At a time like this

It was only a matter of time. But eventually, a (white) Facebook friend called out his Facebook friends for using Facebook to post cat videos and the like, when, you know, Ferguson. This post got dozens of likes. Privacy settings would presumably prevent me from checking, but I'm going to assume the likers are split between those who'd never have thought of cat videos at a time like this, and those who absolutely posted cat videos after news of the grand jury decision had broken, but who've been shown the error of their ways. There's also the person - not someone I know - who comments that her use of cute-animal sharing is her way of comforting herself at a time like this, and thus not evidence of ignorance or insensitivity, quite the contrary! Which... is both entirely plausible and unlikely to hold up in the court of social-media opinion.

We've been down this road before. But this time around, I've learned that there's a term for it: "social media signaling." At least I think that's what that expression refers to. What one does and doesn't put online ends up seeming like some kind of ultimate barometer for what a person thinks is important, when in reality, many people are keeping that-which-is-important (political opinions, photos of loved ones) off social media. But the way a feed works, it can seem as if Friend B's complaint about a coffee shop closing early (note: a complaint I've had) is somehow in response to Friend A's heartfelt analysis of police brutality, even if these two friends don't even know each other. It's jarring, though, and it makes Friend B look like a terrible person. Meanwhile, Friend C will be alternating posts about the serious and the trivial - what does it all mean?

Of course, the desire to avoid looking clueless can, in the aggregate, end up making the world a better place. As in, does it really matter if someone shared Ta-Nehisi Coates's reparations article because they want to signal their good-person-ness or out of a sincere belief that that's, you know, a really important story? Shared is shared, right?

The danger, though, is that a certain tone, or approach, has a way of inviting defensiveness. Accusing people of racism because they've shared cat videos - even if the accusation comes from a place of sincere outrage - will cause some to reflect, and others to roll their eyes and hide your subsequent updates.

Further thoughts on Mark Zuckerberg's undershirts

We're all aware of the argument: Given that women in [name a country with a terrible human rights record] are subject to [name an extreme form of deprivation or violence], women in the West have no right to complain about anything. Feminism, in this understanding, is a zero-sum game. Except that that's never the point - the point is to dismiss feminist concerns, not to get feminists to change their priorities.

In a piece that vaguely gestures in that direction, Sally Kohn defends Lena Dunham from her from-the-left detractors (conveniently allowing TNR to illustrate the piece in the way that all lifestyle articles must be illustrated, i.e. with a photo of Dunham), yet objects to those who - ahem - called Mark Zuckerberg's gray-t-shirt comments sexist:

Seriously? Zuckerberg did not explicitly—or, I'd argue, implicitly—contrast himself with women, but merely stated that he finds fashion concerns to be "silly" and "frivolous." If anything, he was referring to his fellow male tech CEOs, like Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and his Prada suits; after all, only 6 percent of Silicon Valley CEOs are female. But in criticizing Zuckerberg, Davis and Krupnick relied on a stereotype that he himself did not—that only women care about clothes—and perhaps even reinforced that stereotype in sounding the feminist alarm.

Kohn cites "the risk of feminist overreach." As she sees it, feminist scolds are out to get poor (intentional, intentional...) Mark Zuckerberg and his noble rejection of Prada:

[I]f feminism becomes like the boy who cried wolf—if girls, and women, cry sexism too readily and often—America will stop listening. The minute feminism becomes hypercritical and humorless, it becomes too easy for the mainstream to dismiss our more valid complaints. And let’s be honest, it’s kind of refreshing for feminism to be at the cool kids’ table of society at the moment, fraught and confining though it might sometimes be. Does anyone really want to return to the period of sidelined, shrill feminism?

And so the game is given away. No one who describes any era of feminism as "shrill" - indeed, no one who uses the word "shrill" - is arguing from any kind of pro-feminist position. Now, it's totally fine (if a bit contradictory) for anti-feminist women to write opinion articles. But Kohn is claiming to be criticizing the movement from within, so as to save it from itself. Which seems a bit disingenuous, but who knows. Kohn's basically right about Dunhamgate. Maybe an editor added "shrill"...

What interests me here more than the feminism angle, though, is the crying-wolf one. It's not crying wolf to cite less-than-extreme examples of bigotry, assuming you do so in a way that acknowledges their non-extreme nature. As I've said so very many times, it ought to be possible to call out anti-Semitism that falls short of death camps. So, too, with sexism. That NYMag piece was prominently tagged "casual sexism," for goodness sake! Neither item Kohn cites in any way attempts to suggest that Zuckerberg himself is a particular threat to women. Rather, his comments say something about our culture, and point to a very real reason that women (and others with stereotypically feminine interests) end up dismissed as unserious.

Now, if you're going to write about something - anything - it's a weak rhetorical strategy to open with a big disclaimer about how well aware you are that there are more important things in the world than what you're about to say. That does pose a challenge for those who seek to highlight things that are -bad-but-not-that-bad. Commenting at all has a way of seeming to be overstating the case. I was attempting to address something along these lines, as it happens, in my post about the strudel-commenting stranger. My point there was certainly not that the biggest menace to women today is the possibility that you'll get unsolicited comments about your afternoon cake. Rather, I was trying to convey that there are certain day-to-day... specificities about being female that set women back. And I intentionally don't use the term "microaggression," because for whatever reason, it has a way of coming across as overstating whichever case.

On wrote-juvenilia-before-things-went-viral privilege

Someone (who may read WWPD, and if so, should feel extra-encouraged to respond) favorably linked on Facebook to Simon Waxman's plea that major publications leave college op-ed writers alone. Waxman - just like yours truly! - knows what it's like to have published less-than-stellar essays while still a student, for an audience of other students, or at most, profs who know full well that you're still learning how to construct an argument, etc. Back in the day, stuff may have gone online, but there wasn't social media, there wasn't this "viral" capacity. You could write nonsense, that nonsense might even make it to physical print, and Time still wouldn't hear about it.

Anyway. This is something I thought about quite a bit before - and after - deciding to respond to the Tal Fortgang debacle. After all, my objection to parental overshare is in part that a young person shouldn't be forever known for his or her most embarrassing moment. Isn't this sort of the same?

No, I ended up concluding, it's not. There wasn't space to get into all these concerns in my earlier article, so, here goes: A 20-year-old who writes and publishes an essay, and consents to its (and his) further promotion, isn't the same as an 11- or 16-year-old whose ostensibly private remarks are put into a major publication by a publicity-minded writer parent. Nor, for that matter, is this the same as the "Apple store lady" viral video, or the other, similar situations, where a low moment in someone's day, week, month, or even - apologies to that crap 1990s sitcom - year ends up surreptitiously recorded and posted online, so that the whole world can tell this person having an off day what an evil, entitled person they surely are. We're talking about adults, who are choosing to present views that are their own. There has to be a cutoff somewhere, and unless we go the whole 'the brain only fully develops at 40' route, most college-student articles are fair game. At least as much so as small-time blogs written by (presumably) adults of unspecified age and education level, blogs that will periodically find themselves ridiculed on Gawker or whatever. At least a writer for a student publication imagined some audience.

Yet, at the same time, it does kind of suck that this is now a thing. Not so much in Fortgang's case - he seems to have more than consented to the publicity - but that other, less confident, if technically adult students can now end up viral at what could well be their intellectual low points, students who may hardly even have a conception of what it means for their classmates to read their article, let alone the world. So? How to deal with this ambiguous category of text?

This, though, seems more an issue of etiquette than - as with parental overshare or turning private moments viral - ethics. Factors like how big of a platform someone has, or, if an item has been published, if it's a student publication, should play at least somewhat into whether or not something oh-so-outrageous gets a take-down, and if so, what form that takes. It's sort of... bad form, if you're someone with a tremendous platform and endless experience, to react to a piece in a college paper as if it were Kristof's latest. You also don't want to be patronizing and assume a student will think otherwise once older - chances are, the student will think the same but be better-able to articulate these thoughts. But maybe, if you are going to respond to one of these items, especially if you're doing so for a large audience, it helps to make it very clear that what you're responding to is by a student, in a student publication? It can't hurt.

Not-so-sweet 16

Ah, Facebook. A high school friend was tagged in a scanned copy of our school literary magazine's yearbook photo, which alerted me to its social-media presence. At first I wasn't sure I was in the group photo, but yesterday several friends and, more definitively, my husband, confirmed. It's from either my sophomore or junior year, making me 15 or 16 at the time. (I presume WWPD has an international audience - a very glamorous one at that - that might need this spelled out.) I can tell it's not my senior year in part because of the presence of students I know graduated before me, but also because I must have looked better than that by 17. At least that's my recollection.

'Hi, I'm on the school literary magazine! Please read my thinly-veiled short stories about unrequited crushes!'

It's hard to explain exactly what was most unimpressive about my appearance at whatever age this was. (I'm estimating 16; 15 was worse, and involved glitter barrettes.) I looked a bit fatter then than I do now, going by this photo, but probably weighed the same - the well-known phenomenon of "baby face." I don't think I still own that exact sweater, but wouldn't rule it out, and in any case still dress like that. I haven't found drastically better things to do with my hair. The eyebrows look a bit 1990s-tadpole, but that's to be expected. None of the clichéd adolescent complaints (acne, braces, bad glasses). 

No, it's the expression. The face that radiates no life experience, and so, so much awkwardness. While I may not look better at 30 than at 23, and while no age thus far has left me looking like a supermodel, there's something nice about knowing that whichever ravages of ancientness have yet to reduce me to looking as I did at 16.

Let this post be a lesson to the pop-evo-psych-PUA contingent, who insist that women peak while still technically girls, and that it's downhill from 16 on. This may be true of the handful who go into runway modeling at that age. Not so the rest of us.

Shaming-shaming-shaming

It was bound to come to this: we now have shaming-shaming. And since the pornographer who revealed the identity of the frat boy who revealed the identity of the Duke porn star has himself come under criticism, I think we've also seen some shaming-shaming-shaming.

In defense of posting photos of your food

Setting aside the question of why photographing one's food would be a "food selfie," here's what I want to know: why is it such a thing to denounce the taking and sharing of photos of food? Some Guardian commenters liken it to posting photos of the scatological result of food consumption, but even those less viscerally repulsed seem to object for a great many reasons. If you photograph your food, you're apparently doing so rather than eating it. (Not sure I follow the logic - assuming a smartphone, chances are, your food hasn't gotten cold. There seems to be a mistaken belief that once someone takes the photo, they must immediately go onto whichever social media site to post the photo and browse others.) If it's interesting food you're photographing, you're a braggart and a snob; if it's just the usual, it's 'who cares?', so basically you can't win.

I'm afraid I don't see the problem with taking pictures of your food and posting those pictures on social media. Of all the things one can post, it strikes me as among the least offensive. You're not sharing secrets, or whining. You're not letting all who weren't invited to whichever party know what they'd missed out on. You're sharing an experience - solitary, as far as everyone else is concerned, if it's just a photo of the food. You're recommending a recipe idea or establishment - you're providing a service!

Smartphones and the like have introduced so many frightening things - the family that opted to watch "Mean Girls" without headphones on NJ Transit being just one; the impossibility of being a teenager at a party outside the potential view of your parents and future employers being another. Is "food porn" really such a concern?

The only ways I could see food-posting going wrong are a) if the food photos are truly nauseating, like some kind of stew that may taste great but looks like vomit, b)  if they're accompanied by 'my life is so wonderful' text, or c) if the photos are only of upscale establishments in exotic locales, for months on end, with text about how such places are overrated. And yet it's rarely along those lines. You ate an excellent croissant? By all means, post a picture - the worst that happens is I'll be inspired to seek out a croissant.

Maybe, then, the objection is fundamentally to phones, camera-having or otherwise, being out in restaurants. That much I could understand. The whole dynamic of a phone out changes a dinner. It gives the impression that the person whose phone is out would rather be somewhere else, or is so important that headquarters will summon them at any time. If you're the one whose phone is stowed away (or - but I've gotten better about this! - forgotten at home), it seems as if you're more invested in the dinner than your companion. If someone else's phone is out, I tend to feel (or used to - I think I stopped caring about this) that mine should be as well.

58

Facebook now has 58 gender options. How this is better than the two expected choices plus a write-in option (or the option of not providing any) may not be immediately obvious, but presumably the idea is, male or female will no longer be the default. And it will become known to many not educated in these matters (who may well be questioning such things about themselves without quite knowing what they're asking) that other possibilities are out there.

Once there are 58 options, there will be criticisms. It's simultaneously too many and too few. I've already seen, on Facebook, an objection to the absence of "butch" and "femme." Which led me, in turn, to wonder: are those gender identities in the same way as female and male? As in, wouldn't someone who identifies as one of those generally identify as a woman, and that's just gendered description above and beyond? No one's entirely feminine or masculine. There's not a name for the exact breakdown of every individual, but if someone identifies as a woman and goes by female pronouns, wouldn't "female" suffice? Wouldn't anything else, in most contexts, be potentially offensive? (As in, let's say you meet a new person, and you're recalling this event to another friend. Would you say, "I met this really cool femme woman the other day"?)

Meanwhile, it looks like there are some gratuitous repeats. Are "Cis" and "Cisgender" different? How is a "Cisgender Female" different from a "Cisgender Woman"? Is this about underage users? I take it there's justification - if an obscure one - for "trans" both with and without the asterisk, but again, how is a "Transgender Male" different from a "Transgender Man"?

And will these categories also apply for the "interested in"?

And finally, is it or is it not the proper etiquette for those of us whose gender matches what we were assigned at birth to now switch over to "Cisgender" in one form or another? On the one hand, it normalizes the possibility that one wouldn't necessarily be that, and thus avoids situations like where someone might say "a man" to mean "a white man" but "a black man" to mean "a black man," if that makes sense. Just putting "female" makes it seem, maybe, like you think there's just one authentic way to be female.

On the other, it's my understanding (in part from a commenter here, but no way to search the comments that I'm aware of) that some trans men and trans women simply identify as men and women, respectively, and aren't particularly thrilled to have a distinction made between the men and women who were assigned their genders at birth and those who were not. Meanwhile, I don't see it as particularly relevant, in most situations, that I was assigned "female" at birth. What's relevant, gender-identification-wise, is that I'm a woman.

'It's not about you' is the obvious - and perhaps appropriate - answer to this last question, but it kind of is about all of us, given the 58 options, and that if you have the option of being more or less polite, you may as well go with 'more'.

TMI and "the natural look"

I read two wonderful articles today, shared them on Facebook and/or Twitter (I'm forgetting), but neglected to bring them to you, the tremendous WWPD readership. If that means everyone's now seeing this for the second or third time, hey, no one's forcing you to read this, which brings us to...

Maureen O'Connor's piece about how "TMI" doesn't apply to social-media sharing:

Assuming the information in question is yours to share — your life, your ideas, your stories, your pictures, your theories about elf genealogy in Lord of the Rings — you cannot share too much of it. There are no captive audiences on the Internet.

O'Connor doesn't do as much with the "yours to share" angle as I might have, but her point is spot-on. Why are people so offended by internet sharing that bores them? There is, as O'Connor notes, an unfollow option on Facebook, so you can avoid minute-by-minute updates from people you like offline/don't want to insult without unfriending them. And with this blog, I assume nobody's reading it against their will.

The annoyance at excessive/boring updates (and excessive/boring updaters are often among the annoyed!) seems like a holdover from the days when simply having an online presence made you a loser. It still seems a little suspect when someone's sharing on social media what they really should be sharing with offline friends. Even if, at this point, it should not.

The second article-highlight of the day: Sali Hughes's response to those who comment on her beauty articles in the Guardian just to say how stupid they think makeup is. The best part:

And I certainly don't care if you're a man who prefers 'the natural look'. The personal preferences of men I don't know, who lack even basic manners in their dealings with others, are of absolutely no consequence to me and my face.

Indeed. Who are these men? Why do a small but vocal minority of men flock to posts about makeup, only to announce that they don't care, or don't like the stuff?

Lifestyle roundup

-One of the strangest things about the post-Facebook age, I find, is the way that what was loser-marking behavior in the earliest days of social media (posting photos you've taken of yourself, or being obviously online on a Saturday night or, say, New Years) has switched over into being... cool. I think?Young/cool people, am I missing something? My impression of today's fashion is, if you haven't documented a party, ideally by photographing yourself at it, and posted it instantly, chatting on- and offline simultaneously, you're out of the loop. If you actively choose not to document-and-post your own social life, this is no longer because what's going on is too scandalous or fabulous, or you're too busy having a good time to photograph it, but rather evidence that you haven't been outside past 8pm since 1994. In any case, as with all fashions, this appears to be cyclical.

-Does it tarnish high fashion when models bare all in Playboy? Hadley Freeman thinks so:

It is well past time to call bullshit on this alliance between fashion and Playboy. If women want to make their careers out of glamour modelling, good luck to them, but to suggest that Playboy itself is somehow chic, that to ally oneself with that dud Viagra pill of a magazine is excitingly racy and that women who have achieved enormous success and fame in their fields are proving their self-worth and sexiness by posing for it is just demented.

The eternal dilemma. Which beauty ideal is more democratic or feminist or what have you: the regime of "chic," which is sometimes welcoming of eccentrics, but not of the usual variants of the female form; or the regime of male-gaze, which tends to lean more conventional and not particularly empowering, but which also tends to include virtually all women, what with male tastes (if not the tastes celebrated in mainstream male-oriented mags) being far more subjective than runway-casting requirements?

I'm a huge Freeman fan, and used to be Team Fashion on this one, but the more I think about it, the more I end up, if one must choose, on Team Male Gaze, with the obvious caveat that we'll need to include the lust of women-liking women while excluding that of non-women-liking men. If fashion really were about self-expression, it would be about self-expression for all women, or many women, or, at least, not just a handful of the thinnest and youngest, on whom anything looks Fashion, because that's how fashion's been defined. The typical woman is sexy to some people, and chic to none.

-Mark Bittman suggests, as a resolution, "Cook big batches of grains and beans." I remain unconvinced.

The airing of self-directed grievances

Noreen Malone said it best: "Before you ask people about resolutions tonight, consider whether you'd ever ask them to list the things they hate most about themselves."

I'd considered writing another resolutions post, given that last year's went if anything better than I'd hoped. (Except the pasta thing. I don't function well without DeCecco.) But where to begin? Do I want to announce my goals, or my flaws? To what end?

In the age of constant online image-crafting, posting a resolutions list is extra-fraught. Too much candor and you're either admitting something that's a liability (do you want your boss to know that you procrastinate? do you want potential dates to know that underneath your clothes, you have a tremendous if well-camouflaged gut you plan on addressing in 2014?) or just boring everybody. In 2014, you plan to work out/eat more vegetables/floss daily? Wonderful, but of interest to you and you alone (unless the non-flossing had gotten out of control).

It's tough to hit the right balance - not too humblebrag or overly sincere, nothing that suggests you're already this perfect being who can merely strive for further perfection. But also nothing that announces any genuine problems with you as you currently exist. It's like the college essay - you need to tell the truth about yourself, but not really. Resolutions are self-centered... except when they're not, which can be narcissistic in its own way. If you resolve to be kinder to others or start composting or whatever, that's, again, awkward to announce. Like everyone else, I want all that is professional, personal, aesthetic-about-my-person to improve in the new year. I'll leave it at that.

So I'm not announcing any resolutions for 2014. I will instead announce that the first read of 2014 is Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. 2014 is thus off to a not-so-good start in the avoidance-of-cultural-consumption-I-find-overly-familiar department. This is (thus far - haven't finished it yet) a book about a Jewish woman from New York who gets married and goes with her husband to a part of the U.S. where one needs a car (she can't drive), and to Heidelberg. Heidelberg! Who is, knows she must be, a writer, but ends up in a literature PhD program in New York, as one does. And there I was, thinking this was a 1970s feminist classic I really ought to have read, not some kind of semi-autobiography published ten years before I was born. What I'm trying to say is, I'm currently taking recommendations for novels set somewhere I'll find unfamiliar. Nineteenth-century France, for obvious reasons, doesn't count.

WWPD Guides: social media and shaming

Another day, another online-idiocy-and-shaming debacle. This time, though, it's not a private action made public, it seems, but a public posting made, err, extra-public?

So, so, so many thoughts on this, but a few scattered ones, before I forget...

-When is stupidity fair game for online mockery? It depends: Who was the intended/plausible audience of whichever act/post?

There's a spectrum, from a private incident observed or private conversation had, to a mass email/Facebook post, to a tweet or blog post, to an article in a small online publication, to a big one, to one of the ones whose very purpose is making things go viral. Someone's fussing about a latte being with the wrong amount of foam? Yes, that's annoying for the barista, not to mention for you, the person waiting in line behind Mr./Ms. Fussy. If you feel compelled to share this on social media - and why not, if you can convey it in a clever way - by all means, do so... in text. Don't post a photo of this person, as if they're America's Most Wanted. Don't launch some campaign to identify this person, their place of work, etc. And so on. Very obviously public-audience-intended means a far lower threshold for what can be made fun of in an identifiable way.

-What's the purpose of the mockery? Is it genuine anger that someone could be so racist/sexist/etc.? Is any of it a dare I say a performance of indignation, a fear that if one doesn't register one's disapproval, one will lose one's post as Sensitive Person on whichever social-media platform? Is what's being mocked innocent stupidity and not racist/sexist/etc.? There's something to be said for shaming truly awful behavior, behavior that nevertheless falls short of what even a non-libertarian such as myself would oughta-be-a-law. But people just being kind of unpleasant? Shame the unpleasantness in a way that doesn't shame the person. If you must do the latter to do the former, do neither.

-Is the object of your fury a famous person? We're so accustomed to stories of celebrities and politicians gaffe-ing it up a storm, then it'll be like, oops, and then life goes on. The same redemption narrative may not go over so well for ordinary people who lose their jobs, reputations, and so forth when one mistake in an otherwise anonymous life becomes the thing they're known for. I think what happens is, once someone's incident, whatever it is, goes viral, they feel like a public figure to the people reading about the incident online. It just starts to feel like a story that's out there, and this person's name is already just so known by the time you've arrived at it. But they're not actually famous, as in famous beyond this incident. It's a very different situation.

-What about the (inadvertent) shaming of people in your life? Oversharing about others brings up two separate privacy concerns: that of the person being discussed without consenting to this, and that of the person doing the sharing, who may imagine he or she is sharing with a far smaller audience than is the case. As such, overshare needs to be treated as something about which people need education, not as a self-evident wrong. This is something I've come to realize, having first addressed parental, then teacher, overshare. In both cases - and in others I've yet to hold forth about - someone will feel as if they're telling an anecdote from their own life that's of course theirs to share, when in fact... But the point shouldn't be to start shaming the oversharers. At least not before they've had a good explanation or several about why whichever type of sharing is excessive.

Again, what happens is, most of us know yet don't know what it means to say something to a lot of people. Typing a private email feels like typing a status update, which feels like typing something that will be emailed to an editor who will, in turn, post it before a huge audience. You never really get the presence of your audience, big or small, the way you would if in a big crowd. A funny thing happens, and the impulse is to share. It's what everyone else is doing, so it won't feel like a big deal. But an "overheard-in-NY"-type story is different from an overheard-in-my-nuclear-family one.

Images and neurosis

-Every form of social media has its own neurosis, it seems. First Facebook, now Instagram. I don't use Instagram (not out of some principle, just never got around to it), but having looked at it, I could see how this would make sense. It's the photos that inspire the greatest neurosis on Facebook, so a site that's just pictures is bound to do the trick. And boy do neuroses vary! I can't imagine caring that a friend had constructed a "bar" out of mashed potatoes. I've cared (in that fleeting-but-neurotic way) about other, no less ridiculous things, but, like, what's stopping any of us from buying some potatoes and putting them in cocktail glasses? For me, it's photos of people's trips to Japan, especially but not limited to meals consumed. Planning a Japanese-home-cooking extravaganza this evening, but I suspect it's not the same.

-Nothing new to say at the moment about Lulu and her well-squeezed lemons, but I wondered about Heidi Moore's observation here: "Insecurity is a big money-maker," she begins, and thus far, agreed. That's why models are so much younger and thinner than they'd seemingly need to be - it taps into the two classic insecurities, and allows even young or thin women to feel inadequate. "Happy people don't buy things," Moore continues, adding, "Unhappy people engage in 'retail therapy', and buy clothes, jewelry, electronics or even food that makes them feel as if they have higher status." This is where I'm not so sure. What about when depression (clinical or colloquial-use) manifests itself as an indifference to stuff? I know that my own interest in the-shiny tends to be greater if I'm feeling generally positive about things, lower if crankier.

-Elle Fanning stars in a short film about body image. I saw this and my first thought was, that seems about right. Fanning is a pretty 15-year-old actress, and we're living in a society that asks grown women to hate themselves for not looking 15, and 15-year-olds for not looking like actresses. Anyway, that's not it at all - Fanning is playing a teen girl who thinks she looks horrible. While there's no reason someone with body dysmorphia or the less-extreme variant (aka being a teenage girl) wouldn't be that conventionally attractive (the idea being, you don't have an accurate sense of what you look like), I'm not sure what I think about the casting. Because the best response is rarely going to be, 'Don't worry what you look like, you're movie-star gorgeous just the way you are.' Not sure how one would go about telling young girls, 'You're probably within normal limits, and that's just fine,' but ultimately that's the answer.

Tracy Anderson's glute(n) advice, and more

-The latest Slate Culture Gabfest takes on viral social-media shaming of public obnoxiousness. A topic near and dear to my heart. The more people who start questioning viral shaming, the better.

-The latest in parental overshare: a parent (with a distinctive name) provides an annotated version of his seven-year-old daughter's Christmas wish list, complete with photos of the "insane" (his word) list itself, kid-handwriting and everything. Given the number of places I've seen this linked to, and the stats visible on the post itself, I suppose it counts as having gone viral. Is it funny? Sure. Is it an invasion of this kid's privacy? Yes, that too.

Parental overshare comes in two forms: tragic-and-exceptional and humorous-relatable. Both are privacy violations, but it might be more obvious why the former would pose a problem. We're sympathetic to the extent to which a kid's problems can deeply impact a parent, but ultimately the information - the relevant medical records, juvenile-detention stints, abuse-victimhood, etc. - belongs to the child. (OK, we as a society are perfectly fine with infinite parental sharing; I, and like three other people, are not.)

It's less obvious why it's iffy to post about within-normal-limits parenting escapades. Lighten up! seems the obvious counterargument. And does tend to be good advice generally.

But imagine you're the kid. It's kind of terrifying to imagine being known for your brattiest/most ridiculous childhood moments. And children - on account of being children - virtually all act in ways that would seem, in adults, narcissistic, impatient, and lacking all sense of proportion. Thus why, when adults make the sorts of fusses that these days so often go viral, we refer to them as acting like children. But your age at the time whichever item was posted will be less memorable than your display of spoiled entitlement. It will be you who threw a tantrum over not getting the right jeans. You who saw it as the world's greatest tragedy when you weren't invited to that sleepover. Should this be exploited for material on a Gawker affiliate? Is it somehow OK if your decompensations were hilarious, or if your parents were clever writers able to make them sound more entertaining than they were?

-Usual suspects Mark Bittman and Tracy Anderson have come to the rescue this (eternal!) holiday season, with tips for not becoming too glutinous or whatever's the preferred euphemism this holiday season. Both advice columns are also, more subtly, efforts to distance themselves from reputations as (very different kinds of ) ascetic extremists. Bittman doesn't tell you to extensively research each ingredient, but rather to eat real foods. Simple! Anderson, meanwhile, manages to admonish without calling her audience fat. She advises against juice cleanses, and also endorses putting food into one's mouth should one be so inclined. Moderation!

Except not really, if one reads between the lines. Bittman's "real food" suggestion is not as straightforward as all that. We get this as an aside: "(Most real bread, for example, is water, flour, yeast and salt, with the possible addition of olive oil or a seasoning or two, and the possible subtraction of yeast. Yeast conditioners and ingredients with five syllables have no place in real bread.)" Yet in this day and age, bread is sweetened. It just is. Even the most basic-looking ones at Whole Foods. Because that's the issue, right? Bittman's audience isn't confused because it's thinking of food as nutrients - that's so 1990s. It's about what constitutes real food, and a Talmudic debate is needed to dig up the answer.

Anderson, though, starts from a place far less reasonable than Bittman does, and thus would have to do far more to soften her reputation. (Relatedly - why do I know this? - she's on a broader campaign to distance herself from a quasi-pro-ana image. It seems to involve juxtaposing insistence that women not focus on skinny jeans with advice on fitting into the same.) She insists on a minimum of "30 minutes, six days a week" for workouts. She finds it dangerous that parents feed their children excessive amounts of... fruit. And laments her own gluten allergy, which I suppose we're to generously assume isn't a convenient allergy to carbs. (I don't doubt all medical gluten concerns, just of those who've made a career of honing and critiquing Gwyneth Paltrow's "long butt.") How could Tracy Anderson not be allergic to gluten?

And then there's this: "If you’re hosting, make sure everything in your house is organic and nothing else." But of course.

Social networks

On Facebook:

So yes, these two ads appeared, and I surprised myself with the ability to capture this via screenshot. And I wanted to be like, how sexist! I wanted Lily Allen to make a (not-as-racist-this-time) music video in protest! 

But ultimately, my only grievance here is with cyber privacy or lack thereof. I do indeed want a new non-stick pan and pair of black pumps. I suspect that I'd looked at exactly that pan and exactly those shoes. (Went instead with these - sorry Aldo.) And I have my reasons. I'm not ashamed. But when those ads appear, it's like Mark Zuckerberg has looked into your soul. 

*****

On LinkedIn:

 I've been on it for a bit, but only just now started using it. So if I know you in a professional capacity, or if you're a friend with whom I have some kind of professional overlap, I may have added you. If this is you, but I haven't, by all means add me.

I know it's very much the thing to scoff or cringe at "networking," but if you live in the woods and are trying to make it in various arenas very much not based in the woods, that charming air of offline mystery isn't an option. Given the extent to which I'm already using Facebook and Twitter to keep track of contacts-loosely-defined, a site that's just dedicated to that purpose - without distractions like a (truly amazing) video where cats steal dogs' beds - seems useful. 

What had put me off LinkedIn wasn't "networking," but the fact that, like everyone else, I'd been getting invitations to be random people's contacts on the site for quite a few years, long before joining the site. I now see exactly how that happens, although it wasn't such a mystery: To find people you already know, you can do this thing where the site looks through all your email contacts. And what you're then supposed to do is only add people who in some way or another make sense. Which is to say, not to hundreds of former students. Not to people you may have either been shown an East Village hovel by (so many realtors!) or gone on a date with 100 years ago, so long ago that you don't remember which it was. But it seems a lot of people miss this (I for a moment feared I had - that I'd accidentally added everyone I meant specifically not to - but, no), or just, I don't know, cast a really wide net? 

I'd started to associate the site with spam, basically, is what had happened. But according to NYU's career-advice experts, it's not spam, but standard. So, we'll see!

Bugged

Is my apartment bugged? The most-recommended-for-me NYT Online article this morning was the one about how imported spices are 12% vermin. And sure enough, last night's dinner preparations were cut short when I was adding red pepper flakes to a pan that already contained oil and meticulously chopped (OK, chopped) garlic cloves, for an arrabiata. And out came a bit of, as the more-blasé-than-I-am like to call it, extra protein, in the form of a whole, if desiccated, fly. No arrabiata was had. We'd been using these pepper flakes for how long? Which, yes, suggests there was no great health risk, but still. The interesting thing is, I hadn't Googled this phenomenon or otherwise told the internet about what had happened. It just knew.

Meanwhile it's unclear what one is supposed to do with this information. Buy local red pepper flakes harvested in the red-pepper fields of New Jersey?

*****

In other internet-age news, the insensitivity-and-public-shaming cycle continues, with the clueless fish-in-a-barrel of this news micro-cycle the 22-year-old (former; she was subsequently fired over this, "this" being either the costume or the ensuing scandal) office worker who dressed as a Boston Marathon bombing victim for Halloween. That's such obviously poor taste that you do wonder why she chose it, let alone went to work in it, posed at work in it, and posted it online. And, the response was - predictably enough - wildly out of proportion to the original offense, with random strangers threatening this woman's life, and because, in further wisdom, she'd apparently posted a non-blurred photo of her driver's license online as well, the mob knew where she lived, or at least where her parents did. And as everyone who's already remarked on the story has noted, two wrongs and all that, plus if you're so very sensitive to senseless deaths that this costume gets your blood boiling, is the answer really to threaten another?

As online shame-fests go, this is a less straightforward example of the problem than the other variant, which involves someone acting in a mildly unpleasant way and being surreptitiously recorded, that recording then posted online. And I'd include, in this category, parents posting hilarious photos of their own kids to fully public sites with the intention of encouraging strangers to laugh at your child. There's something uniquely unsettling about the capacity of the internet to make private or just small-scale and offline bad-day moments part of someone's permanent record, or really the defining thing they're known for forever. Everyday questionable behavior, even things that fall well short of dressing like a terrorism victim or wearing blackface, are potential fodder for an online mob. The proverbial fuss-made-at-a-coffee-shop-over-skim-vs.-low-fat-milk sort of not-one's-best-moment. I suspect that everyone from time to time behaves in ways that, out of context, would make them seem like terrible people. Shouldn't we, I don't know, be aware of that before joining in those sort of righteousness pile-ons?

"Sometimes I really hate men."

This roundup of Facebook status-update crimes just popped up where else. It's pretty funny, and gets at some of the issues here, but in a far more clever way than the post I'd halfheartedly half-written in response. Basically the gist is, do not confuse Facebook for your mother. (Item 3, but really all of them.) If something goes well in your life, do you really think everyone you met briefly in a class six years ago is happy for you?

But there are other interesting observations, such as that past a certain threshold, complaints about getting hit on stop reading as feminist activism and start reading as bragging about one's own gorgeousness. The example provided:

On my walk home from work, I was whistled at twice, honked at twice, and one car almost caused an accident slowing down to stare at me. Sometimes I really hate men.

This item caused all kinds of controversy in the comments. Complaining about harassment isn't bragging!, some insist, adding that only a man would possibly think this. Catcalls aren't compliments!

So. I'm quite sure I'm not a man, but I immediately knew exactly what that item was referring to. True, victims of sexual violence are not necessarily any which way physically. No, being stalked isn't even remotely like being scouted by a (legitimate) modeling agency. And as I've said here so many times before, street harassment is typically less about looks than perceived vulnerability, thus explaining why you might have been much better-looking at 23 than 13, but getting far more street attention from men at the younger age.

But are we really going to claim that women who are admired every time they leave the house, asked out every time they go to a coffee shop, proposed marriage to every time they take the bus, that such women are not being praised for their looks? That being certifiably stunning isn't at all a form of advantage? That women never, ever brag about this sort of non-threatening attention, but knowing that it's socially unacceptable to announce that one is hot, include a quasi-feminist disclaimer?

And are status updates a useful vehicle for protesting honest-to-goodness male sketchiness? If we take into account that status updates (by men and women alike) are about constructing an image, the terms change. The instances women experience of feeling genuinely threatened don't make for catchy, upbeat witticisms suitable for a general audience. So we may hear about oh-so-creepy dudes on the subway who want to know what you're reading, but not about the ex who follows you around town. The men whose idea of street attention is 'Hey good-looking,' and not the ones who try to physically trip women as they pass, or who expose themselves, etc. The very nature of the genre lends itself to exactly the kinds of attention that are more on the 'flattering' end of the spectrum.

It gets complicated, though, because the sort of attention that is a compliment - and we know this, in part, because women past a certain age so often complain about no longer receiving it - can also be perceived of as menacing. Even something as seemingly non-aggressive as being told you're beautiful can, depending the context, be wildly inappropriate. So it might seem the safest bet to say, fine, yes, we suspect on some level that some 'complaints' are bragging, but we'll never really know which count as such, so we should give the complainers themselves the benefit of the doubt.

Which would be fine - and which is, practically speaking, the only way to go - if it were not for the following: These conversations can define the essential female experience - or young-and-female experience - as being hit on all the time, thereby excluding whichever women are not from female solidarity. The feminist sphere can at times end up mimicking exactly that which it's trying to combat, acting as if the only women who matter are the ones who are young, pretty, and appealing in a general sense to men.

Followers

Every so often, people I knew long ago will add or remove me on Facebook. The emotions this arises are close to nil - these are, like I say, people I haven't seen in years, and if it's "remove," whatever vanity there might be in the "friend" number (and not much for me, as I've removed people for reasons such as not remembering meeting them), it tends to even out, what with the equally mysterious adding.

My point here is thus not about Facebook neurosis - which pertains only to people you at least once gave significant thought to - but rather something technical about Facebook: you're still automatically "following" the people who've unfriended you. I discovered this when a high school classmate had unfriended me, which I discovered when I saw them listed as a mutual friend's friend, i.e. not mine. I thought that was what had happened, clicked on their profile, and saw that I was "following" this person.

What's "following"?

I had vaguely known the site had this function, but had thought it was something like Twitter - separate altogether from "friends," with no pretense of mutual interest. Like, you might follow a celebrity, or follow someone in addition to being friends with them, if they're an artist of some kind, and you want to show your support. But I hadn't enabled it myself - why would people I don't know follow me on Facebook rather than Twitter? Whom would I follow rather than friend? If I hadn't enabled this, how was I now "following" someone?

And yes, OK, there is an associated neurosis: what if all your friends have unfriended you, but you're still following them by default? There's no list of people you're following if you're following them for this reason, it seems. It appears that your number of friends only drops by one once you manually "unfollow" the person who's already unfriended you, so you'd never know.

But there's also the question of, what if you're the one who's done the unfriending? Don't you want a clean Facebook-break from whichever person? Why would you want to keep including them on your list? And isn't it just an odd system? I'd imagine that most unfriending happens when there's a lack of mutual affinity (such that the removed friend may have already long hidden the remover's updates), and it's simply that one of the two people was more invested in list-curation or whatever and thus made the final (but not so final!) cut.

But let's say you unfriend someone because you find their posts offensive, or because you have a limit of how many Lord-praising (or atheism-promoting) status updates a day you can handle from any one person, or because you never liked them to begin with and now that you're no longer working together,* you're free to remove them. Why do you want them reading your posts? I mean, you probably don't. It's really hard to picture a situation where the removed friend would be something other than indifferent or offended, and would therefore want to keep following the former friend's updates. So why is it set up like this?

*I understand this temptation, but this always seems short-sighted. If you're in a profession, you never know who you're going to need a good word from. With all the hide-updates possibilities that even I have managed to figure out, it's really not necessary to burn bridges.

Bisou endorses this post

The latest study about how loneliness will kill you has conveniently made headlines just as I'm on some serious deadlines, and my husband's spending a couple weeks away at conferences, and I'm living in the woods, the kind of hyper-busy demanded of those my age in the year 2013, but without a heck of a lot of face-to-face human interaction. Am I lonely? I don't think so - I have friends and family I'm close with, even if they're not any of them in the woods with me at the moment, unless you count a poodle, which, why not? And I'm enough of an introvert that the woods-jogs and gosh-darn-getting-work-done marathons this permits are fine by me. But if I were going out tonight, rather than staying in with the no-sleep-till-Introduction-is-polished goal, I think I'd be OK with that. Of course, if Hulu had Season 4 of "The Bob Newhart Show" (no television, but out of cheapness, not principles) and I could knock back a couple of those rather than finishing this task, I'd be OK with that as well.

Still, it's like, uh oh, what if I'm actually basically neglecting my health by not getting out more? What if I find myself talking to said poodle, things other than dog-commands and cooing? (What if I asked my dog to read my dissertation and make edits? If only.)

But left with all this thinking-time (one cannot, after all, dissertate while poodle-walking), I got to thinking: maybe part of what we're calling "loneliness" comes from a very modern sense that everyone else is socializing more than we are? Not just among woods-dissertators - we have our own particular concerns, which we are sharing with our poodles as necessary - but also among urban office-workers with happy-hours and the like? (Yes, office-workers, we the dissertators believe that the grass is greener.)

First there were the 1990s sitcoms, which gave the impression that adulthood means forming a tight-knit group of friends, who are like family, without anyone ever drifting in or out of the group. If you were someone who - because of temperament or geographical constraints - has close friends who are not all also close friends with one another, or if you're someone closer with your similar-age family (siblings, spouse, cousins, etc.) than your friends you see at the coffee shop (although there were siblings on "Friends," I recall), you may have felt that your life didn't match up.

Then, of course, came Facebook. The thing not only reminds you of all the people hanging out without you, people you would not even remember existed if it weren't for the site. It also presents this distorted overview of how people spend their time. Evenings out are documented. Evenings in are not. Introverted adults who are frankly relieved that they're no longer expected to be at bars or parties several nights a week all of a sudden find themselves wondering if perhaps this is expected. The age-old question the young ask themselves - 'Am I a loser for staying in on a Saturday night?' - is now something those who are 45 and married with kids may find themselves wondering.

And I'm leaving out the obvious: adults are now expected to have hundreds if not thousands of "friends." Even though I think we all understand that no one has five hundred confidants, the list-of-friends phenomenon invites us to quantify our social lives as never before. It poses a question. Well, different questions, depending one's circumstances, depending one's neuroses. The question might be something like, 'why is it if I have over a thousand friends, only fifteen of them wrote on my wall for my birthday?' Or: 'why, if I have two hundred friends, do I not have plans for this weekend?' Or: 'why does X have twice as many friends as I do?'

Point being, you're left with a sense of what a typical social life is like that probably doesn't bear much relation to what others are actually up to, and with an impression that social life can be quantified, that you can numerically fall short. Again, it could be just something I'm imagining, from the vantage point of an especially woods-hermit-ish week. But I wonder if "loneliness," which is apparently distinct from solitude or not having a large group of friends, can actually increase in proportion to our perceptions of how numerous and fulfilling the social lives of others must be.

Middle school and the neurosis of narcissism

As I sit waiting for commenter Caryatis's mystery "suggestion about" my "writing style" (about which I'm of course extra-self-conscious as the dissertation deadline looms), I will risk inflicting it, in all its passive-voiced, parenthetical-filled, insufficiently-concise-unless-I've-read-it-over-and-if-it's-on-WWPD-chances-are-I-have-not glory (along with whichever mystery quality everyone but me is aware of but that all until Caryatis, including professional editors, have been too polite to point out, gah!!!) on you, my constructively-critical readers. If you wish to put this post into a word doc and return it to me with track changes, by all means. (Consider me 15% serious.)

Self-consciousness is really the right state of mind to be in for this post, which is about middle school.

So. The book of the moment is Emily Bazelon's much-publicized one on bullying. (Will I read it? Will I get around to seeing if anyone wants me to review it? Or - realistically - will I be too focused on wrapping up The Thing, by which I mean a certain bloated research project which, if I de-bloat it, could theoretically culminate in an advanced degree.*)

Bullying, of course, has been topic du jour since Dan Savage launched the It Gets Better Project. What began as a sudden awareness that the rate at which LGBT kids are bullied (at school and online, but also at home and at church) surely relates to the rate of suicide and self-destructive behavior in that population has, it seemed, morphed into a more general sense that the cruelty of childhood is not something we should just accept.

And it used to be more than just accepted. Some of what we now view as bullying would, in the past, have been seen as character-building. We might have pitied home-schooled kids precisely for not having gotten made fun of by their peers, an experience that thickens the skin and prepares one for adulthood. But today, that view seems out of date. We must not only remember that there's nothing wrong with being gender-non-conforming, but also that the annoying kid perhaps has a disorder of some kind. The idea that one's quirks should be lessened via socialization... persists, but has become controversial.

I'm 29, and so the last of the pre-enlightened generation. Though born smack in the middle of the milieu that now does this, I was not helicopter-parented. I took the public bus alone starting at 10, the subway at 14. I hung around with friends after school in the pre-smartphone era, thank goodness. My cohort's first unsupervised parties, first romantic entanglements, remain - by contemporary standards - virtually undocumented. And - and this I'm not so nostalgic about - we were horrible to one another. Not in high school - either we were already too old, or I went to a weird high school - but middle school was the worst. The worst!

In conjunction with Bazelon's book, Slate, where she's an editor, is posting first-hand accounts of having been a bully. Thus far, all three have been accounts of middle-school cruelty. Middle school, especially for girls (?), is awful. Awful everywhere, not just in Manhattan, where it might be its own unique brand of awful. But is it awful because of bullying? Bazelon asks in her NYT op-ed that we not call all nasty behavior among kids bullying. And... thinking back to my own experience at that age, I remember immense nastiness, but not bullying. I remember what was effectively a class-wide low-grade eating disorder (and there's a "Seinfeld" reference about how this is the result of bullying among girls, as vs. wedgies for boys), but then again, this was the Upper East Side - those who didn't make it out are probably still removing the doughy part of their bagels and filling the shell with low-carb salad. I think that was just an initiation into a certain kind of adulthood. This was, after all, the same school Gwyneth no-carbs Paltrow went to.

In the spirit of delving into the dark ages, I tried my best to remember those years, and failed to recall any bullying - of or by me, of or by anyone else. I spent those years in or dramatically excluded from then re-included in a clique of the sort that, if I passed such girls on the street today, I'd feel vaguely intimidated. (Think that commercial - possibly for car insurance? - where a pudgy middle-aged dude is followed around by "the popular girls from the local middle school," who shame him into eating less.) I was middle-schoolishly narcissistic and felt it was all about whether everyone liked me, not realizing that everyone else was wondering the same thing.

These years weren't entirely awful. I made closer - well, perhaps not closer, but more intense - female friendships than I've had since. There were no boys at the school, and we were at any rate too young to be dating, so nearly all drama (yes, some girls like girls) centered on female friendships. And it was fun to kind of discover the world with peers, in a way you really can't once you're older and not as easily surprised. It was fun to finally emerge from the confines of my family and whichever parents'-friends'-kids were my 'friends' and actually make friends of my own, ones whose values might not be exactly the ones I was being raised with. But it was, for the most part, a miserable few years, with cruelty the norm. If it had been bullying, perhaps it might have been addressed. But it was just some combination of that age and a peculiar subculture. The school might have taught self-acceptance, for all I know (my memory of this time being thankfully largely repressed) they tried.

Did the nastiness build character? I'm not sure. I suppose I learned, in those years, about caring whether I was cool, and what I looked like... only to care exponentially less from high school on. My sense is that those who don't go through this at 12 or so end up facing it later in life, sometimes well into adulthood. I know it's supposed to be better to be a dork as a kid, and cool as an adult, but I think there's something to be said for not caring if you're hip, not worrying about being spectacularly good-looking, when you're 25, 45...

And much of the cruelty of middle school is simply a first glimpse at life's unfairnesses. Once you reach the age of making your own friends and not just playing with whomever, you're confronted with evidence that some people are better-looking and more likable than others, that some people you like won't reciprocate. But it's not just rejection. It's at this age that you first learn that people you don't especially like or give much thought to probably don't much like or think about you, either. This, when you first learn it, can be jarring.

Even if it isn't expressed particularly cruelly, dislike or apathy, when it's a new experience, stings in a way it never will moving forward. Not getting invited to a sleepover can, in the moment, feel like a tragedy. This makes middle-school students seem like horrible, neurotic people with no sense of proportion,** but if you look at as a developmental stage, you don't condemn the individual. And people do, as a rule, grow out of this. With age, certainly with Facebook, you realize that people are hanging out without you, that this doesn't mean these people hate you but rather that they give as little thought to you as you do to them unless prompted. You realize that the world does not end if you're not the most beautiful and most popular - that no one's attractive to everyone and liked by all. You will still have dates, friends. Maybe it's helpful to experience blunt rejection as a kid in order to be more easygoing later in life?

I am, you will notice, leaving this post with the essential unresolved: can/should middle school be non-horrible? I tend to think efforts in this area should be made, but am not sure a) that it's possible, and b) that a certain amount of pain - but not past whichever threshold - does indeed build character.

*Note that this post has two levels - the reliving of middle-school neurosis, and the current almost-done-isn't-done dissertation panic. I may not care (enough, alas) what I look like, but I sure do care what Chapter Seven does.

**This is one very important reason why I'm against parental overshare. Kids, till a certain age, lack perspective, and that's normal, but it's difficult to see that when reading an essay, and readers will come to associate that particular individual with vapid, selfish, massively neurotic behavior.

"'Another gem'" UPDATED

Do your teach (at any level)? Do your friends teach? If so, half of your Facebook feed probably consists of anecdotes from class, cute snippets of kids' assignments, and examples of the more entitled emails sent by college students. The students in question are rarely (never, in my experience) named or readily identifiable, but it always struck me as iffy to share this type of info at all. On the one hand, the stories can be comforting to fellow teachers, the threads useful forums for advice, and yes, all of it can be immensely entertaining. On the other, students will find it. If you're in the class, certainly if you're the kid in question, you'll know.

So my inclination had always been to keep this sort of thing (and anything even quasi-confidential - I don't understand or trust the privacy settings, making me something of a paranoid curmudgeon, but anyway) offline. And then official policy in my department became that one could not share such stuff on Facebook, which struck me as reasonable. Everyone's qualms are different (and mine, given my feelings on parental overshare, are probably higher than most), so it's best if institutions have a policy.

On that note: An admissions officer at Penn just lost her job, seemingly over having made fun of parts of applicants' essays on Facebook. It's unclear what Penn's policy/her division's policy was on this, but it seems like the employee may not have seen these excerpts as breaching confidentiality, if the kids' names were not provided, and if the kids were not really identifiable. As much as I see this as problematic, it's not obvious everyone would (again, given the ample Facebook-newsfeed evidence), so yes, there need to be policies, clear ones, because common sense doesn't cover it.

UPDATE

And now, the second Facebook professional overshare of the day, this one also, strangely, related to circumcision. Lest you think discussion of male genitalia and its surgical modification is some facet of our modern TMI society, let me just say that a lot of the 19th C material I've had to go through for my dissertation involves matter-of-fact references to men getting circumcised, or references to them being or not being thus. To be circumcised (in this context) meant to be Jewish; when a non-Jewish man became Jewish, what would have to happen was not necessarily just alluded to.