My very urgent not at all late Mayim Bialik op-ed take

A million years ago, I read (and reviewed) that "Israel Lobby" book. The main thing I remember about the book itself was a certain rhetorical device: the authors would preempt whichever point about a sinister Jewish cabal controlling everything with a finely-worded disclaimer about how of course they are not anti-Semites and of course they do not think a sinister Jewish cabal controls everything. It was this odd back-and-forth - the thing they were arguing, and the periodic insistance that anyone who noticed what they were arguing had (willfully?) misunderstood.

Disclaimers are funny like that. If everyone thinks you wrote X, but X is something you don't think, not even a little bit, it's always a good idea to stop and think why that mistaken belief about your work is out there. Sometimes there will be a reason - a bad headline, say - but you want to be sure. You want to be sure you're not arguing X. I went through something like this when writing my book. I anticipated certain criticisms. But rather than disclaimerizing and saying that even if you think my book is about X, oh no, I insist, it's not, take my word for it, I went and looked at the texts that are deeply X and examined where I did and did not agree with those stances. Where you think something controversial, you need to own it. Where you've been unfairly accused of thinking something you don't, you should at the very least know for yourself why the accusation is unfair.

This approach is more easily accomplished in a book than an op-ed. Maybe that was the issue with actress-scientist Mayim Bialik's recent NYT piece. But also, maybe not? Because bad takes are clickbait, or maybe for a more noble reason I'm not thinking of at the moment, the NYT Opinion pages had her do a video continuation of the op-ed as well, where she could defend herself from her critics. I watched a lot of it. I watched her go through the ritual of explaining that of course she doesn't victim-blame (which she does; that's central to the op-ed!), because... well, what was her reason, exactly? Because it's her, and she's a good feminist, and how could anyone possibly think something like this of her? (And I caught the very beginning, where her editor notes how well the piece is doing traffic-wise. You don't say.)

Well, the reason people criticized her piece was because she wrote it. I mean, I have no preexisting beef with Mayim Bialik. If anything, for various personal reasons (see comments to the post below) I'd have been biased to agree with her. But... the piece itself! Why is it remotely relevant to Bialik's history or lack thereof with respect to the "casting couch" (on that term, see Jessica M. Goldstein's excellent take) that she was not allowed manicures as a child? Why the cutesy ending about how plain-looking women don't need to look for love on casting couches, as though that's remotely what the expression "casting couch" has ever referred to? Why the reference to choosing not to flirt, as though the women men think are flirting with them actually are in all/most cases? Why the treeeemendous blind spot of, dressing modestly within a religious context has a long history of not doing a darn thing to prevent sexual abuse or assault?

I get the minuteness of Bialikgate. Minute compared with what's happening in Somalia, minute compared with the story now circulating of Trump joking about how Pence wants to murder gay people, and minute within the broader Weinstein-and-abuse story. (Bialik's story is about having not been a victim; thus in a sense the press it's gotten, since anything other than #MeToo was, from a cynical journalistic perspective, a fresh take.) The fate of the world does not hinge on whether Mayim Bialik gets, I mean really and truly gets, where her op-ed went wrong. And it's not as if she's abusing anyone. Anger should be directed at abusers, at the culture, not at individual self-identified feminist women who fail to meet flawless Awareness standards. Why am I still thinking about it even at all?

Partly it's that the piece came so close to being useful. It might have been a reflection on the ambiguities of an industry where, under the best of circumstances, people - women especially - are getting chosen for work in a large part based on their looks. It might have been a piece that reflected on how an industry (or society) that pseudo-values women only when young and gorgeous winds up screwing over all women. It might even have been an unpopular-opinion-ish point about how lived experience is different for women deemed sexy and those deemed less so - about how plain-looking or dressed-down women can absolutely still get assaulted, abused, etc., but may not be the recipients of a certain kind of ambiguous male attention. It might have been nuanced. It might have stayed put at Bialik's own highly specific experiences, without the additional take-tastic level of and you, too, could avoid sexual assault, if only you wore longer skirts, hussy. But who would have clicked on that?

So I guess this interests me as a media story. But also a rhetoric one. The it's me disclaimer, the one where the argument that the author is not actually saying whatever it is they're saying isn't so much an argument as a demand not to besmirch their good name, is really something else. I wonder if it's a rhetorical devise only really possible if you're someone generally protected from criticism. A star, in one area or another. Someone without the protection from criticism that stardom allows may well want to pull a but it's me, but be, at one stage or another, prevented from doing so.

Rory Gilmore's writing career

Everyone loves these Gilmores. I want to get it and, searching my blog's archives, have apparently tried to get it and failed to do so before. I watched (or had on as background noise) all four mega-episodes of the miniseries and... I'm left where I started, wondering what others are seeing that I'm not. I think it comes down to whether you think the fictional New England town of Stars Hollow would be delightful or suffocating, and everyone knows where I stand? Anyway.

As Miss Self-Important points out, the weirdness of the new miniseries is that Rory, who we last saw as a recent Yale graduate, is supposed to be 32 but hasn't let's say filled the time between then and now. A recap I found somewhere — maybe one of the many Vulture ones? — pointed out that these episodes, or some version of them, were meant to air a decade ago, which may explain why Rory's in such an early-20-something rut. All Rory has done professionally since college graduation is briefly (?) work on a political campaign, and write a few freelance articles, and she's sort of couch-surfing, dating around, hanging out with her mom... but also jetting off to London and having a string of glamorous professional near-misses. 

While this might have a slacker-ish, "Girls"-ish sound if Rory were a decade younger, at 32 it's more the sort of thing that raises alarm bells. She didn't have kids, or a different career, or any major illness or personal crisis that we know about. She has a lost decade to account for. She's therefore off. And not off in an oh-those-millennials way, but in a would-be-upsetting-if-real way. But this is never acknowledged. Or it is acknowledged, but in the cutesy manner of the show, where she's just this free spirit on a journey. Which is what it's called, I guess, when people with endless (discreet) independent wealth decide not to do anything to fill their days.

I'm jumping ahead to the end, because it's the only way to make sense of what comes earlier. It's getting spoiler-y:

It's only at the end of the four endless episodes that Rory's relationship to the writing world becomes clear. At that point, she's decided she's going to write a book. A memoir of sorts, about her relationship with her mother, called Gilmore Girls. (The show, get it?) And what does this decision involve? Not literary agents or editors. Not self-publishing. Just a whole lot of telling anyone whose path she crosses that she is now Writing A Book, as though deciding to write a book is a career path. (And everyone she meets treats it as one!) Having read all 10,000 personal essays from writers who've written actual, published books, successful and well-promoted, who were stunned to learn that book-writing alone doesn't pay enough to quit a day job, I'm deeply, viscerally aware that actually writing books is something one does, if one is lucky, on the side.

And yet there's Rory, announcing to her mother that now that she's decided she will Write A Book, she's going to go from couch-surfing to renting an apartment (in Queens rather than Brooklyn, how sensible!) that has a study, because how could anyone write a book in a home without a special room devoted to the project? (I just... I mean...) She announces the book she intends to write with more confidence that anyone will care than I'm able to summon re: the book I actually wrote. 

But why should she have other concerns when she comes from a world where spare-room-having establishments are being thrown at her left and right? Which will it be, the posh-sounding cabin offered up by the superrich friend-with-benefits, or the spare empty mansion left behind by her superrich grandmother? And then it becomes clear: She's an heiress. That's why she puts on nice new business attire to go into her unpaid job (side note: remember the flack Hannah Horvath got for that unpaid post-college internship) at her town paper! She may be broke, but the world is her safety net!

So how should the viewer, especially the not-Rory writer-viewer, feel about all this? Either we can say that the show offers an unrealistic portrait of the writing life, or it offers a very realistic portrait. If you're wealthy, gorgeous, and went to the right college, you can just coast along on an impressive-sounding but work-sparse career that consists of the occasional highbrow publication. And a memoir of a couch-surfing early-30s aristocratic woman would probably sell.

A normal body

One day, perhaps, it will be possible to discuss body-image issues without this layer of hypersensitivity such that saying anything, absolutely anything, even anything empowering, is impossible. That day hasn't come. Jezebel and Jezebel-commenters find it problematic that a beauty-pageant contestant's body is being described as "normal." There's no such thing as a normal body, you guys! This is thin-shaming of the other contestants! Or wait, this woman is more thin than fat - so it's fat-shaming! 99.99999% of women could never be as thin as this Miss Indiana!

But what are we to call a body that - while not exactly like that of all women (no body is!) - gives the impression of being... realistic? Of being the plausible result of a healthy-enough lifestyle and no cosmetic surgery? (Without having any idea, of course, how this particular woman came to look as she does - the question is the message her build sends.) Precisely because so many women are built give-or-take like this woman, celebrating her in a bathing suit ends up not just flattering the great many women who kind of look like her, but also suggests... that even though we're looking at her in a bikini, she's been selected for something other than having attained (or been genetically gifted with) a freak-of-nature-in-a-good-way physique.

New extremes in #normcore

I'm more fascinated than I should be by "normcore," which seems to explain so much. But I thought of it most recently when I saw that another of my excessive fascinations, Into The Gloss, had a spread on... wedding bands for the unmarried. Not in the traditional sense of, a woman will wear one to avoid getting hit on, or a man will do so to project a certain married-man allure. (This is apparently a thing, or so George Costanza believed.) No, because wedding bands are attractive, like, as jewelry. This is demonstrated - how else? - with the use of a naked (but mostly SFW) model smoking a cigarette, and then some other women whose glamor is demonstrated in various ways, but who are there to encourage you to go out and get a wedding band for yourself. Because ITG is ever so persuasive, you may well do just that.

The cynic in me says, ITG is sponsored by one of the jewelry brands mentioned (see the tremendous banner ads for said brand), and they had to come up with something. But why wedding-band chic? Why does that convince, if not because it's the ultimate in conventional jewelry? It seems to fit with the old-lady-chic vibe, in the sense that it's the sort of thing that's cute when someone early-20s or younger does it, or, perhaps a better way to say this is, is a way to highlight that one is so young that, haha, one couldn't be married, one is simply so young and rich and fabulous that one will spend a usual wedding-ring amount on a wedding ring, to wear as a random accessory. I have trouble imagining a woman of a more madame age doing this.

Freedom of spirit, overanalyzed

Jemima Kirke, aka Jessa from "Girls," has such pretty hair. Is her painting derivative? Evidently. Is there some fascinating unstated story behind why "Brian," "Mike’s best friend," is "there most nights after the kids go to bed"? I want to go with yes. That hair, but also that free-spiritedness. So many of these free spirits about! Such a funny expression - are we the relatively anxious and uptight in some kind of spiritual prison? How is a "free spirit" different from a Manic Pixie Dream Girl? So many questions! Questions the freer of spirit probably don't find themselves internally debating. If you're queasy about spontaneous DIY tattoos and people smoking inside in a house with young children, your spirit may be on the restricted side.

On a note totally unrelated to questions left unanswered in the Kirke photo-spread, men can now be bisexual. Science has now decided that this exists, whereas some earlier incarnation of science looked at the men attracted to and involved with men and women alike and said, nuh-uh, or something. What was news to me, though, was that the prof who had initially claimed men physically can't be bisexual is the same one as led the notorious in-class dildo demonstration at Northwestern.

Also surprising, to me: the extent to which that episode resembled that scene from Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life." I must have skimmed the previous CCOA discussions of this incident, because I'd always thought the "dildo demonstration" was, some prof showed the item in question in class, in order to, I don't know, identify it? I hadn't quite put it together that "a female guest speaker was brought to orgasm by her male partner using a sex toy." Thank you, NYT Magazine, for enlightening. A free-spirited female guest speaker, no doubt.

The guyfriendzone

The "guy friend," a topic I thought WWPD had retired, must resurface now that Jezebel's linked to this hilarious Onion article (redundant?) about the phenomenon, entitled "Sexually Frustrated Woman Just One Of The Guys." Sample passage:

“You don’t have to be on guard around her,” said coworker and friend Ted Reiner, 26, a man to whom Valetta gives “awesome” dating advice and whom she has specifically styled her hair and clothes to please and hopefully arouse. “I don’t have to worry about what I say to her. I’m never trying to impress her or anything. Plus, she’s not high-maintenance at all. And she’s not crazy or clingy or anything.”

A Jezebel commenter has already responded, "Sounds like a Nice Girl," i.e. like a Nice Guy, but a girl. I disagree. What's spot-on about the piece, in that usual spot-on Onion way, is that the woman doesn't give the men who won't date her a hard time. She doesn't whine about their lack of interest. She certainly doesn't try harangue the guys she wants to date into sleeping with her. She never even makes her interest known!

Which is really why the whole Nice Guy/Friendzone paradigm isn't gender-neutral. The man who befriends a woman/several women as a way of getting into their pants will generally make this known. A woman in the equivalent situation probably will not. (Having never had the good, or perhaps bad, fortune to be considered one of the guys, at least in a group of straight guys, I wouldn't know firsthand.)

Or maybe that's not quite it - maybe the difference is that in Harry-Sally friendships, it's assumed the man's carrying a torch, at least if he's single, even if he's not. Whereas part of what makes the Onion article funny (yes, yes, the dangers of analyzing humor) is that no one thinks unattached women with male friends secretly want to sleep with said friends, in part because no one - apart from women, that is - thinks of women as getting "sexually frustrated." The piece works both as a painful truth to the one-of-the-guys women who've experienced this - or so it's been received on Jezebel - and as a humorous gender-reversal for those who believe the received wisdom about only men thinking like this.

Into The What?

When guilty pleasures collide. Emily Schuman (of "Cupcakes and Cashmere" fame) has come across better than possibly anyone else profiled on "Into The Gloss." Which is to say, there isn't the requisite posturing about being so very low-maintenance... followed by a list of dozens of serums and moisturizers used daily. It also isn't a great big list of Estee Lauder, her sponsor... unless all the brands she mentioned are owned by one conglomerate. (Where's my corporate sponsor? Ideally this would be Uniqlo, but I'd settle for Nars. Or Zabar's, Murray's Cheese, Strand...) She just frankly discusses what it is she has to work with ("a pretty athletic build"; "I lack any real facial definition"; "mousy-brown" hair that she bleaches), and the end result is relatable rather than self-deprecating. Relatable not because these happen to be my own personal concerns (which I have, fear not, just not those), but because the whole thing reads more as 'within-normal-limits woman making the best of what she's got' than the trials and travails of being naturally stunning in a world with too many parabens and not enough pulverized kale.

***

Unrelated question relating to a different post on the same site: What does the following mean? "Last year, a friend gifted me with [fancy soap]." Why not the far more direct "a friend gave me"? While I know that "gift" can now be used as a verb (and that some contingent cringes every time it is), I'd thought it was more in the context of, say, a fashion blogger is comped whichever handbag from a designer, and then it can be that Coach or whatever "gifted" the bag. But do friends now "gift"? Is this used to indicate that something was given as a gift, as versus I don't even know, handed to someone? Like where "give" is just a synonym for "hand," like hand/give it to me? Or does it just add an air of luxe to whatever's being discussed? So your friend might gift you luxury soaps, but give you an extra roll of toilet paper.

***

Unrelated comment relating to yet a third. The so-very-now look for men's hair is apparently the one that's been so-very-now since forever among male physicists. (For obvious reasons.)

Mindy Kaling is onto something

-I will no doubt be weighing in on this. For now, the placeholder.

-Is it really all that empowering to end an article arguing against people/women having facelifts by advising, as an alternative, "a good deal of skin care"? Yes, Luisa Dillner also advises "good sleep" and "good diet," but isn't "skin care" itself problematic for many of the same reasons as cosmetic surgery? As in, it involves spending far too much money on that which likely won't do anything positive for one's appearance, but might nevertheless have some unforeseen medical and/or cosmetic consequences? (At least if you're poisoning yourself with lipstick - and you are - your lips actually become - temporarily - whichever color you've painted them.)

If "skin care" means sun protection, not scratching at mosquito bites (or not getting so bitten to begin with - thanks very much, faulty window screens), and, if at all possible, seeing a dermatologist if there's an actual, identifiable problem, then yes, wise. But I'm not sure where, on the "love the face you have" spectrum, the thousand-dollar creams fall, relative to surgery, injections, peels (this is a thing, yes? not just something Patsy does on AbFab?), etc.

-I've been watching a lot of "I Love Lucy" at the gym, while folding laundry, and beats me why, but there it is. And I noticed something I'd never thought about when watching the show originally, as a toddler or thereabouts: Ricky Ricardo is, like, attractive. (Possibly relevant: my husband's been away for a while, as have all human beings, so I'm comparing black-and-white sitcom stars to, I don't know, squirrels, or the more strapping of the deer. And, I suppose, Fred Mertz.) Desi Arnaz must have used a really expensive moisturizer or something, because damn.

Well! Apparently (credit goes to a relative, but a different one than identified the crawfish) Mindy Kaling agrees. She calls him "matinee-idol good-looking," which about covers it. Glad to know I haven't lost my mind/taste, as presumably Kaling is comparing Ricky to a broader cast of characters.

$89

No one can ever accuse me of not conceding out of pride when my commenters are right. You convinced me about the whole bra thing. I had some time to kill in the city today, ended up near the fabulous Journelle, and lo and behold, that thing you all said was out there - flattering and comfortable - exists. Why had I not found it before? Because it costs $89, that's why. But I had no other - to borrow Kei's ever-applicable term - wanties (had tried on and nixed the idea of $90 workout pants - perhaps a better choice for those whose workout isn't jogging through mud, and Sephora, the usual contender, meh) at the moment, and was emerging from a work-hermit period of non-spending, so. No more information - brand, perhaps, but not letter or number - lest this veer off into full-on overshare territory, or attract altogether the wrong audience. My point is simply: You're right, WWPD readers, you're right!

I should say, though, that was a funny bloggy interlude. On this specific topic, I've generally taken the your-gamine-privilege-is-showing stance. As in, chic, boyishly-built women will sniff at the more substantial bras, suggesting flimsy wireless options, which do indeed look more now, but it's like, the only way you can wear those and still look good is if you're built like one of those Birkin offspring. But it is possible - for some! not all! - to wear them and not look good. There's clearly some subset of not-at-all-gamine women for whom those undergarments are unflattering but comfortable. Or so I've heard.

Anyway, during my urban wanderings, I reflected a bit on this question more broadly. Why did I come to my initial conclusion? I figure it was, in part, a questioning-received-wisdom thing. Specifically the kind of received wisdom that pertains to these sort of questions. As in: do you really need to "invest" in accessories? If your skin isn't dry, do you need moisturizer? If your hair isn't greasy, must you wash it every day? If your eyelashes are dark, do you actually benefit from mascara? (False lashes are something else - I've never worn them but they can look fantastic.)

This is partly a cheapness thing (I don't believe in buying things one simply feels one must, without questioning it), but also partly a quasi-feminist one. The amount of grooming-and-spending women are told we need vastly exceeds that which any individual one of us requires to look our best, and indeed, some such interventions (see: skin problems caused by skin products) make us look worse. This notion that femininity means all these rituals that may or may not do anything for you... appeals to some, but not to me. I think it's fine to do whichever things do make a difference - for me, that means throwing $$$ at Japanese hair products; for you it might well mean fancy moisturizer - but I think there's something to be said for being cynical about such things, whenever there's an entire industry asking that you do X.

Gwyneth Paltrow smokes one cigarette a week

This - yes, readers - is the story of the moment. There are several interpretations floating around, or that pop into one's head upon hearing this:

1) Paltrow has humanized herself, revealing an imperfection, thus making herself more (well, less un-) likable.

2) Paltrow has revealed shocking hypocrisy, after lecturing us on the dangers of bread and white rice. She? Smokes?

3) Paltrow has revealed herself even more goodie-two-shoes than we thought - this is her great vice? (Consider the likelihood of a headline, "Lindsay Lohan/Charlie Sheen Smokes One Cigarette A Week.")

4) Paltrow is preempting the inevitable paparazzi discovery that she smokes.

And all of these are plausible. But I'm going to go with another, less-often-suggested possibility:

5) This tells us what we all already, on some level, knew, namely that "health," when offered up in any fashion-and-lifestyle context, is weight. If Paltrow's weekly indulgence were a massive wedge of cheesecake, then you might count me surprised. I mean, it even sounds like the kind of diet advice women once exchanged (and perhaps still do, but less openly) - instead of having dessert, smoke a cigarette. This isn't a hedonistic slip-up. It's still more image-control.

"Bitches be crazy"

A while ago, I mentioned that Simon Rich had written one heck of a misogynistic humor essay for the New Yorker. The well-known problem with misogyny intended as humor is that there's no way to call it out without learning that one is a humorless feminist for not laughing along. More on that in a moment. In any case, I'd kind of forgotten about this, until I was out walking Bisou, listening to this week's live-taped Savage Lovecast. Special guest, Simon Rich. Reading one of the stories from his new collection. And which one? The very same one as had been in the magazine, the one about God having a girlfriend. She works in fashion, she's gossipy, needy, diet-crazed, and doesn't like it when he works late at his job, which is creating the world in six days, and thus kind of a big deal. But she's all, why don't you spend more time with meeeee, because that's how the ladies get, y'know? A stale set-up, with an original conceit. But because that's how it goes when one walks a dog in the middle of nowhere, I kept listening.

Anyway, re: laughing along, I probably did some of that, but I'm fully capable of laughing if put in front of an old episode of "Two and a Half Men." The bad-sitcom chuckle. Put me on an airplane and the bar drops lower still. Because of this character flaw, I can laugh at a joke about how women enjoy "lo-cal yogurt," just not in the same way as I laughed when Sarah Haskins mocked the yogurt-as-woman-feed phenomenon.

(This is all of it a separate phenomenon from appreciating great art that happens to have been created by a bigot, or that expresses bigoted views, an issue that itself needs to be divided between an understanding that everyone from back-in-the-day would fail at modern-day political correctness and a possibly different standard for that which is contemporary/recent. Rich is obviously talented, but this is not the kind of literature where that sort of thing applies. Contemporary literature where you are compelled to at least temporarily overlook bigotry, to me, means some kind of new insights or style or something. I could go on, but will save that line of going-on for my dissertation.)

This was my typically longwinded way of saying that there was that story, on a podcast ostensibly about being at the cutting edge of gender-and-sexuality awareness. Which seemed just odd. A term like 'heteronormative' doesn't even begin to describe the piece. And yet, not odd - very much of a piece with Savage's frequent portrayal of women as prim or naive killjoys. Savage reacted to the story/essay thing by asking Rich if, after reading this story (part of an anthology dedicated to said girlfriend), the author's girlfriend still performs oral sex on him. (Savage-speak for, 'she hasn't left you yet?') As in, Savage got that it was insulting, but what he did with that knowledge perhaps wasn't so helpful.

The podcast also included the usual advice component, and near the end, there was a question from a woman who knew she was a lesbian but wanted a second kid, and wondered if it was OK to stick around with her husband and only come out after having said child. Easy answer: no. But Savage answered instead with some enthusiastic, "Bitches be crazy," adding that when "bitches" want a baby, they're crazier still.

Here, I'm afraid my ridiculously low bar for finding something bad-sitcom amusing wasn't even met. I may have cringed slightly on account of Savage's painful attempt at sounding young and hip (even if he was possibly riffing off a Stephen Colbert routine?), or his ironic pose as a straight-guy misogynist, which we of course know is hilarious because Savage is gay and enlightened and does so much good (and he does!). Was it supposed to be OK within the context of a live performance that included a female dominatrix demonstrating something that must have made more sense not in podcast form? Whatever it was about, the "bitches be crazy" ending was just gross. But yes, it fit with the choice to have Rich read "Center of the Universe."

More thoughts on what this all means soon, perhaps, when the haze of the head-cold lifts, or bring yours to the comments.

Coffee politics

Remember the young woman so privileged she was applying for food stamps? The detail readers honed in on was the $1.50 coffee-shop coffee the author mentions drinking at the top of the piece. Search the page for "coffee" and you see the rage in the comments. There's a whole genre of condescending financial advice geared at The Youth, telling them that coffee out adds up. Why is it always coffee? Let's unpack that one author's cup of coffee's significance, and that of coffee and class more generally, setting aside the question of where coffee itself comes from and that whole set of labor concerns:

-Telling a broke middle-class person to give up lattes is, as we established in this thread, very much like telling a legitimately-poor one to exchange fast-food for lentils. It's ignoring that this purchase is a pleasure as well as a convenience. And you just get the sense that part of the tsk-tsking does come from the fact that advice-givers are uncomfortable with whichever caste enjoying themselves, or having the audacity to believe their time has value.

-Britta brought this up in the earlier thread, but it also bears repeating: Debt changes everything. As does parental assistance. And the economy is such that you can perfectly well be college-educated, employed in an office-job, and not earning enough to live on in your locale. If you're starting from negative $, it's less obvious what 'living within your means' means than if you're budgeting a salary. Does it mean not a cent other than what's needed to maintain your nutritional requirements and look reasonable at a job interview?

-No one needs coffee. Yet coffee isn't bad for you, either. That might make us think it would seem less decadent than the obvious comparisons (alcohol, tobacco, non-diet soda), but if anything, that coffee's only sinful in its gratuitousness makes it the most appealing target for anti-decadence crusaders. There's this kind of noble, respectable quality to actual self-destruction, like you're a devil-may-care libertarian relic of the hard-living days. (Maybe less so with jumbo soda, but even there there's the nanny-state concern.) That whichever self-destructive products cost money is secondary. But there's nothing hardcore and stick-it-to-the-man about foamy espresso drinks.

-Someone who thinks $1.50 coffee is cheap probably comes from a wealthy family, or at least not a truly destitute one. A coffee at a coffee shop will, in my experience, nowadays cost $2 in posher areas, far more in a restaurant, but maybe still less from a cart/deli, and definitely much less at home. A couple relevant facts about YPIS: 1) a speaker who identifies as privileged, who acknowledges privilege, basically invites accusations of privilege, and 2) one easy route to a quick YPIS is to hear someone refer to X as 'not that expensive,' and to be like, dude, if you think X isn't absolutely the most expensive thing ever, your privilege is showing.

-The classic job of the otherwise-unemployable humanities BA is barista. We associate coffee shops with underachieving middle-class white kids, friends' children who by all accounts should have real office-jobs by now. This (see footnote here) helps explain why baristas make at least minimum wage and still get these odd sympathy/solidarity tips. But it also tells us part of why coffee, that fueler of productivity, is seen as a slacker beverage. If you're on the coffee shop and not headed to the office, that changes everything.

-The fetishization of coffee exemplifies the food thing. Something ordinary is now artisanal, and vastly more expensive. And the food thing is what's wrong with young people today.

-Someone who can hardly afford $1.50 for coffee - brace yourselves for this - is actually not doing so great financially. I would go so far as to say that if you are a college-educated, coffee-drinking adult and weighing the pros and cons of this purchase for reasons other than whatever joy you get from thrift, this is indicative of a larger problem, one that coffee-or-not won't solve. While privilege is multifaceted, and includes race, able-bodiedness, level of education, and intangibles like which class you come across as, it would seem, if we take our liberal-arts-grad hats off for a moment, that someone out of school who's scraping together a buck fifty for a coffee is not privileged. Maybe even really, really not privileged.

-What readers are reacting to, the ones who are horrified that an unemployed person would spend $1.50 in a coffee shop, is that the indulgence in question is so painfully middle-class. It's a future-oriented indulgence that won't impair your ability to mesh with a white-collar office environment. But there's also the schadenfreude, the element of watching the mighty tumble, or simply regression to the mean. As in, look at her, with her middle-class trappings, thinking she's so fancy all the while not being able to afford groceries. And it's also just so depressing, if you're unemployable, and your great pleasure is this thing intended to make office-workers more productive on too little sleep.

"Crazy curious"

Recently, at a Pain Quotidien (don't judge), I saw three young women, home from college, maybe, quite obviously good friends, but all three just sitting there, looking at their phones, for a long time. Not chatting about what they were reading, just staring, surfing, scrolling. There was clearly agreement that this was the thing to do at that moment, and it's not as if one of the women was stuck fiddling awkwardly with a pre-smart-era cellphone. They looked perfectly content - making it my curmudgeonly problem that I found this arrangement kind of sad. When I was their age, hanging out with high school friends in coffee shops and the Japanese restaurants that functioned as bars, we discussed what happened back at college. We weren't trying to be two places at once.

The purpose of this anecdote is to say that I get it. But then there's this, from a Room For Debate about Facebook and romance:

Just the other day, I was in a supermarket in Los Angeles and I saw this guy checking out this girl. He was standing next to her in line at the juice bar. He kept looking at her, and she kept looking down … at the Facebook app on her iPhone. 

Now, I know some of you right now are thinking, maybe she wasn't interested. That wasn't the issue. Because what I'm about to share with you is something most of you have probably done. 

He gave up and disappeared. But I was crazy curious so I stood next to her in line and got real close and peeked at what she was typing into her phone. 

Her status update: When am I going to meet a nice guy? It seems like all the good men are taken.

There's just so much material here. First, that dude was checking out a woman in a supermarket in no way tells us that dude is single, let alone interested in pursuing anything with this woman. Certain public spaces are just like that. Or maybe he was looking at this woman because he knows her, or to tell her about a piece of toilet paper stuck to her shoe, or who knows. Then there's the dating guru (also a dude) sidling up to this woman and getting close enough to read her status update. While glancing in the general direction of attractive members of one's preferred sex(es) is just human nature, sidling up, even for research purposes, that does strike me as creepy. 

Anyway, to finish the nonsense-overanalyzed, that this woman was publicly bemoaning her singledom doesn't mean she actually wants to find a partner. If anything, I've found that women who make a thing (sometimes a profession!) of writing about how tough it is to find a man tend to be precisely the women not interested in pairing off (with a man, at least) in the first place. Either it's that 'single' has become a key part of their identities, or maybe they're insisting so much because it's expected that single women mind their predicament, and the repetition is a cover for not minding one bit, or for being a closeted lesbian, both can happen. It is, in short, a script. 

But if I emerge from this contrarian shell for a moment, I do get the dating guru's point. It's not all that hard to picture a woman indeed wanting a boyfriend, but thinking it would be unacceptable to meet one at the supermarket. That it would be pushy and presumptuous for her to go after a guy she noticed (who would have gone after her if he was anything but repulsed by her physical presence). That it would, on the other hand, smack of desperation to accept a dude's advances.

The paradox of modern romance is that we've retained the idea that men must pursue, added to it the idea that any man who pursues a woman is inherently creepy, and yet it's clear enough online, one way or another, when a woman is available and looking for partners. Or, it's that it's viewed as desperate to use the internet to look for dates, but a date found any other way won't work either, because you can't meet someone at the office, and friends-of-friends should be a safe zone, and not hitting on people, whereas strangers are sketchy. Oh Ross Douthat, I'm not sure at all where all those babies are gonna come from. 

On my immediate surroundings, as I wait for the shuttle

Love:

-It's the only reliable, one-stop source for (almost) everything I buy. I want a big bag of bulk rolled oats, and a splurge on plumcots. They come through.

-It isn't more expensive. People want it to be, because it's so insufferable (see "Hate" below) that it seems it ought to be, and maybe it is in some parts of the country (Chicago?), but in most of my experience, it's not. It was cheaper than the nearby Gristedes in New York, and is about the same as Wegmans here. (An employee at WF here once remarked to me that Wegmans is so expensive, which was, I think, overkill.) One gets the impression that it's more expensive because the kind of items that tend to cost a lot (produce, meat, fish) look so much more appealing here, so you end up leaving with more. And I suppose the per-pound stuff is expensive for what it is, but it looks no more appealing than any other salad bar, which is to say it ranges from nauseating to that which could be prepared in two seconds for a tenth of the price, so I avoid it.

Hate:

-Every single thing that isn't food is pure, unadulterated rich-hippie obnoxiousness. Cosmetics, skin creams, paper goods, and placebo-or-worse supplements, all packaged in such a way as to make you think you've done your good deed for the day/week by making that selection. This takes up a huge amount of (in this case) the middle of the store, such that if you want ice cream or bread (and why wouldn't you?), you have to wade through a sea of it. Given the number of "Smile, You're On Camera" signs in that section, and the prominence of lotions that won't slowly kill your baby like what's sold at CVS, it would seem that the very purpose of it is to give bored SAHMs with a case of kleptomania something to do. I, at least, have yet to find a purpose of it, and the shuttle drops us off for two full hours, so believe me, I've tried. A bunch of extra-non-toxic nail polish in colors that are always just slightly off.

-Because the presumed customer is a sanctimonious beeyotch fresh from a hard day lounging at the self-refurbishment spa, people who work here fall into two categories: obsequious/chipper in that way that so confounds people who aren't American and seething-class-warrior. Once again, today I got on line for the latter. In a brilliant move that saves the company labor costs while giving the customer the illusion of labor solidarity, they've effectively phased out baggers, so if you bring your own bags, you bag as the cashier rings you up. Because I'm not from a country where it's always been thus, I'm slow at this, and have trouble coordinating the bagging and the checking of prices on the little screen. So. Today, I made the grave mistake of mentioning that I'd used four bags, as I had not seen the "BYOB" discount ring up. Turns out the cashier had entered it already. I apologized, thanked her, apologized, thanked her, and so on. Then, when she handed me my receipt, she angrily insisted on pointing to where the bag discount was indicated. "I believe you," I assured her, but to no avail, further evidence that the bag refund at WF is more trouble than it's worth.

The accompanying text

Much to the severe disappointment of my male readership, these days I'm directing more of my extracurricular-online attention to Pinterest than Blogger. It's visual rather than textual, upbeat rather than contrarian/cynical. It is, in other words, a far better antidote to dissertating.

But my desire to explain the reasons behind my pins sometimes gets the better of me. I know, I should let the images and brief captions speak for themselves, and keep the textual/critical out of it. But I feel compelled to provide a guide to each fashion personality as currently conceived, and the challenges it brings. In order of my excitement about them, from most to least:

Space-age: That which is studded, that which is neon, and, of course, galaxy prints. Mod, punk, and goth all make their contributions. It's about looking futuristic. Silver wedge boots are a must. Avant-garde Antwerp designers, why not?

While "space-age" can be a persona, this isn't best accomplished by wearing head-to-toe space-age everything. (Tavi would disagree. As would steampunks.) Instead, it's a kind of post-goth minimalism, with more gray than black, with the occasional "pop" of neon or galaxy-print, if you're so inclined. As a rule, in life, it's best off keeping that-which-is-space-age to accents. All of this adds a certain unavoidable incoherence to a space-age board.

Another challenge with this board has been deciding whether or not to pin everything space-age I can track down. As it turns out, not everyone with access to galaxy-print material has a good idea of what clothing to make with it. (Thus why a huge piece of it is hanging on the wall behind me, like a futuristic tapestry.) And there are a lot of DIYers out there taking a Pollock approach to black Keds, with mixed results. There are items on this board I would not wear, or encourage others to purchase. But I've been erring on the side of over-inclusion, just to keep track of what's out there.

Gamine: The "gamine" look is, as I've mentioned before, overplayed. As I also noted, it's how I like to dress. Every time Uniqlo gets a new shipment of horizontal-striped jersey material, every time it discounts said shipment, I'm there. So I'm not conflicted about celebrating a look that's not exactly outside the mainstream. Nor do I feel compelled to include everything striped. I know gamine when I see it.

The challenge with here, however, is that too often, "gamine" is used to mean "that which is worn by a slender, flat-chested woman, preferably French." I don't want to fall victim to a variant of the "models off-duty" trap: thinking a look is "gamine" because the woman wearing it is, even if the look in question would be the opposite of "gamine" on anyone else. A Birkin spawn in a Patagonia is, for example, not "gamine."

Glossy Tribeca Whole Foods Mom: As the name suggests, this category was inspired by the women I'd see when shopping at those odd, midday, grad-student hours at said supermarket, near my old apartment in Battery Park City. The "Tribeca" Whole Foods, not actually in Tribeca, is nevertheless the headquarters of the berry-and-soy-milk-smoothie set. I would wait on line at 2:30 or whatever, inevitably behind a woman with a quilted Chanel bag and an engagement ring worth all five guaranteed years of my stipend. But what interested me weren't so much the universal-at-this-point status symbols, as the particular, and particularly American (it has L.A., Chicago, and suburban incarnations, among others) way of looking rich. It's a polished look. Shiny hair and nails. Glossy. Unlike the women of the Upper East Side, they're not striving for some other persona (WASP circa 1962, Catherine Deneuve circa 1965...), but are perfectly content going out in public in leggings and running shoes. They look fit, not skeletal. They are, at the very shortest, 5'10".

Here, the problem I run into is that there aren't a lot of garments that convey the look in question. It's a way of carrying yourself. Think of the women from the "30 Rock" fight-club episode. A certain glow. How do you convey, via fashion, hair that's glossy to the tips? Well-toned upper arms? Non-waifishness? Cosmopolitan Americanness? But ideas keep coming to me. The board lives on.

Swiss/Northern Italian Socialite: This is a woman unironically enthralled with what she imagines upper-class British women wear. But, despite herself, she dresses more elegantly than they do. There's a certain overlap with the recent, oxymoronic "heritage" trend, certainly in the color scheme and choice of fabrics. Lots of brown leather, camel knits, (the illusion of) quality materials.

Allow me to sound (even more) insipid, but the challenge here is that "heritage," this cycle at least, is done. Unlike "gamine," it doesn't seem to have staying power. Fisherman's sweaters once again look frumpy. Efforts by Banana Republic and so forth to look extra staid have lost their charm. There is hope, though, because S/NIS isn't heritage. It's more refined. But is it maybe too refined? Perhaps the problem is where I live. I pass a Ralph Lauren every time I go into town, and the window is chock full of inspired-by-equestrian, and it's underwhelming.

Ring finger as crafts project

Coughing, fixing the parts of my Napoleon chapter that don't require too much intellectual capacity, jogging incredibly slowly around Genius Circle, and, yes, Pinterest. My observations on the last bit:

-One exciting use of Pinterest is, you get a window into the taste of others generally, and of those who repin/like the things you post in particular. There's a woman in Vilnius whose taste matches up almost precisely with my own. Vilnius! There are others who, when I see the context (prom dresses? hordes of kittens?) into which they've repinned something I'd pinned, make me question my own taste.

-To my fellow fashion-and-style pinners, found via the general "Women's Apparel" section: If you profess to have a interest in fashion/style, and wish to share it with the world, why are your thoughts on the items you pin limited to "want!!!!" or "super-cute!"? It's not that "cute" is a meaningless modifier (although I'm confused about applying it to running sneakers, goth attire...), or that Pinterest is anything other than a glorified wanty list, or that "articulated" has to mean "with text." I'm not saying you need to justify your choices ala your reading list for a qualifying exam, but there should be some articulated something.

-Along the same lines, if your aesthetic preferences just happen to line up with exactly what's out of your price range at Neiman Marcus, your wanty list is less a statement about your style, and more one about your relationship to your personal finances, or your desire to convey status, your insecurities, etc. Yes, Pinterest is an excuse to "get" things you never would in real life, to break free of the practical limitations of cost and comfort, but how many Jimmy Choos must we be asked to admire?

-Along the opposite lines, but reminiscent of the shopping "dieters'" fantasies I read about for this article, it's difficult to get inspired by a pair of sensible plain tennis shoes or unremarkable bootcut jeans. If the mere thought of going to the Old Navy website fills you with adrenaline, perhaps, again, this is about something other than style - a shopping-related neurosis, perhaps, or evidence that you're not really such a fashion-and-style person after all. Don't get me wrong - appealing design is by no means limited to high-end. I myself have made fashion-victimy purchases (ugh, Alexa Chung) from L.L. Bean. But some of these choices seem to be missing the point, and anything that involves dumping the entire Lands End catalogue onto a wanty list would qualify.

-More disturbingly: is it really now done to paint the nail of that finger a different shade than the rest? Does this originate with the addictive treacle that is Cupcakes and Cashmere? "Ever since I got engaged last year, I’ve been wearing glittery polish on my ring finger [.]" When a diamond isn't enough. Women whose income is not via glossy retro-values style-bloggery, do not try this at home. Or, god forbid, at a job interview.

-Most disturbing: despite having evidently banned pro-anorexia postings, the site includes tons of "inspirational" images of thin women, diet advice, dieting mottos, juice "cleanses," etc. Often with a nod to "health." It would seem that these postings are "healthy" if their recipients actually, by some rational measure, could stand to lose some weight/get some more exercise, but are "thinspo" if their audience is 100-lb women shooting for 95, 95-lb women shooting for, I don't know, zero? The audience, at least as much as the content of the advice itself, tells us where to draw the line, but is, alas, unknowable. While there are, as we are constantly reminded by newspaper commenters and other great minds, more overweight/obese/thin-but-sedentary Americans than anorexics/bulimics/exercisaholics, my entirely anecdotal and non-representative sense of these matters is that the women with this obsession tend to be the thin-already-but-never-thin-enough, some of whom would qualify for medical definitions of eating disorders, most of whom would not. The entire "fitness" aspect of Pinterest baffles me.

Blonde brunettes

What do many brunettes considered to be great beauties have in common? They're naturally blond, or have gone from light brown to near-black. Consider Olivia Wilde. Leigh Lezark. Rooney Mara. Jennifer Lawrence. What does it all mean?

-Because it's expected that women will go for hair shades lighter than whatever nature gave them, in order to look conventionally prettier/sexier, a woman who goes darker is making a statement: 'I'm alternative,' perhaps, or 'I don't care what people/men think of me,' or 'I'm something of an intellectual, and don't sleep with just anyone.' Or: 'I'm so pretty, nothing I do can detract from this, sorry guys.' It's the opposite of what a woman who bleaches/highlights her naturally dark hair is indicating. It's the opposite of a miniskirt or pushup bra.

-Conventional beauty standards are - and I realize I'm the first to remark on this - racially biased. Women who come from the blonder countries, or whose features have something in common with those common to those countries (see: Halle Berry), are considered more attractive, at least by the powers-that-be. Hair color itself is only a part of what 'blonde' is about. It's also blue eyes, a tiny nose, etc. (Not that no blondes ever have giant schnozzes, no brunettes blue eyes, etc.) Yet the brunette 'type' - its myriad significations - remains a draw for some, remains a quality of some fictional characters. A blonde with dark hair is a brunette without those inconvenient traits: 'ethnic' facial features, a curvy build. Thus the casting agent looking for a 'brunette' is inclined to cast a blonde.

-The ubiquity of the blonde brunette poses a problem for women with naturally dark hair, when we look for style/beauty inspiration from the usual sources. It's also a bit dispiriting, in a Photoshop kind of way, that the celebrities we're meant to view as our representatives look not only better than we do, as we'd expect, but also different. A Greek, Sicilian, or Armenian woman simply does not look like a Swedish woman who's gone goth- or librarian-chic.

-None of this, of course, is intended as a condemnation of blond women who dye their hair darker. From what I understand, having blond hair basically amplifies the often creepy reaction women, esp. young ones, get from strangers. That, and I'm enthusiastically in favor of self-expression-through-self-presentation, especially of the non-permanent, non-surgical varieties. No one should, as an individual, have to justify choices to go blonder or darker, curlier or straighter, etc. My point is merely that a societal expectation that a pretty brunette is a blonde with dyed-brown hair a) exists, and b) isn't so great for we the naturally dark.

Annals of the useless

Asking a 15-year-old actress how she gets such shiny hair, which lip balm she prefers, and what she does for exercise. Really, NYT? Some teeny-tiny percentage of humanity looks best at 12-16 (and, thanks to a middle school friend's recent Facebook photo-scanning extravaganza, we can rest assured that yours truly wasn't one of them) and the best-looking of 12-16-year-old females are held up as society's great beauty ideal, because for whatever reason they never came by to ask those of us who think beauty's more often found in men. Somehow I don't think going out and buying whatever shampoo this girl uses would make all the difference.

Johan the Plumber

When the rest of socially-liberal American womankind was still worried that we were looking at a Santorum presidency (or are we still?), I wasn’t too personally concerned - concerned, yes, but not for myself - because I had the good sense to marry a bona fide EU citizen. If the Santorum were to hit the fan, I’d have an out. Yes, liberals hated Bush and threated to leave the country on account of him. But this time it’s gender-specific. Liberals don’t fear Santorum. Liberal women (and gays, obviously) do.

Which explains, I think, the new set of Gevalia coffee ads, being aired on Hulu if not elsewhere. The concept is that a “Swedish” man named "Johan," representing European “caffe” (or “kafe,” or whatever “coffee” is in that pan-European coffee-commercial language immortalized in Dunkin' [typo fixed, thanks Jo!] Donuts ads as “Fretalian”), compares himself favorably with “Joe” – American coffee – who we are to understand is a regular American dude off-screen. In the ads, Johan goes around seducing, flustering, regular American women. He is Johan, and he wants to rub your feet and give you cinnamon buns, or something. 

There’s of course nothing new about the idea that American women would prefer a foreign guy, one who perhaps doesn’t choose his clothes based on what will make him look unequivocally heterosexual. (Even out gay American men do this. It’s just the guiding principle behind how American men dress.) What is new is, dude’s usually either British or maybe French or Italian (“perhaps Fretalian”). If not Hugh Grant or Prince William, the European is a Latin lovah. 

Here, however, Johan is Swedish, a representative of reassuringly socialist Northern Europe, not Berlusconisville. If you go off with Johan, think of the subsidized childcare! Or, if you don't want a kid just yet, think of how no-big-deal it will be to get birth control! You and Johan don't even have to get married, because that's how they roll. (OK, this last bit isn't going to fly with American women, both because it's been drilled into our brains to value marriage, and because we want legal residency status at the very least, which cohabitation probably wouldn't accomplish.) 

How very wise of me, I thought, as the national conversation disintegrated into a discussion of whether a woman must take a special contraceptive pill every time, and whether 95% or is it 98% of American women are in fact prostitutes, to marry a Jo and not a Joe.

What are women's jeans for?

I know you've all been waiting for an update on my quest for all-cotton women's jeans. It continues, on and off. I've ordered some online (free shipping both ways...), but am not optimistic.

While I had not initially articulated it in these terms, I've come to realize - ever since moving to the woods and not periodically replenishing on lower Broadway - that the problem with spandex/stretch in jeans is that it gets fried over time in the wash, and is thus responsible for this effect. The low-rise-ness comes from the fact that whichever material allows the jeans to look perfect in the store will, after X washes, deteriorate and cease to cover all they were meant to cover. You're left, in other words, with just the cotton, and the illusion of having lost weight, even if your non-stretch clothing items and recent rediscovery of Haagen Daaz tell a different tale. So not only is this crap material (in my opinion) the reason the dye just slides off today's oh-so-flattering dark-denim skinny-jean, but it also explains the ubiquity of low-rise, even on wearers of jeans that were not sold as such.

Above and beyond my own quest, I started getting really curious if 100% cotton women's jeans exist. I clicked on various styles from different brands to see fabric content, making a point not to bother with styles with "skinny" or "legging" in the name. And the verdict is: stretch is as ubiquitous as high-fructose corn syrup, and much in the same way - there where you expect it, but also where you don't. Old Navy, which has the most all-cotton options I've found, nevertheless puts heaps of polyester as well as stretch in its most basic style. L.L. Bean sells several all-cotton versions of the "mom," as well as one attractive variant that's plenty synthetic. A classic look from Wrangler has spandex, as do virtually all from Levi's. (One gorgeous pair is all-cotton but goes for $178, at which point you might as well go to A.P.C.)

There are many good explanations for how all denim marketed at women came to be stretchy. Factors such as the dropping cost of spandex and the desire of consumers not to feel fat - automatic vanity sizing, so much so that the reviews of all-cotton Old Navy jeans include remarks about how they're sized too small. We've come to expect stretch, so we have no real concept of what any pants size ought to feel like.

There's also the near-impossibility of finding clothes that fit properly at chain stores, which is where everyone - rich, poor, in-between - shops, paired with the continued societal insistence that things fit properly. Add 2% spandex and (until they're worn out) your jeans look made-to-measure. The necessity becomes all the more obvious when you try on pants that don't have stretch, but that are no less mass-produced. They look... wrong, in a way one is not used to anymore. They bring us back to an era when pants were sometimes unflattering, and when one might discover that pants bought three months ago no longer close.

While I have not taken this as far as bringing pants from the 1990s to the lab, my sense is that the ubiquity of stretch in women's jeans is a result of the circa-2004 trend of premium jeans. These were the $200 pairs, typically with distinctive stitching on the back pockets. Often, and differentiating themselves from the designer jeans of earlier eras, they did look massively better than the ones that came before, better shades of denim, better fit, and at the ready to be styled with a pair of heels and a sequined tank top, the going-out uniform of that era. They probably also fell apart in the wash, but they looked good in a way that the flared Mudds, Levi's, or (remember those?) Jnco's did not. Then, understandably, cheaper brands switched over to the "premium" look, using more/darker dye and increasingly more stretch, until a pair of black leggings could be defined as jeans. There is now virtually no non-premium-inspired alternative. Even "classic" jeans have stretch.

So the pros of stretch are obvious. Until the jeans fall apart, you have that once-elusive garment: a made-to-measure pair of jeans, and in an ego-flattering size, at that. And if spandex isn't as eco-friendly as cotton, you're at least not needing to buy new pairs every time your own size shifts ever-so-slightly. Also, of course, a budgetary advantage. That problem from days of yore - jeans digging into your waist and cutting off circulation when you sit down - is not such an issue when spandex is involved.

But why, if stretch is so wonderful, is it ubiquitous in women's jeans, but just about unheard-of in men's? Men's jeans, except in styles aimed at would-be Mick Jaggers, are typically 100% cotton. They look like... jeans. The way jeans used to look. And yet you don't hear men complaining that it's impossible to find a decent pair of them.

A seemingly pointless question that points to something far greater: why are women's jeans 2% spandex, men's 0%? Why is the gender difference in denim - that is, the reason for a woman to buy women's jeans, a man men's - an issue not of length and crotch-roominess, but stretch?

One possibility is that women want to believe they're a size six, while there's no male equivalent to this desire. Another, that it's expected women will buy new jeans every five minutes regardless, so there's no need to promise durability. Yes, stretch=junk, "premium" be damned, but women love shopping, so why not sell them junk?

The most likely explanation, however, is that women are expected to wear body-con everything, whereas men are penalized for doing so. Men do not have problems finding "jeans that fit," because there's no expectation that a pair of mass-produced denim pants will fit like made-to-order riding breeches. For men's jeans to fit, they need to be big enough to close, small enough not to fall down. And they hardly even need to fit - belts can hold up jeans that are too big, and beer-bellies can most certainly pour over pairs that are too small. For this reason, the only women's jeans at a non-horrendous price point to lack stretch are called "boyfriend jeans," although let it be known that "boyfriend" can become "sexy boyfriend" only with the addition of 2% spandex.

So it's progress, in a sense, that women's jeans are now at least comfortable. It's still expected that they be skin-tight, but at least now, there's less of an expectation that we ought to shape our own bodies to fit into the pants, now that the pants stretch to fit our bodies. (Soup commercials be damned.) Form-fitting no longer means circulation-destroying.

But ideally... what do we want here? Men also in jeggings? In principle, I support this sort of thing, but in practice, I remember the ubiquity of the men-in-tights look among Parisian joggers, and I don't think we want a shift in this direction. Narrow pants, yes, super-spandex, no. I suppose I'd rather see a shift in the other direction, with a redefinition of what it means for women's jeans to "fit." Something like "boyfriend" jeans, but without the more-offensive-the-more-you-think-about-it name.