On changing the culture

Because the thread was getting unwieldy, I'm going to address Miss Self-Important's question, "[W]hat could grad programs concretely do to acknowledge the fact of non-academic employment?," in a post of its own. (In my initial response to her, I came up with a weak 'they could change the culture', but now I'm on my second coffee of the day.)

What they could do, at meetings for admitted students and at the beginning of grad school itself - perhaps even in materials sent out to prospective applicants - is offer up the facts about what those in the program do on the other end. How many have tenure-track jobs, and how does that compare to other departments. How many have jobs. What those jobs are, and whether they in any way relate to the training (or the credential). With, fine, whichever allowances for the fact that a certain number of people end up being stay-at-home parents, and that includes people with MBAs.

It wouldn't have to be some kind of tragic thing that would send everyone screaming in the other direction. It couldn't be, because otherwise programs wouldn't go in for it, but it also wouldn't need to be. Obviously lots of people do go to grad school knowing the odds of TT employment, and do so because they have a Plan B (or different Plan A) in mind. This is largely information people can - but often don't - seek out and get on their own. What this would bring would be transparency. It wouldn't be a dark secret that some graduates found meaningful work, but not as professors, or altogether outside academia.

What I remember of that period, though, was a great deal of attention paid to the fellowships themselves, some to opportunities to do research abroad, that sort of thing, but next to nothing about the other side. The moment of disillusion for me came when I looked up where someone who'd done a dissertation on a topic closely related to mine at one of the Euphemistic universities had ended up. And the answer seemed to be: unemployed. Was it nervous-breakdown-flameout unemployed? I couldn't tell, and thus didn't know how concerned to be. This is where transparency would be most appreciated.

A private matter UPDATED

All of the discussions lately about contraception - so much catchier than the Big Political Issues, and yet more hard-news than whatever else you might get from WWPD, so allow me to proceed - center on the question of "access to." What does it mean for women to have "access to" contraception?

The problem with this topic is that it's, well, personal. Female friends might discuss this, but typically, in my experience, certainly past college, they - we - do not. I assume that the heterosexual women I know who don't have 15 children are doing something, but couldn't say in most cases whether it's actually that they're abstinent; discreetly lesbian; or infertile; or with infertile men; etc., etc., etc. It's not my business. This is, after all, an issue whose legal grounding comes from a "right to privacy."

And yet I wish that as a rule, there were more openness about contraception. I wish that frank discussions of birth control weren't somehow equated with confessions of what, precisely, goes on in the bedroom, how often and with whom. But that's how it goes. If a woman announces she's on the Pill, it's kind of... inappropriate, as if she's set up a webcam in her bedroom - no! - in the public parks where she and her myriad lovers fornicate the night away. Admitting to being on the Pill is like confessing to a sordid private life. Shouldn't be, but is. It's TMI! Overshare! What if the young woman's parents or potential employers read this thing? What if They - that amorphous They, including, of course, the potential elementary-school-age students of women who aren't even teachers - were to know? What then?

Never mind that the reality of this is, it's about the same as if all of a sudden, men had to partially subsidize tampon purchases. It's an expense that impacts virtually all women for some period (sorry) of their lives. It benefits all of society that random benches and office chairs and seats at the movies aren't destroyed, yet the people whose clothing/reputations would also be impacted tend to be the ones purchasing the Tampax. Men would probably resent having to pay for something they don't, personally, use. Given the extent to which contraception is employed, this is, more or less, what we're looking at. It absolutely means something about society that there is now contraception, but on an individual level, it tells you approximately as much about a female pharmacy-goer that she's purchasing a month's supply of birth control pills as that she's stopped by the Always aisle.

Precisely because contraception is oh-so-private, misconceptions arise - especially, needless to say, among men - about what this "birth control" thing is all about. They easily forget that the very need for contraception comes from women having sex with men. Sparing these men - I might add - 18 years of child-support payments, not to mention the serious possibility of 18 years of continued communications with every woman they've ever slept with. It becomes a discussion about women choosing to have sex, when the sex in question by definition involves men. Not such an issue for women who have sex with women. Not to bring my dissertation into everything, but this is kind of like when Napoleon and others in 19th C France wanted "the Jews" to intermarry, without ever considering that for this to happen, non-Jews would need to be involved.

They also - further evidence, if any were needed, that "Seinfeld" has covered everything - don't have an immediate sense of how it is that they haven't impregnated the women they've been with. They don't, in other words, have a terribly good sense of what birth control is. It's going on behind the scenes, so they can pretend it doesn't happen, like the proverbial high school boy who imagines girls lack digestive tracts. There was, of course, Rush Limbaugh, making the leap that a woman who defends the Pill a) uses it herself, b) uses it as contraception, and c) needs lots of pills in order to have lots of sex. Then, in this nutty-but-popular article that's being linked to left and right, a genius named Craig Bannister hears that it would cost a woman $3,000 for three years' worth of birth control, and concludes that women with this complaint "are having sex nearly three times a day for three years straight, apparently." How so? "At a dollar a condom if she shops at CVS pharmacy’s website, that $3,000 would buy her 3,000 condoms – or, 1,000 a year. [....] Assuming it’s not a leap year, that’s 1,000 divided by 365 – or having sex 2.74 times a day, every day, for three straight years."

It did not occur to these men that there are forms of birth control other than the condom, let alone that these might not all be equally effective. And it appears that many found Limbaugh and Bannister's argument convincing. One adds a new level to the brilliance by catching on that this $3,000 figure is in reference to a prescription method, but assuming that a young woman is on the Pill to avoid the need to use condoms. The word "steamy" is used. If this episode tells us anything surprising, it's that not all sex-obsessed social conservatives are closeted homosexuals. Some are merely repressed straight men with active imaginations.

In one sense, the "$3,000 worth of sex" contingent is just being misogynistic, just making the most of a politically-sanctioned opportunity to call women sluts. Maybe some know what the Pill is, but get a kick out of hurling epithets. It points to anxieties about what it means that a woman can go out and have sex with tons and tons of guys and not bear any physical consequences whatsoever.

But I suspect all this discussion points to a genuine misunderstanding about the technology underlying our experience. There are some concrete reasons why, despite lower infant and childbirth death rates, the average woman doesn't have a dozen kids, why women are able to participate in the workforce, why young women and men - for that matter - are not forced into marrying the first person they've slept with. It saves everyone from having to promise a lifetime of fidelity to someone it may turn out they don't even enjoy sleeping with once. On some level, the anti-contraception side - and I mean by this not only whichever tiny minority would have contraception banned, but also the great many social conservatives who see contraception as kinda-sorta a bad thing, kinda squicky, part and parcel of These Corrupt Times - imagines that those who eschew the extremes of the "hook-up culture" - a couple of serious, monogamous relationships in high school and college, say, followed by marriage around age 25 - somehow don't need to use contraception. "Nice" girls/women do not have post-its on their foreheads bearing the name of whichever prescription they're on, so it can be assumed that "nice" means eschewing contraception.

The debate ends up putting defenders of contraception in a bind. On the one hand, there is the desire to point out that the Pill has medical uses, and that contraception is used not only by the young and promiscuous, but also by the married-yet-premenopausal. To beat it over the heads of the reason-impaired that non-barrier methods of contraception are not used more often by those having more sex, but are a binary, on-it-or-off-it sort of thing. It's entirely possible to use birth control daily and have sex yearly, or never. It's also entirely possible to support access to contraception and not, personally, use contraception. There's a perfectly understandable desire to emphasize, in other words, that contraception =/= sluttiness.

On the other hand, while beneficiaries of contraception tend to fall all over the spectrum on these issues, as they include virtually everyone in heterosexual relationships (with the possible exception of closeted politicians, whose family fertility may bear some resemblance to that of the Protestant couple at the beginning of The Meaning of Life: "We have two children, and we've had sexual intercourse twice."), supporters of contraception tend to also oppose making value judgements about the difference between consenting-adults sex with one partner, and with 1,000. I mean, not entirely - even Dan Savage rails against bathhouses and the like - but "slut-shaming" is, as a rule, considered unacceptable discourse. Thus SlutWalks. No, being for/on contraception doesn't make a woman promiscuous, but if she is promiscuous, don't judge. While the not-that-there's-anything-wrong-with-it approach has its merits - ideally women wouldn't be any more judged than men, and it's important to remember that "promiscuous" is subjective, as is "sex positive" (Dan Savage, after all, is anti-bathhouse), and that even those who take a pro-marriage, pro-monogamy stance might support premarital experimentation - it has the unfortunate impact of alienating those who acknowledge they benefit from contraception and would openly support it, if they didn't think doing so was signing onto some kind of broader pro-libertinism agenda.

The problem with either approach is that it's inevitably about the question of women having sex, even though the sex in question is, of course, with men. A woman who takes a pill each day to prevent pregnancy is, each day, acknowledging that she is, or is open to being, sexually active. Men... might carry condoms if intending to have sex relatively soon, or in a relatively casual capacity, but a man who has sex whenever luck strikes, or with a woman/women with whom (responsibly or otherwise) no condoms are used, is not continuously on birth control. So, apart from the (significant!) social double-standard regarding male and female sexual activity, there's this way that men can kind of play at being chaste-but-for-procreation. It's plausible that an individual man only ever had sex to produce whichever children he and his wife ultimately bring into the world, because she and whichever women he'd been with before were the ones making those monthly trips to the pharmacy.

This was long and rambling, the result of more drafts than a WWPD post usually receives (which is to say, there were drafts, and when this post was, as it were, conceived, the Limbaugh kerfuffle had yet to even happen). Shorter version: the invisibility of contraception does much to explain why the conversation surrounding it is so screwed up.

UPDATE

Just noticed Emily Bazelon's take. And... I'm not sure where Bazelon gets her definition of "sex-positivity." Sandra Fluke's Affaire produced outrage precisely because Fluke reads as mature and super-serious. Fluke did not ask for any "slut" solidarity, or even, from what I understand, mention if she herself uses contraception. She certainly didn't just proclaim the right of women to sleep with hundreds, thousands of partners, so long as everything's between consenting adults. The controversy came from the fact that the woman slut-shamed does not come across as a "slut." If she had been even a touch "alternative," this all would have played out differently.

Take 2

I remain unconvinced that "race" or "racism" is the best lens through which to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it plays out among the parties themselves. I think it's a very useful lens for understanding why certain third parties get involved, but the Israelis and Palestinians themselves, no.

But let's say for the sake of argument a convincing case could be made that some Palestinians have absorbed and reformulated traditional anti-Semitism, and that some Israelis would totally love the Palestinians, if only they were Slavs and not Arabs. Let's assume that racism is a valid lens. What's gained by opting for that lens, and what's lost?

As I see it, to use this lens is to, however inadvertently, a) essentialize the parties and their hatred for each other; b) give support to racist third-parties on both sides, who find it easier to openly hate Arabs if they can call them "anti-Semites," easier to hate Jews if they can call Israel a "racist" state; c) alienate otherwise liberal sorts among Jews and Arabs worldwide, who would be far more sympathetic to the "opposing"-such-as-it-is-for-relative-outsiders side, and far more (constructively) critical of their own, if they weren't under the impression that they were defending themselves, as it were, from Racism; and d) weaken the meaning of the term "racism," making it tougher to apply where it desperately needs applying, namely to fully outside observers who use a conflict they don't really care about as a pretext for being big ol' racists domestically, and whose voices we could simply ignore (it's not like we can de-racist racists) if we properly identified them. If we choose to speak of the conflict in timeless terms, such as that classic, "enmity," or words like "conflict," all of that's avoided.

What, then, is the benefit?

The Palestinian cause vs. the Palestinians' cause

I realize that to even dip a toe into this territory-so-to-speak is to invite the following thread in the comments below: 'All criticism of Israel isn't anti-Semitism! The Occupation should be the #1 global concern. No, no, the Palestinians are in the wrong! Walt and Mearsheimer are big racists! No they're not, you didn't read the book! Did too! Not as closely as I did!' So I do ask that, should I be so honored to have commenters at all, they discuss the specific point of this post, and not use this as an opportunity to provide their at-the-ready generic rant about the Middle East. I'm trying to look at this differently, so bear with me.

In sum: I do not think even the Palestinians most radical about their cause are anti-Semitic. I don't think the Palestinian beef with Israel has anything to do with anti-Semitism. Unlike perhaps most of my fellow Zionists, and unlike Christopher Hitchens, I do not gasp in horror when Palestinians adopt the symbolism or vocabulary of sinister, old-school, Western anti-Semitism, or if they condemn Jews and not just Israel/Israelis. This is because I don't think the Palestinians' beef with Israel is fundamentally about anti-Semitism. The beef is about control of land, not about anything more nefarious or complicated, and the land issue is complicated enough. By the same token, I don't think the Israeli side of the conflict is about anti-Arab or anti-"brown" racism. The Palestinians could be ethnically Swedish, and they'd still be this group of people in competition for the same land. It's poor form and ultimately counterproductive (if, in the immediate moment, seemingly effective) when those on either side express themselves in "racial" language, but we shouldn't assume that they're doing so because they're either side engaging in a "race" conflict. What they're doing is trying to win allies on the outside among the anti-Jewish and anti-Arab, respectively.

It's both good and bad for the Palestinians that their enemies happen to be Jews. Good, because this wins them a whole lot of allies they wouldn't have if their enemies were whomever. It was a blow for anti-Semites that, after the Holocaust, one was asked to see Jews as victims and not conspiratorial, all-powerful oppressors. While (some, among the still-living) Jews bounced back, it was no longer socially acceptable, once the Holocaust was in the public eye, to fixate on Jewish "money," Jewish "overrepresentation," and so on, certainly not without coded language. So of course anti-Semites - who contrary to popular opinion did not cease to exist in 1945, or 'learn their lesson' - jumped at the chance to embrace the cause of some undeniable underdogs whose crap fate, all will agree, owes at least something to some Jews. And it even comes with a fashion-forward scarf! Bad, of course, because it's precisely these allies who've confused matters for liberal-minded sorts, Jews especially, giving the mistaken impression that there's something inherently anti-Semitic about being in a conflict in which your enemies happen to be Jews. Along the same lines, if claiming to be 'of the West' wins Israel some support among the Arab- and Muslim-phobic in the West... This I will need to expand upon in its own post, so sit tight.

To lower everyone's blood pressure for a moment, think of it like this. Imagine that two neighbors, one who happens to be Jewish, one who doesn't, get into an argument over... any number of ridiculous things people argue about that have nothing to do with their ethnic-religious origins. Someone's dog ripped up someone else's flower bed, whatever. We wouldn't say that the Jew's antagonist in this conflict is an anti-Semite. Sometimes Jews, like everyone else, get into disputes, and those disputing with them have whatever beef anyone has with anyone. However, if a bunch of strangers to both formed a committee to support the Jew's antagonist, while ignoring similar and worse conflicts in the town between non-Jews, we might wonder about the committee members. Now, if the Jew's antagonist, picking up on his likely source of support, throws a 'dirty Jew' in there, that's foul play and all, but that doesn't mean the original conflict was about anti-Semitism. It was about the flower bed.

Pro-Israel Diaspora Jews, along with centrist/independent-minded sorts in the West, as well as virtually everyone I agree with on other things having to do with this issue, all these folks need to stop thinking of the Palestinians' beef with Israel as being about anti-Semitism. The Palestinians didn't randomly pick the Jews as a scapegoat. They have a dispute with the Jewish state. This doesn't mean we should cease to condemn suicide bombings or, for that matter, the strategic-yet-idiotic appropriation of Protocols and similar. It's entirely compatible with telling it like it is when it comes to the Westerners who've picked the Palestinian cause of all the world's causes precisely because it allows them to bash Jews. For what I can only wish was the last time, it's easy enough to figure out which Western supporters of the Palestinians do and don't fall into this category by hearing what they have to say about Jews on topics unrelated to the I-P conflict. If the "advocacy" is really about anti-Semitism, 99% of the time there's some beef the person has with Jews at home/Jews in theory that accompanies and likely predates any attention paid to the Middle East. All it means, but this is significant, is that we not look at Palestinian terrorism as of a piece with pogroms, etc.

That's personal! UPDATED

As someone who writes in the first person on this here blog, and who often finds herself writing about other such writing, I've often thought and sometimes written about how one approaches this genre/this set of genres. By "genre(s)" I mean everything from "overshare" essays about love life, body image, etc., to articles or blog posts that mix a personal story with one of broader significance (think Amy Chua on parenting, Allison Benedikt on Zionism, or, indeed the Drezner's tenure tale, to give just three recent examples that have come up on WWPD). The authors/bloggers in question might be people somewhat in the public eye - that is, writers/academics/bloggers with readers outside their immediate families - but are not sufficiently famous/glamorous that strangers would be giving the slightest thought to their personal lives if they hadn't put it out there. So a Kissinger or Britney autobiography doesn't count, but a Park Slope parenting tell-all by someone well-known in sustainable-food circles does. (I.e. not people who would make it into this amazing/upsetting German celebrity magazine that's all about famous people whose bathing suits don't fit properly. Amy Winehouse's bikini top needed some serious adjusting, as did Kate Moss's bikini bottom. This is what's on the cover of the magazine, in the checkout area along with the tobacco and hard liquor selection. No Whole Foods, this Rewe.)

If you're writing one about yourself:

-Be clear with yourself (and, if relevant to what you're writing about, your loved ones) where you draw the line. Dan Savage, for example, talks about oh just about everything (note the "tail" query in a recent podcast), but not his sex life with his husband. First-person, personal-issues-topic, tone of openness, none of this requires actually spilling all. Where you draw the line is sometimes best not to spell out for readers, because this is information in and of itself that curious sorts will extrapolate from. But, as with Savage, sometimes common sense supports a decision, and there's no harm in stating it outright.

-Remember that the "you" your readers are getting is one based purely on the text provided, and others provided previously. If you hint at your husband being a tyrant (Benedikt), or a pushover (Chua), readers will round up. And you don't get to complain about this, because they didn't just randomly pick you out of a crowd and decide to discuss your marriage. You put it out there. Remember that however harsh the criticism, it's not you-you being criticized, so even if you end up learning valuable things about yourself, you don't have to take this personally. It's not your marriage in its entirety. Its the tiny glimpse offered by a couple of anecdotes.

UPDATE (and expect more such updates):

-Your children are yours to raise. They're not yours to write about. I know I'm repeating myself, so I won't restate all the arguments here, but this really does belong in the official WWPD guide to writing and writing about personal essays, as PG's comment below inadvertently reminded me. Kids who are under your roof, especially, are not in a position to consent to being written about, so even if they were totally OK with it, what would that even mean? In this Facebook age, no one has much of a right to reinvention anymore, with all those friends from middle school virtually present at all times. But at least leave the potentially humiliating anecdotes of childhood to the children who've lived them, to retell years later if they so choose.

If you, the parent, believe what you need to say about parenting is really that important, find some way of doing so that in no way implicates your own, identifiable, real-life children, and sorry but yes, they're still identifiable even if you're a woman who kept her name, and their last name is that of their father. Write about Parenting, not your parenting, because your parenting is also their upbringing, and what if they, unlike you, never become big-deal writers/bloggers with an audience? Or better yet, write fiction, and even if some readers suspect resemblance to truth, you've probably mixed things up a bit, right?, and even if you've used their real names (which I wouldn't advise), it's not really about them.

Caveat: This doesn't carry over to if the personal writing is about having a child with severe mental retardation or severe autism, or worse (and yes, I'm thinking of this essay). In such cases, a) the chances that the child will read or write about his own childhood are slim to none, and b) this kind of writing could be immensely helpful to other parents going through the same thing, canceling out any remaining ickiness about discussing the private moments of a real-life person who can't give consent to being written about, or about the possible necessity of mentioning the siblings' childhoods as well. But if the issue is, your 12-year-old is begging for designer jeans, your 16-year-old keeps flubbing the PSAT, your charmingly articulate four-year-old's fixated on scat, this is not for you to report to all. If you need reassurance in these non-tragic matters, some combination of general-terms writing, fiction-writing, and private conversation with other parents about raising kids will have to suffice.

If you want to criticize one:

-Don't even begin if the person who wrote the thing is, say, your boss, your best friend's girlfriend, your neighbor with whom you share childcare duties. The recipient will take personally criticisms of personal writing, even if in an ideal world that would not be the case, so there will be real-life consequences. But even then, it's tough to criticize the personal writing of someone you know well or have strong feelings about, because that background is coloring everything you think about some measly 800 words.

-So, assuming the author is a relative stranger, or the kind of personal essay/opinion writer who actively invites criticism of his work, stick with the text(s) provided. If it's in there, it's fair game.

-Do not throw in personal details about the author beyond what's provided in the article/post or in other articles/posts by the same person. This goes both for if you're critiquing the writing of an acquaintance about whom you know details beyond what's provided, and for if you're improvising your own assumptions via speculation. Both are irritating, because there's no way to refute arguments that are based on personal details above and beyond what you're willing to provide publicly. As in: it's fair game to point out that someone hurling a YPIS ("your privilege is showing") is himself a graduate of Andover, if this is in some public bio of the individual. It's not fair game to be like, 'and at Andover, he always made a big deal about how his pink polos were Lacoste,' or, 'his parents so obviously could pay the full tuition, no way was he on scholarship.' It might be awfully tempting, but don't.

If you want to defend one:

-Don't say that all criticism of the piece is inherently unfair, because it's just one person's personal experience and don't judge, etc., etc. Writing for an audience, even writing in the first person, doesn't get a pass wrt being judged. Because, as noted above, it's not the writer-as-person who's being judged, but the persona as he comes across in the piece of writing.

-By all means include that disclaimer about being friends with the author, and defend your friends when you think they've been misunderstood, but don't then expect readers who know neither of you to find this persuasive.

There's probably a good bit more that could be added, so consider this a proto-guide at best.

On not worrying about it

I can't have been the only one struck less by the particularities of the weight-loss plan discussed here than by the obvious unsuitability of some of its adherents and would-bes for any weight-loss plan, especially one this radical. One woman who considered but ultimately decided against the regimin "is 5-foot-3 and 130 pounds, but said she hoped to shed 20 pounds in time to be a bridesmaid at an April wedding." Just, just... it would be Bridezilla enough if a not-even-heavy-to-begin-with woman wanted to become underweight or the low range of normal, not sure precisely where that falls, for her own wedding. But this is for someone else's! And good grief, she's not even fat! As a fellow short woman, I know that even a few extra (or fewer) pounds can show, but a 20-pound, experimental-diet-induced weight-loss on an already-small person is, in the medical opinion of this French-lit PHD student, not a wise idea.

An even less wise idea: Another woman who did sign up "said she was thrilled to lose six pounds in seven days, and hopeful about reaching her goal of losing 30, which would bring her close to her ideal weight of 135 [at 5'8"]. She said she did not feel hungry and did not obsess about food as she had years ago, when suffering from anorexia." Emphasis mine, but also emphasis implicitly added by anyone with a brain who got through that paragraph. It's obviously a brilliant idea to put people who used to be anorexic on a 500-calorie-a-day diet.

I realize it's not that simple, and that female eating in our society is pretty much disordered-by-default, but it would be all kinds of fantastic if women could do the following:

Step 1: Assess if they are, medically speaking, overweight enough for it to be a concern. If so, and if they're concerned about it, by all means they can look into (sensible) diet and exercise modifications. If not...

Step 2: Assess the likelihood that they will ever be ballet dancers, models, gymnasts, or ingenue actresses. (Hint: if you're over 18, that ship has sailed. Same goes for most under-18s as well, of course.) If yes, they stand to benefit in the form of money and glory if they stay thinner than otherwise necessary. If not...

Step 3: Assess whether anything whatsoever in their lives would be better if they went down a size or lost 10 pounds. And, for women in this category, who are not up for roles in "Black Swan II: The Even Skinnier Version," life would most definitively not be better at a smaller size. Yes, society penalizes women for being large. Yes, it rewards (a tiny subset of) beautiful young girls for being very thin. What it does not do is treat differently a within-normal-limits adult woman who wears a 4 and another who wears an 8.

What's left, then, is a woman who realizes she's been dieting for its own sake, because that's what women do, because it's fun to be able to fit into some arbitrarily-sized pants.

To be clear, the alternative is not to declare it noble and righteous to ignore all nutritional science, to live off foods with "Reese's" written on them, and to be blissfully indifferent to major weight fluctuations. There's a point at which not-caring veers over into something as unhealthy as caring too much, and that point is hard to pin down. I suppose what I'm getting at is that there's on the one hand the issue of people - men and women both - who arguably, for health reasons, have reason to be concerned, and on the other a whole lot of women who are, in a sense, worrying a whole lot about what is essentially a health concern they don't have. This results in a society in which "diet" (or all the various euphemisms that amount to the same thing) becomes not merely something for someone who by some not-unreasonable standard needs to lose weight, but the default attitude of women of all sizes.

I have more to say about this, but am having trouble articulating it further, so if commenters have thoughts...

An alternative to sanctibullying

Britta writes:

What makes me sad is I AM a 20-something, leftist, politically aware woman in academia who I identifies as a feminist--I ought to be squarely in the main demographic of "young feminism" today, but instead I and every single other woman like me I know is completely alienated/disengaged from mainstream feminism, precisely because of the ridiculous sanctibullying.

Often enough, sanctibullying takes place within the context of a discussion about a legitimate issue. Some sanctibullying does not even pretend to be about any particular issue, but even your-privilege-is-showing for the sake of YPIS is ostensibly about income inequality, educational inequality, and so forth. As a rule, as I think has been established, sanctibullying is not what happens when have-nots hate the haves rather than the system. If someone who actually grew up poor is riled by the out-of-touch-ness of preppy college classmates, that's a different scenario than a preppy kid who's just taken a class on inequality getting all excited about how he can now tell others that their privilege is showing. The goal here is not to prevent underdogs from expressing frustration. It's about preventing the haves from posing as pseudo-have-nots in place of actually helping fix whatever problem they're ostensibly so concerned about.

Sanctibullying could be scrapped, or at least considerably lessened, if sites where it occurs took the same self-monitoring approach they already do on other matters (as with "body-snarking" and "triggering" on Jezebel) and ask that readers consider whether their goal is making yuppies blush in shame, or furthering discussion, maybe even action, on a given issue. The manifesto could go something like this:

Out-of-touch-ness in and of itself needs to stop being the primary target. We need to look beyond conversational aloofness and try to address the root of problems. The game needs to stop being about pointing out privilege not owned up to, and to start being about positive change. It needs to stop being about pointing out where specific individuals are ignorant, and to start making it a general rule to inform. Ignorance, then, will be indirectly combatted without making it personal.

For example, the food-movement wars. In a thread, someone will say something about how everyone should eat organic kale from the farmers' market. Someone else will point out that farmers' markets are expensive. Another commenter will point out that these markets accept food stamps and sometimes encourage their use. Yet another commenter will chime in that we have it all wrong, it's about having the time and energy to get to a farmers' market. Original Commenter show up again and counter that the time and money are there, it's just a matter of not getting cable.

Then it will be, whoosh, Original Commenter's privilege is showing! Doesn't Original Commenter know that cheeseburgers and "Real Housewives" are the only pleasure in hard-working, honest, poor people's lives? That the kale-and-legume diet, if undeniably affordable, is all and well if you have time to prepare it and peers who reward you for eating like that, but kind of unappealing without the cultural framework telling us it's virtuous? Ugh, it will be decided, people like Original Commenter should just STFU.

On the one hand, food deserts, cultural factors, these are real issues that are left out of the conversation when Original Commenter explains how a summer spent at a villa in Tuscany with Liv Tyler showed him what vegetables are supposed to taste like. On the other, it's unclear if these issues are addressed productively by throwing virtual (mealy American) tomatoes at Original Commenter. In a sense, they are, because the YPIS accusers are showing solidarity with a theoretical offended food-stamp-holder. But this is itself problematic, because, as with Caitlin Flanagan's imaginary Mexican laborer, it's putting words into people's mouths (although sometimes guessing right), and because, for every otherwise apathetic thread-reader who might now realize for the first time how unfair our food system is, another will be put off by all the energy that's been directed at making Original Commenter feel horrible, and stop reading. Original Commenter himself will be too put off by all of this to care to think about it further. A missed opportunity.

The main problem, though, is that making Original Commenter think he's a bad person accomplishes none of the ostensible goals of the discussion: fixing the food system, getting ambivalents like Original Commenter on board, or even giving the screwed-over a chance to express their frustration (because, again, the YPIS accusers have all the kale they could dream of, but want us to consider that not everyone is so lucky).

So rather than the approach being, 'You, Original Commenter, clearly never had to work a day in your life, clearly grew up on organic kale and feed the same to your elite-kindergarden-going children,' a concerned commenter might simply point out why the belief that kale is universally available or desirable is inaccurate. This should be plenty to cause Original Commenter to rethink his views, to see where his own privilege may have entered into it, but it still leaves things open for Original Commenter to stay in the conversation and maybe, you know, help.

Worldliness and cultivation

Isabel Archer summoned my response to the latest incarnation of the paper-versus-plastic-versus-tote debate. However, I'm far more intrigued by her two most recent posts than with the question of how one takes home groceries and takes out trash, so after quickly mentioning that in Paris, the grocery store encourages toting, the market (or at least this one market street) is all about the plastic bags, except that they're more like produce bags with handles, and are meant to be placed not in a tote, nor even in a straw basket, but rather in a fabric cart-on-wheels, onto the others. I'm meeting her contrarianism with contrarianism, although I do on some level agree with most of what she says.

First, meritocracy. I too come from a family that values education, and it seems to have stuck. (Today I finally got to see actual books in an actual library in Paris! Woohoo!) So I think I get where Archer (Isabel? How does this work with pseudonyms?) is coming from. But while I agree that the education system places far too much emphasis on well-roundedness, and that making more Archerist families has potential, I think we need to be attentive to what is, I suppose, the opposite problem: the assumption that attention to appearance, interest in getting a boyfriend or girlfriend, having social skills... that these qualities are detrimental to or incompatible with academic achievement. This is a problem for several reasons. One, it's simply false - some people win in the looks, brains, and charm departments, and we can read all about some of them in the NYT Vows. Such is life. Next, the idea that smarts and social ease are mutually exclusive is what's led to the phenomenon of the dorky kid being assumed brilliant, even when presented with heaps of evidence to the contrary. (I know Miss Self-Important has written about this, but am not quite awake enough to find where...) And finally, there's the gender-studies angle. It's far more detrimental to women and girls to demand a choice between being a primp-for-prom person and a go-to-class one. (Although for the record, agreed that it's all kinds of ridiculous to cancel class so that students can get their hair done.) Girls are correct in perceiving that life is easier with better looks, and while this can be taken too far, if all that's necessary is trading a worn-out shirt from an aquarium exhibit for something better-fitting and less dolphiny from the GAP, I don't see the tragedy. If I can conclude in a way that makes any of this make sense, what I'm driving at is, schools shouldn't demand well-roundedness, but they shouldn't penalize it, either. There are enough hours in the day to primp, study, lust, play (ugh) team sports, and so on.

Next, travel. I suspect that part of what Isabel Archer experienced as a Dartmouth student in Paris had less to do with the fact of being abroad, or of being in France in particular, than with the altogether odd experience of being an American college student on study abroad. I suspect this because my own time in Paris in college, though productive academically (as in, some of the best courses I had in college, from UChicago profs but in French), was not necessarily the best way to go about experiencing that city. We all had the option to stay for the rest of the year, attending a Parisian university (but with American tuition), but I didn't think twice about returning. To Chicago. Hyde Park.

What I've felt the first few days living on my own in Paris is a bit like what I did when, months after Birthright Israel, I returned, this time with Jo - rather than a busful of potential Jewish husbands and an armed guard - to Tel Aviv for a few days. For me, at least, travel is only any good if you have the freedom to go around on your own. Whether you're on an educational tour of cathedrals or on a bus with prospective ethnoreligiously appropriate fiancés, or even just traveling without a group, but with a very set checklist of tourist sites, if you have that sense of being shepherded (or shepherding yourself), you feel as though you're briefly seeing places or even people that look interesting, yet are being so thoroughly shielded from any exposure to the place itself, because that would be dangerous and unproductive. Going to the HEMA in Belgium, or Monoprix in France, is indeed just looking at foreign shampoo and Target-like accessories, kitchenware, and so on, but for me, stuff like that is half the fun of travel.

Which brings me to the cultural differences question. Yes, it's banal that cultures are different, and anyone who's spent any time in a not 100% homogeneous place knows this from experience without leaving home. However, there's a big difference between meeting individuals of different cultures and being altogether immersed in one. Perhaps I'm biased, because my (limited, although I realized this even at the time) impression from a few months in Paris of what it meant to be Jewish in France as opposed to the US motivated my choice of career. Yes, embarrassing as this is, My Study Abroad Experience Changed Me.

Finally, agreed 100% that traveling is not relaxing in the least.

In which WWPD becomes an advice column, and intersemester blogging reaches its prolific peak

I normally agree with her suggestions, but Prudie's way off in her advice to the girlfriend who finds it unsettling that her boyfriend's female friend will be sharing a room with him at a conference that, it appears, she's not even attending. Obvious questions: If he's only seeing the friend because she lives nearby, why the slumber party? Isn't his disclosure almost a free pass for messing around? (Wasn't this dealt with on Seinfeld, when George uses pseudo-openness to attempt an affair with Marisa Tomei?)

But more to the point, different people are comfortable with different things - even among its adherents, monogamy has endless meanings and variations. A wide range of activities could be considered iffy by some and 100% OK by others - ambiguous-sounding coffee-dates that aren't work-related, drinks alone with a new friend of the opposite sex, remaining close friends with exes, sharing a hotel room with a just-a-friend, etc., etc. None of these are breaches of capital-M Monogamy, but all have the potential to contradict monogamy as understood by a particular couple. Obviously, there are limits - restrictions ought to go both ways, and there are some rules that could impact both partners while plainly speaking to creepy possessiveness on the part of one (ruling out Facebook friends of the opposite sex, say, or insisting on only having joint email accounts). The professional sphere is coed; any attempt at restricting a partner's interactions with the opposite sex that interferes with (legit) networking probably crosses the line. (Extreme example: forbidding a partner to even attend far-off conferences in the first place.)

But I don't think it would take much effort to track down relatively non-neurotic couples who'd object, in both directions, to the hotel-room scenario, or who'd agree, again, in both directions, that it was quite reasonable. It's not that the boyfriend's callous, or that the girlfriend's a possessive freak. It's that if this isn't something they can work out with an effortless compromise, the sort that doesn't require an advice-columnist's intervention, they might want to both see other people.

How to revive liberal young American Jews' interest in Israel, in three steps

I recently predicted the disappearance of The Secular American Jew. But I'm talking eventually. For now, Seinfeld's in syndication and we're not going anywhere. While I don't think there's much that can be done to make a population whose very existence depends on an ever-fading social divide with non-Jews continue for all eternity, I do think there are ways to increase interest in Israel among the apathetic. I don't quite agree with Beinart that a more liberal Zionism that chucks any anti-Arab rhetoric would bring young liberal Jews into the Zionist fold in droves, although I'm all in favor of that shift happening, so who knows. Anyway, my ideas are outlined below:

1) Make Birthright about Israel and not America. The trip that sends young American (and other Diaspora) Jews on free trips to Israel is obviously the place to begin. And every time Birthright comes up, someone, soon enough, will refer to "Zionist brainwashing." This could be the case on some trips, but the one I went on was far more devoted to convincing wary American Jewish guys to embrace (literally, figuratively) American Jewish girls - and, in the person of IDF soldiers, to convince American Jewish girls of the potential of Jewish masculinity - than it was about anything to do with our surroundings. If my group took anything away from the trip relating to Israel in particular, it was probably that the country's drinking age is under 21. The whole thing might as well have taken place in Montreal. Israel was at best a picturesque environment, one from which we had to be shielded by a security guard and rules preventing us from wandering off on our own for ten minutes because OMG terrorism. What I'd like to see isn't indoctrination, just more discussion of Israeli history, contemporary life in Israel, and so forth, including but not limited to the conflict, and less pleading instruction on how to be a Jew in America.

2) Place Zionism into a postcolonial-studies framework. Young, liberal, educated American Jews who hear "Israel" and "colonialism" assume what's meant is that Israel is a colonial entity. We need to get everyone to read Memmi, and to think of Israel as a state that came out of oppression, that's flawed in all the ways one expects of such states, but that's surprisingly successful, considering. No, the right-wing friends-of-Israel won't like this. But if young Jews had a better understanding of Zionism as a liberation movement for a people who'd been faulted for centuries for not having a land of their own ("Go back to Palestine" was a cry yelled at Diaspora Jews, after all), a movement that couldn't possibly have emerged in response to the Holocaust because it began well before, then perhaps the necessity of Israel as a Jewish state would become a starting point. How to best and most ethically protect Israel - and how to criticize its current actions that some read as colonialist but that I'd choose to criticize with other language for reasons I won't get into here - could then be discussed from a place where the country's very existence isn't up for debate by those who don't quite get where it came from in the first place.

3) Put Israeli culture above Israeli politics, or at least shift their relative importance to American Jews so that the latter doesn't fully overpower the former. Israel apologists so often come up with the same list of reasons we should love the place. Reasons 1-98 have to do with Israel being the good guy in every last conflict with its neighbors or the Palestinians - those who believe this believe it, and those who don't think it's all kinds of ridiculous. Reason 99 is Israeli high-tech achievements, inventions, and so forth. Reason 100 is Bar Refaeli. It gets tiresome. The existence of any kind of Israeli culture, high or low, is obscured. Music? Cuisine? Fashion? Film? If what Israel's defenders are trying to communicate is that the country is not defined by its symbolic place in international relations, the way to argue that point isn't by explaining just how hopeless the Palestinian leadership was in this or that year, but by cultivating an appreciation of Israel-the-place. American Jews more up on how Israel actually is, and what Israelis really are like, might end up in some ways more critical of specific Israeli policies and all that. There'd be less knee-jerk rah-rah, but also less knee-jerk I'm-liberal-which-means-I-think-Israel's-evil.

The end of the secular American Jew?

It seems self-evident to me that secular/cultural American Jews - the ones who really get Allen-Roth-Seinfeld (even if we, too, cringe from time to time), whose speech evokes Zabars or Flatbush, and whose level of observance is slim-to-none - are on their (our) way out. Ours is an entity that has always required two factors to persist: on the one hand, an active interest on the part of some members to keep the group going, and on the other, a social border of sorts keeping Jews and non-Jews apart. This border existed in part but not entirely because of anti-Jewish feeling from the outside, but at any rate it's the two combined - the positive interest of some Jews in keeping the culture going, paired with the fact that all Jews were defined externally and incapable of escape even if they wanted out (converts still being referred to as Jews and all that) - that in the US and in Western Europe kept that thing going. Today, one part of that equation is just about gone.

Which leads me to the WWPD Grand Theory of Intermarriage in the Contemporary US: The social border here today exists less than it did at any point in modern Jewish history I can think of.* What this means, among other things, is that while in past generations, the default was to marry another Jew, today, not so much. Rather than congratulating previous generations of secular-but-in-marrying for really caring about what it means to be Jewish and chastising our own for apathy, as is the typical Jewish-communal (and, often, Jewish-individual) response, we might consider that back in the Golden Age, non-Jewish marriage partners were much, much less of an option, in terms of Jewish family disapproval, sure, but also in terms of who non-Jews were willing to date, and of how socially integrated even acculturated Jews were in the first place. Jews had all kinds of will towards assimilation way back when - not all, of course, and not even most, perhaps, but there's enough evidence that those who tried so often failed that it helps to look not only at what some Jews wanted, but what, broadly speaking, was possible.

Because here's how it goes today. Let's say you're a secular Jew who really cares about Jewishness, who's involved in all those great activities aimed at keeping the legacy alive (Heeb, J Street, you name it) and who's all principled and opposed to intermarriage. You'll meet more Jews than those who really couldn't care less, but since you're secular, you live in a mixed world, your college, even if "disproportionately Jewish," is still majority non-. Possible Jewish partners for you are reduced because you're not looking for someone observant, but also because you'd rather not be with someone Jewish and, for lack of a better phrase, self-hating, because that gets tedious, and because such people are not usually looking to date other Jews to begin with. Of the two or three remaining Jewish possibilities, there's a good chance there won't be sufficient mutual romantic interest to get anything going. At which point, non-Jews or cryptic singledom start to seem like the only options.

Or let's say one of the two or three acceptable Jewish possibilities does work out. You can rest assured that you, at least, did not contribute to the problem. Then what of your children? They'll be Jews sure enough, but then... You can tell them to marry in, but "in" what? If it's not about religion, then what? Blood? That's racist! they'll exclaim, and you'll have a tough time with counterarguments. And it's back to square one.

While intergroup marriage doesn't mean the end to any kind of secular Jewish identity (consider, for instance, that the two young actors most associated with Jewish roles were born to such unions), it means the eventual end of an ethnicity independent of either religion or the state of Israel (as in, actually inhabiting it, not just approving from afar).

As much as I find this unsettling, I'd find the only practical alternative even more so. To resurrect, so to speak, the social boundary might do wonders for the Jews, but would be a disaster for actual Jews, who are now accustomed to deciding how much we want to opt in or out of various aspects of Judaism and Jewishness alike. Asking secular Jews to resist assimilation sounds noble enough when we're picturing a bold stand against blond WASP hegemony. But what assimilation really means isn't, these days, joining up with some generically white-country-club version of America. It frequently means pairing off with someone even less assimilated to this upper-crust version of white America. It's easy enough for a liberal American Jew to roll his eyes at cousin Larry from Long Island marrying a bubbly former Miss Kentucky. But what if the "shiksa" is not The Oppressor, but a black or Mexican woman? Or what if the partner's WASPy as all get-out but same-sex? Once "assimilation" means full participation in liberal America, rather than simply a form of social climbing with a twist of self-hatred, it's near-impossible for liberal American Jews to oppose it except through... big-time religious observance or Zionism, neither of which are real possibilities for that set.

Usual suspects I suspect may respond to this, and all others, comment away.

*And thinking of it I have been. Countdown to all-about-the-diss post begins.

Literature and anti-Semitism, Part II

Yes, I've read it. Given that I'm fully capable of reading English, I know far too little about British Jewish history. Anthony Julius's book seems like a good intro, even if it's about representations of Jews and more specifically negative ones, given that I'm in the business of reading absolutely everything I can get my hands on about literary representations of Jews. So, my lack of authority on this subject established, along with my slightly greater authority on a vaguely related topic (catch a theme?), onto Harold Bloom's essay.

Bloom remarks at the start of the review that the book led him "to give thanks that my own father, who migrated from Odessa, Russia, to London, had the sense, after sojourning there, to continue on to New York City." I could see this if his father had gone to, say, Berlin, but I'm always wary of assessments by Americans that compare anti-Semitic There to safe-haven, Semitophilic Here. If we're talking Then, then we can go through the whole discussion of quotas and country clubs, but basically, Alvy Singer felt uncomfortable for a reason. (And don't Americans read British literature? I definitely encountered Shylock in high school English.) If we're talking Now? I'm often asked how anti-Semitic France really is these days, and my own "first, personal, reflection" is to consider Walt-Mearsheimer, that note, the Roissy commentariat... and just generally, the fact that Jew-hatred continues to exist in the US. That blacks are and were in an undeniably worse situation discrimination-wise than Jews in this country, and that the anti-Semitism that does exist in 2010 America is clearly zilch compared to 1942 Germany, makes this particular form of oppression less salient. But before pointing fingers, we might want to check on what's happening and has happened at home.

The rest of the review? I'm basically convinced, and it's refreshing to see it mentioned in a major publication that regular old anti-Semitism hides under the label "anti-Zionism." I'm not up on contemporary American or British literature enough to say whether the latter's more insulting to Jews than the former, but that could well be the case. There was a not-so-flattering portrait of a Jew in "The Group," one of the American novels I read most recently, but it wasn't written recently, so who knows.

What makes me slightly wary about the book being reviewed is the same thing as concerns me about all works devoted to representations of Jews in Country X between years Y and Z. The goal of these works is almost invariably to explain what understandings of "the Jew" can tell us about the non-Jews of a given time and place. Given that this is part of what I hope to do with my dissertation,* it's not something I disapprove of - hardly! But it needs to be paired with something about the existence of actual Jews during that time and in that country. Works that do this well (such as) avoid reinforcing the idea that Jews are merely an idea in the heads of the rest of humanity. Because any study with "Jews" in the title confronts this massive asymmetry - far more people have contemplated "the Jews" than have experienced being a Jew. This makes "the Jews" appear a important historical phenomenon than Jews themselves. But since there are plenty of ways to get at what Italians thought in 1850, or the French in 1820, etc., if this is the one you pick, it's only right to see how Jews represented themselves, and (as much as this is possible) to know the lives of Jews at the time/place. This is not only fair to these Jews, but also useful even if all one is interested in is how the Jews were imagined and what this tells us about Italy, France, etc. Because think about it. If 90% of representations of Jews were of peddlers, this means something quite different if 90% of Jews at the time were peddlers than if the novel's set on the Upper West Side in 1998.

*Which, oh lucky WWPD readers, you'll be hearing about in immense detail in the weeks, months, and I hope not years to come.

Once and for all: Against 'boyfriend' apparel

Back in 2007, I held forth on the annoying trend of "boyfriend" clothes. They say it's 2010, but the latest issue of Vogue has a spread advising women to wear the "boyfriend" everything. No! Don't do it! Here's why:

-Again, watch as fashion ignores women with any kind of a noticeable chest. Aside from the woman-with-tousled-hair-in-nothing-but-a-men's-dress-shirt look, menswear and that which is menswear-inspired, worn by women with anything of a bust - particularly shorter women - equals frump. One notices in Vogue that the woman who oh so adores 'stealing' from her boyfriend's closet is a model, as is her boyfriend, and the two are around the same height and proportions. What a shocker that they can share clothes! On the plus side, this trend, if it sticks, could be a great thing for men who are 5'2" and curvaceous. (The real tragedy, far as I'm concerned, is that the dream space-age dress exists, but is designed for the flat-of-chest.)

-It's a clever marketing campaign based on the idea that 'boyfriend' is a word with which women are hoped to have positive associations (it means you're coupled off and thus not in want of a man, but too young and carefree to be settled down). What it also is is an implicitly homophobic marketing campaign, telling women it's fabulous and empowering to cross-dress, so long as you present said cross-dressing as borrowing from a male partner's wardrobe. The boyfriend need not exist - the sweater can be purchased straight from the women's section. But the dressing-like-a-dude must come with an implied 'but I'm into dudes, I promise!' (Also addressed, I see now, at Jezebel.)

-On a related note, boyfriend-clothing implies that women can only abandon girly-wear once they've found a man. The boyfriend sweater is for when a woman no longer needs to impress potential mates with a sweater that clings. There's this implication that the woman who wears boyfriend dress is whatever the opposite of desperate is, and that this I'm-taken quality is in itself her allure. How a woman in baggy, ill-fitting clothes will get this across is unclear, but that's what 'boyfriend' is meant to make the shopper believe. 'Boyfriend' also implies that women only dress in clothes that fit properly when single (or, perhaps, married but ready for something on the side.) As in, love means never wanting to wear a skirt.

-On a related related note, there's something irritating about the way the menswear trend sells itself as women's liberation. As with the flapper look of the 1920s, freedom for women to look more like men, however freeing to women with naturally non-curvy builds or non-girly inclinations, adds a whole set of new restrictions, and doesn't necessarily add up to clothing any more comfortable or practical than what women currently have as options, especially given the current, corset-less state of women's clothes. There is officially nothing more comfortable than a t-shirt-material dress - toss some leggings under it if the weather requires, and guaranteed, you're twice as cozy as a guy in equally formal attire. The only uncomfortable/impractical item specific to everyday womenswear these days is the super-high heel. (Bras are, so to speak, a toss-up, either making an outfit more or less comfortable, depending.) Vogue, meanwhile, suggests a form of androgynous dress that involves pairing the structured, tailored discomfort of menswear with thousand-dollar stiletto Louboutin sandal-booties. If 'boyfriend' meant 'flats', this might be something I could halfway get behind. But if it means hobbling around in a three-piece suit, no thanks.

The missing intro to the post below

The reason I liked the idea of the Gawker anti-my-gay post was that there is a definite (and much-analyzed) trend to either over - or de-sexualize what it means to be a gay man. The former is, of course, the assumption that "gay" means "ready to sleep with everyone male within a 100-mile radius, in particular your lithe 16-year-old nephew." The latter manifests itself as Queer Eye, Will and Grace, and any other attempt at defining "gay" not as "sexually attracted to/involved with men exclusively" but as "fashion-savvy and loves spending time with women." The latter - the women part - is especially problematic, because if anything, gay men have less interest in spending time with women than do any other segment of society. Much of their time can be and often is spent in an all-male world, where they can find both possible romantic partners and friends of the same sex, the two of which cannot be combined for straights. However, perhaps because gay teens often have a bunch of female friends, there's this idea floating around that gay men love-love-love women, enjoy their company more than straight men do, and want them for everything short of intercourse. But why on earth would this be the case? Of course there are individual gay men who connect for any number of reasons with individual women. And of course there are certain professions where women and gay men meet in great numbers. But once the threat of high-school bigotry subsides, does your typical gay man want to spend his time surrounded by females? That's not my sense.

So while I doubt that there's a movement of women out to 'adopt' gays as their friend-pets, I do think there's a general misunderstanding out there about how gay men relate to women. Anything that helps clear this up...

The frump-skank dichotomy

I'm pleased to see the why-is-there-no-place-in-fashion-for-breasts issue addressed, even if I'd have addressed it slightly differently. We're used to hearing that the problem with the skinny-model phenom is that it makes women, particularly heavier women, feel bad about themselves, and then to hearing someone else pipe in that we shouldn't be encouraging obesity, and then someone else will say that beauty comes in all sizes, and so goes the discussion. But even if we remove from the discussion issues of self-esteem, overweight, and the well-being of the models themselves, there's one rather striking problem with models being built as they are, given that their job is to show women an idealized version of how they themselves might look in different clothes.

Let me explain. The great challenge of getting dressed for the day, beginning at give-or-take age 15, is adjusting to a post-adolescent build. One is accustomed to looking for clothes that fit one body, then suddenly must find clothes that fit another. Every shape presents its own challenges, but a common situation for women with breasts and/or hips of any noticeable size is as follows: too-baggy clothes produce frump, too few or too tight produce skank. Many of us were as children built similarly to today's models, which is precisely why seeing clothes on those models is of no use to us once we're old enough to buy our own clothes. In something too low-cut, models' busts are not bursting out inappropriately. In something baggy and androgynous, their breasts and hips are not tenting out the material to produce the visual effect of a ninth-month pregnancy. This, and not (just) what I said earlier, is why the whole 'let's take our fashion tips from off-duty models!' fad is such nonsense. Look one by one through those outfits and try to imagine each on a woman whose physique doesn't give everything an ironic, avant-garde interpretation.

What's crucial here is that not all the discussion of 'curves' and 'real women' is a euphemistic one about overweight. Clothing is not marketed to or designed for heavier women, agreed, and agreed that often, the heavier the woman, the more difficult the relationship with the fashion industry. But clothing isn't marketed to or designed for thin women either. (See Amber's description and linked photos of Lady Gaga's physique for an example of thin as it exists in the everyday spectrum of women's builds.) As clothing exists, evening gowns and bikinis aside, breasts get in the way. Is an idealized woman's body one without breasts or hips?

All of this leads to two possible conclusions. One, the 'frump-skank' dichotomy is itself nonsense, and rather than being disturbed by clothes doing the 'wrong' things with our curves, we should just wear whatever we want, bursting cardigan buttons be damned. It is The Media making us believe that sheer tops or menswear-inspired pants-suits only look appropriate on the shockingly tall and thin. Flattering is a construct! (Amber's desire "to run around in a PVC bodysuit with a rooster hood, or no pants with giant hoof-heels" is matched by my own, equally radical one, which is to just wear a button-down shirt, no sweater over it, without even a moment of self-consciousness). The other is that 'flattering' is not in fact a myth, but that some trickle-down effect makes it so that even non-designer clothing is made to best flatter a body type that is, yes, 'real' in its own right, but highly unusual among grown women, even slim ones.

Towards a better definition of envirosmug

I was about to write my most non-libertarian post ever, demanding that the government step in and demand good environmental behavior so that it's not left to the consumer, who will either do a bit of the right thing with a hefty dose of smug or, turned off by the smug, proudly swing plastic grocery bags from the sunroof of his SUV. (Assuming SUVs can have sun roofs?), leading, apparently, to crankiness and marital strife, but then found that this rant's been written.

So, while I endorse Amanda Marcotte's post (not that PG, say, couldn't locate a turn of phrase in it that turns out to be shockingly questionable - I didn't read it that closely) I would only add that there's a bit more to the smugness question. Marcotte claims envirosmug is only something imagined by those who feel guilty about their own behavior. That's not how I see it. As long as the more important environmental choices are left to the individual, certain individuals (who manage to cluster at various Whole Foodses where I sometimes shop) pat themselves on the back just a teensy bit too enthusiastically for whatever it is they do that (most visibly) helps the environment, while conveniently ignoring whatever it is they do not. When I think "smug," I'm picturing not a vegetarian or a cyclist, but someone who carries a tote with one of those "I care" logos, filled perhaps with the odd "I care" product, into the SUV to drive the four blocks home. Or someone who takes the time to lecture Mark Bittman that tomatoes are out-of-season, when all the man is trying to do with this particular recipe is to encourage people to a) cook at home, and b) try a meal without meat. As I see it, government intervention here wouldn't be about bringing the 'bad' in sync with the 'good,' but simply removing self-presentation from the equation, sort of like if the cost of a 15% tip were included with the price of a meal. Sure, some could do more, but doing just a little bit would no longer feel to anyone like heroism.

On effort, visible and hidden

Paul Gowder asks: "What is 'trying too hard'"? I answered, "Trying too hard, in any context, is when the effort is visible." While I like how I phrased this, I'm not sure if I agree with myself on this one.

Paul is right that visible effort can, in some cases, contribute to, rather than detract from, results. There's truth to the adage that 90% of life is showing up. Most everyday and workplace conflicts are best resolved by showing that you're taking a task at hand seriously, and indeed by taking the task seriously, whatever the results. Students will often ask - implicitly or explicitly - for an improved grade by pointing out how hard they worked on an assignment, in the hopes of that elusive 'A for effort'. Futile, one might think. But a classmate of mine in college issued this complaint and got her grade raised, thereby leading me to lose confidence - temporarily! - in the educational system.

In fact, visible effort often serves people well in situations one would expect it to do the opposite. A situation fellow UChicago alums know all too well: the kid who declares, whenever tangentially relevant, that he is an Intellectual. He might even wear a Blazer. (For whatever reason, women do not go in for this.) One would expect those who announce their braininess to fail academically, yet often enough, they succeed. Such men are not lying about credentials or inclinations, but are merely discussing them openly, whereas some people might be more inclined to discuss their plans for a new pair of ballet flats than their dissertation topic unless otherwise prompted. Insert gender analysis here, but not all intellectually-inclined men are of this type, so gender isn't everything.

As for trying too hard in the context of dating... Part - most - of what's understood as 'trying too hard' is when someone adopts the opposite of the clichéd expectation of what their gender is supposed to want from a relationship. Meaning, women who come on strong re: hopes for marriage and kids on the first date don't impress, nor do men who ask for sex immediately and with no segue or anything, even when the man wants to settle down and the woman wants some fun that evening, simply because tired insistence on scripts reads as dull. But! Women who offer sex 'too' soon (or who hint at this with an over-the-top sexy outfit, references to a complete lack of interest in 'a relationship', etc.), and men who announce an interest in commitment and things domestic before a 'reasonable' time (or who hint at abilities as a provider through discussions of how well their accounting firms are doing), are seen as trying too hard to please. Here, trying too hard is a problem because it's not directed at an individual, just at a script which the other person may find irrelevant. The turn-off is not so much the effort as the fact that the effort is designed to please A Man or A Woman, as opposed to a particular man or woman. The 'trying too hard' is an effort not to impress, but to be generically impressive. Visible efforts to impress a particular person, assuming that person is somewhat interested, have to go quite far to be deemed creepy; even the slightest visible efforts to impress generically tend to seem excessive.

Against 'slow'

It's not slow-food. It's slow-everything. I'm suspicious every time anyone asks us, as a society, to slow down. It is my suspicion that those who ask for 'slow' are simply out to get New York - perhaps Jews specifically, perhaps gays specifically, but at any rate, something along the lines of the first quote on this page. So am I surprised that Mike Huckabee has not only written a book on Christmas but one that apparently asks us to slow down its observance? No, not so much.

(Are there non-bigots who simply fantasize about living in a cobblestoned past? Sure, but if they don't specifically acknowledge the parts of that past that were not charmingly dedicated to finding new uses for kale, then they're part of the problem. Or, what Travis Boyer says.)

You only think you like it

An ever-increasing range of behaviors - shopping at outlet malls, eating fried foods - are constantly being classified alongside the usual canon (alcohol, tobacco, and the hard drugs) as not just 'enjoyable to certain people', but as something far more serious: they are responsible for stimulating the pleasure centers in your brain. Neurotransmitters are, it seems, involved. This is serious.

Wholesome undertakings - exercise, helping old ladies cross the street - are also periodically declared to not only be good, but to stimulate the bits of the brain that make us happy. But when the act in question is one we ought not to like, the brain chemistry is presented as somehow sinister. There is on the one hand what we actually like, and on the other what our brains are tricking us into thinking we do. As though on some fundamental level, we would all prefer a lifestyle of locavore Mormonism, if only some mix of peer pressure and sneaky neuron behavior did not fool us into believing otherwise. As if there were a more authentic form of enjoyment beyond what's known or will soon enough be known about brain chemistry.

Against 'naturally thin'

Having made the case against 'natural beauty', I'm going to attempt the same with regards to the concept of 'naturally thin,' a subset of the category already discussed, but one that poses its own set of problems.

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Every women-oriented thread about fashion models, once it passes the 'she should eat a cheeseburger' stage and the 'eating disorders are no laughing matter' one, includes someone pointing out that for all we know, many of these models are 'naturally thin.' Some people are just built that way! Who are we to judge?

This brings up the question: what is 'naturally thin,' anyway? Sometimes it's presented as including all thinness resulting from healthy or moderate measures (salad versus fries with dinner, yes; cocaine and bulimia, no). But, as it's usually understood, 'naturally thin' refers to any and all thinness not the result of intentional dieting or weight-maintenance. A woman who is naturally thin, the thinking goes, simply can't gain weight. Even if she wanted to. But why would she, now that even those famous pockets of the world where fat was considered desirable are giving way to pro-thinness norms? Which brings us to the problem.

So, here's my theory: despite the popularity of the expression, there are almost no 'naturally thin' women walking around these days. Moreover, the expression, 'naturally thin', misused in 99% of cases, should be abandoned, because it does more harm than good. Here's why:

1) There is no such thing as 'natural' food consumption in our society.

The 'naturally thin' woman is thin despite her 'natural' approach to food - eating what she wants, when she wants, without intentional restriction. A 'natural' approach to food is free of neurosis - no binge-eating out of anxiety, but also no choosing the salad over the fries if the fries appeal to you more. Alas, if you have an uncomplicated, eat-when-you're-hungry attitude towards food, you're far more likely to be overweight, given the availability of food today, not to mention the existence of foods specifically engineered to be extra-tasty and extra-fattening, than were your equally non-neurotic predecessors. A healthy attitude does not necessarily, in this case, lead to physical health, and only rarely leads to thinness. Making a conscious choice to eat foods marketed as 'natural' (or Pollan/Waters/Bittman-approved) might have some advantages, but it is not eating 'naturally'. What would natural even be, anyway? What people ate in 1850? Cavemen? Where would we draw the line?

2) The 'naturally' emaciated are often naturally not-big, but are rarely naturally as thin as they appear before you.

This is to answer the question re: models, the one so preoccupying women everywhere. My point here isn't that models would be average-sized if it weren't for eating disorders, or that all women, if they didn't watch what they ate, would be overweight. There are certainly women who, eating only pastries, are small. Call these women the naturally not-big. But 'naturally thin'? It's been known to happen, but above, oh, age 11, there's not a lot of it going around. Yes, models are young, but not that young. They look prepubescent not because they are in fifth grade - in most cases, they're not - but because they are paid to take their naturally tall and thin bodies (remember, I admitted that some women are naturally thin, just exceedingly few, but models are among those few) over the border into emaciated. Of all models, there are, again, surely some who are just 'like that', but if the level of salad-and-cigarette consumption by this demographic around Union Square West is any indication, that's not the usual situation. Point being, it's not that models aren't naturally thin, or that we're all just one eating disorder away from looking like a model (we're not), it's that they aren't, generally speaking, naturally that thin.

3) Much like 'natural' beauty generally, 'natural' thinness is used to describe the opposite.

Just as various allegedly subtle shades of eyeshadow and the like are marketed as 'naturals', Google "naturally thin", and you'll find a wide array of diet books and websites with that title. Which seems strange, given that by definition, 'natural' thinness can't be gotten from a diet book. What these programs appear to have in common is that they are all being marketed as alternatives to diets. Given that diets are rarely referred to as such by those selling them, this is unsurprising. But the programs promising "natural" svelteness go further. And, as with the makeup-free Elle France cover, the decision to switch from calling diets 'diets' to calling them 'anti-diets' gets called heroic by those incapable of realizing that nothing has changed. "Thank god. I am so tired of dieting books!," writes one commenter... who goes on to list two diet books she likes, and a third she intends to buy.

4) Of those who are indeed naturally very thin, 'naturally' as in, without intentionally restricting calories, there's a good chance what's keeping them that way isn't something you'd want.

Dire poverty, stomach ailments, life-threatening illnesses, serious drug habits, or an inability to eat enough when depressed (depressed, in this case, about something non-weight-related), these are not things anyone looking for a way to shed those last ten pounds is signing up for.

5) As with other forms of 'natural' beauty, 'natural' thinness is about a posture of effortlessness, not about an actual lack of effort.

No one wants to be 'that woman' at lunch, admitting that she's ordered a salad because she doesn't like the way her hips spill out over her jeans. Which is why so many extremely thin women claim they are 'naturally' the way they are, as thought the basic calories in - calories burnt formula does not apply to them. Thus the clichéd interview with a model, in which she makes a point to eat, say, a cheeseburger, so that the interviewer can comment on how genetically blessed this woman must be. Yet very thin women often do eat tiny amounts, even openly so, for reasons they attribute to health (convenient allergies to all densely caloric and tasty foods, perhaps alongside a 'fitness'-inspired daily 20-mile run) or to morality ('I'm not eating this cake, not because it's fattening, but because eating animal products hurts the environment!'). It never comes as an immense surprise when someone with a thinner-than-model physique turns out to be a vegan. (I am, however, always shocked to see vegans who are any size other than emaciated. What, other than Camembert, are these people consuming?) Women in Category #5 thus pretend to be in Category #4, thin despite their best efforts otherwise, leading to some, but not many, truly ambiguous cases. Further confusing matters, 'naturalness'-wise, there are women thin for reasons of health or poverty who still watch what they eat for getting fat. But, the thinking goes, you're allowed to be particular about food, but only if it's for a cause more noble than your attempt to go from a 4 to a 2. (A hint: the quickest way to go down a dress size is to try something on at H&M, then go try on a similar item at the Gap. Much better than worrying all waking hours about your weight.)

If I'm against 'naturally thin', it's not quite for the same reasons as I came down on 'natural beauty'. Here it's really about the fact that the myth of 'naturally thin' both dangerously ignores the inordinate amount of time and energy women waste on weight-related fussing, something that we really should address, and at the same time valorizes a total lack of concern about what we put into our bodies, as though a 'natural' approach is a sign of superiority, the model who eats cheeseburgers winning out over the cheeseburger-eating woman of normal size, as well as the salad-eating model. Because, if this makes any sense, we should care what we eat, just, you know, not too much.