A de-gendered reading of unearned confidence

Sometimes I've thought that I should, as a writer, do more with the fact that I have a PhD. Like, in a 'look what I've got!!!' sense. It's not unknowable that I have one, but it's not really front and center, either. While the training and experience I got from doing a French and French Studies doctorate has influenced my writing, thinking, etc., the title itself seems... irrelevant? Pompous? Like something that would be (and has been) held against me by certain readers who assume a humanities is some kind of extravagant finishing school that you (or your parents) pay for, and not a full-time job? But there have totally been times when I've thought, a male writer would be wielding that PhD for all it's worth, getting his authority respected, rounding up expertise, not down. 

Well, let's set aside the gendered reading, because all of a sudden there is a writer wielding a PhD in just the manner I'd never have the audacity to, and that writer is... a woman named Wednesday Martin. She's been going around claiming her PhD (which she discreetly fails to mention is in comparative literature) makes her a "social researcher with a background in anthropology." These claims were key to her whole positioning - as in, she's not yet another finance-dude's wife, writing a back-stabbing memoir about the other moms. She's a career-woman! Almost an anthropologist! Except... maybe not quite an anthropologist. 

There's no shame (ahem) in having a literature PhD and and then writing about things other than your subject area. Nor is there shame (ahem, ahem, ahem) in being a humanities-oriented person married to a math-oriented one, even if that almost certainly means you're the lower earner in your household.

And not all writing needs to meet social-science standards. If someone wants to write a book about why she thinks it's a terrible thing that Upper East Side women work out all the time (note: definitely not what I'm writing a book about), I guess I'm OK with their not having actually measured a statistically significant sample of the population in question with calipers. Indeed, sometimes the quasi-necessity of including statistics in an otherwise personal or subjective essay ends up ruining the flow and turning something never meant as an Argument into an unconvincing, biased polemic. 

As for whether there's shame in presenting your mean-spirited musings about your neighbors as ethnographic findings and invoking your doctorate in an unrelated field in the process, could be. Part of me admires her lean-in-ishness, but part of me is also sort of horrified.

Liberation

-"When I tossed my self-tanners and reverted to the bluish complexion of my Scottish ancestors, I was free. It was the same liberation I imagine curly-haired women have when they finally reject the straightening iron."

Meh. Try having ancestry that gives you must-wear-sunscreen-constantly pallor and unmanageable hair.

Re: the former, given that any darker than golden and you may find yourself subject to a good bit of racism in the States, the idea that accepting white skin constitutes "liberation" is a bit YPIS. I get that some women and some subcultures go in for tanning, but the idea that if someone doesn't, they're majorly penalized, seems a stretch. I wouldn't mind if I'd gotten the darker-skinned genes from my father's side of the family, not the pale-and-skin-cancer-prone ones from my mother's, but this is less an aesthetic issue and more because there's no such thing as a non-gross sunscreen, and who wants to see a dermatologist?

As for the latter, it's kind of a plus - in this hair-extension era, those of us who've been hearing from hairdressers and more for our entire lives that our naturally-wavy hair's too thick and too voluminous can now think of ourselves as having, for free and with no extra effort, that extra under-layer fine-haired women get at the salon.

-In more hipsters-make-your-food news, are pop-up restaurants the ultimate HMYF phenomenon?

Says Felix Salmon: "Projects like [some pop-up restaurant] feel more like a membership, with overtones of philanthropy. Customers are asked to pay for food and service, but they're also asked to cover many of the business's start-up costs — sometimes literally."

HMYF is always about the diner feeling like the check is actually some kind of charitable donation. Helping young artists! Supporting local agriculture! The diner should if anything feel kinda guilty that the server is serving him food, that the kitchen has made him food, like this was all a really big favor. Mere civility and a decent tip on the part of the diner would be offensive.

And: "[T]he semiotics of pop-up restaurants all scream, This is a great deal. Haphazard service, cheap chairs, liquor-license issues: Diners see these things and think they must be getting a bargain price."

This has been the hot new thing in how expensive clothes are sold since WWPD diligently reported on the matter in 2005. Set a casual atmosphere, and all the angst that normally accompanies treating one's self vanishes, even if the prices remain the same. While it would be a stretch to call Scoop or Intermix hipster, there's something hipsterish about this phenomenon. (Think the trustafarian in haute rags). The vibe has to be such that all diners who could possibly afford it are made to feel too old and square for the experience.

And: "Pop-ups are manufactured scarcity, a perfect draw for New Yorkers' constant desire to find the new new thing."

If that's not HMYF, what is?

-How flattering! Also! While I actually like the fact that my commenters challenge or disagree with me 90% of the time (but could do without the 2% who comment as an outlet for crankiness and a chance to yell, "WRONG"), and find the (food and fashion) blogs where every comment thanks the blogger for being awesome and calls him a genius, a little straightforward I-like-what-you-write-on-the-Internet-for-free-on-breaks-between-organizing-footnotes-on-what-is-at-least-a-solid-rough-draft-of-an-academic-article-to-be-submitted-somewhere-soon is always appreciated.

Those crazy kids UPDATED

In vino veritas is not terribly controversial. Assuming we're talking a couple drinks and not a coma, a suddenly-expressed desire to seduce someone of the same sex, or a friend of the opposite sex one would have sworn when sober one only liked as a friend, is a sign that, well, in wine, there's truth.

Tara Parker-Pope asks, "Why do otherwise good kids seem to make bad decisions when they are with their friends?" Those familiar with her writing, on topics such as why alcohol consumption by the underage will ruin their brains forever, may guess, peer pressure! Brain science confirming that teens succumb to peer pressure! "The findings [of some study] suggest that teenage peer pressure has a distinct effect on brain signals involving risk and reward, helping to explain why young people are more likely to misbehave and take risks when their friends are watching."

My knowledge of the brain comes only from "House" and having seen a brilliant student health center neurologist (and some scans of my own brain) on account of an obscure, inconsequential and at any rate apparently waning, headache disorder. But I have a theory! (I haz a theory, more like.) Maybe, when teenagers are around their friends, they do... wait for it... what they wanted to do anyway, but didn't have the courage/stupidity to try when not with their friends. 

This is not to say, rah rah teen impulsivity, but to point out that we misunderstand peer pressure. We misunderstand it because we view it from a parent's perspective. My little Timmy would never want to experiment with sex, drugs, rock and roll. It was his friends who turned him on to all that! Which is bizarre, because we acknowledge that adults seek out potentially risky behaviors in search of pleasure. We don't assume a 30-year-old orders wine with dinner because everyone else is doing it, even if indeed everyone else is doing it, and that entered somewhat into the decision. Nor do we assume adults have sex because they want to fit in with some perceived cultural norm. Why do we think that teenagers, who if they haven't experienced whichever pleasures yet personally at least already know which activities society deems pleasurable, engage in risky-yet-pleasurable behaviors because they want to fit in? But this is what the expression "peer pressure" implies, that the peers are pressuring kids to do things they otherwise wouldn't want to. 

This study, from what I understand of it, is a slight step in the right direction, in that the idea is that the peers who pressure are the "'very good kids,'" but that in a group, kids aren't so good, as opposed to the popular belief that bad kids coerce good ones into behaving badly. (I realize that that's not what this study's contribution is supposed to be, that the point is something about peer pressure working even when the peers are not in the room.) But it's still missing the point. We should (I hypothesize) think not of peer pressure, but of peer drunkenness. In horde of other 16-year-olds veritas.

UPDATE

This response to TPP gives a sense of how peer pressure looks from a parent's-eye lens.

"They said they were sending over an Asian woman"

Amy Chua's article about "Chinese" parenting - aka immigrant parenting, aka Jewish parenting, aka none of that wishy-washy multiple-intelligences, I-just-want-you-to-be-happy nonsense - is the buzz of the day. (Miss Self-Important, among others, beat me to it. But I had to go out for a sugar brioche before finishing this post. I'm a fourth-generation American, I have my priorities.) 

Mostly, the novelty of the piece is that we're accustomed to this cliché being torn apart - as MSI notes, we can anticipate a not-all-Chinese-are-the-same reaction. And here's a real Asian-American perpetuating the stereotype! To Chua's credit, she explains that by "Chinese" she means a certain parenting style by no means exclusive to Chinese or even Asian parents.

But even if we accept that there are different parenting styles in different cultures, there are a few confusing elements in the piece. One is that Chua speaks as though she raised her children the Chinese way, yet mentions a "Western" husband. Is part of Chinese parenting treating the non-Chinese parent like a child, thus ignoring his wishes in terms of how to raise the kids? Another, which Isabel Archer points out, is that "Chinese parents," according to Chua, do not permit their children to act in school plays. Why would this, of all endeavors, be deemed a waste of time? Jewish parents - or, really, "Jewish parents," - classically tell their kids not to be on sports teams. While this is counterproductive in a world of "holistic" college admissions, it's at least consistent with the notion of academic success before all else, whereas further exposure to literature and memorization couldn't hurt. I suspect, however, that the theater thing is particular to the author. Finally, there's this: "Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, 'Hey fatty—lose some weight.'" One might react to this in the Jezebel manner, in horror, but Chua's point is that Chinese parents don't care about self-esteem. Fair enough, but it's legitimate to ask why it matters if the A student - male or female - is overweight. The girl's not allowed to date anyway, and is not on her way to becoming an actress. Is it that heft is a sign of Westernness, of assimilation, of having cut class to go to McDonalds?  

My authoritah here comes from a) my own upbringing, which had elements of "Western" and "Chinese" traditions, and b) my having gone to a high school - the high school - where the successful children of "Chinese parents" end up. On the one hand, the fact that there were (and are, but I was class of 2001 and speak anecdotally) so many Asian and Asian-American students at Stuyvesant in the first place meant the parents were doing something right. On the other, at a school so heavily Asian and Jewish, the B-and-below students were Asian and Jewish. The potheads, or the kids whose smoking may not have extended beyond tobacco but who at any rate cut class to hang around outside: also the offspring of "Chinese parents." The slackers, as well as the just mediocre, were the product of families that would, if Chua is to be believed, accept nothing less than an A. It could be that even the "worst" of these kids ended up better off than the average NYC students. But the article left the impression that your child, too, can be permanently obedient, permanently valedictorian. As MSI puts it, "The real question is, how did Amy Chua get her children to obey?"

Point being, the "Chinese" method makes for a lot of good little 10-year-olds, but guarantees little once mainstream culture becomes readily accessible. Where Portnoy went nuts with the "shiksas," consider a "Chinese-parented" classmate of mine who apparently arrived at math camp only to discover that the dorm had a TV and to park herself in front of that long-forbidden fruit. This is, in other words, a parenting style that only works in a very particular situation. If everyone's "Chinese," someone has to be the B- student. Meanwhile, even if the obedient behavior sticks and the kid gets into a good college, a given family can only stay "Chinese" for so many generations. 

Meanwhile, in the towns and villages of America and beyond, just as some kids randomly turn out to be gay, others randomly turn out to be incredible students. Not children of neglect, but not children raised to excel at all costs, whose success isn't tied to obedience. In cities and suburbs, well-connected parents manage to pass their careers down to the next generation, keeping out the "Chinese." Parents can only do so much. 

This isn't to say they shouldn't try, and I do think that in America, too much emphasis is placed on the 'A' as the result of innate intelligence and thus not worth working for. Chua has a point here: "What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences." Some children do want to work - remember Saffy and Edina? - but this strikes me as true as a rule.

My question, then, is about what results Chua promises, and to what end. Non-bratty children? That much seems doable. Children capable of supporting themselves as adults? B-students, too, manage just fine. Superstar geniuses? Unlikely. But is the point social mobility? Probably not, because unless they're actually struggling immigrants (less likely to read articles like this one), or single mothers prior to women entering the professions (not likely to exist in the US in 2011), the parents who'd parent in this way would have already reached professional heights themselves. So is it just about not letting one's own children regress to the mean? If so, I see how there'd be an audience, but it hardly seems a cause we as a society should support - why not let the mediocre children of the high-achieving fall behind and leave spots for the high-achieving children of the mediocre? The only way it kind of makes sense is from an international-competition angle. American parents, man up! Because "Western" is really "American" - Western Europeans are not, to my knowledge, exposed to the culture of holistic self-esteem.

The voice of Mrs. Wolowitz

Dear readers-arrived-from Sullivan,

-For the record, I don't think the character of Kyle's mom is the best example of the annoying-Jewish-woman stereotype, because, as Sullivan correctly notes, "South Park" is a world of equal-opportunity mockery. However, there's no better, immediately-recognizable visual representation of this cliché. The character most emblematic of this phenomenon on TV today is, to my knowledge, Wolowitz's mother. Granted Wolowitz himself is something of a leap backward as far as representations of Jewish men are concerned, but at least he's not a grotesque disembodied voice.

-Sarah Silverman is not a character created by a Jewish man or a non-Jewish man, for that matter, but the alter ego of one Sarah Silverman. Of course she's not hahruhhble in the way that the fictional Jewish woman often is. That she's considered both Jewy and sexy is unusual, exceptional, and probably has something to do with the fact that she was not created as the would-be date of a male Jewish protagonist, but rather is herself the protagonist. That she exists in no way negates the crap image of Jewish women in American entertainment of the last several decades.

-While I am of course delighted that my readership now (temporarily) extends beyond immediate family, I fear that Sullivan's introduction to what I posted - that I'm writing about Jewish women's "difficult position" - may give the impression that I believe crap images of Jewish women in media to be The Greatest Problem Facing the World Today. To preempt any such assumptions, let me be clear: it is not. Even for those of us who are Jewish women. OK, I won't speak for us all, but in my own life, at least, this problem ranks rather low. Perhaps because, as the Slate post I was originally responding to points out, so many actresses considered beautiful are in fact Jewish, for real-life Jewish women, being Jewish, looking stereotypically Jewish, these are not obstacles to attracting male attention. Again, even if it were terribly difficult for lady-Jews to get dates, this would not rank among the world's major catastrophes, but the fact of the matter is, it's not. This is what makes the crap images at once frustrating and irrelevant. OK, not irrelevant, but what exactly is the impact of these images on the lives of the women ostensibly being represented? My sense is that there is one, but I'm not quite sure how to articulate it without going the anecdotal route. Any ideas?

The WWPD Guide: Trend Anticipation

This is the new look, and it's time to get used to it.

This is, by the way, a shot of the same woman (same day, presumably) as the Sartorialist photographed to illustrate the difference between fashion and style - the photo was meant to exemplify the latter. An outfit the Sartorialist perceived as a rejection of the trend cycle I (along with, apparently, Refinery29) read somewhat differently. What I find compelling about the get-up - aside from that I'm delighted that wide-leg jeans and floppy hats are so-very-now - is how it illustrates the principals of trend anticipation: the look is current because of its one-by-one rejection of that-which-has-been-so-very-now-for-just-a-bit-too-long.

Examples: Dark, skinny jeans have been every woman's default? Trade 'em in for pale-blue flares. Wayfarers have become synonymous with sunglasses? Go for giant round frames. Fedoras and porkpie hats have been the it accessory since Agyness Deyn and the rest of Williamsburg declared them so? The time for wide-rimmed has arrived. It-bags with studded black leather give way to a brown clutch. As for the blouse, nothing remotely silky-'70s has been fashionable since I can remember, which is to say since the mid-'90s. This woman is so unfashionable that she is, in fact, ultra-fashionable. Thus the Refinery29 post on how to use the outfit as inspiration for how to rock the current trends. Thus the overlap between the outfit in question and what are, as of five minutes ago, the current trends.

In other words, by picking the opposite of a bunch of fashionable styles, this woman has created a look that gives the impression of having staying power, which is what the Sartorialist picks up on. And it probably will look "now" for quite some time. Trend anticipation is not frugal in the same way as, say, not giving a crap and only wearing Old Navy basics bought around the time that chain first appeared. But skinny jeans or leggings-as-pants were a better "investment" (or, more accurately, a better buy) five years ago than they are this afternoon.

This is the moment, I think, for me to clarify what I meant in terms of fashion, in fashion, things looking dated, and so forth. I'm not talking about that which only fashion-types notice, both because that's not the point and because (even though, fair enough, I read some fashion blogs, and neither Paris nor NYC is representative of how much The Average Person cares about clothes... with some exceptions) I wouldn't be qualified to do so. I'm not talking about trendiness, aka fads, aka the things in H&M all but the most daring/fashion-victimy of us pass by on our way to low-priced basics. I'm referring to the changes in silhouette, both of individual items (boots, pumps, pants, jackets, etc.) and of whole outfits, that can mark a wearer as looking of a different era, or of the one in which she lives.

Most of us - not all, dear contrarian commenters, but most, and with the caveat that it's entirely possible that 99% of men, yes including gay men, don't much care about clothes and I'm conflating "humanity" with "women," "women" with "women in NY," "women in NY" with "yours truly" - do want to look at least vaguely current. Attractive, individual, appropriate, or subculture-specific as well, perhaps, but also of-this-age. Thus the "timeless" marketing idea in the first place - if it wasn't a problem, in the eyes of many consumers, to look dated, there'd be no need to shop for "classics." We could all just buy well-constructed jeggings and wear those for years. But once we admit to ourselves that we'd rather look "now" than "five years ago," the best way to approach buying new clothes - or choosing which old ones to bring back into the mix - is to embrace the opposite of all current silhouettes. Predicting specific trends, aka fads (horizontal-stripe shirts, knock-offs of Chanel's newest nail polish colors, hipster-Victorian-artisan) is futile, but also irrelevant to this post. Meanwhile, getting the overall outline right is very doable. It is, at any rate, something I did unconsciously for years, until trying to figure out why, despite not being particularly well-dressed/stylish/fashionable/glamorous/you-get-the-idea, I often find myself ahead of trends.

On polygamy and assimilation

Grad school is, as I mention below, all about delayed gratification. The slow-motion process of research itself, of interpreting the findings into something another human being might possibly understand or care about, of applying for grad school itself, then grants, then (dare I say it) jobs. So it was kind of exciting to see that the fact that I spend day in, day out researching 19th century assimilation; trying to frame that research in a way that might make sense to someone who isn't me and hasn't read that particular microfiche; and attempting to figure out how whatever it is I've found will translate into a dissertation or (a girl can dream) a career; has led to my having something akin to authoritah on the topic.

But for France, not the US. So while I can't (without reading up on it) offer my own take, in response to Douthat or anyone else, on the particularities of Teddy Roosevelt's thoughts on eugenics, I can weigh in on the more general question of what it means to be "pro-assimilation." Here goes...

Oh, and a disclaimer: I go on and on, but the main part of my answer to MSI, Fuzzy Face, and Douthat is in bold below.

First, let's get this out of the way: individuals aren't (often) purely progressive or purely traditionalist, purely Constitutionalist or culturalist, however we're looking at this question. And what might have counted one way in one era probably looks different or the next. And individuals tend to fall somewhere on a spectrum. Pardon my French, but Zola, hero of the Dreyfus Affair, wrote a not-so-flattering novel about Jewish bankers, while anti-Dreyfusard hero of right-wing nationalism Barrès had a moment of post-WWI epiphany that Jews can be French after all.

Anyway, there are not Two Americas, but the necessities of conceptualization are what they are. I don't think it makes sense to dismiss my argument - or Douthat's, for that matter - simply because we didn't, in the course of a short article or post account for this diversity. A generous reading of either of us assumes that anyone with half a brain knows that people come in more than two 'types.' I'm not a fan of the trend in academic writing to equivocate as though nuance means never arriving at an argument. So, these are just arguments, without which there'd be no discussion.

Also obvious, but missing so far from the discussion: assimilation goes both ways. Much of America's specific culture relates to where our population came from. Pizza, rap, words like "schlep," these owe nothing to the Noble Anglo-Saxon Tradition. This is all partly an argument over whether we're calling aspects of our culture that we can trace to WASPs superior to ones with different roots.

MSI, I will now get to the pressing question of Mormons. I'm not sure how that much fits into the topic of assimilation, as opposed to, I don't know, rule of law? Mormons had not been doing things the way they had since time immemorial, nor were their cultural (esp. marital) particularities specific to a different ethnic or racial background, as you point out. So however harsh the government was with Mormons, the goal was getting a bunch of people 'like us' to stop rebelling and being different and return to being 'like us.' Unless there's an aspect to this episode that I'm unaware of, I'm assuming a Mormon who refused to be polygamous went on to be accepted (as in, not oppressed, not not mocked - even WASPs are mocked) in mainstream America, and that a Mormon who converted to mainline Protestantism would have simply morphed into a undifferentiated Real American. The issue with Mormons was, I'm thinking, not terribly unlike that with Protestants in France - the 'problem' was their behavior, but they were a conversion away from unhyphenatedness.

As a point of comparison, take Napoleon's insistence on assembling a formal committee of French-Jewish leaders, over a decade after French Jews has been legally French, and asking them in all seriousness whether Jews practice polygamy. In terms of the absurdity of the question, imagine asking a bunch of Jews on the Upper West Side in 1990 whether they practice polygamy. That the Jews explained that they were monogamous ultimately failed to convince Napoleon, who went on first to convene another official meeting of Jews, because one can never be too sure, and ask them the same thing, and then, upon receiving yet another satisfactory answer, decided to go ahead anyway and create a law of exception discriminating against most of France's Jews, effectively revoking their newly-won citizenship. This episode, too, was about assimilation and the incompatibility of polygamy with Western modernity. But here, "polygamy" was not the practice of having multiple wives, but a pretext given for exclusion of a population that was, in its way, very much in favor of assimilating.

This diversion into my narrow area of expertise is to point out that demands of assimilation come in two forms. (Or infinite forms - if you'd prefer to do so, think of it as a spectrum.) On one side are demands that could easily enough be met, even if there's resistance at first: requests like 'don't be polygamous' or 'speak English' or 'attend public school' or 'get rid of that impossible-to-pronounce last name' are impositions of Western ideals, etc., etc., but can be met by all, assuming social exclusion doesn't stand in their way. A postcolonial studies prof might not like it - and I might not like it either, raging lefty I apparently am - but these need to be categorized differently from unmeetable requests. By this I mean demands that aren't so much demands as they are assertions that They will always-and-forever be too different. Examples: 'don't be from a religious tradition that was polygamous in biblical times,' 'don't have dark skin,' or 'marry into the general population at a time when the general population isn't open to marrying minorities in the first place.'* Any demand that asks someone to change something they can't - either because the trait is immutable or because social exclusion is too great of an obstacle - isn't so much about offering conditions for how to become an American as it is about asserting the eternal non-belonging of certain groups of Americans. Who does and doesn't belong is constantly shifting - again, because a Mayflower-only request wouldn't yield a whole lot - but the principle itself stays constant.

Finally, to return to Douthat's argument, what I understand it to be, and why I'm still not buying it. This will, I think, address MSI and Fuzzy Face as well. If what Douthat were saying was simply that various measures - insistence that immigrants speak English, or alter their names, or reign in their polygamy - repel today's well-meaning multiculturalist PC-types, but have historically served to help minorities blend in, then I don't think he'd have said anything terribly controversial, and aside from the PC-types in question and your college postcolonial studies prof, no one would be up in arms. Yes, yes, demands of assimilation are a form of violence to those of different but equally valid cultural traditions, etc., etc., but this is a different discussion. The question of whether the West should impose its values on immigrants is a real one, but it's one that assumes everyone could become Western, questioning only whether this is a fair thing to ask of non-Westerners. Boundaries shift, but traditionally this whole discussion has been an internal one among liberals. Today, the position that one should ask ferners to change in any way has become in the US, associated with the right. In France, that's not quite as much the case. But wherever the debate is situated on the political spectrum, the fact remains that there's another whole set of people who don't want to deal with Them in the first place, don't think they have a shot at assimilating.

What Douthat did, however, was to conflate genuine pro-assimilation requests with the assimilation request used as a proxy for a quite different demand, namely that ferners stay away or wear a coned hat or whatever. The cultural-rather-than-Constitutional America, the second America, encompasses both, by his definition, which is a lumping-together I don't think makes sense. So, I'll refine - no, revise - my argument to explain that I'm not calling second-America-as-Douthat-defines-it xenophobic, only a subset thereof. And I think, if we're going to divide America in two, it makes far more sense to separate those who think immigrants can become American (whether by changing their ways or simply by having their papers in order, if that) from those who believe in an essential Americanness not open to all. But, Douthat counters, refining his own position, it's impossible to divide requests that immigrants assimilate into categories of well-meaning and xenophobic. Nativists and assimilationists are often one and the same set of people. Yes, everything is ambiguous, but, I counter, it is quite possible - necessary, even - to divide requests into those that seem possible for the ferners in question to meet, and those that are so outrageous, so unattainable, as to amount to exclusion disguised as a request for assimilation. 

And finally, finally, in response to Fuzzy Face's problem with my use of "fern." ("it is you added the illiterate jargon thing.") Guilty as charged, although I don't intend it to be a comment about literacy so much as about nativism. Ferners, by my definition, are foreigners as understood by Americans who are suspicious of foreigners. Foreigners are marked by not having an American regional dialect of any kind, what with being, well, foreign. I don't see "fern" as coming from a particular region's accent so much as from the accent of any native US English speaker saying the term "foreign" with a sneer, while at the same time trying to play up his own folksiness. If my use of the term prior to defining it offended the illiterate-yet-cosmopolitan community, I apologize.

*This is, in a nutshell, my dissertation topic, but for France. I point this out both by way of an explanation for the length of this post - I find this stuff endlessly fascinating - and also as a disclaimer re: my weakness in terms of specifics of US history. I won't, for instance, get into MSI and Britta's debate about the reasons for anti-Chinese sentiment in pre-eugenics California. 

Literature and anti-Semitism

Scott Lemieux sent me a link to his post about the was-Nemirovsky-anti-Semitic debate. Shockingly, I like what he has to say about the problem with arguing against an ill-defined/unnamed opponent who apparently cries anti-Semitism at every turn, and about the problem with Patricia Cohen's Madoff analogy. Even more shockingly, I've found a way to respond in far longer of a post than I'd intended.

But I haven't read David Golder (yet) either, which limits what I can do here. I have, however, been studying a French writer of Jewish origin who wrote about Jews in the 1840s, and have been neck-deep in these themes for a few years now, giving me tangential authoritah. Basically, I think the best I can add to this discussion is to lay out just what I think the relevant questions are for this sort of issue:

1) Should we ask, our minds open to either possibility, whether a work is anti-Semitic? To sort out whether a given work is anti-Semitic is rarely the most interesting critique of that work, or even of representations of Jews within the work in question. (Exception: The Israel Lobby, or any other work whose significance is contemporary-political rather than literary-historical.) It's simply too broad of a category to get at anything sufficient. Far too many novels and plays about Jews include anti-Semitic tropes for this to be a useful way to distinguish one such book from the other. Teasing out what was where on the spectrum about Jews at a given time poses a problem. (My own way of assessing this, if need be, is to see how Jewish readers at the time responded to a work. This method poses difficulties of its own, but is better than going by how I react to it in 2010.) That said. It's a very different thing to choose another angle to focus on than to deny a work's anti-Semitism when it's sitting there for all to see.

2) But if we agree that a work is anti-Semitic, then it's evil and unworthy of study, right? What will happen to Literature? This, I suspect, is the fear that stops some well-meaning critics from correctly labeling some works. But given how many books remain in the canon despite their unflattering portraits of Jews (and blacks, women, gays, etc.), my sense is that unless the author was very directly involved in political anti-Semitism (i.e. Celine, Drumont, etc., as versus Zola having written about some Jewish financiers, then going on to save Dreyfus), there's not much to worry about, and even then, there isn't necessarily. But especially when a writer's Jewish, it's unlikely accusations of self-hatred will halt book sales. On the contrary! (See: Philip Roth.)

3) Is a Jew is capable of producing an anti-Semitic text? The answer to this is so obviously 'yes', but since some have their doubts, think of it like this: These Jews are not so much self-hating in the sense of gee-I-hate-not-being-Swedish as they are inclined to see themselves as exceptions. (Yes, yes, Arendt.) 'Jews are parochial/greedy/pushy/insert-stereotype-here,' they think, 'but I'm different, and thus blessed with the capacity to see what non-Jews see when they see Jews.' They conflate the complexity that all of us can see only in ourselves with some kind of unique quality that separates them from the clichés they feel surrounded by. The fail to see that everyone else also feels special, that no one feels like 'the JAP' or 'the Jewish banker.' What ought to prevent Jews from becoming anti-Semites is an awareness that anti-Semitism is about hatred of all Jews, even the ones who never worry about getting exact change in restaurants.

Of course, it's complicated. There are works written by Jews about unpleasant people in their own families that get adopted, though no fault of the authors', by anti-Semites. It could be that David Golder is such a work. I'll have to read it and find out.

4) One note about what isn't anti-Semitism in literature: It's not anti-Semitic for a Jewish character to be described as having physical features or a profession common among Jews of the milieu being described. In other words, if a Jewish character has dark hair and works as a peddler, or is named Gold-somethingorother, this is simply plausible description. Too often (including in the latest Nemirovsky discussion, but also in various things I've been reading lately about Jews in French literature), literary representations that fail to portray Jews as physically, culturally, and linguistically identical to their non-Jewish equivalents are classified as anti-Jewish. As I see it, as long as we're in 'prominent nose' rather than 'crooked beak' territory, we're in the clear. (Context is everything. If it's all about the nose, that's another story.)

Failings of the brain

-I forgot, in front of my class, how to say "square" in French. I could remember square as in Union Square, and as in conformist (which was, as it turns out, the definition my student wanted), but the shape? Hmm.

-I forgot, while speaking to Jo about I don't remember what, how to conjugate "to know" in English. I may have even gone with an "I not noes." I'm not kidding.

-Looking into possible nearby vacation destinations, I found a NYT story on the foodie delights of Ghent, NY. Mildly intrigued, I clicked on the link to "Ghent," and simply could not believe that a Little Belgium on this scale existed right in the Hudson Valley. Belgian restaurants and everything else Belgian galore! And then, not at all quickly enough, it became clear that this was a guide to Ghent in Belgium. I want to blame the misleading link, but no.

Majorly demanding

Paul Gowder mentions "the fact that econ is more demanding than, say, an English major, and econ majors know it, encouraging the kind of intellectual arrogance displayed by this type of person." Having never taken an English or economics class past high school, I can't speak to the difficulty of those particular courses of study, but his "[...], say, [...]" allows me to* infer that, as a former French major who took some but not heaps of college math, I have authoritah on the matter.

Strictly speaking, yes, anyone literate in a given language can read a book and write something about it. Whereas once numbers are involved, different people hit that wall where everything stops making sense at different levels. (Honors Calculus, Week 2, oh the memories.) But in terms of what's actually looked for in a humanities class, there too, different people hit that wall at different levels. If you've hit such a wall, it might well feel like your classmate's paper got an A because he's better at BS-ing, that there's no objective difference between what you handed in and what he did, but it could also be that he had an interesting take on Huis Clos and you didn't. It could be that you didn't hit any sort of wall, and are in fact an under-appreciated critic of Sartre, and the grading really was subjective, but that's the case far less often than students tend to think.

Also: if some college majors are more demanding than others, it's not necessarily that one field is inherently easier than the other, but that, for structural reasons, certain fields have 'weed-out' classes, whereas others are more self-selecting. With French, at least, if you were uncomfortable reading novels and writing papers in that language, you didn't pick that major; consequently the average grade in a French literature class might well have been higher than in an econ or pre-med class.

Then again, I don't at all understand what my boyfriend works on (astro-something), and he understands perfectly well what I work on. So who knows. But I'm more inclined to think means he's sharper than I am than that the humanities on the whole are for the relatively slow-witted.

* Typo fixed! No, French-majoring did not knock English out of my brain entirely.

Quasi-literary quasi-aspirations

Writing stuff in exchange for payment seems a hopeless way to make (or contribute to) a living, so while I have a few pieces sitting around (conservative defense of birth control, anyone? Jewish parochialism? Anyone?), I'm not optimistic enough to do anything with them, other than to perhaps send them to publications and count to ten as I wait for the publication to fold.

That said, one literary market seems to be in full force: first-hand accounts of Upper East Side prep school. If your child could paint a Pollock, I could most definitely write up a novel based on my impressions of that rarefied world. If I dig deep, there's got to be something. What's holding me back?

-It's a boring topic, not to mention one that's been done. Somewhere in the blogosphere is an exchange, I think with Amber, about how there are already enough novels set in New York, so who needs more? Readers might think they do, but they don't, unless whatever it is covers new ground. Which, for reasons soon to become clear, my Great Upper East Side Novel would not.

-I was neither the limitless-credit-card-holder-soon-to-develop-a-coke-habit-and-then-poof-onto-Yale-like-nothing-happened nor the scholarship-student-of-color-from-a-not-yet-gentrified-outer-borough-location. If you did not experience high fashion and hot clubs while underage, you have no authoritah to write about lives others could only dream of. If you did not spend your private-school years developing totally justified class angst, living in two worlds, etc., you have no authoritah to write the Private School Outsider novel. One reads about Manhattan prep schools to learn about Class In America. I could certainly analyze the strange ways class mattered at the school, but can't contribute, not first-hand, at any rate, to tales of extreme decadence or out-of-placeness.

-I left after 8th grade. The thrill of the prep-school novel is the precocious entry of high school juniors into New York's glamorous world of adults. As far as I know, my classmates' debauchery was limited to 'interactions' with boys from the local boys' schools, not with investment bankers. Plus, who remembers age 13 and younger? Frank McCourt, I suppose, but it's a gift I lack.

OK, I remember some. But:

-I am unwilling to write (thinly-veiled or openly) about real people I once knew.

-What I do remember, and would be willing to write about, is not the stuff novels are made of. Does anyone really care about how the cafeteria was all gourmet (Caesar salad, balsamic this-and-that, and one time, due to a parent's donation, a whole lot of crayfish), or how a ridiculous amount of ballet class was mandatory, or how how we used striped tights as a challenge to the uniform, or how all the 'half-Jewish' kids had Jewish fathers, or that dances - for kids! - cost $50 because they 'went to charity' but were really just opportunities to - at long last - speak to members of the opposite sex? The neuroses and disordered eating of well-off adolescents, also memorable, could provide enough material for maybe a "Styles section" blurb, but the imagined calorie count of a hollowed-out bagel does not a novel make. I also have a Sheldon-like recollection of who was in which clique in the third through fifth grades, a subject I found fascinating at the time, but beats me what made it interesting. And even if I could remember why I cared, and could find a way to make others care, too, this would involve creating all new people who were just like the real people (again, authoritah), but not (again, won't speak of real people).

-Compare this with this. Whose Upper East Side authoritah would readers respect?

It's online!

Must. Promote. Self.

Now, must finish lesson plan.

'This one time, I had a real-person job'

Sadie at Jezebel comes down hard on Caitlin Kelly's NYT piece about working in retail on the side while trying to make it as a freelance writer. Having read both the article and the post, I'm still wondering what the complaint is, other than the broader point that it's totally unfair that Person A's articulate-enough whining gets into the Times, while Person B's does not, even though Person B has superior authoritah on the very same subject. It strikes me as just as unfair that Person B gets to rant on Jezebel, whereas Person P over here rants for assorted friends and family members, as well as a pseudonym named Petey. But such is life.

Sadie writes, of Kelly, "if she wants a medal, she's not getting it." I did not see where in the article the request for a metaphorical medal appeared, but the Jezebel commenters get really into it, as they do whenever a situation merits (or seems like it might merit) either a 'bish plz' or use of the word 'whambulance.' In other words, accusing someone else of whining, while whining yourself, is totally awesome. Because calling someone else "privileged" is proof beyond any doubt whatsoever that you are in fact typing your comment from a sub-basement studio in a Brooklyn neighborhood the trust-fund hipsters haven't heard of yet, but will soon so as to give you something new to complain about.

So, long story short, everyone commenting at Jezebel is more hardcore than everyone else, or than this one NYT writer, or who knows, but every commenter there worked this real-person job this one time and it was way harder than what the NYT writer is dealing with. How the pyramid-building and so forth allows time for keeping up with the Jezebel comments remains one of life's great mysteries.

If having once held a less-than-fulfilling job made one a good person, as goes the myth, not only would all working-class people be Mother Teresa (yet, strangely, nasty people exist at all income levels), but not-good people would be hard to come by indeed. Aside from Rothschild-level elites and those who head straight into leadership positions in the family business, everyone, even members of the much-hated college-educated upper-middle classes, will sooner or later find himself with work less well-paid and stimulating than, I don't know, brushing Queen Elizabeth's corgis. The reason a post about 'I once had this job' garners a gazillion comments it that we all once had a job like this or that, and it's human nature to think your own story matters. (Am I, P of WWPD, the exception? Take a guess.)

So. This comment is ground we've seen before:

"I'm pretty sure we'd have a much kinder society (and I might get benefits!) if people had to support themselves in the service industry for a year."

OK, slight problem: if those who don't need to work work all the same, so as to have some independence from their parents, or so as to avoid being that guy who's never had a real job, that leaves fewer jobs for those who need money, not 'character'. If you think it sucks to deal with someone who spent all her weekends shopping while you were folding the clothes, would you prefer losing a potential retail job to someone who only took the job so as to buy even more designer jeans than is already the case?

Ultimately, even if 'builds character' is a legitimate reason to take a job, if that's why you signed up, no one's offering, especially not in this economy. For the college-educated or college-bound, Jezebel-approved real-person work is often harder to snag than snooty-sounding low-paid work for which a degree/veneer of snootiness is required. This is why I found Paul Gowder's bafflement at lawyers who choose low-paid legal work over similarly low-paid service-industry work altogether baffling--no one would hire someone with a legal degree, or someone who took the J.D. off his resume but still seems like someone with a legal degree, to work as a waiter, because if it's your restaurant, you want someone a) who will stick around at the job, and b) who won't act as though the job is beneath him. Just as stores, restaurants, and other locales known for employing teens often refuse to hire young people still living at home who only seek pocket money, and who will leave once Swarthmore or Oberlin starts come the fall, these same places will not want to hire lawyers going through a screw-the-Man midlife crisis. Unless you can act that well, or really do need the GAP as much as you claim, good luck out there.

Hello navel

Googling myself before returning to a 600-plus page tome about the experiences of (you guessed it) a 19th century French Jew, I discovered two surprising things. One, a blog post I wrote in response to an article in PresenTense was reprinted in full in a following issue as a "Letter to the Editor." I don't remember ever sending anyone a letter, so Ariel, if you're reading this, ma zeh? Isn't the usual practice that you have to actually direct the comments to the publication? In any case, the blog post is credited, and the attention paid to my bloggings is flattering, so my confusion is basically in how the word "letter" entered the picture.

In less flattering fame, I should probably consider moving away from Park Slope, as my unfavorable words for the Food Co-op apparently reached the arugula-eating hordes. (I just purchased some Citarella arugula myself--$1.29, pas cher!--and brought it back via subway, just to make a point.) In a piece aptly titled, "Googling Ourselves," a Co-op member asks, of guess who, "Has this woman actually seen the Coop?" A strange question when one considers that among my many grievances with the institution, mentioned in the post she responds to, was that the Coop folk would not allow me to look inside. Ultimately, accompanied by a friend who was then a member, I did get a good look, but mocking someone for never having seen the inside of a supermarket that doesn't allow non-members to enter except under special circumstances strikes me as plenty amusing.

And, one last moment of narcissism: haircut=done!

More "studies"

The time has come to defend my honor against the National Review's Phi Beta Cons blog. First I learn that I am a "French Studies major" (an odd way to refer to someone in a doctoral program, but a good way to belittle the author of an article you dislike). Then I discover that in "studies" programs "you generally get grad students not intelligent enough to enter mainstream fields taking on an intellectual project that is, theoretically, more demanding." I appreciate the thought, but lest the Phi Beta Cons be concerned, I am in two different departments, one of which is French Studies, the other of which is French, which I believe counts as a mainstream field. Both are plenty rigorous, further evidence that the denunciation of "studies" programs comes from those with little knowledge of what's being discussed. So, before going any further, let it be known that I am not an undergrad, nor am I incapable of getting admitted to a 'mainstream' program. In other words, to borrow from the esteemed scholar Eric Cartman, respect mah authoritah!

As for the substance of the Phi Beta Cons counter-offense: I confess that I have not read every single conservative critique of academia ever written. This does not disqualify me from commenting on the subject. I've read plenty on the topic, far more than the works I cite specifically in my article. Had I listed the lot, it would have been a list, not an article, but my blog archives contain plenty more examples, for the curious. To make "sweeping claims" on the basis of "a few examples" is pretty much inevitable in the format of an article this length. For what it's worth, while I have seen the occasional decent critique of academia from the right, such as the discussion of academics' tendency to "problematize" rather than answer a question, these are rare, so rare that this is the only one that immediately comes to mind.

I'm still left unsure as to what a conservative critique of academia would even be. The "excellent" article Robert VerBruggen points me to--Charles Murray's piece on "educational romanticism," is, according to Murray's own introduction, "the story of educational romanticism in elementary and secondary schools," and thus not an article about higher ed. Next, Travis Kavulla writes, "My impression of what conservatives are demanding is, in a word, rigor." Liberal academics, too, demand rigor, and would disagree if one claimed that they did not. What do conservatives mean by "rigor" that differentiates their rigor from that of liberals? As I pointed out in my article, academic silliness--the Dartmouth prof being the obvious example--appears silly to those across the political spectrum. Each conservative attempt at "exposing the silliness that currently has a home in academia" further removes the possibility that serious academics (on the left or right) will care what conservative critics have to say, since plucking the most absurd examples of behavior in any field and examining them out of context fails to tell you anything substantive about what's going on.

The reason this concerns me is in part that I am arguably on the right for academia, or at least for the humanities, if only because, the way the world works these days, to defend Israel as a Jewish state is to be on the right. But it's also that, looking at things from the perspective of someone who is neither on the left nor on the right enough to count fully as either (but not in the sense described in this book), looking at things as objectively as possible, I do not think the conservative critique as it currently exists benefits either conservatives or academia. Right-wing denunciations do not push academia to the right; they certainly do not make the seminar room a friendlier place for conservative students or faculty. And, from the perspective of academia, a whole range of the political spectrum represents itself as hostile but ignorant, which in turn does not help in terms of checking the more extreme cases of politically-correct blather that do turn up from time to time and require well-reasoned take-downs. If anything, the conservative critique as it currently exists pushes academia further to the left.

Doublethink

For my thoughts on major questions of our age (as opposed to major questions of the nineteenth century), see here and eventually one of the articles referenced here.

Ish rotzeh isha

While eating dinner, Jo and I have been watching an especially implausible--but clearly cheap to produce--reality show called "Farmer Wants a Wife." The "city women" come from areas of dubious urban-ness (places where, say, one has to drive), yet the show begins with all of these shots of Manhattan. And the farmer... has a body unusual among men in search of a wife. He is clearly an aspiring actor living in New York who was taught to ride a tractor for this show. (And yes, this show does bring to mind the "tractor incident" from "Seinfeld.")

It occurred to me that the best reality show ever, of this same theme, would be an Israeli man who wants an American Jewish wife. Or, why not, Diaspora Jewish, so that there could be some French, South American, and Canadian participants as well. Now I don't see why an Israeli man would want a non-Israeli wife--Israeli women tend towards the gorgeous--but the potential for farcical culture clash would be far greater than that of a farmer meeting girls from Dallas and Orlando. The difference probably seems huge to those involved, but it's not coming through on the small screen.

In my reality show, women from New York and Paris could be sent to a small desert town in Israel. It would be like the Birthright trip to the club in Eilat, for which all the American Birthrighters dress like they're going out to a club in the Meatpacking District, except it would go on for weeks, the eliminations would involve mock-IDF basic training (again, like Birthright) and at the end, someone would get 250,000 shekels.

Crushes, continued

I probably could have explained myself better in my last post, but to respond to Amber's response, I suppose my main point was that I don't believe there's any use in dividing crushes into categories of authentic and inauthentic. Cultural and situational factors certainly do influence how much of the population one is primed to think of in terms of a crush. But since that's the case no matter what, how can it be that a prof-crush is artificial because it comes from young women's limited imaginations about relationships with older men? Isn't a young woman's crush on a man her own age just as much about seeing a world of limited possibility?

Time to get anecdotal: I never experienced the prof-crush as is now being discussed, just the less-racy phenomenon of prof-admiration. But I did switch from girls' school when I was 13 to coed school at 14. I remember that I was initially not sure what to make of all these boys, since from the perspective of a girls'-school eighth-grader, a boy is only relevant if he is a crush. I'd never had male friends, so the first male friends I did make I tended to think of in crush-like terms. Thankfully I soon got past that attitude. But that said, although I can today point to what was in retrospect a very obvious reason for why I formed my early high-school crushes, that they were situational does not mean that they were not actually crushes. They sure felt like it at the time, and who am I to argue with my decade-younger (gosh I'm ancient) self?

Because the question is, if those crushes were fake, when is a crush real, and not just a "model of behavior" adopted in error? Which brings me back to my original point, which is that the only time a crush 'counts' according to Amber's model is, by implication, when it forms on an appropriate, available target.

"She was there to sell makeup but the father saw more"

OK, one more comment on the story of the week:

Something sounded familiar about "Kristen's" trajectory: "Ms. Dupré said by telephone Tuesday night that she was worried about how she would pay her rent since the man she was living with 'walked out on me' after she discovered he had fathered two children." Thing is, "she was working in a bridal shop in Flushing, Queens, till her boyfriend kicked her out in one of those crushing scenes. What was she to do, where was she to go, she was out on her fanny."

Couldn't Dupré have just signed up to be the now-ex governor's nanny? Sure, his kids are a bit old for that by now, but Fran was still on the scene by the time Mr. Sheffield's offspring were well into their 30s. That way, many repetitive episodes later, after fighting off the evil Ms. Babcock, she could have become Mrs. Sheffield, er, Spitzer.

WWPD: Pop culture contrarian

As we've already established, I don't care if famous people are Jewish, or if they have one Jewish ancestor from way back when. Unless that ancestor comes from this one 19th century French-Jewish family that I'm studying at the moment, in which case I totally care, and want the details. (Other than Julia Louis Dreyfus, I can't think which celebs could possibly fit the bill.)

I also don't care if famous people are looking a bit too skinny these days. Demands that a celebrity "eat a sandwich" do not move me, not one bit. I especially don't care if Ann Coulter does or does not down a Snickers. Do we know these people personally, such that their physical well-being concerns us? Isn't the point that they're skinny? Because unlike everyone else, these people are paid to watch their figures. If I refuse cheese at a department reception, I'm an idiot, whereas if Nicole Richie does this, she's keeping her job, whatever it is that she does. If those whose job it is to stand around and be photographed didn't have to make sacrifices, now that would be a problem.