On "Nanette" ambivalence

Everyone seemed to really love "Nanette." By "everyone" at this stage (there will be other stages), I mostly mean people I follow on social media: friends, acquaintances, like-minded writers. I had not, thus far, much-if-at-all noticed any reviews. But judging by word-of-mouth reception, the show, a Netflix stand-up special, seemed to have achieved the miraculous feat of seeming spot-on regarding feminism, across swaths of feminists who don't necessarily normally agree on much. There was a #MeToo angle! Something about mansplaining, but not heavy-handed-seeming! But also: performer Hannah Gadsby spoke about being a gender-non-conforming lesbian and not — as others would sometimes insist — a trans man, which pleased the contingent fearful that butch lesbians these days are under pressure to transition. (That is not my lane — I'm a cis woman not averse to menswear, but who, earlier this evening, booked something called "partial head highlights" — and nor am I any kind of outside expert; I bring this up merely to point out how branches of feminism I wouldn't have expected to were converging over "Nanette.")

Without giving much thought to how any of this would translate to comedy, I found myself with the requisite set of factors — an hour or so of free time, a limited array on Canadian Netflix — and figured why not?

It started out promising: We meet Gadsby with her dogs, and they're excellent dogs. Then, and more importantly, there's Gadsby herself, who's so charming, as well as just... original. Her stage presence, but also her well-told, unusual-for-stand-up life story (a gay Tasmanian woman with a background in art history, in an arena where "woman" can, on its own, suffice as difference). And maybe most of all, originality-wise, an unpredictable politics: unambiguously progressive but in-group critical. That's a tough line to walk, especially in comedy — how can this be done without making it seem like you're giving out-group members, aka the majority of the audience (and of society), permission to laugh at the group you're a part of? — but somehow she was managing it.

And then...

The second part of the routine is what critics (although the word "critics" seems the wrong word for near-unanimous adulation) have deemed the point. It's a monologue covering quite a bit of ground, all righteous, some cathartic, some more along the lines of a gets-it-right op-ed (or, as some have observed, a TED talk): Picasso was a sexist whose lover, during his own middle age, was a 17-year-old girl. Self-deprecation is problematic, you see, a self-defense mechanism of the marginalized. Comedy is problematic. Gadsby speaks about her own experiences as the victim of sexual violence; what she says is not funny, but who would ask this to be? She also repeats the refrain, "straight cis white men," I think in that order, in reference to the category of humanity without experience being the underdog.

Where did all this leave the viewer, or much more accurately, this viewer?

I came away as convinced as I already was — which is to say, abundantly convinced — that homophobia is a scourge which has lived on well past when some might imagine it's obsolete, if with more specific knowledge about Australian homophobia than I'd ever had previously. I was also — shockingly, I know, especially As A Woman — already opposed to sexual assault, as well as irritated at the thing where male geniuses (and a whole lot of not-so-brilliant men, under that cover) get a pass to do pretty much whatever. And yeah, I've experienced a bit of mansplanation in my day, even if my interpretation of it may be slightly different than the usual. (I think mansplaining is a thing, but a thing men also do to other men, only the dynamic's different in that context.) I may not have been precisely the target audience for "Nanette," but not far off.

But did agreeing with (most of) the arguments themselves mean liking "Nanette"?

According to The Moment, yeah, pretty much. Reviews and profiles in major publications (New Yorker, NYT, Guardian, etc.) tended to hit the same notes: Behold, a list of unassailable public figures who not only praised "Nanette" but declared it the most important work ever. Behold, Gadsby herself, someone whose relatively late, out-of-the-blue-seeming success, after numerous personal and mental-health struggles, feels not just earned but like justice being served. And then the third element: the cultural and political context, the ultra-solemn Now. "Nanette" feels like a response to Louis C.K., to all the bad men who've felt entitled to our bodies and our laughter. (Consider the New Yorker's choice to have Moira Donegan, creator of the "Shitty Media Men" list, as a "Nanette" reviewer.)

Failure to swoon over "Nanette" becomes a multifaceted misdeed: a dissent from the critical consensus; a personal-seeming insult against a performer who seems like an unusually deserving person (because, after all, the show is so personal);

While watching "Nanette," I found myself thinking of Woody Allen, not least because he comes in for some criticism in Part II. A straight cis white man, yes. Problematic, undoubtedly. (And who can forget that the journalist credited with #MeToo — even if, fine, two women journalists got there first — is none other than Allen's son? Woody Is Everywhere.) But I have trouble thinking of the self-deprecation of Allen's early years as coming from a place of privilege. I found myself wondering whether Gadsby, whose show so deeply rests on her own unequivocal underdog status, has reckoned with her own (best as I know) gentileness, when effectively throwing Jewish humor (yes, and other sorts as well) out the window.

I am not an experiencer of male privilege. I did not take the ugh-men turn remotely personally. Nor, somehow, was I cheering.

Far more than Woody Allen, though, the comedian I had in mind while watching was Ali Wong, a comic I also learned about via social-media hype leading me to a Netflix special. It's hard to argue that Wong's physical presence in "Baby Cobra" (which, for what it's worth, I watched and enjoyed well before motherhood was on the horizon for me personally) or "Hard Knock Wife" — Asian-American and heavily pregnant — is less outside stand-up norms than Gadsby's. Wong, too, broke ground, and addressed all manner of 'identity' topics, and also... was hilarious.

It helps that Wong's performances (and, as I recall, the critical and social-media endorsements of them) don't leave the viewer feeling like anything less than a heartfelt enthusiastic reception means you're an anti-Asian bigot, or unsympathetic to the challenges of life in a female body. Nor, for that matter, that any response other than This Is Important was akin to bashing a sensitive soul's artistic production.

But what I kept thinking was, are we meant to believe Ali Wong pandered to the patriarchy by doing stand-up routines that were funny the whole way through, addressing race, female sexuality, and miscarriage, but also, heaven forfend, making audiences laugh? More broadly: why is anything other than unsubtle, earnest outrage now viewed as being on the wrong side? Does someone like me — someone who (this is in the book) found much of "Master of None" cringe-inducing — simply not belong to this era?

(Is it too cynical, or worse, to remember that "Master of None" was only held up as this icon of Awareness until co-creator and star Aziz Ansari became problematic via an itself-problematic early #MeToo story, wherein he was reportedly gross while dating? To remember this, that is, and to wonder whether it's tempting fate to declare Gadsby — or any human being! — the epitome of pure, underdog goodness, when who knows what will surface, or as they say online, milkshake-duck?)

Sanctimonious entertainment doesn't drive me to the right politically. (Thus why you're getting this to-do on WWPD and not in a publication — I could see my view on "Nanette" being not just published celebrated on the right... but for the wrong reasons.) Maybe it does this for some, I wouldn't rule it out. For me, it just makes me think cultural consumption is something that effectively needs to happen in private, if it's to happen honestly. Not necessarily in the sense of alone, but among friends, or over direct messages.

To be clear, it's not about what can or can't be said, or not exactly. I'm well aware that there's a tremendous market for dissenting views from self-identified progressives. But that market is, or amounts to, the right. Or if not the right, exactly, then a subset of the center that has its priorities wrong, obsessing over progressive sanctimony while the right offers up one disaster after the next. It's certainly permitted not to like "Nanette." But where are you left if you like its political message but not its artistic one, or just found the whole thing a bit meh, despite rooting for the creator personally? Is this a case where it's best to say nothing at all?

The trouble with personal writing (yes, I repeat myself on this) is that it's impossible to criticize the writing without seeming to be judging the author, or making light of her struggles. A similar problem comes up with political art: If you care about Issue A, the expectation is that you'll love Work X, and conversely, if Work X doesn't do much for you, then it's clearly because Issue A doesn't move you. This approach to culture, which feels (and is!) so very now, isn't entirely new. It's just become ubiquitous. (Please, please read Lauren Oyler on "necessary" art, especially this part, but really, all of it: "When applied to bad art with good politics, 'necessary' allows the audience to avoid engaging with a work in aesthetic terms, which tend to be more ambiguous and difficult.")

"Nanette" falls squarely into both situations — it's personal and topical. To feel meh about "Nanette" is — unless you're really leaning into contrarianism — to feel as though you're wrong politically as well as contributing to the wrongs the performance's creator has already had to suffer. Which is... not great, I think, for art, or ultimately, for politics either.

A year later

March 14. That felt familiar, but why? Pi day? But familiar beyond this. (I'm reasonably pi-day-indifferent.) And then it hit me: My book! The Perils of "Privilege" came out March 14, 2017. This is a date I was so keenly aware of in the year or so prior to it, but somehow less so once it passed. A year! I still can't quite believe I wrote a book, and am so grateful to everyone who helped make that happen, who read the book, bought/borrowed it, and reviewed or otherwise wrote about it.

Here's some of what the book is about:

-Why the privilege call-out ('check your privilege', etc.), which in theory seems like a way around making it about the person being called out, somehow manages to do just that.

-Misogyny presenting itself as progressivism (as in, it's not women who are the problem, of course not, just privileged women however defined, who are the worst).

-The way a privilege framework fails to address anti-Semitism, in part because Jews don't 'count' as marginalized, and in part because of the age-old anti-Semitic notion of 'Jewish privilege.'

-The trickiness of reconciling a privilege framework with idiosyncratic obstacles.

-Problematic faves.

-2016 (sorry!), and how Bernie and Hillary supporters were united in their belief that supporting the other candidate was evidence of privilege.

-Trumpism as a warped version of/pushback to the privilege framework.

-Blog comments. Tweets, but also blog comments. The all-too-common online situation of people getting called out for forms of privilege they don't possess. (My biggest regret about the book is that I didn't assertively make the case for treating online as part of life, rather than a distraction one can simply ignore. I'd gone that direction intentionally, but could have better spelled out my reasons.)

Writing a book falls into that category of experiences that can change everything and nothing. It can lead to fluctuating thoughts: My book is Very Important and this is insufficiently recognized followed up with My book is garbage and the most critical reviewers have found me out, in my profound foolishness. As I understand it, this is - in context - normal. And frankly the book has been more appreciated than I could have ever hoped: a review (and a "notable" inclusion) in the Washington Post, a mention in a NYT op-ed, TVO and C-Span Book TV, NPR and WNYC, and more.

But until the gods of your-ideas-are-actually-amazing appear and declare that you and your work count, the anxieties are there. (OK, even when something like that happens.) Partly it's because - how else to put this? - it's not super duper profitable to write a book. Unless you're offering up 12 Rules for making your bed the way lobsters do, book-writing is a side job. (Tangentially related: I'm fairly sure I managed to disappoint both those who'd hoped my book would be about how "privilege" is a myth and actually white men are the real victims and those who'd been expecting an earnest treatise on how the world would be a better place if everyone acknowledged their privilege already.)

The question of... what's next. I have a bunch of smaller-than-a-book projects in mind, some underway, so maybe one of those? (While I'm still - force of habit, plus people send me links - following "privilege", it may be time for something new.) Will need to wait until the end of the semester, but the dream of maybe writing a book again, maybe, isn't entirely kaput.

Remember the Food Movement?

Sara Mojtehedzadeh and Brendan Kennedy's Toronto Star exposé of a Toronto-area bread factory is great journalism. Great for so many reasons, but here's a less-obvious one: it's about the factory, not the imagined consumer of factory-produced bread. It's not that there isn't any connection made in the piece between factory conditions and consumption, but it's an aside, early on: "These may well be the croissants you eat for breakfast." The point of the article is not to make you, the individual possible-croissant-consuming reader, more closely examine your breakfast choices. It's about labor conditions and - as the headline "Undercover in Temp Nation" suggests - the structure of today's economy. That bread is an everyday item we're all familiar with is a way of bringing the reader in. The essential, though, is what happens in the factory where Mojtehedzadeh works undercover:

No one tells me where fire extinguishers or exits are. Another temp confides she didn’t buy safety shoes, which cost the equivalent of a day’s wages. She makes it through the screening anyway. 

The story is about injury, death, and shady business practices at bread factories. The implicit fix the article demands involves changes to, and increased enforcement of, labor law. There's no suggestion whatsoever that the source of the issue is the modern consumer, demanding bread produced in a factory. No cultural archetype posited as The Bad Croissant-Consumer, to be shamed either for being fancy, bourgeois, and croissant-nibbling, or, conversely, for being lower-class and not getting an artisanal-enough croissant (or for having processed carbs to begin with). Nope, the (correct) assumption underlying the piece is that people of all sorts eat packaged bread; that eating is a necessity; and that the issue is how the people producing that bread are treated. It's a story about consumer products, but not about consumption.

It's my sense that ever since the 2016 election, the food movement - and with it, the more general movement to consider individual (posh) consumer choices the ultimate political act - has been kaput. Yes, food is still political. But the thing where status as a good person hinged on choosing spelt over quinoa, or avoiding winter asparagus, that thing is, for better or worse, over. (Better because it was silly, worse because it's a sign of dire times that silly preoccupations get forgotten.)

It feels like ancient history, but there was a time when I felt a bit guilty about my grocery habits. Not for sometimes overspending on cheese (that I still sometimes do, and still feel guilty about), but for ignoring The Rules. Rules laid out by various prophets: Use only the freshest, most local, most seasonal, or else. Or else what? The concern was always a bit vague, but very much rooted in something ethical.

It wasn't 'clean eating' (which persists, as the euphemism for dieting it always was), but this arbitrary dividing line between real food and fake, where authenticity was measured by inconvenience. Inconvenience, and something a bit more sinister, but always between-the-lines: certain food could be trusted (sourced ingredients), whereas other food - in particular, ethnic food - could not. Everything, to be trusted, had to be served to you by a white, flannel-clad, bearded hipster, at a place with farms listed on the menu. This excluded all dining establishments and grocery options falling under the category once problematically referred to as "ethnic." Oh, but Scandinavian food, that was OK. (Gee, I wonder why the food movement as it once was feels passé?)

While the writing itself would often be in the third-person plural, it was clear that a "we" including food writers weren't buying packaged food at supermarkets - those other people were. "We" were spending 60 hours a week sourcing ingredients at Berkeley farmers markets, at Cobble Hill fishmongers (and to be fair, it is a good fishmonger). Except who were "we," anyway? Much was made of food and privilege - of how not everyone is able to live off kale and locally-sourced squab or whatever. But of those who could, how many ever were?

There was also this eternal pre-food-movement mother, the one who foolishly fed her kids supermarket foods, and who didn't value time-consuming food prep the way her son (there, generally, there was a son) the food writer would. Remember that? That was something.

Individual ingredients were declared problematic, the way individual celebrities (and internet randos) are these days. Everything was scary, in this semi-/pseudoscientific way. Tomatoes sprayed to look red, and farmed salmon treated in some way to be pink! Did you know that asparagus came from Chile? Did you? Exposés about how packaged food was engineered to... taste good, a fact presented as if inherently sinister.

From the prophets trickled down an aesthetic, but an aesthetic you could ignore at your own risk - if properly trained, you would think a Rules-meeting diet was the most delicious. There was no subjectivity to this, no possibility that anyone might actually honest-to-goodness prefer certain packaged foods to fresh, or value time over from-scratch preparations. Genuine nutritional concerns (why is sugar added to so many packaged foods?) mixed with aesthetic ones (much of locavorism), as well as ones that were clearly pointing the way to worse eating habits.

When I thought about this rationally, The Rules made little sense: wasn't it a better idea to eat less (or no) meat, rather than locavoring one's way through traceable steak dinners? Wasn't purism re: local/seasonal inhibiting vegetable consumption, if it left grocery-shoppers feeling guilty for buying the only vegetables actually available to them, for months on end, or at all? But most of all: if there were issues with the food system - there were! there are! - why was the proposed solution a change in individual consumer behavior? I found the whole thing irritating at best, pseudoscientific as well as casually sexist and xenophobic. But it still, somehow, led to this nagging sense of guilt, one I can't say has entered my mind in ages.

Ugh-ing in unison

Highly recommend Michael Sacasas - via Navneet Alang - on "affect overload," or the way social media drifts from ubiquitous emotional displays regarding one crisis to... the same thing, but re: the next:

"Even apart from crisis, controversies, and tragedies, however, the effect is consistent: the focus is inexorably on the fleeting present. The past has no hold, the future does not come into play. Our time is now, our place is everywhere."

Sacasas argues - and I think he's right! - that this phenomenon makes it very difficult to actually stop and think about... well, anything. I'm half asleep but have been wanting to yes-and this since reading it earlier today:

The thing on Twitter, maybe a bit on Facebook too, where everyone is upset about the same thing, all at once, and you feel like you're interrupting a meeting for those distressed about the topic of the moment if you opine about anything else... it's real. It's a thing. It's the thing where someone without any apparent connection to a story of the moment announces they're tired, and the assumption - the default assumption! - will be that this is a tired from the strain of the upsetting story in the news that day, and not any other sort of tired. Not the literal tired of having not slept, nor even the personal-and-political tired of having dealt with discrimination on a personal level. (Not that the not-having-slept tired can't have personal-as-political roots of its own...) No, the tired of terrible things having happened, that you have read about. The tired of something having happened to a member or members of a demographic you're not necessarily a part of, but that you definitely consider yourself an ally of. And it's not just "tired" - it's any out-of-context ugh. The assumption is that you are plugged into exactly what everyone's talking about now, even if you're in no way employed as a commentator, and that this is an ugh at what everyone else is ugh-ing about.

The impact, then, isn't just to reduce the thoughtfulness with which it's possible to analyze current events. Nor is it just to make any thoughts not about the news seem insensitive. It's this odd performance-yet-shaping of emotion. Think of your moods in a given day. When were you happy? Sad? Angry? I suspect that even for the very online, these don't especially track with news stories. Not never - for reasons I myself don't entirely understand, I find the Weinstein story incredibly sad and angering, even by awful-story-in-the-news standards - but... not as much as it would seem from social media? Because people have offline lives, as well as all sorts of idiosyncratic things going on in their online lives, inasmuch as those can be divided at this point, etc., etc., apologies but I am tired in the literal sense. 

The overshare era is done, replaced with intense displays of emotion about what would have to be a limited part of what's impacting anyone's emotional life. Yes, this relates - in ways I'm not quite awake enough for - to Jia Tolentino's argument about the personal essay feeling irrelevant unless anchored in an issue, unless - in a sense - an op-ed. Which is a win for privacy, I guess? But seems as it if would have some downsides as well.

Must be nice

The expression "they took our jobs" evokes, what, that South Park episode? Nativist resentment? That's assuming the "they" in question are immigrants. What if "they" refers elsewhere?

Twice recently on Twitter - once antagonistically, once not - I've seen this topic pop up. What interests me is the question itself, which is when someone should or shouldn't take a prestigious internship, or fellowship funding for a creative pursuit, or for a grad program, or... you get the idea. When is a job not just a job, but economic redistribution?

Because the answer clearly isn't never. Sometimes, money of that nature does or should take need into account. College scholarships come to mind. Specific jobs programs. Beyond this, though?

As appealing as it might be to aim for need-based employment - in spirit, if not in practice, because how on earth would this be enforced* - it seems like it would invite any number of unwanted consequences. If the truly independently wealthy - people who've inherited or been given so much money that they don't need to work - did the honorable thing and either didn't apply for internships/fellowships/grants or - because surely even the fancy are allowed ambitions - handed back any money they won, then... great? (Would they, though? Are the independently wealthy handing their far more substantial corporate salaries, in full, over to charities?)

It gets much trickier when you get into this other caste of supposed rich people with no need to work: adults currently - or potentially - dependent on their parents or partners. Compared with adults who have neither option, these are... adults with options. But what are those options? The parents scenario can involve things like - to give a not-that-uncommon example - not coming out because if you did, your parents would cut you off. Or parents who want to give and give and give, and do, but really shouldn't, because they're not actually rich enough to support their 30-year-old child's journey through a fourth graduate program.

The partner one has its own issues. There's the extreme (but, again, not-uncommon) case of people staying in abusive relationships for financial reasons. But there's also the precariousness angle - a partner could leave, or lose their job, and then what? Is this gendered? Sure can be! The notion that a woman with a higher-earning male partner doesn't need to work is bad news. Deeply bad news, in that it extends not just to women who do in fact have partners who fit that description, but also, as an assumption, to women as a caste. If women are viewed as people who do/should/surely must have rich husbands, why pay women an equal amount? Why pay women at all?

Point being: There are the people - and this would be most adults - who need to work to live and it's that simple. Then there are the handful who don't - how nice for them. Then there's this not-insignificant group of people who could - under temporary or precarious conditions - not work, but who would be risking something in giving up on employability. And I'm not keen on the implications of declaring that set part and parcel of The Privileged, and announcing, for example, that a stay-at-home mom is entitled for seeking a return to the paid workforce.

*As in, how would anyone force rich people not to take jobs (whereas the state can, in theory, force rich people to pay higher taxes, which is the way this should actually be dealt with), but also as in, how would employers measure need? Or how would that happen in a non-exploitative way? Employers can and sometimes do exploit desperation, but will, in other situations, reward the already-posh. But this notion that redistribution is going to come from employers seems mighty unrealistic.

Blueberry bagel as subtext

So. Lots of the people on the cultural appropriation is wonderful bandwagon, or adjacent liberal but anti-"PC" bandwagons - and who are at this very moment being called out for their white obliviousness on that topic - are Jewish. This has been the case for the last however many rounds of this topic. Best as I can tell, it's true in the US and Canada alike. What does it all mean?

-The ungenerous interpretation: The Jews in question are white, middle-class or well-off, and but for this one marginalized quality, Jewishness, would be raging alt-right white supremacists, as versus contrarian liberals. They feel as they do because they're white; their Jewishness is incidental. And after all, Jews are also well-represented among this set's critics.

-A more generous interpretation: Those with a liminal, intermediary, ambiguous identity - Jews, but also, to varying degrees, white women, gay men, non-black POC - have unique insights into how it goes for the oppressor and the oppressed. Even if they're not announcing their Jewishness, and instead opining as white people critical of 'identity politics', it's relevant.

-The sympathetic interpretation: Jews have long been oppressed, still are, especially by the newly-revived neo-Nazi movement, but a left framework refuses to acknowledge this one form of oppression makes some Jews feel excluded from the broader anti-oppression struggle and be sort of like, screw you, left and right. (Subtext: 'We never got a chance to complain about the dreadful things done to bagels.') But then you have to choose; some choose the right, whether out of a sense that the left is worse-for-the-Jews or for whichever other (esp. baffling in light of this GOP administration) reasons.

-The meta interpretation: I keep thinking about Item 3 from Bret Stephens's (yes, how apropos) advice to those who "aspire" to write op-eds. It is, in effect, to avoid nuance. That this is what the style does indeed demand means opinion-writing can't ever quite reach the subtleties of opinion-having. A stance that places you on a culture-wars team sells better than one that does not. (I'm still amazed that I got the opportunity to write a book that's critical of privilege discourse, but not team-anti-identity-politics.) To really get into the subtleties of how Jewishness impacts an experience of whiteness, this is something that needs... introspection? A separate study of its own, one not in op-ed format?

As might be obvious (?) I lean towards all of the above. I don't think the answer here is to say that well actually, white opinion-writers A, B, C, etc., are Jewish, both because they're still also white and because the listing of the Jews, no matter the motivation, can feel like a sinister activity. But not mentioning that A, B, and C are Jewish somehow feels - to me, a white Jewish writer a few notches to their left - like missing something important.

The beginnings of thoughts

-The post-decency presidency. He's not just unconcerned with niceties on some liberal-arts-seminar level. It's this elaborate performance of, how would a person act if totally OK with being awful? And the answer is, unsurprisingly, not great. 

Because oh. my. goodness. Say what you will about virtue-signaling. Roll your eyes, if you feel like, when acquaintances with no personal relationship to a tragedy, no news or help to share, post about how they find it sad. But if your job is president of a country, then even if your mind is on which flavor of potato chips to next eat, you really do have to at least pretend to care. Ideally you would care, but given who the president is, that's exceedingly hard to picture happening.

All I can think is, Trump won on a platform of opposing political correctness broadly defined - not just of-the-moment hypersensitivity and progressive Tumblr excesses. Not just baseline, mainstream-etiquette rejection of overt racism and sexism. No, it goes further. It's about rejecting whatever check most of us but especially politicians are meant to have on selfish and tone-deaf impulses.

Which, look, if his thing were that he said what popped into his head, had no concern for niceties, but had good policies, and diverted the energy that might have gone to platitudes and PR towards improving things, then... fine? But no, this is not what he was doing. This was never what he was going to do. He's dispensed with niceties and put, in their place, awfulness.

-The White Lady, post-post-election. (Chapter 4 is on this but I wrote it - like the rest of the book - pre-election.) Anne Helen Petersen's essay and much of the Taylor Swift continues to exist content. Also: Chelsea Clinton continues to exist content. Louise Linton's #designerboasting, Paris Hilton's canine McMansion. The lady who opened a fancy-Toronto-neighborhood-named but also appropriative bar in Brooklyn. Marie Antoinette.

As always, there's the question of, how much of ugh-white-ladies is anti-racism and/or anti-oligarchy, and how much a form of ugh-women-in-general but with a progressive-seeming veneer? It would seem to be a case where speaker identity matters. When a white man - I don't care how sure he is that he's speaking As An Ally - declares white women the worst, particularly a straight white man who likely has a romantic history (real or desired) in which white women play a substantial role, I have to wonder. Whereas when a woman of color - especially, in the US context at least, a black woman - makes what are in principle the same points, I'm ten trillion times more likely to think there's something there.

But this still leaves the question of whether it's on the whole a positive development that Bourgeois White Lady Awfulness has become such a thing in the culture. How much is it a necessary corrective to the idea (an idea someone may in fact hold, maybe?) that the real racism or classism is sexism, i.e. that rich white women of the Louise Linton persuasion are, because women, just as oppressed as, say, trans women of color? And how much is it just a new way of sparing rich white men - that is, the people with the most power, but oh, not the most luxurious privilege, just, you know... power - their comeuppance?

-Sam Sifton or maybe the NYT on behalf of him crowdsourcing female authors. A response tweet that one got - and that I'm now not finding - with someone's spreadsheet listing books they'd read, with the authors' gender and race also noted. The necessity of feeling allowed to like what you like (and of having some space where you consume whatever you consume, without an audience), but also the advantages of being... thoughtful? intentional? when, as a critic, you're deciding what to promote. Which is a different thing. And which is what a summer reading list in a big newspaper consists of. The whole thing didn't begin with online activists digging up a Goodreads account.

Supermodel vs. Schlub

Recently the following Twitter exchange made the rounds, with a comeback that has won praise from at least two people I follow: Chrissy Teigen - model, actress, social media personality (nearly seven million Twitter followers), wife of John Legend (marital status relevant to the tweet at hand) - tweeted, "I have a best selling book, great boobs, a family I love, am literally eating pasta on a lake in Italy and I married rich." This (since-deleted) tweet was not gratuitous self-congratulation. Rather, it was in response to another tweet, from a now-locked (but one might infer, Trump-friendly) account with 314 followers, suggesting that getting blocked by Trump on Twitter was the high point of Teigen's otherwise pathetic life. Her point? Yeah, not so much.

One response to the episode is that Teigen sure told dude. Another: this was a punch down. Supermodel vs. Schlub. Presumably the fact that dude's account went from public to private in the course of my writing this blog post has something to do with him being inundated with negative attention from Teigen's numerous supporters. Teigen had been personally insulted, but only one of these two people was in a position to instigate a Twitter pile-on against the other.

There's a third possibility, which I'm getting to...

Versions of this dynamic, involving people with platforms but not Teigen-level celebrity, play out on Twitter all the time. Someone behind an account with relatively few followers (or - as in a case I'm thinking of, just one follower) will say something fairly garbage, directing their women-should-serve-men, their all-lives-matter, at someone with a large platform, who is also personally (as in, identity-categories-wise) impacted by the issues at hand. It won't be report-worthy abuse, but it will be on the cusp. The speaker will be, individually, quite powerless, but will be speaking in defense of the powerful.

What are the options of the marginalized-but-platform-having party? Should they just take it silently, missing an opportunity to show what oppression looks like in action? (That was certainly my response to a wave of Twitter harassment I received, just before it became the thing to RT one's harassing mentions.) Retweet but with a screenshot? Obscure the account name? Quote-tweet and mock the idea but not the person? Quote-tweet with a 'look at this idiot'-type message? How responsible, if at all, should they feel for subsequent harassment the last of those might inspire?

And what's the threshold, once we're talking not about real influence but just... disparate follower counts? I had few qualms reacting to tweets from a dude (I think?) who thought he'd dug up something really nefarious when he went to the Wikipedia page for the Israeli flag and learned it had ~Zionist~ origins. As if this was some sort of discovery. My aim, in sharing the tweet (which had already been RT'd - favorably, I would guess from the context - by SlutWalk Chicago, which was how I'd found it in the first place) was to point out the abysmal level at which a conversation supposedly about "Zionism" was taking place, with craptastic consequences for Jews, regardless of position on Israel. Does it matter that flag dude and I have follower counts in the same general range, and are neither of us even Twitter-famous?

Or was I, in calling out bigotry-tinged stupidity on Twitter, part of the problem of how one just can't say anything these days, and therefore the Reason Trump Won TM? I felt a twinge of guilt for sharing it. Guilty, that is, not because I doubted the importance or correctness of calling out that (consequential) foolishness. Guilty for taking pleasure, even a little bit, in doing so.

If we take a step back and return to what the Teigen-and-troll back-and-forth was actually about, we see that the president is blocking people on Twitter. The same president who uses his Twitter account to do things like announce a ban on transgender people in the military. If Teigen chooses to use her platform to draw attention to the absurdity and general disastrousness of the Trump presidency, isn't that... good?

The third option, then, involves - sorry, this is not very exciting - taking things case-by-case. A norm that says it's always bad and inherently harassing to publicly tell someone they've said something offensive, if you have more of a platform than they do, effectively eliminates social media's capacity for righting wrongs. It is a good thing about Twitter, say, that there are people from marginalized groups with power on there (sometimes elsewhere, too!), who are able to expose and push back against all manner of horribleness. Meanwhile a norm that every misstep needs to be called out by everyone who sees it, however tangentially involved, just leads to the kind of awful Twitter pile-ons where self-proclaimed allies battle it out with one another, ostensibly On Behalf Of, and they may each and every one of them mean well, but ultimately for their own entertainment/posturing.

Put another way: blanket rejection of call-outs - when it extends to people who a) are actually impacted, and/or b) were personally insulted and are replying to the person who personally and publicly insulted them - is purity politics in its own right.

The hoagies of privilege

Now that I'm neither blogging professionally nor working on a book partly about internet controversies, I know I can skip stories of the moment. I can see that Lena Dunham (!) rehomed her rescue dog (!!!) and decide to just let that one sit. It's not that I don't have, within me, 7438297423 words on Lambygate. I've just made a conscious choice not to put my energies towards bringing that potential document into existence.

However! I can't let the David Brooks sandwich story be. Short version: People on the left - liberals, leftists, progressives - might be annoyed at Brooks here for the wrong reasons. Or not exactly the wrong reasons - more like, they're only annoyed, I suspect, because it's a David Brooks column.

Before I go further with why I think this, let me backtrack and remind/explain what I'm referring to: David Brooks's latest NYT column is a quasi-endorsement of the Richard Reeves argument that the trouble with America today is that upper-middle class people don't know they're rich. Brooks, like Reeves, is right that the wealthy but not super-rich try really hard to keep their kids at least as well-off as they are. And Brooks has been on the limousine-liberal-hypocrisy beat for ages, one for which there is always a steady stream of material, so he chose wisely.

Where things go wrong: Brooks takes the privilege-awareness aspect of Reeves's argument - the one that was, at least, only a framing devise in his otherwise reasonable op-ed - and insists upon it:

I was braced by Reeves’s book, but after speaking with him a few times about it, I’ve come to think the structural barriers he emphasizes are less important than the informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent.

By "informal barriers" he means cultural capital. Taste, in the Bourdieusian sense:

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

This is the passage that led to all the #trending mockery. Haha, said left-to-liberal Twitter, David Brooks thinks it's elitist to eat deli sandwiches! Or: David Brooks thinks elites know what striata baguettes are, when who knows what that is!

Here's Brooks's conclusion, which interests me more than the sandwich specifics:

We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible. The rest of America can’t name them, can’t understand them. They just know they’re there.

This is... a "privilege" argument. It is the "privilege" argument. Brooks is saying not just that cultural capital exists (which, yes), but that it is actually the most important form of capital. He's saying that the subtle (ahem) distinctions - "hav[ing] the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality" - are the stuff elite status is really made of. Which is - I believe, and argue in The Perils of "Privilege" - missing the point. In the absence of capital-capital, cultural capital doesn't do a heck of a lot. And insisting upon specific giveaways - especially food and drink - never works, because kale and lattes and whatever came after those have long since made it out of whichever Park Slope or Berkeley corridor of artisanal luxe. It's an appealing argument, because cultural capital is a thing, and feels like a revelation when you first learn about it. But ultimately, money - and race, gender, etc. - matter a whole lot more than ingredient expertise.

Where have we seen this flawed idea before? The left! On the left - except in some newly-prominent pockets of the socialist left - it's been one big mutual privilege-accusation-fest for the past decade. Everyone's secret, not-admitted, subtly-expressed privileges were forever being revealed by people just as privileged. That was blog comment threads! It happened offline as well! Until... I don't know, maybe until Trump, or maybe David Brooks's latest column, progressive discourse often involved fancy people accusing one another of recognizing gourmet ingredients, or making ostentatious statements about not recognizing them, so as to suggest a scrappy past. This certainly also existed on the right - Charles Murray's "bubble" quiz! - but it sort of was progressivism, in a much deeper sense.

So yes, it was some mix of a relief and just bizarre to see a progressive consensus around the notion that structural inequality matters more than cured-meat classification. I can only hope that sticks. I'd like to think this means (my fellow) progressives actually get why the salami argument was wrong, and weren't just mocking a David Brooks column for its own sake.

A vivid imagination

There's a Twitter formulation that involves summoning one's followers' imagination: Imagine being so stupid/evil that you'd think this thing that I disagree with. This is not an Against "Imagine" Tweets post, so much as an attempt to figure them out.

Like any rhetorical strategy, "imagine" can be more or less helpful, depending the context. Some viewpoints really are incomprehensible, or so craptastic that calling them incomprehensible is basically a way of calling them evil and nonsensical at the same time. A recent clickbait trolling piece about how tough it is for white men - and about how white men specifically deserve credit for preventing Nazism from taking over the world (!) - got "imagine" responses on and off Twitter, which seems... more than fair. Bonkers plus hateful gets an "imagine." That seems right.

Still, "imagine" is not, in most other cases, a formulation I can get all that enthusiastic about. As a rule, why present regular-level wrongheaded opinions as inconceivable? They're just... wrong. Wrong, but not inexplicable. "Imagine" cuts off the possibility of an explain-but-not-excuse. Of a type of understanding that doesn't necessarily imply empathy. It puts up a wall, not simply against generous interpretations of dissenting viewpoints (which... not all viewpoints deserve generosity), but against the type of comprehension that can be helpful in arguing against an idea, or, say, useful for creating a fictional character.

Take the following "imagine" tweet:

"Imagine being so fragile that you're triggered by gender neutral bathrooms"

This is, on the one hand, an implied argument (one I agree with) that gender neutral bathrooms are necessary for many trans and gender non-conforming people, so cis people wary of them need to get over it. On the other, there's the "imagine" angle, which prompts the reader to... well, to do what, exactly? To divide the world into the good people, who can't even imagine how someone could think otherwise, and those other people, whose sentiment is not just wrong but unimaginable? 

Taken literally, if not as plausibly intended, the "imagine" formulation prompts... imagination. And yes, I could imagine a woman (cis or trans) not wanting to share public restroom facilities with cis men. I can even imagine - not support, not agree with, just imagine - a cis woman existing who did not want to share a bathroom with trans women, "imagine," again, being key here. To "imagine" not the same as 'I can sort of see their point.' It's not devil's-advocate. It's just... X is a view that's out there, I'm familiar with it, I can wrap my head around its existence. To imagine a view in no way precludes finding it misguided or even abhorrent. It's not neutrality. 

Let me put it like this: I can imagine that some people are anti-Semitic misogynists. I'm a Jewish woman. I'd obviously prefer it if anti-Semitism and misogyny didn't exist, but I've encountered both, including in the linked-up variety. I'd rather, frankly, if I could find the existence of people with those views unimaginable. Point being, I'm not trying to virtue-signal my own superior imagination (which I don't even think I have). I'm saying that I think it's a pretense that any of us can't imagine views we disagree with, or even despise. 

Imagines, to be clear, aren't necessarily progressive. They cover a wide range of topics and points on the political spectrum. A sampling:

"Imagine being religious unironically"

"Imagine fleeing to a country as a refugee, being taken in, set up and sent to college only to whine about how awful the country is online."

"Imagine giving a fuck about the founding fathers."

"Imagine being so USA-centric that the only form of slavery you accept the existence of is the kind that was made illegal in 1865."

Oh, and there's even an overtly racist variant:

"Imagine being such a brainlet that u believe 'Diversity is our strength' when literally all statistics, from social-economic prove otherwise"

"Imagine," then, is a way of implicitly faulting others, not for thinking something you don't think, but for being able to wrap their head around the existence of those who do. And... I'm not sure what to do with this.

The privilege books I didn't write

Maybe the strangest thing about writing a book on privilege is the passion with which some readers (or prospective readers) fill in the blanks with what they imagine/want/fear such a book to be about. Everyone has a novel in them, and so, too, it seems, a privilege book. To which I say, the more the merrier! I certainly did not intend for my book to be the only voice or angle on what is a fairly huge and abstract topic.

With that in mind, below, a mere handful of the books about privilege that maybe someone else will one day write - and some of which I'd happily read - but that The Perils of "Privilege" is not.

-A study of The Privileged, in which I delve into the lives of the rich and well-connected, using the weddings covered in Vogue as a starting point.

-A book uncovering privilege in its many facets, with the goal of making sure that those who may think they have it tough have properly reckoned with forms of privilege of which they may have been oblivious.

-A holding-forth about "SJWs" and Young People Today and anyone else who speaks out against injustice, informing the reader that Well Actually racism, sexism, etc., are simultaneously over and delightful, and also the real privilege is being American.

-An academic monograph on the detailed origins of how "privilege" is used in the social sciences and humanities.

-A guide, for those who see themselves as privileged, on how to avoid coming across as such.

-An activist instruction manual, teaching heirs how to leverage their inherited advantage for good.

-A memoir analyzing my own privilege, across the various axes (cis, straight, white, from New York, and with a doctorate in French for crying out loud), and delving deep into the history and significance of the neuroses and (symbolic) self-flagellations these inspire in me personally.

An essay, a moment

I've been thinking, thinking, and thinking some more about Aisha Mirza's Buzzfeed essay, "White Women Drive Me Crazy." I still can't decide what to make of it. Is it a "must-read," especially for white women, as some on Twitter would have it? (Maybe.) Is it racist, as some of the less-savory Twitter sorts would have it? (No. Geez.)

What it is, then, is both compellingly written and deeply of-the-moment. It involves feelings-projection journalism (and in a yoga class! yoga!): A white woman in Mirza's yoga class looked startled. Much of the essay is Mirza's interpretation of that woman's facial expression. It concludes with Mirza noting that she no longer sleeps with white women. Mirza approvingly quotes a friend: "'Black and brown men experience as much gender discrimination as white women.'" As much discrimination, if not more. But gender discrimination? To me, at least - insert requisite disclaimer about my own myriad identity categories here - this feels like the sort of thing it feels righteous to nod along to, but that neither makes sense nor leads anywhere especially progressive.

So it's a frustrating essay in many ways. And yet the issue at the center of "White Women Drive Me Crazy" - a society where white people act as if people of color are inherently dangerous - is an important one. Its implications - police brutality, racist 911 calls of the 'there was a black man in my general vicinity' variety - are plenty real. There's value in hearing about what it feels like to be someone who, by simply existing, is perceived as a threat in mainstream society.

If you're looking for a prime example of a 2017 personal-political essay, with all the strengths and flaws that entails, this could well be it.

Here's how the essay opens, and why I'm so stuck re: what to make of it:

Yesterday I stepped on a white woman’s yoga mat by accident and she looked at me like she had woken up to me standing at the foot of her bed, like I had just suggested we murder her husband and run away together. She looked at me like I had escaped from a zoo, like a hippo had found its way into this Brooklyn yoga studio and was casually waiting for the 8 a.m. class to begin. She looked scared, like she had just found out that the world really did end in 2012, and she had been going to yoga three times a week since then for no reason, because she is actually a ghost.

I'm torn. Torn between the competing impulses to just not question a marginalized person's experiences of oppression, and to push back against the impulse to attribute racist tirades to people who simply looked white and startled. Between recognizing the pain of through life in a body that white people (white women?) fear, and recognizing the general ugh-ness of confident assertions that anyone knows, just knows, what some perfect stranger is thinking.

While the internet outrage of yore the piece first reminded me of was, of course, the xoJane story by a thin white woman moved to tears by the presence of a fat black woman in her yoga class, because yoga, thought-projection... But upon reflection, it also recalls another one. One involving - sorry - Lena Dunham. Remember the time Lena Dunham got everyone angry (bear with me) by claiming an NFL player had called her ugly, except... he'd done nothing of the sort? For those whose minds are not compendia of the various Dunhamgates, here's the Dunham passage in question:

I was sitting next to Odell Beckham Jr., and it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and he determined I was not the shape of a woman by his standards. He was like, "That's a marshmallow. That's a child. That's a dog." It wasn't mean — he just seemed confused. 

The vibe was very much like, "Do I want to fuck it? Is it wearing a … yep, it's wearing a tuxedo. I'm going to go back to my cell phone."

Because Lena Dunham is (rather famously) white, Odell Beckham Jr. black - and because of the "fuck" portion of her phrasing - this story quickly became one of Dunham engaging in, then apologizing for, racism. Which... yes. (Why exactly did she think Beckham was pondering her sexual allure?) But it was also, unavoidably, a story about life as experienced by a woman who does not look like a supermodel, but inhabits a world where basically all other women do. Dunham's feeling that people were looking at her like she was "a marshmallow" is unverifiable in individual instances, but absolutely based on the real phenomenon of ordinary-looking women in the public eye getting treated as if they don't count, don't belong. I'm sure it is tough for Dunham - yes, even with her success, her whiteness, her wealth - to have a significant part of the internet holding forth continuously on how they would not in a million years have sex with her.

It's difficult to talk about amorphous phenomena like how we imagine we seem in the eyes of others. If we're going to do so, it's certainly better not to name those others - that is, to avoid putting words into specific other people's mouths. Better still, I think, to make clear that what we're doing is saying what we think someone else is thinking, rather than presenting our own feelings as evidence of something tangible. (Even better: fiction! But that's even more difficult.) But given that Mirza's yoga classmate could be any one of the millions (?) of white women who do yoga, it's not a feelings-projection that crosses the line. No yoga-class White Ladies were harmed.

I suppose where I'm left is wondering whether to read the essay as an experience-testament piece, of value to the author and those who personally identify with her story, and in no way about convincing white people - white women - of anything in particular. If that's the case... then I suppose disregard all my thoughts on it, unless we're far enough into Trumpism that Ashkenazi Jews aren't white. If, however, there's an element of it that asks something of white women, what does it ask?

A generous interpretation would be that it asks white women to strive for a society where people of color are not treated as inherently dangerous, both out of anti-racist goodwill and so as to avoid having their startled expressions (maybe) misinterpreted. A less-generous one: it's asking for an eggshell approach to human interaction, in which white people (or just white women) second-guess their every facial expression, and just generally remain hyperaware at all times of the identity categories of everyone they meet, viewing every moment of human contact through the lens of, well, privilege. My interpretation, at the moment - very much subject to change - is that it's a bit of both.

Wheels on Fyre

When I saw the vague social-media rumblings about a music festival gone wrong, my impulse was that this was one trending story I could easily skip. I don't go to music festivals (and was never tempted, even in my younger, occasional show-going days), and can't get up much excitement over controversies (or fashions) specific to music festivals.

Then I saw the viral photo of a cheese sandwich. The sandwich - ordinary if unappetizing, but still presented with fresh-enough-looking mesclun - embodies the story. The story being, as I understand it from copious explanations (and backstories), that a music festival promised a luxury experience (and more; more on that more in a moment) but delivered... a badly organized, music-less music festival. Standard-issue tents and food instead of yacht parties or jet parties or whatever. Something approximating a regular vacation for most people, but a mess, and tragic-feeling for those experiencing it because they'd paid up for something else entirely.

Now, as someone who as purchased unnecessary goods and services, who am I to laugh at others having been ripped off? I mean, I've spent $6 (CAD but still) on matcha lattes, and if one of those turned out to be a cup of lukewarm Lipton, I'd have been displeased. (Note: that has never happened. They're magnificent and worth every Canadian cent.) Does this mean I forfeit my right to cast stones?

Or... does the sheer scale of this spending (tens, hundreds, of thousands of dollars), and its ostensible purpose (avoiding the peasant experience of going to a regular-posh music festival) make schadenfreuding, in this case, acceptable?

Does it even matter what I publicly conclude here, when I can perfectly well find it hilarious in private?  

What struck me most was the movie trailer for the festival, which I watched via the Vox explainer while on the bus to the supermarket (this background, I think, is key). Yes, the video depicts luxury, but more than that, it shows... soft-core male-gaze fantasy. It's a bunch of beautiful (famous?) women, and only women, in bikinis, frolicking and not infrequently making playful physical contact with one another:

This is, in other words, a sort of conspicuous consumption where access to beautiful young women is a big part of what's being bought. And not even in the sense of sex work - no, it's about being seen, by others, as the sort of man who can get women who'd universally read as desirable.

So yes, some of the visceral fun of watching the Fyre story unfold is about my snobbish sense that the (unaffordable-to-me) thing a bunch of people had paid for was (or, well, promised to be) tacky, douchey, whatever. Some is also that the lack of an equivalent phenomenon wherein rich women pay up to watch beautiful men dancing serves as a reminder of just how sexist our society remains. The proverbial punch, then, goes in any number of directions, if mainly, on the whole, up. But is that even the issue? Is this even political? Or if so, is it even subtly political? Or is it just populist catharsis minus so many of the troubling elements that that can sometimes involve?

Life in the age of the micro-era

After a whole lot of working from home (dissertating, Dish-ing, freelancing, etc.), I'm once again working from a mix of home and not-home (teaching French and book-writing in English, and also freelancing, and also, in principle, sleeping). This means I need to be, like, dressed. Not merely in clothing, but in clothing that's a notch or several above what's needed to walk a dog in the woods, with a 5% chance of running into another human being, and a 0% chance of running into one who'd expect me to be dressed professionally, fashionably, or anything along those lines.

This seems so simple, so obvious, and just so doable - I'm well out of college! I have a degree in French! I live in a city with lots of stores! - but is kind of daunting. Part of this is that I hadn't realized quite how dire the situation had become. My 'good' clothes turned out to be very washed-out Breton-striped shirts from several years ago. So a lot needs to be replaced, or just sort of purchased to begin with, but there isn't really any conceivable time to do this in. And I'm not even factoring in the other shopping expedition: Canada-ready winter-wear. My inner stereotypical heterosexual man experiences this with a sense of impending doom. But there's also a part of me that's a stereotypical... my own demographic, let's say, and that was totally all, "There's Intermix/COS/Muji in Toronto?!" I can kind of see getting excited about this.

The more complicated question is what to buy. Again, sounds simple! But I have no idea. It's sort of... been a while? And when I last properly shopped, I was a) younger, and b) living in another era. The era when bangs/fringe, kale, and farm-to-table, and more on this in a moment... were in. While it sounds so pathetic to be like, 'I want to wear what's in!', this is a genuine practical concern if you're dressing like a 2008-era grad student. If you have a sort of implicit sense of this, you can focus on cut and fit and all of this while sneering at those who bother with trends. If you don't - if, that is, you've spent the past four-plus years split between avant-garde or super-now fashion-blog reading and disintegrating skinny-jeans-wearing - this takes a bit more effort. Or maybe it just takes going to Zara and buying whatever more or less fits.

But this isn't so much a fashion post as an era one. I've been thinking recently - and this mainly has implications for how I present various things in the book I'm writing - that times have changed. Since 2008-ish, or even 2011-ish. Trends seem different - noticeably so. Cultural trends, not just clothing. Young People Today, perhaps they're different as well. Still working on putting my finger on what these differences are (and, book-wise, on precisely how this shift has both exaggerated and diminished various "privilege" concerns), but for the time being, this is my point in full: Times have changed.

Author-humiliation-bait and YPIS

I'm not sure if this even counts as a YPIS cycle, because it's just so ridiculous, but here goes: a Jezebel-affiliated piece takes down an xoJane personal essay about tipping, one introduced with the heading - all-caps - "UNPOPULAR OPINION." The essay is by-and-about a young woman who refuses to tip. (For maximum future author-shaming, it includes a photo of the author, in a restaurant. Because a really great thing to do is to proudly declare your aversion to tipping with an accompanying photo.) The Jezebel "Kitchenette" post is about why people who don't tip are assholes. So far, so predictable. But! The xoJane author a) lives somewhere where there isn't a lower minimum wage for tipped workers, and b) is a retail worker making minimum wage. These details combined do kind of cut against the idea that this opponent of tipping is some rich lady oblivious to the plight of low-income workers.

But how can an anti-tipping piece go without a YPIS critique? What the Jezebel affiliate comes up with:

I'm going to put this as plainly as possible: restaurant jobs are harder than retail jobs. I know it hurts to hear that, but it's true. Sorry, Sarah; your lot is not the harshest one, and you are far from the special snowflake you see in yourself. You can resent the implication all you want, but I'm not implying, I'm straight-up telling. Your job is easier than a job waiting tables, and if you'd ever worked in a restaurant, you'd damn well know that already. 

I've worked multiple retail and multiple restaurant jobs — on average, there is absolutely no comparison of which one is more physically, emotionally, and mentally demanding, and it's not even particularly close. Do you get breaks at your job? Generally-speaking, do you have regular hours? Is your pay directly dependent on your ability to put up with harassment and abuse from customers (not should it; is it)? Oh, you do, you do, and it isn't? Kindly have a seat, please.

Take that, minimum-wage retail worker! How dare you be so stingy with your tips, what with the pile of gold that Old Navy or whatever is surely paying you, except that you're getting minimum wage, but... yeah. It would seem that if restaurant and retail workers get at least minimum wage in a certain locale, but only the former also get tips, servers are if nothing else getting paid more. But no! Here's this pampered, princess, minimum-wage retail worker, paid no doubt a ton to write an essay for xoJane (#sarcasm), and where there is privilege, it must, of course, be checked.

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...

"Nuts, how many in one serving?"

Elle addresses a topic new to women's magazines: what is it, exactly, that's "making us all fat"? Who exactly is meant by this first-person-plural isn't clear - the accompanying photos (of models, of the author) show slender women. Are we really all fat? In womensmagazineland (and Elle is usually the best of the bunch!), yes, we really are all fat. All of us are works in progress, in need of some kind of cleanse or lifestyle change or euphemistic improvement. Or so it was - the pendulum seems to have swung, and we're no longer in euphemism territory. We're back where we started, with already-slim women shaming one another for having not chucked entire food groups. Women's mags, too, have joined the backlash against PC, and are now back to triggering disordered eating through a more direct approach.

Two things jumped out at me about the piece. The first was the title (or maybe just the Twitter title, Twitter being where I found it), which had something to do with "green juice," which is apparently making all of us fat. Even those of us who still haven't gotten around to trying it. The strip mall with the Japanese supermarket and Trader Joe's won out as today's excursion. But I shouldn't get complacent; sushi is also making us fat. And bagels, although that's not going to surprise anyone who's ever come across an article of this genre before.

Actually, Justine Harman's framing of this piece - which is an interview with a lecturer in This Is Why You're Fat Studies - is brilliant. The gist of it is that all of the "Cleaneatalian" foods are - paradoxically - the ones that are making us fat. Skim lattes, green juice, and almonds - almonds! - are the problem. (Typing this reminded me of some almonds a few feet away; they're now at hand. Said almonds are at this very moment in the process of making me fat.) Of course, what sort of "problem" are we talking about? The article's aimed at the kind of woman who is not, in fact, fat. Or it's aimed at flattering the reader into thinking she's already slim but could be thinner still. It's not (just), in other words, a service-journalism piece alerting readers that the proverbial lowfat Snackwells are actually more fattening than fruit, especially if you respond to the reassuring packaging by eating the entire package. It's more along the lines of, you think you're doing everything? You're not - there's more.

Which brings us to the other thing that jumped out: Harman describes the diet-peddler she's interviewing as "the kind of glowing brunette you might see shopping at Whole Foods in lightweight cashmere while you're wearing your linty Lulus and snacking on Snapea Crisps." This is some of the most impeccable lifestyle writing I've ever seen. Harman managed to make wearing Lululemon to Whole Foods sound shabby.