ("[L]ike my mother before me, who got carded well into her thirties, I’m often mistaken for a student.")

Or is it some sort of personality issue on display (or - it's writing! - that of the author's narrative persona)? ("Undeniably, there’s a small thrill, a tiny power in rejecting other women’s standards, in playing the provocateur. And in knowing firsthand the one sure way to win the attention of every man and piss off every woman in any given room: Wear thigh-high socks.")

Or is just obliviousness? ("Kate [Moss] herself was a revelation, a one-woman shift in the beauty paradigm who made it seem possible that there was an upside to being built like I was.") It might be super-highbrow thinspiration, which is, if nothing else, not something one sees every day. Not a genre one sees much of, which is probably for the best.

Whatever it is, it's strangely compelling. Well done, Stephanie La Cava. I may be a year older and an unthinkable number of pounds heavier than you are, I may identify with exactly none of that article, but it was, I suppose, food for thought.

Speaking of food, see also her Grub Street Diet. Although it, too, should probably come with a trigger warning of some kind.

Feelings revisited

But first, some more self-promotion.

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

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

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

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

I got a feeling

There's a certain genre (and I use the term, as always, quite loosely) that consists of personal essays centering on a feeling. Two examples that come to mind, both from Jezebel: Lindy West on flying while fat, and a Groupthink contributor on riding the train while female. (Which I'd remembered as on the main page. Anyway.) Both of these posts are ostensibly about unpleasant interactions with men while on transportation. The former is about a man fat-shaming the author; in the latter, a different dude sexually harasses a different author. The idea being, with both, to get a discussion going about a commonly-shared experience.

The problem in both essays is, the man never quite does the thing he's being accused of. West's plane-seat neighbor never calls her fat, indeed does nothing to indicate he's got anything against fat people generally or fat people on planes specifically. While West's overall point is a fair one - it probably is rougher to be the fat person on the plane than to be the thin person whose personal space is temporarily taken up by another person's girth - the Exhibit A consists of standard-issue in-flight squabbling, West's size having nothing to do with it. West goes on to describe what others tell her "with their eyes on nearly every flight," and it's certainly offensive:

"You're bigger than I'd like you to be." "I dread being near you." "Your body itself is a breach of etiquette." "You are clearly a fucking moron who thinks that cheesecake is a vegetable." "I know that you will fart on me."

And yet. Did anyone say this? This particular seat-mate, she's clear, did not, and he's the offender she chose to focus on. While all of this feels true, and while whichever stash of anecdotal evidence and common sense tells me West knows what she's talking about, it's not there.

The sexual-harassment post follows the same framework. A woman is afraid that a man who's looking in her direction will sit next to her. He doesn't. Was he leering at her? Hard to say. It's even hard to say if he was looking at her to begin with:

You can see him in your peripheral vision and you can feel him looking. You're at a distance, but your hair is pretty bright and you're wearing lipstick so you know he noticed you. Keep reading, keep looking down. You briefly wish you were less attractive or had mousy hair or had an invisibility cloak. He keeps looking at you.

It's ambiguous at best that he was looking, let alone ogling. He never touches her, never talks to her, doesn't approach her, doesn't sit with her when given the option. We learn a great deal about the author's ambivalence about being (as she sees it) an attractive woman, but next to nothing about whether this particular man found her remotely interesting. A lingering gaze on public transportation tends to mean nothing. (Apologies in retrospect to everyone on the subway I've ever half-asleep gazed at for no reason other than they were in my line of vision!) And most of the extra-few-moments' gaze in the direction of the person in the subway car one finds least physically revolting is perfectly innocent. The man in no way violated the author's personal space.

And yet. It can be unnerving to be in a train car with someone giving off an odd vibe. While I can't say I'm personally acquainted with the experience of being just ravishing, just as I can imagine it's awkward to be fat on a plane, my imagination is limber enough to picture that it would be annoying to be stunningly gorgeous on a train. (Instead, I have that small, pale, female, nondescript quality that makes me the person people gravitate next to on public transportation. On planes, there's of course less say in the matter; the norm is for the stranger next to me, whatever his or her size, to view a significant % of my seat as their own space.)

Point being, these are real phenomena being described. The feelings aren't entirely based on self-image concerns. But feelings are tough to convey in argument. Something about rounding up a feeling to an argument puts the feeling itself in doubt, as if it's all just projection, which I - going by my feelings - kind of doubt.

Two new genres for 2012, two examples for each

-Defending the Glamorous:

We saw this with the pains a former prof of James Franco took to insist upon the movie star-scholar's academic serious. But we saw it again when Nicholas Kristof stood up for known underdogs like George Clooney (!) and Angelina Jolie (!!!), the latter of whom Kristof confesses, in an aw-shucks-intellectual-version moment, he did not recognize.

-Offending the Target Audience:

It's a safe bet that Matt Gross (see the post below, and his response - ! - in the comments) knew his article about Jerusalem would tick off religious Jews, Zionists. He may have guessed that in simply agreeing to fly to Israel as a travel writer and not a Rachel Corrie, he would win the ire of some on the left. (And he did!) But he also managed to offend the kind of left-of-center Jews who do get involved in learning about and criticizing the treatment of the Palestinians, the growing power of the not-so-progressive ultra-Orthodox, other "iffy" aspects of Israel. Gross's problem seems to come not from the genuine problems (myriad and well-reported) with Israel, but from a sense that the place is kinda Jewy, and that which is Jewy induces a cringe. Thus even his ostensible fan base - the readers who praise every Roger Cohen intervention - did not give him his hero's welcome after all.

Then there's Alex Gallo Brown in Salon, who, along with his girlfriend, grew tired of being hipsters with "privilege" and left Portland of all places to become volunteer organic farmers in the South-loosely-defined. (New Mexico?) All they wanted was to see the country, get out of their parochial "blue state" environment, and make the world a better place! Yet pretentious turns of phrase, a remarkable lack of self-awareness, a bizarre grievance against "blue-state" women who do grocery shopping, all of it hits the wrong note, and wins them all kinds of YPIS-hurling enemies among Salon readers and, inevitably, Gawker. The angry horde is of course made up of those very much like the writer (that is, in favor of owning privilege, and demolishing regionalist parochialism in its snootier forms), and not Mexican farm workers or poor Southerners. But oh, they're angry.