To age out of Slutwalk feminism

Predictably, the Internet is denouncing Jessica Valenti's column about her feminist qualms with missing getting catcalled. Predictably, because for the tell-it-like-it-is pop-evo-psych crowd, it's too easy: Aha!, they exclaim, Women do like getting catcalled! And extra-aha, even professional feminists realize 36 is over the hill!

But allow me, a woman who will - knock on wood against streetcar derailment - see my mid-30s sooner rather than later, to come to the piece's defense. Online feminism has long tilted maybe a bit too much to a very specific plight: that of the pretty young woman. I'm not talking about issues like assault and domestic violence, whose disproportionate impact is on women, period. Nor am I talking about the sort of street harassment that's about intimidation (generally of young girls). When I, someone to whom the 'if you look 25 or under, you'll be carded' signs don't apply, opt not to go deep into a city park at night, this despite that being my country dog's preferred toilet, it's not because I'm concerned that someone in the park will find me spectacularly good-looking.

What I'm referring to are cases like... the plight that is getting ogled and hit on constantly even though you're engaged. This is quite simply not an issue for all women.* I point this out not to hurl a YPIS (your privilege is showing) at online feminism (it's awfully contextual whether male attention is even "privilege"), but because of the "all women" meme, hashtag, etc., that's developed around these topics. As comes through clearly in the comments threat to that post, quite a few women get why constant attention would be annoying, but who haven't been harassed and can't personally relate, and aren't entirely pleased that this isn't something they experience. (And then there are the women with "resting bitch face," who fall somewhere in between; we're the ones who know our day is up when men stop asking us to smile.)

So yes, there is some value in an online feminism that recognizes female ambivalence to male street-attention. Is this, as topics go, a little slow-news-day? Yes. Might Valenti have pointed out that "lascivious stares" can be an ego boost to those of all genders, and, at that, even if the admirers aren't of the gender you yourself admire? Yes, that too, but the fact that she did not doesn't negate the rest.

Anyway, something I've found, as I've become moderately ancient, is that my personal style has shifted more towards looks that are... conventionally attractive? flattering?, and away from more eccentric styles. Not for would-be street harassers, who I'm quite confident won't confuse me with Gisele no matter how I dress or do my hair. Just for, I don't know, what was referred to, in my distant childhood, as "self-esteem." It's as if I have some subconscious desire to balance things out - whereas I used to be able to rely on youth as an accessory, and to wear (or buy with intent to wear**) sillier outfits, not to deflect the Male Gaze, but because I liked the looks, I now think, hmm, that dress from the cool Korean store may be $29 (CAD), and have a floral, Elaine Benes quality, but it also fits like a potato sack... and then end up down the street at the yoga store that shall not be named (cheaper in Canada, but still not cheap), where I instead buy a fitted tank top. Not an adventurous choice or an interesting one, but it has the potential to make me look, if nothing else, non-sloppy. And (not to get too practical, weather- and appropriateness-wise) to be worn as a base layer under other things. It's not a mutton-dressed-as-lamb (to use an awful expression) thing, exactly, since neither the Before look nor the After one is particularly va-va-voom. It's just... the dress was so fun! And so clearly not the right choice. To me, this - more than the absence of street harassers/street admirers - is the real disappointment.

*OK, a caveat - according to BBC Woman's Hour, which I take as infallible, "100%" of women who ride the Paris Metro report harassment, which, having spent the summer when I started getting called ma'am/madame in Paris and deflecting street harassment beyond what I'd experienced in New York since my early teens, I don't find particularly hard to believe. A lot does come down to where you live, and my anecdotal (and thus probably way off) impression is that in Paris/France/Europe/not-America (and fictional Midsomer, especially), women of a certain age keep on getting attention from men, of the good-attention and bad-attention varieties.

**It's entirely possible that these clothing-related reflections are actually more about some recent KonMari-ing of my wardrobe, and the reckoning that can encourage. That dress had "going, barely worn, to thrift store" written all over it.

This post contains too many italics

The most articulate response I can summon to Ted Scheinman's claim below (via) is: This again?

High-scoring students at top colleges who pursue doctorates in the humanities have already capitulated to manifold compromises: instead of earning small fortunes at consultancies, we sign a six-year contract to live on or around the poverty line while our teaching, writing, and research busies us for roughly 12 hours a day.

I got a lot out of grad school personally and intellectually, and all the usual disclaimers. But. If I had imagined, for even a glimmer of a moment, that "small fortunes" or "consultancies" were options for me, I might not have signed up. Yet I think Scheinman's talking about people like me. I guess "high" and "top" are relative, but "honors" and "UChicago" might count, and I vaguely recall that I'm someone who does well on standardized tests, but it's been so long, I don't remember the details.

But... while I absolutely had college classmates who went on to that sort of path, it's not as if each individual elite-college student sits there and ponders a choice. My choices - not just my inclinations - had left me with the choices I did have, but these were not choices made senior year of college, for the most part. I was on the track to something-poorly-compensated-involving-writing long before graduation. There was nothing I could offer a consultancy (such things as... knowing what one was, or how to even find out about jobs at one) when I graduated. If I'd been a completely different person, with a different major or substantially different coursework, sure. But, alas. I combed the Idealist listings - successfully, because 2005. Then I rejoiced and headed to grad school (and - how 2005-2006 - took a pay cut!) when I learned I'd be paid to read books.

I suppose it's different at the really elite schools, and do have a Facebook friend who periodically mentions being a humanities major who went the get-paid-a-lot route and seems confused about why others wouldn't do the same, and I want to be like, because we didn't all go to college where you did!, but then I figure maybe I'm wrong, and anyone who did go somewhere super-duper-elite probably knows more about this than I do. (Scheinman also says something about impostor syndrome.) But I doubt if it's that different, certainly post-2008.

The politics of YPIS

Who is it who uses the expression, "your privilege is showing"? In those words, or that message phrased otherwise?

YPIS, we may imagine, is the cry of the underdog. After so much 'well, we all know how it is to have yacht troubles,' someone who sure does not will finally reach a breaking point and inform the group as much.

Or we figure it's a phrase picked up at liberal-arts colleges, once awareness has been raised of the fact that not everybody was fortunate enough to go to high school at Andover, to have parents with advanced degrees, to be white. It's born, in other words, of liberal guilt. It's liberal haves trying to create safe spaces for (largely theoretical) have-nots. As in, sure, everyone in the room has a yacht, but let's remember that if someone yacht-less were to enter, they'd feel really bad if their yachtlessness were highlighted.

Both of these are about the calling-out of cluelessness, and are ways of upholding (or introducing) political correctness. They're about alerting the oblivious to structural inequalities. In doing so, maybe they're inspiring some sort of movement to level the playing field, or maybe not. Bringing us to...

I tend to think YPIS falls further to the right of the left-right spectrum than we might think. This for two reasons. First, there's the fundamentally conservative use of YPIS, or more to the point, of the (not universally appreciated) expression, "first-world problems." It's the assumption that by verbally acknowledging privilege, inequality has been sufficiently addressed, removing the need for any social-justice concerns. It reinforces the divide between an "us" that has and a "them" that does not. It seems to be about being ill-at-ease with one's own privilege, but actually gives the impression that this privilege is in no way precarious.

Second, of course, is scrappiness oneupmanship. This is when YPIS is used to demonstrate that, while Party B is where he is in life just 'cause, Party A, you know, "built it." This is important because YPIS is generally used among those who now have, either by or on behalf of those who claim they once didn't have. Even if it's rarely the cry of the actual self-made (who, when not trying to make it as politicians, tend to play down their humble origins), YPIS is a plea in favor of self-made-ness.

All of this comes back to, and was partially inspired by, the Brooks-Douthat noblesse oblige argument. What, for some conservatives, makes a Romney better than an Obama is that a Romney knows knows knows knows knows he's privileged, whereas an Obama - who well remembers what it's like not to be in that world - maybe does not. Romney has no self-conception as scrappy, whereas Obama might.

If it's the classic cluelessness - not knowing how to do basic chores, say - then a meritocratic elite would seem to win out. But maybe not? Precisely because today's meritocrats don't get how much they have (goes the argument whose conclusion I don't buy, as I'll get to...), they don't create a stoic, austere life stage for their young. Thus, most glaringly, today's college experience. Students have the audacity to live in Target-furnished splendor.

As I see it, though, the reason meritocratic elites aren't interested in having their college-student offspring sleep on splintery boards isn't that they're trashily nouveau. It's that they understand that their status is precarious, even if it's not as precarious as all that, although In This Economy... Knowing you're from a well-established family is quite different, you-can-just-relax-wise, than knowing your parents both went to law school. Psychologically, at least. There's not the same psychological need, then, for meritocrats to embrace artificial rituals intended to mimic hardship. Even in a poorly-functioning meritocracy, there's the sense, however unfounded it may be, that one could lose everything at any time.

So does this mean that we should resign ourselves to born-leader-ish leaders, to graying Ken dolls out of Nick at Nite who gosh darn get things done? Far as I'm concerned, that doesn't really solve the YPIS issues. If the meritocrats (born-rich and otherwise) imagine they're less privileged than they really are, the patrician always-hads, for their part, tend to imagine that their own experience might be defined as "normal." This was, at any rate, my experience at school with people from Romney-like families. They on the one hand knew to feel grateful for what they had, but on the other, imagined that everyone with less was "poor." Making them, of course, middle-class. Noblesse oblige is an interesting idea, but if the nobles fail to see the gradations, if they believe anyone who can't afford to send a kid to private school is basically tragic, if this, then... And as I finish some must-do tasks now, I shall let commenters finish the thought below, or let lurkers finish it silently.

Hags

Yet again, the question of very young (think too young for middle school) fashion models is phrased in Think of the Children terms. Guardian writer Viv Groskrop at least offers, as an afterthought, a look at what it means for adult, female consumers that a model has to look 12 and if she also is 12 so be it.

Tucked away at the very end of the piece is, I think, the real story:

How young, then, is too young for fashion? And what's too old? "Sixteen is a good age to start," says [modeling agency director Carole] White. "Seventeen is the perfect age for a model, because most girls feel comfortable in themselves by then; 18 is good too, though, because then all their schooling is out of the way. If a girl started at 20, she would find it difficult to get work. Her agent would probably lie about her age and say she was a year or two younger."

As a 28-year-old full-time student with plenty of student friends my own age or older, I'm tempted to address the bit about all plausible "schooling" being finished by 18. But I will instead highlight the bit about what happens should "a girl" begin modeling at the decrepit age of 20. I will, at the risk of repeating myself, note that the very language of the industry assumes a grown woman couldn't model clothes. I mean, 20 is old for a "girl."

No doubt, the telling-it-like-it-is response would be something about how, for men, for the usual evo-psych reasons, a woman is past it as soon as she's no longer a girl. But it's not clear how this would relate to the preferred looks in images very clearly directed at women, not men. Even if men prefer 15-year-olds (and I'm not saying they do), they wouldn't be the same 15-year-olds.

It would seem, then, that having ever-younger models is a way to draw as many consumers as possible into the insecurity tent, to make even college juniors feel inadequate, and how else to address that inadequacy than by buying crap?

Further vindication: the self-flagellating edition

Part of me is thrilled to see that sanctibullying (YPISing*) is currently under attack. (See here, via/as well as here, via Scott Lemieux's twitter.) Another part of me is all, but I came up with these terms! I'm responsible for the definitive anti-YPIS writing of the blogosphere! Yet another part of me is well aware that I did not comb the internet searching for whether anyone else had ever had the same complaint before I launched mine, so I'm back to "thrilled." Full circle. Moving on...

Courtney Martin sees YPIS as a first step, a step in the right direction. She wants us to "move beyond" the calling-out of privilege, the guilt, oy, the guilt, but does not seem entirely convinced. Jill Filipovic, meanwhile, can't say enough how well-intentioned she believes the YPISers are. So close! Not quite there.

So, to rerereiterate:

-Sanctibullying is not poorly-executed social justice. It's not about wanting desperately for the world to be a more equitable place and, in one's enthusiasm for that noble cause, hitting a nerve. It's about killing two birds with one stone and claiming to be a good person as well as a self-made person in a meritocracy.

-Broader social-justice concerns can lead to increased self-knowledge, to a greater understanding of one's own privilege, and to a decreased likelihood of making clueless statements. What they can't do is tell you diddly-squat about the experiences of someone else, in particular a stranger on the internet, and how lucky they've been.

-Especially because people tend not to open up so readily about genuine suffering, or even just a not-so-well-off background. So you get to hear from the proverbial child of the Brooklyn Heights townhouse that he grew up in an outer borough and is thus hardcore, whereas the kid who grew up in East New York or even Flushing would rather talk about something else.

*For new readers (as if!), "YPIS refers to the accusation, online especially, that someone else's "privilege is showing," as in, "Why don't obese poor people just shop at Whole Foods and go to Equinox, I lost 10 pounds that way!" Except that normally, the cluelessness was less extreme, but is exaggerated by the accuser.

***********

Along the same lines...

No, it's not normal to tip at least a dollar (via) for a cup of regular coffee to go. Remember that this means $1 on a $1.75 drink. It's normal that people who make above minimum wage but not much above would want this - I certainly did when I worked that job - but it's far from expected. Claiming it is confuses people who need to understand that certain service-industry workers don't get minimum wage because of an assumption of tip income. I get that a lot of New Yorkers are ridiculously wealthy and feel a sense of guilt at the fact that they make a trillion times more than their barista. But this has all led to some kind of cultural assumption that anyone who ever goes to a bar or coffee shop, ever, is clearly enormously well-to-do, because anyone who isn't is living exclusively off home-soaked legumes. When there is, I promise, a lower-middle ground in which legumes play a prominent role, yes, but so does the occasional pre-teaching coffee. I could go on, but this has, I think, been more than enough on this topic.

Moving on up, moving on down

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the Amy Chua-fest was about regression to the mean, aka the fact that sometimes kids with all the privilege in the world still don't get into the Ivies. We-as-a-society are accustomed to discussions of how unfair it is that smart and hard-working kids without all the privilege in the world are held back, but we're not sure what to make of the reverse phenomenon.

This is a problem, of course, primarily for the kids in question and their parents, parents who believe in social mobility through education, who are themselves its beneficiaries, but who now have to contend with the fact that their children, however wonderful, are not certified wonderful by the relevant authorities.

Chua's contribution, "Chua" defined as an amalgam of the phenomenon as understood by those who did and did not read the whole thing, was to say a) that it's OK to want certified-wonderful offspring, and b) that amorphous, milieu-propelled, 'privilege' alone is not enough to get them there. Oh, and c) that, absent the kind of obstacles that the kids we generally think of as less privileged (more specifically, children of immigrant families) experience, young people have no drive to succeed, so if you want your privileged kids to stay that way, you have to create an artificial atmosphere of absence-of-privilege. Not just stuff like, no designer handbags in 8th grade, but more like, if you get a B, you will starve to death in the gutter. Basically, Chua's innovation was rethinking the concept of privilege, both in terms of declaring it acceptable to perpetuate hard-won high-status, and in terms of pointing out that we-as-a-society overestimate the extent to which simply having educated and well-off parents guarantees class maintenance across generations. To put it another way, aka to repeat myself, we're used to thinking of social mobility in terms of its inadequacy as a way of propelling people upward; she's reminding us that it functions decently well in propelling some downward.

The rest, as I see it, is secondary. The 'Asian vs. Western' bit; the question of whether one can, in fact, get a good education at a school that isn't Harvard (was this ever in doubt? was 'a good education' ever the issue?); whether 'success' means Harvard or Stanford and Berkeley too; how to foster a child's creativity or individuality or whatever... none of this is what made Chua's... phenomenon any different. Which is why Caitlin Flanagan has, I think, missed its significance. The "good mothers" she postulates hover in this on-the-one-hand, on-the-other sphere of wanting their children to Find Themselves, yet to end up at Ivies all the same. There is this paradox, fine, but the paradox that matters is the broader one: they want the Ivies to be meritocracies, but they want to make sure their own offspring get ahead.

Meanwhile, Flavia's suggestion, that parents encourage their kids along the way, but not in any definitive direction, "then see who your child is, and what she can do, and recalibrate," strikes me as altogether reasonable, but fails to address the anxieties that drove the wave of Chua-fixation. (Not that Flavia claims to be addressing Chua-fixation.) Chuaism is about making sure your children remain in the same class, about pushing them beyond what's needed to be in that class, just to be extra sure, and in order to make sure they do the same with their kids. It's not about producing children who are, god forbid, well-suited to the work they end up doing.

I, for one, think Flaviaism is more reasonable - why focus on class maintenance, when having wealthy offspring is no guarantee they'll be amazing let alone nearby when you're old? Unless you believe in an afterlife during which you'll be able to bask in the glory of your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren's i-banking careers, when it ends, it ends. But if you're losing sleep over the possibility that future beings with your DNA will worry about where the next meal is coming from, you're better off advocating for more socialism - or better yet, moving to a country where that's a done deal - than banking on your descendants being smarter, luckier, and more hard-working than most. Sort of like, as I've also said before, if your number one concern in life is that your offspring marry fellow Jews, you're better off moving to Israel than exerting pressure on them as individuals, when it could well be that they'll obey, but their kids won't.

But Chuaism isn't about reasonable. It isn't about looking at what it's supposed to matter if in 2150, people with your last name are lawyers or janitors. It's about taking whatever twinge of paternal angst compels parents to find it mildly tragic when their children, however happy, fail to be certified as wonderful, and rather than suppressing it, as is reasonable, making that the focal point of parenting.

In 2011, women remain cows

Is it BS to tell women to marry young? Depends. Anna North at Jezebel pulls this quote from an interview with Mark Regnerus, who has some thoughts about cow purchasing and free milk, ancient territory here at WWPD: "My advice is if you find somebody who you love and who loves you, make it work, whatever it takes!" North is not convinced, the Jezebellians are appalled, but as far as I'm concerned, it makes sense, insofar as there is a window of opportunity during which women are neither too young to settle down nor in not-getting-any-younger territory. Yes, that window should be extended - in both directions. Which includes making it so that 20-year-old women in happy relationships should be able to feel they've found their life partners, knowing in the back of their minds that their options will be more limited later on. It is not as easy to find a man - not that all women want to find a man, or that they should, or that it should be first priority, etc., etc. - at 40 as it is at 20. It isn't as easy to find friends, either, when one is out of school, so it's not just about female nubility. But 40-year-old men have greater romantic options. Feminists - and I speak as a feminist, if not for feminists generally - can wish it otherwise, but it is what it is.

Of course, the man one has "found" at 20 will have to be willing to stay with a woman who's not going to be 20 forever for there to be any point to this. Unless the idea is to procreate and then let the man run off with whomever, in which case yes, settling down young at least lets you have kids, but under what conditions? This, in turn, is the flaw of the pro-early-marriage argument. Is it easier to "keep" a man found at 20 than to find one at 30 or 40, as I feel like a commenter here once countered when I argued this before? Maybe, maybe not, depending what "keep" entails. Divorce is legal, adultery happens, as do marriages worse than so-so, and committing to a not-so-committed man at the peak of one's conventional attractiveness is a worse bet than starting something on more solid ground later on.

Where Regnerus, in turn, goes wrong is in pointing out that these days, men don't need to buy a woman a ring in order to get sex from her. Which is true, but which leaves out the fact that women do not want rings from many men they sleep with. Sex is not a pleasure women provide for men, but one sought out by all but the asexual; pursued in earnest by all but the most restrained. Pretty young women realize that 20 may be the only age when they can go at it with beautiful 20-something, when they have their best shot with many dashing older men as well (many of whom will seem sleazy to women their own age), and think, now is the moment.

"But I still think you have better odds of succeeding, especially if you're attractive, if you don't give in, if you make him work hard, get to know you, make commitments -- all that stuff that seems pretty basic."
Youth and beauty in a woman mean the power to get a commitment (although, obvs, the not-so-good-looking marry, too), but also the power to have sexual adventures that aren't available to the less attractive, and that won't be so readily available later in life. With the Pill plus condoms, this is fairly low-risk activity, physically, but still more risky for women than men. At the same time, sexual activity doesn't necessarily even mean intercourse. My vague recollection of what the young people did way back when is that more casual relationships often did not include the full repertoire. (What "base" does Regnerus think can be reached before a woman has "put out"?)

If you tell good-looking coeds that the guy they're having casual sex with probably won't commit, they will be unmoved. (Young women who have hook-ups but then tell a researcher that this isn't meaningful enough, that they want more, are, uh, following a social script? If women sleep with men they're attracted to without the promise of a commitment, it's because they want sex with a hot guy more than they want a commitment.) If you tell them that they may be having fun now - and Regnerus kinda-sorta admits that women have sex for reasons other than in exchange for hoped-for commitment, falling short of acknowledging female lust - but that the free-milk offering of women generally makes it harder to get men generally to commit, and that this will be a problem when a young woman is not so young and/or finds a man from whom she wants a commitment, this will be marginally more convincing. But not all that convincing, because of the serious relationships that do exist, how did they begin? Wedding announcements don't include anecdotes about how delightful the sex was within hours after they met, but that's not to say this wasn't how things proceeded.

Which brings us to... "Men who have sex early in a relationship feel little impulse to make strong commitments." The logic here confuses me. Of all sexual encounters among those who don't yet know each other well, a few of the partners are men who want more, a few women who want more, many men who just want sex, many women who just want sex. So yes, a relationship that begins with sex is likely not to become a marriage, whereas one that begins with formal introductions through family members or a matchmaker, in a society with arranged marriage, is far more likely to go that route. Meanwhile, a relationship that begins with a string of three dates without so much as a peck on the cheek? Are we to assume marriage ensues, or that there's no fourth date because the two weren't so into each other? I'm sure there are numbers on this, less sure that they'd account for marriages occurring because a woman metaphorically crossed her legs, as versus because that's just how things go for men and women in a society or subset thereof. If man and woman alike are of a free-and-easy subset, if nothing's happened, that doesn't bode well, I would think, for a long-term anything. Meanwhile, it strikes me that the way to get men or women to commit is to have a society in which neit

Off the topic of this post, but still striking:

"In American colleges, 57 percent of students are women and 43 percent are men. That's a radical reversal of where we were 30 or 40 years ago. Presuming that people are attracted to people who are like them educationally, it means looking for secure relationships becomes challenging because the sex ratio is so imbalanced."

In the Golden Age, when women didn't go to college, and instead scrubbed floors and changed diapers, or if wealthy supervised these activities, men still found a way to marry their social equivalents. Give it a moment, women will do the same.

Following up

-Remember the discussion a while back about whether fashion is or is not about women dressing to please men, or whether these are two different spheres entirely? The very existence of the "Mr. Newton" street-style blog (see especially posts including the word "cutie") suggests men with an interest in women's... spheres are, if not the intended audience for trendy outfits, fully capable of appreciating the so-very-now. Dressing hot and dressing this-season are not, apparently, mutually exclusive pursuits.

-And the one about how long it takes to cook? How cooking professionals underestimate the amount of time it takes to prepare a meal when a) that isn't your day job and b) you don't have all the ingredients already chopped and laid out for you in a series of polished glass bowls? Slate agrees.

Pretty ugly*

There's an entire category of fashion that gets labeled different ways ('ironic,' 'clothing men don't like,' 'fashion victimy,' etc.) but that amounts to the same thing: clothing that's intentionally ugly, yet worn by women who want to look pretty. Think Chloe Sevigny. Think one-pieces with harem-pant bottoms. Think... think absolutely any garment, worn on a woman who clearly pays a good deal of attention to her appearance. If styled in a way that implies This Is Fashion, or put on a model (see: why "models off-duty" is a useless concept), it's all fair game. Unitards, high-waisted jeans with pleats, men's workshirts, flannel...

The latest installment: Jessica Grose, a Slate writer, discovered German orthopedic sandals, which she's been wearing "for years," and which can now, and I've seen it myself, be found in trendy shoe stores in the US.**

Here's where things get tricky. Grose writes: "I don't know about other Worishofer owners, but my love for them is earnest—I genuinely think they are attractive." And yet! For the "grandma sandals" look to work, the wearer cannot herself be of grandma age, just as for the "boyfriend" look to be that and not simply "butch," the wearer must (go out of her way to) give off the vibe of someone who'd have, well, a boyfriend. This is the difference between menswear-as-trend and crossdressing. And these are fine lines, so to speak. Grose may believe she genuinely likes these sandals, but she first noticed them on a stylish (and presumably sub-80) friend. Indeed, she refers to the shoe's "under-40" wearers. What happens at 40?

Because the effect is in the contrast - pretty-young-thing in outfit intended for someone far older - or far more masculine. It all hinges on the visible non-membership of the wearer in whatever category of person one imagines the garment or look to be for. Straightforwardly pretty (or chic, or sexy) clothes, meanwhile, are quite obviously intended to enhance the appearance of the wearer. The message sent by pretty-ugly clothing is that the wearer must be the following to pull that outfit off: 1) naturally beautiful, 2) unconcerned with how she's seen (aka not trying too hard), 3) you get the idea.

I'm torn. On the one hand, I support all trends that permit women to wear the hot new thing without cutting off circulation or stumbling into train tracks or what have you. On the other, I don't like this whole 'let's not look pretty, yet in doing so show off how pretty we really are' strain of fashion, either. All of this brings me back, boringly enough, to the straightforwardly this-looks-nice gamine look so easily procured in Paris, and so conducive to wearing flat shoes and otherwise comfortable attire. Breton stripes and narrow (not "skinny") jeans, ballet flats, feels a bit costumey when actually in France, but basically, problem solved.

*Not to be confused with "jolie laide," which is French for either, this young woman's ugly but has rich and famous parents so we have to say something nice, or, this woman's all-around attractive but has 'ethnic' features that prevent her from fitting the Bardot standard.

**A well-kept secret is that some of NY's best shopping is on residential and untrendy West 72nd Street. Those sandals included, although in that locale it's a fair bet they're being worn unironically for real.

"Did your parents cut your meat up until you were 16?"

Imagine writing a blog post about how you yourself are kind of awesome - you read Proust in your spare time, you're fit, you're quite the philanthropist - but how you're nevertheless curious about the stingy couch-potato set. You ask for commenters to offer their own tales about being stingy couch potatoes, since one never hears directly from the stingy couch-potatoes, only about them. It's time to let the stingy couch-potatoes speak!

And surprise surprise, the comments to your post are filled with accounts from other kind-of-awesome folks who, like you, have met stingy couch-potatoes and who, like you, have the anecdotes to prove it. Would you believe that practically no one will admit in a public forum to being a stingy couch-potato? It must be that stingy couch-potatoes are an urban legend.

Because that's how I see this post on (yes, again) DoubleX, in which Torie Bosch holds forth on what an independent person she is and was, and what spoiled brats other people she's met are in comparison, then solicits comments from the spoiled brats (sorry, "helicopter children") of the nation:

I’d like to hear from a teen or twentysomething who will 'fess up to being so coddled that she called home to find out what to do after she put the wrong soap in the dishwasher. Did your parents cut your meat up until you were 16? Did you ever ask them to let you try to do things on your own, or were you happy to have someone call up your academic adviser when things weren’t going well?

Believe it or not, what she gets are a bunch of tales from others who, like herself, never got help from anyone past 18 or 12 or whatever and yet turned out awesome. The coddled, with I think one exception, do not come forth.

I feel as though we've been down this road, or a similar one, before. No one, at least no American, wants to admit to privilege, to not being 100% self-made. Since most successful people come from backgrounds that are a mix of silver spoons and cracked plastic ones, it's easy enough to highlight the latter.

What's frustrating is that helicopter parenting does exist, and is, in its extreme forms, quite the opposite of privilege for its recipients.* But Bosch half-presents the phenomenon as hand-holding she's proud not to have received - as though people with parents like this have a choice - which misses the point.

*Disclaimer necessary, I suppose. I don't believe my own parents were/are 'helicopter', but don't think the world needs more examples of 'you wouldn't believe the people I've met in my upper-middle-class NYC circles.' And if I was offering concrete examples of people screwed up by parental over-involvement, they would have to be of that sort.

Who's Miss Choosy?

"Why aren't there more female pickup artists?," Jezebel wants to know. Why does no one ever identify the obvious? It's because we imagine that straight men, upon seeing a woman, have already made a yes-or-no decision based on appearance alone, and that nothing a woman does, however charming, can bring her from a 'no' to a 'yes.' Women, we moronically assume, don't do this, and are thus susceptible to silly hats, pseudo-insults. The pretext of "game" isn't just that confidence matters - which it does, to both sexes, and which is the kernel of reasonableness that tricks some into thinking "game" is sensible - but that women do not judge men using the initial-yes-or-no system. The idea that men care about looks while women don't is what's driving all this; the 'men are expected to be agressive, women passive' aspect is only the result of that initial assumption.

Ways to improve the food movement

Focus on what matters:

-Health: Obesity-related illness is not a myth. Exercise is unlikely to be the key to fixing this, so public-health-wise, concern regarding diet does make sense. If this can be fixed ala Pollan via switching from corn subsidies to no subsidies or efficient ones, so be it, but I know nothing about agriculture and so will stop before my local, organic foot makes its way to my mouth.

-Taste: Taste is relative. Kind of. But if the idea is to eat more fruits and vegetables (and, depending which week, seafood), the fact is that produce can be anything from delicious to inedible depending what condition it's in - unlike, say, cake, which ranges from very good to good. The Alice Waters method for vegetables works great, but only works if the vegetables themselves are non-disgusting. The way to get everyone eating better is to get better-tasting healthy food into stores.

-Price and availability: If you're rich and live in Berkeley, seems getting good food isn't a problem. If you're anyone else living in this country, chances are it is. The issues of class and region, then, are key. (I'd also like to declare a moratorium on self-righteous lectures in the national press on 'eating local' from journalists in the Bay Area. Have they seen the markets here? Do they understand that we're lucky these days to find kale? And this is Manhattan...)

-Sustainability: Local or organic? Veganism or meat raised right? Whichever it is, someone should figure this out, so those wishing to eat in a way that's environmentally sound can do so rationally, as opposed to the 'ooh, it's like organic, yum' line of thought.

And not on what doesn't:

-Slowing things down: Some people enjoy spending five hours at the dinner table, cooking slowly, savoring each bite. Others don't. It's not immediately clear to me why the second group needs to adopt the habits of the first. Sure, eating too quickly might correlate with eating fast food which might mean obesity and so forth. But the non-savorers might also be those who simply don't care about food as much as the savorers, who'd rather spend their time doing something else than sucking on a lentil. For some, busyness translates to fast food and so on; others point to the busiest times in their lives as the slimmest. In other words, if we should all be eating less, it's not clear that slowing down our food consumption and attempting to derive a greater proportion of our pleasure from eating than from other activities will necessarily help the cause. (Also, to Maira Kalman - what's wrong with "fast walking"? Of all the facets of modern life, isn't this one we ought to encourage?)

-Knowing the ins and outs of farm life: We are asked to know where our food comes from. This is a different matter from knowing whether our food is produced ethically, sustainably, etc. It is now considered particularly honorable to know what goes into growing vegetables, to know not only if animals were raised and (if for meat) killed humanely but exactly how they are butchered, milked, etc. It's all quaint and charming, but really, why does it matter? If the point is that farmers work hard, the same could be said for so many other jobs that benefit us all but whose inner workings no one asks us to contemplate. (My building, for instance, has 10,000 floors. Someone had to have built it, and this was surely more strenuous than grading a stack of 18 French essays.) While it helps to have consumer representatives on the case, we don't each of us, individually, need to know where our food came from. (And, for David Lebovitz - the woman haggling over cilantro while "holding a very expensive Louis Vuitton handbag" could well have been wearing a fake. The presence of the letters L and V on a purse do not necessarily imply thousands spent. No one can tell the difference, or at least, I can't, but my purse is unadorned and from H&M circa 2004, so I might not be the best example. A good test in this case would be whether she went on to put her purchases in the bag, using it like a canvas tote.)

-Europhilic locavorism/terroirism: It is entirely possible to eat well - ethically, taste-wise, health-wise - without having any nostalgia whatsoever for small-town life or a particular village in Tuscany. (Do I repeat myself?) If the very thought of a fantasy version of Provence is what motivates you personally to put down the Fritos, go for it, but the same notion is a turn-off to others who might otherwise get on board.

Holistic models

Our ambivalence towards judgment leads to the so-called holistic assessments in college admissions - we find it too cruel that a few crude factors could determine who's in and who's out, and so we tell ourselves that a fair decision comes from looking at every facet of a person's being.

It occurred to me earlier, listening to a predictably predictable podcast discussion of plus-size models aren't they amazing, that this is the very same thing that goes on in, if not the actual fashion/beauty industry, the way the industry presents itself. No one is willing to admit that certain identifiable characteristics, few of which are terribly PC, define what models look like, and that even if those change, even if we make courageous strides like allowing size-six buxom blondes ('plus-size models') and fine-featured, emaciated, pale-skinned black teens with straight hair ('diversity') into the fold, something like 99.99% of women and girls will still be excluded from whatever new ideal might arise.

Callers to the program kept asking these two fashion editors about different types of women - the short, the athletic-but-not-overweight, the old, the disabled - and why they weren't being included on the runways and such. Interestingly, only the 5'2" woman got the response that, let's face it, all might as well get: it is what it is. So long as certain women are being singled out for their looks, there will be exclusion that feels unfair. And you know what? I would find it all the more unflattering to not make the (theoretical) cut if I thought 5'2" Jewish-looking 26-year-olds were just as likely to get modeling contracts as were 5'10" Slavo-Nordic adolescents. (Do I repeat myself?)

Point being, sometimes it's better to get rejected - in reality, as with college, or by assumption, which is the only way a modeling agency will ever get to reject most of us - according to generally agreed-upon criteria, than to learn you lack that undefinable quality that divides the beautiful or brilliant from mere mortals.