Assorted thoughts because it's pouring outside

-When men wait in line once a week to see which new clothes a store has in stock, it's not about stuff. It's an experience. (Is Ruth La Ferla tongue-in-cheek here? Her sources, at any rate, don't seem to be.)

-Working from home may be associated with coffee shops but the afternoon coffee is almost inevitably leftover coffee from the morning carafe, over ice.

-Another budget tip (forgive me but I was, until three days ago, paying rent in two cities): Lululemon Run Club. What it is is, you go to one of the stores at a designated time and have... well, what you have is track team practice, minus the track meets. The fee is the same as for high school track practice (assuming a public school): free. No, you do not need to wear Lululemon to participate, although I have done so, both because that's the make of my non-disintegrated shorts and because it somehow feels like a nice gesture. If you need a kick to go running - which, in Toronto at least, with its absence of obvious running paths, I do - it's just the thing.

-There is a Lena Dunham controversy. Probably another since I started typing this.

-There is also curvy wife guy. Basically a man who's some sort of Inspirational Influencer Ted-talk-giving beacon of Positivity posted to Instagram that he's always liked shorter, curvier women than are on the covers of magazines (i.e. the vaaaaaast majority of women; dude has always liked women) and is Not Ashamed to admit that he loves his short, curvy, cellulite-having wife. (He mentions her butt cellulite in the post.) It went viral - if I'm getting the timing right - first with encouraging responses (his wife is among the post's vocal supporters), then with variations on WTF.

I'm embarrassed to admit I find this story incredibly compelling. Why? Is it because at a formative age, the "neg" was a big topic? Because of how similar dude's line is to the thing where men (Jewish or not) admit to actually liking Jewish women? Because it's yet another fine example of body positivity being a conventionally attractive young woman in tight clothes? Because it's a window into a whole non-poodle use of Instagram I find hard to comprehend at the best of times? Because it's hilarious to think of equivalently not-actually-flattering things a woman could say about a male partner's physique? Because dude seems to have confused body positivity (which is about how people, girls and women especially, see themselves) with his own coming to terms with liking a body type that is... what women tend to look like, give or take? Is it - as Sarah Ditum suggests - the "low expectations" angle, that is, how he wants to be congratulated for... loving his wife?

What I keep coming back to is, it's that he presents himself as someone who could have married a supermodel, but only after reckoning with his unusual preferences and becoming A Feminist was he willing to pursue his dream of partnering with a merely attractive woman. That's the premise of the post - that not-a-supermodel was a choice he made, as versus the reality for nearly all humans. That, or his premise is that all men could be partnered with supermodels (something an unfortunate number of men perhaps do believe). Either way, it's a heck of a starting point.

On discovering that WWPD the novel has already been written

The feminist dilemma of our age - at least according to certain articles I came across through my work over the past month or so - is that high-achieving women marry even-higher-achieving men. Something about a study, Harvard Business School... It's not quite the Second After Sartre problem (that is, being a female genius overshadowed, for gender reasons, by a lesser-but-male genius), but it can be. Why, one might wonder, don't elite women pair off with less-accomplished men?

The articles about Harvard Business School graduates (and now, Stanford graduates) do somewhat make my eyes glaze over. But this question is more entertainingly addressed in The Mind-Body Problem, Rebecca Goldstein's 1983 novel, which I just read, maybe reread, although I could be conflating it with Fear of Flying. Both involve questions of female identity as relational, and discuss Jewish female beauty as resulting from racial intermixing via pogroms. Both also have a few more oddly specific overlaps with my life (general biographical details, not from the racy bits!) than I'd have thought possible in fiction. Except for the bit about looking somewhat Slavic - these blondness-providing pogroms evidently spared my ancestors, unless that's where the pallor comes from.

Spoilers below; click on the post title for the rest...

Naked Rufus UPDATED

As I sat contemplating the Mark Zuckerberg shirt story from every which angle, another whole shirts-and-sexism scandal was underway. So much so that "shirtgate" refers to something else!

In all (humorless) seriousness, I'm probably too late to the #gate on this one. The man has already apologized. The woman who called out his wardrobe choice is already getting threats. I'd known about the comet landing for a while before hearing anything about the outfit.

That said, there's a TBTB angle here, for sure. Not a literal hygiene issue, but... that sense in which a man gets to be a mad genius, too brilliant to follow even the broadest outlines of social convention when it comes to dress. But TBTB doesn't quite cover it. It falls more into a different framework: the notion that women are killjoys. Now, some individual women (and - you guessed it - some men) are killjoys, but that's not the issue. What I'm describing is something more like... Men will say that women are uptight, when the freedom men are asking for is one that women don't enjoy. Depending which men, the next step might involve men saying that it's just not in women's nature to want whatever it is.

I realize I'm being vague, but the "issue" could be anything on the spectrum from ogling to - to keep with the Dan Savage motif - "monogamish." Men will call women prudes, when what these women are actually protesting (albeit discreetly) is that whichever freedom is only being demanded for men. And men won't see this, either because it will be inconceivable to them that women would want equivalent freedoms, or because - and ding, ding, ding, this explains the level of anger among some Twitter-types - it's far too threatening to imagine that women might want the same things as men. Men would rather the issue be that women are humorless scolds than for the alternative interpretation to be true.

As for women's nature, we know that no woman would even think to own a scantily-clad-men shirt. Except, wait a moment. I'm a woman, and guess what? I own such a shirt! (Google "Rufus Wainwright" and "Marc Jacobs.") I'd forgotten about this shirt precisely because it's not a thing that one can wear. Certainly not to, like, work (well, maybe to some work...). I bought it many years ago, as a collector's item or home decor, not as clothing.

So! Maybe I do have a new angle on #shirtgate, after all. I say yes to the inappropriate shirts, but make the privilege gender-neutral, and not limited to rocket scientists. The cost-per-wear on Naked Rufus is abysmal, and it's time for that shirt to... come out of the closet seems the thing to type, but I believe that, technically speaking, that shirt is in a drawer.

UPDATE

The #gate continues, and I'm starting to think there's a YPIS angle as well. While it's absolutely reasonable that the idiotic shirt should be called out, the problem is what happens when the entire world seems to be calling something relatively trivial out in unison.

The question remains, however, what options exist that don't amount to a pile-on. Everyone's commenting simultaneously, and each of the individual comments are measured... but then what happens is, minor annoyance times however many thousand ends up sounding like OUTRAGE. While it could well be the case that obliviously wearing a sexy-women shirt at an important press conference is the very definition of unchecked privilege, the eternal YPIS problem is that privilege-checking has a way of quickly becoming bullying.

That said... I think there's a big difference between pile-ons whose inspiration is an ordinary citizen observed mid-misstep, and a public figure of some kind. This scientist is maybe borderline-public-figure, but let me put it like this: If he had, say, worn the shirt to some departmental meeting, and a photo of him wearing it had leaked, and that had been the inspiration for all manner of tweets and think-pieces, then yes, that would have been a problem. The shirt would have still been a mistake, but a social-media calling-out would have been a far greater one. That would have been bullying. But it's not as if this shirt-wearing were surreptitiously brought into the public record. 

Also: Hadley Freeman sums everything up nicely, as usual. And I will of course be tracking down this book about public shaming that she speaks of...

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.

When sloppiness signals seriousness

A week or so ago, I ended up in a fairly intense (offline) discussion of too-brilliant-to-bathe, a term I coined, but a concept that others in-and-married-to-academia are also familiar with. For the uninitiated: TBTB is the phenomenon by which a man is able to demonstrate his intellectual superiority through his lack of effort in the grooming realm. A man who's been so busy thinking Great Thoughts that he simply hasn't had time to get a haircut in the last two years, or a new shirt in the last decade. Central to the theory of TBTB is that this laxity is an intentional part of self-presentation. As in, it's partly that men have an easier time getting away with looking sloppy, but it's also that sloppiness signals seriousness. For men. White men, mostly, but not exclusively. The sloppiness will help a man's reputation, help spread the word that he's so very lost in thought that he - unlike his colleagues in crisp new Patagonia or whatever academics who do spend time and money on their clothing might wear - can't spare the moment it would take to not dress in tweedy rags.

A variant of TBTB, however, is the man who's too brilliant to own more than one outfit. These men - whom we're now hearing about because Mark Zuckerberg apparently owns a lot of gray t-shirts - by all accounts make time to bathe, but their sartorial limitations hold the key to their great works. Allison P. Davis quotes Zuckerberg:

"I’m in this really lucky position where I get to wake up every day and help serve more than a billion people. And I’d feel I’m not doing my job if I spent any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life."

Davis cries sexism, and rightly so. Jess Cartner-Morley also gets it:

Grey marl is a sartorial humblebrag. It’s everyman and yet classy at the same time. (For instance, if you are in a posh hotel gym, the proportion of grey marl T-shirts will be much higher than in a municipal leisure centre. Fact.) Note that when Zuckerberg talks about other men who wear the same clothes every day, the comparisons he draws are Steve Jobs and President Obama. An ego like that has no need of bling.

Indeed.

What's funny to me about all of this is that ... I also wear a gray t-shirt nearly every day. I may shake it up with a white or black t-shirt, but that's about it. Not because there are billions of people requiring my guidance, but because I gravitate to these shirts, and thus seem to have acquired enough of them to last a laundry cycle.

More generally, though, uniform-dressing is plenty common among women as well, at least among women who aren't required to look a particular way for their jobs. (Blogging and dissertating, both very gray-t-shirt-compatible.) Actually, forget that caveat - a moment of internet-research tells me that Joan Rivers was a uniform-dresser. Brad Pitt's ex and current, both also uniform-wearers. Lots of people do this, including men and women, fashion-conscious and not, brilliant and otherwise. It's only held up a mark of genius when a Great Man does it. When a woman does, it's... that she's thrifty, or that she knows what works with her body/her coloring. So it's not quite like TBTB, in that men and women both uniform-dress. The difference is more in the reception.

Susan Sontag's "Top Shelf"

Sometimes a preexisting tag demands a blog post. Sometimes that's hardly the half of it.

Susan Sontag shopped at Sephora. She was on their mailing list.

The verdict in at least two articles noting this fact is that Sontag was "just like us." As a haver-of-loyalty-points myself, I can't disagree.

I suppose one way to look at this is that it's a let-down, that the Beauty Myth impacts even lady-geniuses, holding them back from the great heights only available to too-brilliant-to-bathe men (via). (Now adding the other necessary tags for this post). That's not how I look at it. I see it as definitive confirmation that conventional femininity in no way precludes being an intellectual heavyweight.

And yes, as it happens, the holographic nail polish I ordered just arrived, and looks excellent.

Too brilliant to bathe, home edition

Emily Shire, weighing in on the gender-and-messiness debate:

And just think about how messy men are portrayed in popular culture. An unkempt space is a sign of a man’s strong work ethic, as he’s too busy dealing with “real” problems to bother tidying up. It’s endearing when President Obama mentions how his Washington, D.C., apartment as a junior senator was piled with pizza boxes. At worst, messy men have a lovable, “absent-minded professor” quality.

On the other hand, messiness in women usually denotes a life in disarray. In the movie Bridget Jones’s Diary, an opening scene of pajama-ed Renée Zellweger going through a fridge that is mostly empty—save for a few expired items—establishes how pathetic her professional and personal life are. Think of the countless romantic comedies that cut to a shot of a woman’s bedroom strewn with clothes and a half-eaten pint of ice cream to connote depression after a breakup.

I've already infuriated the internet with my thoughts on gender disparities as they relate to personal appearance. But I hadn't thought about how this relates to household maintenance. Probably because I'm one of those people who cares about cleanliness but not neatness. But as Shire explains it, it's effectively the same - men can be too brilliant to clean, but women cannot.

As with too brilliant to bathe, this probably does mean that men who don't clean because they're depressed are more easily overlooked, so this isn't all a great boon for men, either. But on the whole, this is clearly better for men than women. I'd be more inclined to say here than re: looks that the answer is less caring-about-it all around, but I suppose it depends how much squalor we're talking about.

The case against "too-brilliant-to-bathe"

My guest-post at The Beheld on "too brilliant to bathe" was far more controversial than I'd imagined it would be, which is to say I did not imagine it would be controversial in the least. The following issues have appeared in the comments. I've responded there as well, but because TBTB is one of the persistent motifs here at WWPD, I figured a roundup might be of interest.

 -What about race? Is TBTB just for white men? (One commenter asks, another, at the post's other location, assumes I assume this.) If I'd ignored race, it was because when one bases one's observations on anecdotal evidence, one tends to focus on what has occurred in one's own experience, and in my experience, TBTB is definitively male but not definitively white. The examples I have in mind when I think of TBTB are not exclusively white. But there's a childhood version of this where a kid who's a mess at school is taken for a genius, and lo and behold the kid in question is, I suspect, probably most often a white boy. So, sure, race enters into it.

 -TBTB doesn't actually exist, because in the fields where genius clusters (French Studies is sadly not named), all that matters is your ideas. Here, I'd respond (and did respond) by saying that there's on the one hand a situation (a utopia?) in which appearance really doesn't matter, and on the other a reality of certain fields celebrating the shabby. While this doesn't necessarily exclude shabby-looking women (although there is pressure on them as women, if not as scientists/mathematicians/philosophers not to look shabby, so there's a problem stemming from this), it does exclude women on the whole, or girls, really, who will perceive 'field X encourages the wearing of rags' to mean 'field X discourages women.' It's one thing if being a successful genius female mathematician doesn't require tasteful pink nail polish, which is lovely and liberating for women who'd rather not be bothered, but another entirely if women who feel most comfortable wearing the stuff are not taken seriously if they do.

 -What about the unfairness of having to bathe for both sexes? My feeling is, if I may summarize, that we-as-a-society are too focused on the prettiness of women, but insufficiently focused on the prettiness of men. While beauty is subjective, hygiene and presentability are far less so. A bit of effort is a nice gesture. A requirement of 24/7 effort, oppressive.

Overall, though, the weakness of my TBTB hypothesis (allow me to argue against myself) does indeed come from the fact that beauty is subjective. If we see a bunch of self-styled shabby-genius men, not all of whom are wealthy, with women who just happen to be conventionally attractive and reasonably intelligent, who's to say these women aren't with these men for their looks? Just because I wouldn't be drawn to the ogre look doesn't mean some young woman who's a dead-ringer for a young Brooke Shields is not. Maybe the problem is that men care about what others think re: their partners' looks, and would actually be attracted to TBTB women if only this were socially acceptable. Maybe this isn't at all about male entitlement, but is actually oppression of men. Who on earth knows. This is why, as long as TBTB rests on casual observation, it will never be an entirely convincing case.

The parenting-a-sociopath question

So everyone has decided to share an essay by a mother about her 13-year-old son and her fears that the boy will* commit one of these notorious shootings. Whereas normally, such a shooting must actually happen (and, often, the killer must have already offed himself) for there to be an accompanying photo, this mother takes pains to change the first name of her son (but not her own name), yet provides a sweet photo of the boy, a photo that's now made its way around the entire Internet. (The Gawker version does not include this photo, so that's the one I'm linking to.) [Fixed!] All this boy has done is shown himself to be a very troubled kid.

Will Baude sees this story as fitting in with my running theme of "dirty laundry" - parents writing tell-alls about their still-minor children. The parent (almost always the mother, although there's every so often a father really miffed that his son can't get into Harvard) will be congratulated for her bravery, and everyone will forget that the person whose story is being told by definition had no say in the matter.

Anyway, I've said before and I'll say again that I don't think parents have the (moral, legal of course they do) right to hold forth about their real-life children for a mass audience. I make the following exceptions:

-The child is very young and seriously ill, or severely mentally disabled, and will never read the thing in question. Plus, the parent is doing a particular service to others in the same situation, who must feel quite alone. The same cannot be said for mothers who write about how their daughters struggle with a stubborn extra ten pounds.

-Names and details were changed, other children discussed as well, such that the parent isn't writing about her own child directly, even if one might infer this entered into the research.

-Fiction.

-Small-scale online sharing (emails, parenting forums, Facebook, etc.), where a parent imagines a tiny audience, but there's always the remote possibility that something gets reposted somewhere big.

This latest is, I suppose, an ambiguous case. We don't get the kid's real name, which, along with the great possibility he doesn't have the same last name as his mother, makes it at least a bit of a research project to figure out who he is. (I haven't, at any rate, tried.) The photo, though, might be worse, faces being that much more unique than names. And I know nothing of "The Blue Review," whether this is a mass-audience sort of site or not, nor whether the author herself wanted the story to get as huge as it has. And finally, being the mother* of an apparent sociopath would seem to be an unusual-enough situation that other parents in that boat would need support. One can't help but feel for the author. On the inevitable spectrum of self-promotion to cry-for-help, this is a piece of parenting-writing that falls closer to the latter.

Ultimately my take on the article has less to do with the dirty-laundry angle - present and problematic as it is - and more with the conclusions the author comes to in it. First, there's her assumption that mass murder should be regarded as a "highly visible sign of mental illness." As if no killer is ever just, you know, bad news. Then, of course, there's the stigmatization (in a piece ostensibly against stigmatization!) of the mentally ill, exceedingly few of whom are going to do anything like this. Oh, and there's this: "In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it's easy to talk about guns. But it's time to talk about mental illness." I understand why this mother is thinking about mental illness, but in what way shape or form is it easy to talk about guns, in the let's-have-a-national-conversation sense?

As for the "meaningful, nation-wide conversation about mental health" the author would like... again, let's remember that she is launching this conversation by telling us that her son seems like he'll go and kill a bunch of people any minute now. And this is supposed to convince us not to want him in jail, assuming he committed a violent crime that got him there? But the author's argument, buried under the let's-have-a-conversation gloss, is that people like her son should be institutionalized, and that the state should pay for it. Is that what 'have a conversation about mental illness' is a euphemism for? Isn't forced institutionalization problematic as well? Or do we think if society were just more aware, these extremely troubled kids would magically find the answer to their psychiatric woes, and a problem that has plagued humanity since the get-go - really messed-up individuals bent on destruction - would vanish? Isn't it far more likely that if we decide that this is about mental illness, not guns, communities are going to engage in more of a witch-hunt than they already do for strange but innocuous behavior? Sure, an expert might be able to tell the difference, but it takes a village to locate subjective and imprecise Warning Signs.

The Gawker commenters who make this a race-and-gender issue have a point - why do we-who-are-not-this-particular-boy's-mother care if he ends up in prison? Is it because he is, as the photo reveals, approximately the whitest person imaginable? Is it because he's a genius, a category that, in discussions of children, tends to have less to do with ingenious accomplishments and more to do with our apparent collective desire to label those lacking in social skills (esp. if male) as paradoxically superior to those of us quite capable of making small talk? Ugh, too much to think about, could go on, must do practical non-blog things instead. The comments, though, are open as always.

*Typos fixed.

Report from the woods

Mooching, legitimately, off some Ivy wireless. Still none of that at home, although it turns out I miss hot water much more. For the obvious ugh-cold-showers reason, but for the obvious-in-retrospect one that the kettle-and-torch method of doing dishes isn't so effective. 

Not that there's all that much cooking going on. No electricity meant no sentimentality about near-full containers of jam, not-yet-finished ricotta, if-the-milk-is-still-cool-and-doesn't-yet-smell-is-it-OK-to-drink-the-answer-is-no. Pasta arrabbiata. Oatmeal. Rinse (in cold water, in cold apartment), repeat. There will be chickpeas, quinoa. There have been almonds, raisins. It's all so very vegan. I even had this brilliant plan to have individual-size boxes of soy milk, which would be cool enough in our kitchen and inoffensive enough to moisten cereal, but the rest of Central NJ thought of this first, so never mind.

One of the main streets outta here, yesterday morning.

It could, of course, be much worse. Thankfully no personal tragedies, and as far as I know none of the many giant fallen trees I've seen had hit anyone, or even anyone's home/car. Scary, but so far so good. Chris "don't be stupid" Christie is apparently staying down the street, watching over us in his informatively-embroidered fleece.

The snow-dayisshness has kind of worn off, though. Woohoo, no NJ Transit commute has quickly morphed into, how on earth will my students ever learn the imparfait... before their test, now I'm thinking, before they move on to Intermediate... knowing full well this will be the least of the university's problems. 

"'It's going to feel like up north now.'"

These are words I never thought I'd read: "University of Chicago bought the former Borders bookstore at 1539 E. 53rd St. in Hyde Park. Trendy clothing chain Akira will set up shop in the space this fall." Consider my mind blown: I think it means that these shoes will soon be available for purchase in Hyde Park, Chicago. Yes, the neighborhood around the University of Chicago. I have just learned (via) that Hyde Park - yes, that Hyde Park - is undergoing some kind of transformation, and is on the verge of becoming... pleasant. Yes, gentrification, yes, how tragic for the U of C brand, that the neighborhood will now god forbid include options beyond bookstores and Walgreens. (I now live somewhere where the only store worth going to is a bookstore, but for quite the opposite reason. There is a Kate Spade, a Lilly Pulitzer, a lacrosse-gear shop...) I mean, OMG shoes! Shiny, space-age shoes! You could go admire them on a study break (even if it's too cold and icy to wear them)! And with this, expect applications for Paris study abroad to drop exponentially.

Valentine's Day assortment

-Seems about right. Perfect poodle-face.

-Did you see "Midnight in Paris," mostly fall for its charm, but feel like maybe something wasn't sitting right? See Richard Rushfeld on "the muse/harpy polarity."

-Yes. No.

-A very good reason to get a car already. (Flan!)

-Always with the kale.

Where Nice Guys meet That Guys meet PUAs

Found this gem via Facebook: "A Girl You Should Date," advice, presumably, to the young man who fancies himself an intellectual. To a sort of Nice Guy crossed with That Guy. And the author's a woman (or so the name Rosemarie Urquico implies)! And it's possibly a response to a mildly misogynistic essay! It's intended as kind of... feminist, and has been interpreted that way by various Facebook friends-and-acquaintances, but "girl" is used where "woman" might have sufficed! Where have we seen this before?

"A Girl You Should Date" contains so much wrong that I'm not sure where to begin, so I'll begin with the beginning:

"Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books."

It is of course mutually exclusive to care about clothes and to read books. That's why students in literature PhD programs, male and female alike, tend to be so badly/carelessly dressed. Except, wait a moment... This is, as WWPD readers know, a case of too-brilliant-to-bathe, but with a slight twist. It's about penalizing women for having stereotypically feminine interests. Meanwhile, is dude going to notice the woman, reading or otherwise, if she's not good-looking? Dude may think he's noticing the Nabokov, but it's really the carefully applied highlighter makeup. Regardless, it gets irritating how "clothes" are this stand-in for materialism, when the same men who take such pride in their indifference to matters sartorial almost inevitably turn out to be interested in something just as pointless (expensive wine, food, electronics, sports...). The problem with "clothes" isn't that they're not books, but that this is a non-book interest associated with women and gay men.

Then there's the fetishization of books-as-objects: 

"You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow." 

I know the love of books' smell is meant to be this great big stand-in for an interest in books' content, but it always strikes me as one step away from being one of those people who buy books by the foot at Strand. I'm like way into texts, and that's the case whether it's a PDF, a microfilm, a crisp new hardcover, or one of those yellowed tomes that Bisou likes to munch on when she runs behind that one chair. (And I do wish she'd leave Les eaux mêlées well enough alone, and not mix them further still with whichever mix of wet and dry feed is passing through her digestive tract.) 

But the main ick factor comes from the premise, which is that until proven otherwise, women are vapid airheads. Vapid, money-grubbing airheads: "It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries." No need to go to Zales!

The whole thing reeks of male entitlement, of this idea too many men have of themselves (like dude on NJ Transit recently who wouldn't shut up from the moment he got on, telling his friends what a great intellectual he is, how he loves curling up with a good book, how he hopes to read "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" sometime soon, and held forth so continuously and at such high volume that those of us trying to, you know, read books on the trip were out of luck.) that they are Great Minds. Minds brought down by the horrid, moronic females they're forced to interact with on account of their sexual orientation being what it is. 

So they look for women who are exceptions or, rather, who give off the vibe of "different." They feel special if they hit on the (conventionally-attractive) brunette, not the blonde, the skinny, flat-chested young woman rather than the D-cup. (Fact: having large breasts makes it physically impossible to read great literature.) The "manic pixie" retort is apt. This is about many things, none of which is finding an intellectually-compatible mate. 

"Bad news"

I went to what's probably the nation's best-known math-and-science high school, went to college "where fun comes to die," and am now living in a tiny, closed-off community primarily for mathematicians and scientists. I have been to numerous "apartment parties" where I was one of very few guests or the only guest. I have pained many an interlocutor by forcing them into ten seconds of small talk. So of course when Arts and Letters Daily linked, I read this Nature article about science-types and the autism spectrum (pull quote, from a scientist: "'I do think that when these geeks marry each other, that's bad news for the offspring.'") with interest.

Most of the time, when one thinks about the high-achieving couple's offspring, one thinks about regression to the mean. Or in layman's terms, the possibility that two former supernerds will produce a popular, well-adjusted B or C student. Amy Chua did her part to make it socially acceptable for parents to treat this outcome as one to be avoided at all costs, perhaps by trying to create a striving-immigrant atmosphere right there in your own UMC native-born household; the more typical writing on the subject is a thinly-veiled lament, a parent saying how wonderful it is to have a kid who's so athletic and outgoing, but who, alas, will never go Ivy.

But one does also think about another possibility, one that also may result in no-Ivy-for-junior, but that's a great deal more upsetting, namely that the kid will inherit an extra dose of awkward, minus whichever talents might lead to success as a computer-programmer or whatever. I'll confess that it does not take Borat's cousin to tell me that this possibility exists (see above), but it stands to reason that this of all issues is one that someone would be looking into quantitatively.

I have precisely one million thoughts on this (watch as I reveal my humanities-person-ness in my use of numbers), but the one I'll put in this post is that I wonder how much of the propagation of spectruminess (or whichever medically-recognized subset thereof) goes not through two-math-person couples, but through mothers who seem neurotypical and have no diagnosis otherwise but are... grown-up Darias, basically, who over the course of their lives have learned not to seem all that out-there. I have a zillion tons of anecdata, but nothing, alas, quantitative.

Toilettage

I don't care how many times I come across this expression in my research, but reading about a woman "à sa toilette" will always summon the wrong image.

Speaking of, French vs. American approaches to beauty, on the voyeuristically-spectacular Into The Gloss, the blog that tells you what glamorous women keep in their medicine cabinets. Count me as Team America on this one - it's a bit frightening what an unlimited budget and access to the Parisian parapharmacie amounts to. I mean, the French actress whose stuff it is looks lovely, as she no doubt would with or without ten thousand clear solutions that only allude to purported benefits - you will look "fresher," more "luminous." AKA, you will have spent 15-20 euros on water that smells vaguely like soap. (Confession: after a summer-plus-semester of temptation, I gave in, and if I indeed wore eyeliner to dissertate, walk Bisou, dissertate, socialize with scientists, I'd have some fine La Roche-Posay to remove it with.)

But Katie Gallagher - a fashion designer I once saw on the street in New York - looks amazing (the ITG photo doesn't do her justice), and has the right idea - choose a strange-yet-beautiful hair color, make sure eyeliner is visible but not raccoon-like, keep any kind of makeup that's about painting skin to look like skin to a minimum, and the world does not end if you fall asleep with your makeup on.

Meanwhile, my own toilette is somewhat lacking, because of course the day there's a Dinner is also the day the hot water went off at 9am. While I was plenty awake well before that, I'd been so busy with Bisou's toilette-in-the-modern-sense that I'd forgotten about the water until it was trop tard. If it doesn't go back on soon, I must follow Gallagher's lead re: hair-washing, despite myself. I am officially not brilliant enough to bathe.

"Hobo-chic"

I was just pointed, via Facebook, to a PHD Comics post that might be the very definition of up my alley. For the link-following-averse, it's called "Academic Dress Code," and is sketches of six academic "types," not unlike the "types" I used to research in the 1840s illustrated compendium "Les Français peints par eux-mêmes." In other words, folks, follow the link, because I'm hopeless at describing images. (All I remember from art history in college is that the TA pronounced "focus" "fuckus.") It's designed as a graph, going to "less formal:" people donning, from left to right, a tux, a graduation robe, a business suit, a sports jacket and khakis, pajamas, and rags. I was specifically asked for a gendered reading, and believe it or not I'd already found the comic and gender-read it in my head earlier today, so this shouldn't take too long.

Two of the six images are of women. Not in and of itself a disaster, unless you're of the board-game-commercial, Benetton-ad school of thought, and believe that every single image must be demographically representative. All are white, which is worth addressing, I think, but to properly address that would veer off into intersectionality beyond what I can handle this close to 11pm and on Bisou Standard Time. Of the two women, one is in a graduation robe and you can barely make out that it's supposed to be a woman - a hint of skirt at the bottom is a giveaway. The only unequivocal woman is a grad student in PJs clutching a pillow. OMG guys, grad school is sooo stressful!

Then there are the men. One is in a tux winning the Nobel Prize. Another dons a regular business suit, but is crossed out because academics don't own suits, because they of course never need to attend weddings, funerals, anything outside of academia. A third is the "Smart Academic," who is an impressive cartoon rendition of every man of Assistant Professor age I see around Princeton, saw around Hyde Park. Yup, that's what they wear. What do their female equivalents wear? Who cares, because where are they? They had babies or lost confidence or who knows a few years back, while still in PJs, and have long since become SAHMs, middle-school teachers, dabblers. No one in the lineup appears in any even marginal sense fashion-or-style-conscious. God forbid!

But the final entry - "Hobo-chic" - is the reason I had to post on this. He's the very definition of "too brilliant to bathe," a Nobel winner, "leader in his field," who can dress as he does because he's that important. (He's the only one represented whose skin isn't pasty-pink, but I'm going to assume this is meant to indicate dirt, not that the "hobo" is of color.) A female version of this is inconceivable.

Add all this up, and the issue, gender-wise, is a bit more than women making up only a third of the academics depicted in what is, after all, one cartoon. This is dangerous territory I'm entering into here, I realize, because it will elicit the inevitable, 'but don't you get that this is satire, you humorless feminist?' response, when... yes, of course I do, of course I know "Piled Higher and Deeper." I'm a grad student! What it's satirizing is academia, and this particular installment may be ostensibly poking fun at the geeky unfashionable world of academia - no sharp "douche" suits for us! - it's also, between the lines and I suspect inadvertently, reinforcing the ideas: that the word "professor" should summon the image of a man, that geniuses must be male, that competent profs must be male, that the academics who might otherwise have high-paid jobs are men, and that confidently-displayed (but fully-clothed! maybe even fashionably-clothed!) female bodies have no place in academia.

It's complicated

I've been following the story of the college instructor who fell into conflict with a student in her class, possibly but not definitively related to her inability to properly deal with his stutter. His side, hers.

Nothing about the story's straightforward, which is, I suppose, what makes it compelling. On the one hand, it's about college. On the other, the professor in question is an adjunct who stopped, years ago, at an MA, and the student a tenth-grader taking her community-college class, factors that could make the interaction closer to something that would go on in a high school.

More interestingly: On the one hand, it's about disability. Without announcing to the class exactly what a student suffers from (and see Flavia on this), a good instructor must both accomodate behavior that will seem unusual to the rest of the class, and make the class work for other students as well. This is not something that's yet come up in classes I've taught, but in one I took, there was a (male) student I can only guess was somewhere high-functioning on the autism/Asperger's spectrum, whose blurting included loud, really projected belching. The (female) instructor was in every sense a pro, and dealt with it beautifully, and the other students, all or nearly all grad students from various fields who'd already taught classes themselves, were not going to have the confused reaction a more typical class might have had. College students are not going to necessarily know how to differentiate between Asperger's and awkward/entitled. I mean, I couldn't, either, from a medical perspective, but once you've logged a certain number of hours in classrooms, once you've logged a certain number in life, you start to be sensitive to at least the possibility that someone behaving strangely maybe can't help it. And a stutter, unlike Asperger's (although some online are noting that these two often go hand in hand), will be obvious as something not readily controlled, even to other high school students.

On the other, in cases like these, there's a gender component - a possible "mansplaining" angle. But can someone whose inappropriate timing and choice of words stems from a diagnosed disorder "mansplain"? Seems doubtful. To semi-address Flavia's question, while there will always be "mean girls" and mean boys who live to make fun of "weird," there's another possibility in cases like these that only becomes clear when you take gender into account. However nerdy and eccentric, and even (to a degree - search for "Asperger's" and "girls" for the ample literature on this) whether technically on a spectrum or not, girls are expected to be social and act "normal." Contrary to popular belief, this does not come naturally to all girls. The penalties for behaving strangely and looking unkempt are simply much higher for girls than they are for boys.

Meanwhile, there's a space for boys who come across as somehow different, but are maybe (or maybe not even) especially good at math, or even especially knowledgeable about something else. They may be bullied (and Dan Savage has discussed how his straight-but-nerdy brother was bullied more than he was for being gay-but-not-so-nerdy), this should not be ignored. But under certain circumstances, by certain teachers, often by parents, extreme geekiness in boys is interpreted as a sign that underneath the messy, unwashed hair lies the brain of an Einstein. A girl whose natural inclinations are along these lines will shampoo, condition, and blow-dry. A theoretical female student in Flavia's class may be someone who'd be a "that guy," a "too-brilliant-to-bathe," had she been born male, but she doesn't have the option. She may on some level resent male students she interprets as falling into this category, without considering the possibility that they have a disability, noticing only that they're viewed as budding geniuses. She may even herself have the very same disability, but have learned to compensate for it while quite young, maybe even never to have been diagnosed, because that can apparently happen with girls. Point being, whatever his personal struggles, "that guy" may irritate male classmates, but could well be the object of envy for some female ones, and may inspire something along those lines in female instructors, many of whom are, of course, grown-up geeky girls.

The problem remains, as Flavia notes, that an instructor can never announce to the class which students are merely "that guy," and which should be dealt with with utmost sensitivity because they've been diagnosed and are suffering. Nor, given the ambiguity of diagnosis, do we ever know for certain that various "that guy" students aren't undiagnosed cases, nor that over-diagnosis hasn't so labelled male students who might be better classified as "too brilliant to bathe." And sometimes, as with the boy with the stutter, a student may both have a diagnosis and feel entitled to participate in a lecture class on account of being young, on account of having been home-schooled, etc. Confusing! Are we all sufficiently confused?

So my own approach, if I ever confront something like this in class, would be to model myself after the instructor who dealt so smoothly with the belching student. Be so blasé that students follow your lead. Keep your calm, and be respectful, but without an over-the-top, 'Look, I'm being respectful of the badly-behaved student' attitude. Acknowledge all blurting/over-participating students sometimes but not quite as much as they'd like. Before the semester is even under way, make some general remarks about the need for everyone to get a chance to speak or, if it's a lecture, about how much speaking is appropriate, both so that no one feels individually picked on, and to pre-reassure the rest of the class that non-blurted remarks will get heard, too.

"Is this the right room for an argument?"

Withywindle defends the male know-it-all.

And he's wrong on the Internet! Let me blog-demolish his argument:

Aside from all that ... the ideal is argument, the presentation of non-trivial truth claims, in a conversational tone that invites further argument rather than seeking to end it. Explainering seems an excess of this virtue; the namby-pamby refusal to engage in reasoned argument an insufficiency; I prefer an excess to an insufficiency, especially in this weeny age.

Argumentation, debate, all lovely. But that's not what "Explainering" is. If Withywindle had been able to get past the fact that Solnit's on the left and threw in a few gratuitous jabs at her political opponents - something I don't think Withywindle can claim never to do wrt his political opponents - he might have caught that this is not at all what Solnit's talking about.

"Explainering" is if a woman is the world expert in some area, and a guy who's read one article - one! or less! - on the matter brings it up with her in a tone that makes clear he's confident she doesn't really know anything about it. He may ask her some idiotically trivial detail about it in order to put her on the defensive, to make sure that he's in the position of power. He's not doing diddly squat to further knowledge, or even to further intellectual masturbation. He's just revealing himself incapable of interacting with a woman as her inferior - when he would, in an equivalent situation with a male expert, defer. (It's also what happens when two individuals, both of unremarkable intelligence/expertise, get to talking, and the man, neither the woman's intellectual superior nor inferior, uses his body language and tone to talk down to the woman and do what he can to make her feel like a child.)

Women on the receiving end of this variant of B.S. are in a lose-lose situation. Anything that reads as defensiveness causes Dude to spiral into a web of assumptions - no doubt Ms. Expert here just got where she is because of affirmative action for women, because she slept with the real expert, Mr. Expert, or because Mr. Experts generally wish they could get into her pants and keep her career going with that goal in mind. And saying something like, 'Actually, I won a MacArthur for my work on that very topic' will, to Dude, read as defensiveness. Then there's the option of letting him think he's made a Very Good Point, and addressing it - this ends up being the way to go, getting-through-the-day-wise, but it's sinking to Dude's level, accepting what Mr. Expert wouldn't have to accept, because he'd be allowed to declare himself Expert without anyone think he was protesting too much.

Then there's the rest of Withywindle's post, which seems a bit much coming from someone who blog-interacts with plenty of argumentative "Goilz":

Yeah, it [debating/arguing a point] is a game, and maybe boys do enjoy it more. I think sometimes Da Boyz realize it is a game, when Da Goilz do not; Deze Goilz recoil from what they take as serious, when it is not. And other Goilz, like my interlocutor, know it's a game, and simply choose not to play. But then, some of Da Boyz don't realize it's a game either, and play for keeps, with all their puny and unwarranted self-respect at stake--and enough of them that this makes playing the game unpleasant. Ad utrumque training helps so much.  

Gendered male? Why, yes, the point is to practice asserting "You should go to bed with me" or "You should marry me", in so confident a tone of self-evident fact that the Word becomes Fact. Opinionating, therefore, is a male puberty ritual that too often calcifies into habit. And given the survival of Explainering types, the practice must have positive effects for reproductive survival. Oh, if only we reproduced by sporulation, conversation would be so much more pleasant.

Again, lose-lose. If I point out the wrongness of this, I'm either a) declaring myself not a real woman (on account of liking to argue points and having committed the gender-inverting act that was being opinion editor of the UChicago student paper; on account of thinking it's not only totally OK by me and not infrequently done in our society for women to propose sex/sometimes even marriage to men; on account of quoting from "Monty Python" and not even one of the movies in the post title - no amount of Zappos shoe-ogling will counteract this!), or b) being a flustered, defensive, humorless woman who's all like this like totally offends me as a feminist, waah, how unfair.


So instead, I'll just mention the inconsistency here, which is that Withywindle is on the one hand annoyed that women aren't more argumentative, and on the other declaring that sexual tension itself derives from a more fundamental difference from which come the divergent attitudes towards pontificating in college op-ed pages. The only way to reconcile these is to say that his point is that men are the superior sex, forced, by the unfortunate fact that they by and large prefer women to men romantically, to interact with those bores.

Meh. There are - and fear not, female readers who've yet to locate any - men out there, some of whom are exceptionally Expert, who do not "Explainer" at women. If you find one, and you find him good-looking, and he doesn't, I don't know, have a history of torturing animals or anything, he's probably all right.

Of course, if getting talked down to does it for you, as Dan Savage would say, you need a partner with whom you're compatible. Withywindle's post can even be refuted from a traditional-roles standpoint. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that many women like being with men more knowledgeable than themselves. Let's say this is a dynamic that - due to nature or nurture, for better or for worse, because feminism has yet to destroy it or because it's just part of the beautiful framework of permanent and essential gender differences, take your pick - has stuck. The problem with the condescending, know-it-all stance is that it's not about knowledge or persuasiveness, but about creating the illusion of superiority. As with other male attempts at creating illusions of superiority, born out of their own insecurity, they may snag the occasional insecure woman, but there will be a whole lot of women seeing through it. A woman who does, in fact, know quite a bit will not swoon for a man who pretends to know more, even if she might for a man who actually did.