French Jews, French tips UPDATED

-Have questions about French Jewry? I have thoughts. A short version, and a long one; a mid-length one is in the works. Much as a stopped clock is right twice a day, an obscure research topic proves to have broader significance once in however-many news cycles.

-And back to your regularly-scheduled deep thoughts: Philip Galanes seems awfully confident "that hair dye and eighth grade do not mix." He OKs dress-up that involves a wig, but tells a letter-writer to turn his or her 13-year-old daughter's interest in going blonde into a discussion "about depictions of women in society."

I know it's very much the thing to be outraged whenever girls' parents allow them to express traditional femininity, and all self-expression-through-appearance apparently counts as such. We're supposed to lament the era when gender roles and the desire to primp and all that sort of thing managed to hold off until 16 (or 30?). When young boys and girls alike played in the dirt, explored in the woods, built those proverbial forts that so epitomize the ideal childhood. Why can't kids just be kids?

(I see that I repeat myself, but I really do think part of this is the concept of "virgin hair" - as if something sexual and adult happens when hair color is changed. Which... no. It's just hair, and however you dye it, it grows back your natural color.)

While I do see the skepticism surrounding a world in which young children feel entitled to expensive beauty treatments (and professional hair dye, at least, is a splurge, she writes, having just splurged on some), eighth grade seems exactly the right time to be experimenting with at-home Manic Panic, weird nail polish, etc. If not then, when? There's this brief blip of time when you're old enough to want to do such things, but too young to need to look office-appropriate.

Maybe, then, the issue is helicopter parenting. It seems inconceivable today - but didn't in my day - that kids might be bleaching or dyeing their hair unsupervised. These days it would almost have to be at a salon. And salon means the resulting look will be a tasteful, pretty look rather than the kind a 13-year-old could very well have in mind.

UPDATE

Re: helicopter parenting, there's quite the thread here, of commenters recalling their own "free range" childhoods. (So. Many. Forts.) What's frustrating about the comments is that they're each one presented as scrappiness oneupmanship, rather than as examples of how life just was, quite recently. ('My mother let me blow-torch the creme brulee as a toddler!' 'Oh yeah! Mine let me ride a motorcycle without a helmet while in utero!' I paraphrase but slightly.)

There's a huge divide, but it's not about seatbelts or curfews. It's not about today's parents being more fearful than earlier ones. It's about smartphones. It used to be impossible for parents to know what their kids were up to much of the time - even the kids whose parents tried to construct a panopticon out of guilt. Today, everything's documented, and everyone can be in touch at all times. It's become irresponsible not to use one of these devices. A constantly-monitored childhood was always the fantasy of some parents (we all had those classmates...), but is now the default.

"Seriously Spoiled on Long Island"

-Clickbait, outrage-bait, I should not be reading this, let alone the comments, where I of course began...

-Congratulations, parents who think hiking and volunteering are better activities for children. You have cultural capital that the spa families do not. This is not some sort of glimpse at the One Percent, nor even necessarily the richer 50%. You're not scrappier than these people, you just have better (that is, more upscale) taste. (See this exchange.)

-If a French woman explains that she learned as a young girl how to apply eye cream, or if a Korean woman speaks of having learned a 12-step skincare routine while still a child, it's this beautiful thing, and we the American women who used only Dial soap until college are to gasp in awe. But if this is 'merican girls getting facials, clearly the apocalypse has come. I'm with the commenter who says that this spa thing is at least better than parties for kids to go shoot guns.

-Referenced in the article: "Seriously Spoiled on Long Island." OK, technically the place is on Long Island, and called Seriously Spoiled. But still. If there were a "Seriously Spoiled in New Jersey," I might have to investigate.

-Maybe if all of these parents pooled the money that goes to spa treatments for children too young to know what they are (note: I'm 31 and not exactly sure what happens at a spa), those funds could go towards something noble, like trips to the hair salon for adult women who'd look a bit... refreshed if they actually went to the hair salon? Because that's much of what's at the root of the outrage, right? It's frustrating when young children go to a spa, or wear designer clothes, etc., and we may say that the kids are being spoiled, when actual spoiling is more about giving kids the things they ask for (which can, according to the article, be a spa day, so perhaps...). The issue is more that these are things adult women need to budget for, and it feels wasted on children too young to appreciate it.

-If the NYT Style section ever finds out how much Bisou's grooming costs, I'm screwed.

"Good quality children's literature"

-In principle, I'd like to be the sort of person who'd enjoy having lunch of roasted cubed acorn squash with arugula and farro, garnished with roasted seeds from said squash. (How frugal! How non-wasteful!) I'd like to be that person. But I'm not. Something about a lunch along these lines - its vegan-ness, or its absence of refined carbohydrates - made it feel like something that might go with lunch, but not be lunch. It tasted fine, but it was just sort of sad. It looked stunning, like something The Selby would photograph. Aesthetically, it worked. Nutritionally... I suppose it did, and that a grown woman with some modicum of vanity ought to enjoy something like this. But all I could think was how much better this meal might have been with a pasta-and-cheese component. Or something. It's not that I'm not someone who doesn't think it's a meal unless there's some meat, at least I don't think I am. But Nigella Lawson's chicken is now in the oven, and not a moment too soon.

-The latest in viral mommy-blogging controversy: a guide instructing non-parents what to buy or not as gifts for the children of friends and relatives. It's a pretty incredible piece of writing - intended for an audience, if not as large or critical an audience as it's received - in that it hits every possible hot-button note without the author's ever seeming aware of precisely why people are annoyed, this despite her active presence in the comments. Starting with her assessment of the two possible reasons someone might not have children: "Maybe it's because you haven't had them yet but plan to or maybe you like them when they belong to someone else but don't actually want your own." Or maybe... Where oh where to begin. (Fertility? Financial constraints? Not having found a viable partner nor wanting to be a single parent? Any number of personal reasons someone might not have shared with you, because they're none of your business? Gah!)

But then there's the premise itself - that rather than being unexpectedly surprised when random people who are not your children's parents buy them gifts, parents should feel entitled to this, and in a position to curate before the fact. There might have been a way to provide the same 'service' here - because it is baffling, to me at least, what to buy for young children, especially since moving away from Park Slope, where there was always a store within a few feet that specialized in this very shopping conundrum - that didn't involve chastising people for having the nerve to buy the wrong thing.

The list also demands a kind of hilarious time commitment on the part of someone whose children these are not. One is instructed to purchase "[g]ood quality children's literature," described as follows: "Go for award winners, classics or current bestsellers. Read it 6 times in a row and see if you still like it. Remember that we're going to be reading these books over and over and OVER again, so make them ones that every age will like." Time and pedagogical training that people simply don't have. And the suggestion that as a gift, you take someone's children "to a movie, or a museum, or an amusement park" is quite possibly why the word chutzpah was invented.

No overshare, though. Elsewhere on the same blog, yes, including the dreaded bath-and-potty realm, but not in the post I've linked to.

For non-blonds UPDATED

By now, everyone's seen the story of the blonde girl found in a Roma home. Commenter Quasimodo asked for my thoughts, which I started getting into in the comments, but this may merit a whole entire post of its own:

-Let's please not start assuming blond children of not-blond families are somehow suspect. This, for so many reasons. Such as: Adoption happens across ethnic lines. Lots of light-haired children grow up to be dark-haired adults. Police of the world, don't start swooping in and removing blond children from families to which they belong.

UPDATE: Too late, via.

-There isn't some great, global 'blondness belt' where everyone's rich, extending from comfortably socialized Scandinavia to New England WASPs, Southern belles, and California surfers. There's also this little thing called Russia. (Closer to home: Appalachia. Also: the "Gypsies" of Ireland.) Other Eastern European countries as well. This matters in terms of how we try to make sense of this incident. It's being discussed as if there's obviously some Western middle-class or wealthy family whose missing child this is. When the full story may - in any number of ways, some more upsetting than others - relate to the family of origin being poor and desperate. Of course, there could well be an impoverished Russian family whose child was abducted, or a rich British one, say, who for some reason dropped their baby by the doorstep. But point is, 'blond' doesn't say as much about socioeconomic or global origins as we might think.

-We don't want to overshoot the mark and start talking about the privilege of abductees who happen to be pretty blonde girls. Abducted is still abducted, and is still unthinkably worse than being dark-haired and/or plain in the comfort of your own home. Same deal if the abductee comes from a well-off family. This came up (where else?) in a Jezebel thread about Elizabeth Smart, with commenters debating whether maybe the real message of the story was that access to services for the abducted isn't as equal as we'd like. When something truly horrific happens to someone rich, it's still horrific. It's not as if being abducted from your childhood bedroom at knifepoint by a deranged would-be cult leader and getting raped by him and abused by his wife is an ordinary poor or working-class experience, either.

-Every time a minority is accused of refusing to integrate, I get suspicious. Are we sure it isn't that the majority won't have them? This, in response to anti-Roma bigots who - like everyone who's been to a European tourist destination - has a story, but feel compelled to extrapolate from that story that they were mugged or near-mugged not because Roma have no other options in some areas, but because they're just like that. When looking at issues of integration, what matters isn't just whether the government has some plan in place involving schooling or who knows. It's also how a minority's received socially.

-Can we please not make this a discussion about how those terrible, selfish Jews insist on claiming that they were WWII's only victims? Who exactly are the Jews not aware that Roma, gays, and the disabled also had the Nazis to contend with? Or aware but denying this? I'll grant that what we learned in Hebrew school or whatever might have been about roundups of "Gypsies," so there may be some misuse of terminology, if no more among Jews than the general population. But really. It would be nice if, every time the Roma came up, anti-Semites didn't come out of the woodwork to hold forth on how Jews think they're so special, with their fancy Holocaust. On behalf of The Jews, I'll say that what we don't appreciate is when other aspects of that period of history are brought up in such a way as to deny the Jewish experience. As in, without an 'actually Jews didn't have it so bad' angle tagged onto the discussion of the suffering of other groups.

-While this really doesn't have anything to do with Jews directly, it does bring to mind the blood libel. Not that this couple was falsely accused of having a kid they hadn't officially adopted (that may be right), nor that they were at all accused of planning to serve the kid for dinner. (They do stand accused, by Internet commenters, of prostituting her out, based on no particular evidence as far as I can tell.) But just this idea that there's something particularly squicky about a blond child being lost to the blond community, and something particularly nefarious going on in the non-blond population.

"Occasional"

Pamela Druckerman, the woman behind the book (books!) telling Americans how to have well-behaved, vegetable-eating French children, has written a guide to taking the kids to Paris. It contains amazing advice, everything from "where to find a potty" to "Paris is not a den of anti-Semitism or adultery." (But what to do when the potty contains lewd and anti-Semitic graffiti? Apart from hope that your child can't - yet - read French.) There's advice on how to get food for picky eaters, which... isn't that Druckerman's thing, that children need not be picky eaters? And then she suggests McDonald's?

She doesn't let up entirely, though: "Croissants and pain au chocolat are of course on offer too, though these tend to be occasional treats for French children." What what what? If you're in Paris for a week (or, ahem, a semester), damn straight you're eating croissants every morning. That's your "occasional" right there - that you don't actually live in France. Find some other road to cultural immersion that doesn't involve pastry deprivation.

Or you could go the more ascetic route, as one father advises: "One thing that proved helpful was buying a fresh baguette in the morning when we left the hotel and breaking off pieces of it for them through the day. They were quite happy with that and a bottle of water."

Tights for boys

-Inspired by the recent tragedy in Bangladesh, the Guardian has provided a list of places to find "ethically, locally, lovingly made clothes for babies and children," because what is a factory collapse if not an excuse to luxury-shop, and why wouldn't we assume ethical (or greenwashed) clothing producers genuinely love your child. It's an amalgam of causes - anti-materialism (one also learns, in a disclaimer, that it's also OK to buy less), gender-progressivism (one must now dress one's children in gender-neutral clothing? what happened to the good old days, when one could simply love and accept children who wish to crossdress?), and heaps upon heaps of old-fashioned (but thinly-disguised) let's-go-buy-expensive-stuff-and-distinguish-ourselves-from-the-commoners.

Pardon the cynicism, but for whatever reason, this gets to me. The factory collapse story just keeps getting worse, but shopping for organic cotton "tights for boys," while probably not contributing to the problem, most likely isn't fixing it either. What probably needs to happen - and I believe commenter Britta and I have both already addressed this - is, things need to change in how clothing is produced-relatively-cheaply abroad, things that will somewhat-but-not-drastically increase the price of that clothing.

-On the topic of kids these days and materialism, another Guardian piece takes on the new phenomenon of fancy-schmancy children's parties. "As a child, when I used to go to birthday parties – which wasn't often – I might take a card. I would then get sandwiches, crisps and lemonade and play a few party games." Times have changed. Or... have they? This topic was deemed timely for a 1964 U.S. television audience. How I know this...

An Easter Monday-not-April-Fools post

There's a certain branch of Judaism that consists of one principle (no, principal! thank you commenter-copy-editing) tenet: the non-celebration of Christmas. Every other rule can be broken (or, more likely, not known about in the first place), but come December 25, no tree, no "merry," no nothing. Realistically, for secular non-hermits, there will be a certain amount of cheerily acknowledging others' celebration of the day, but you yourself need to openly not partake. Depending how strictly you non-observe, you may not even feel comfortable doing 'Jewish Christmas' - the Chinese-food-and-movies approach.

What's always fascinated me about Judaism-as-non-celebration-of-Christmas is that it doesn't seem to extend to other Christian observances. Specifically, Easter. I remember dyeing eggs - and at home, not at the behest of some outside entity trying to impose Christianity on unsuspecting Jewish children. And I remember a lot of Peeps. Easter just never meant anything to me either way. 

And why was that? Like Christmas, it pops up alongside a Jewish holiday, and there, the two are actually somehow related. And the religious significance of Easter is if anything more Christian than Christmas - as an atheist Jew, I believe Jesus was born, but not that he (or anyone) was resurrected. Historically, a brief search suggests there were pogroms on Christmas as well as Easter, so this doesn't seem to be the determining factor. The obvious: Christmas is the much bigger secular-Christian holiday. It's the soundtrack to your life from Halloween on every year whether you observe it or not. Easter, not so much. 

Well! Times have changed, or maybe I've been oblivious, but now, Judaism-as-non-celebration-of-Easter is also a thing. Via Facebook, I came across Ari Kohen's post about Easter and majority-religion privilege. Which led me to his earlier post bringing attention to another post: by a Jewish mother, PJ Feinstein, unsure of whether to donate $1.99 worth of plastic eggs to an Easter-egg hunt at her child's daycare. 

I recount this with the chronology in which I came across these posts, to recreate my own thoughts on the matter. First, re: Kohen's post on "privilege," I thought, yes, this does address why 'what's the big deal?' is a pathetic and even offensive response from members of the majority to complaints of a minority. Of course, the word "privilege" is 100% guaranteed to elicit defensiveness (and if you dig into the responses, it does). Particularly when it's applied to Gentiles by a Jew - there's so much of a popular assumption that Jews are extra-privileged that remarks from a Jew about hegemony have a way of eliciting retorts about the % of Jews at elite colleges, the overrepresentation of New York Jews on sitcoms, the power of the IDF relative to the Palestinians, and so forth. It's difficult to convey how a group could be successful as well as marginalized, and to do so without resorting to 'look what happened in Germany,' which is, let's face it, the obvious retort. The word "privilege," though not inaccurate, doesn't necessarily help.

Then there's Feinstein's Easter-egg query. First, my vat-vill-dem-goyim-say? impulse is that it's probably Bad for the Jews to center a discussion around the spending-or-not of $1.99. I mean, I get that it's not about the money, and from the post itself, it's clear that the price is given to indicate precisely that. But those inclined to respond that Jews make too much of a fuss about everything are probably not going to see it like that. Anti-Semitism 101.

As for the substance of the matter, if this child is going to participate in an Easter egg hunt (as seems to have been a given), the matter's already been decided. How is participating and not paying better than participating and paying? How is that a principled objection to anything? And more to the point, it seems like my initial thoughts on this - Jews really don't care either way about Easter - may have been right: Writes Feinstein, "I viewed the egg hunt as something fun for the kids to do rather than as religious activity." Indeed. I personally don't care one bit whether Christians or atheists of Christian origin think Christmas, Easter, etc. are or are not holidays Jews should acknowledge, because it's not for them to say. But I do care what Jews think, and if Jews don't have a thing with Easter, it doesn't seem necessary to artificially impose the Christmas-thing on that holiday.

Goes around, comes around

Maybe these things are cyclical, because this doesn't feel entirely new, but it seems we've rediscovered that middle school is awful. A parent writes (anonymously) to the NYT parenting/mothering blog that her daughter is in seventh grade and doesn't want to go to school. Should she transfer? We're told much about the school and her academics, not why she doesn't want to go, which would probably give us the answer. Bullying? Transfer. Seventh grade is unpleasant? Stay put - it'll be over soon enough. 

Also cyclical: the re-re-rediscovery that diamond engagement rings, rather than being an essential fact of human sexuality, are - gasp - a cultural construction. Rohin Dhar at Business Insider has penned the latest exposé, although in 2007, Meghan O'Rourke brought us to about the same place. Dhar begins with what I'm going to read as hyperbole: "American males enter adulthood through a peculiar rite of passage - they spend most of their savings on a shiny piece of rock." Jewelry aside, is marriage how men these days enter adulthood? And are they really rendered so destitute by ring-purchases? His point -- "Diamonds are not actually scarce, make a terrible investment, and are purely valuable as a status symbol." -- is a mix of true and eh. Is anyone buying a diamond ring - or a pair of pants, or anything other than a stock or similar -- as an investment?  

As a rule, I like the idea of telling people that things they think they must buy are actually optional. And there probably are men out there who need to hear that the world won't end if they don't go broke buying a ring. But these revelations always come up short. Yes, marketing is a thing; companies want us to buy their products; companies mark up prices to turn a profit; and if we knew where just about anything we owned/ate came from, we'd be horrified. This isn't diamond rings. This is capitalism. This is why we don't all go around in potato sacks. (Diamonds are probably worse than sneakers, are definitely worse than quinoa, but might not be worse than other gemstones. It's possible to win at unconventional and fail at ethical.) 

And, allow me to repeat myself, but these revelations inevitably inspire comment threads of individuals explaining how non-sheep-like they were or will be in their own formation of government-stamped heterosexual unions made official when the man offers the woman a precious metal band with a gemstone in it. 

Meanwhile, marketing isn't everything. The human interest in adornment isn't unique to capitalist societies. Nor the human interest in symbols. The value of a diamond (or diamond-looking) ring isn't necessarily status, at least not in the way Dhar suggests. Some couples want wedding jewelry that looks like what it is. And we live in the society we do, shaped by forces, marketing and more, that preceded us - a diamond or diamond-looking ring of a certain shape says "nuptial." The stone doesn't have to be any particular size or authenticity for that to be the case. 

Personally - fine, on this topic, why not the personal - I'm not interested in jewelry, can maybe get it together to wear earrings, but mostly not even that. (Shiny ballet flats, yes. Sparkly nail polish, yes. Jewelry, never saw the point.) The only jewelry I wear, 99% of the time, is the symbolic variety, so yes, I like that it looks like what it is. 

Middle school and the neurosis of narcissism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had one more beauty-post in me yet!

-Autumn is back at The Beheld, I'm back just at WWPD. That was an exciting guest-blogging stint, and I'm so grateful to Autumn for the opportunity. And she's spot-on to bring up the "Girls" beauty-disparity kerfuffle. I didn't, on account of I'm still getting through Season 1, but I haven't been avoiding spoilers, and this was absolutely the beauty story of the moment.

-Sometimes a middle-aged man approaches a very young (13, maybe 14-year-old) girl to photograph her:

I first met [him] when I was in, like, 8th grade, and it was my first year at Coachella. I was just walking around with my friend and her older sister. Usually there are a bunch of photographers there always pulling people aside for fashion blogs or something— they’re always taking pictures. And I guess there was this photographer that pulled me over and he was like, ‘Oh, can I take a couple pictures of you?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, sure, why not?’ And after he gave me a card and walked away [...]

Adorbs! Not creepy, like the male street attention plain-looking middle-school girls such as myself received on a constant basis at that age. Because, you see, this was fashion, and the middle-aged dude in question was a famous fashion designer. This woman - sorry, girl, she's now 17 - is not underage. She's art.

-A final thought on women-and-male-beauty, before I retreat back into other projects entirely unrelated to this admittedly compelling topic: I agreed to let the Huffington Post reprint my already-controversial "too brilliant to bathe" post... realizing, as I did, that that post only really made sense in conjunction with my earlier post on male beauty. I hadn't wanted to repeat myself, but for things to work as stand-alone documents, sometimes doing so is useful. And... writing these posts, and reading the (coherent) responses, has left me with a more precise sense of what it is, exactly, that I'm arguing.

So. When I say that male looks should/do matter to women, what I mean is not that men had better race over to the gym. Nor do I think the problem is one of 'leagues' - that is, of women dating men obviously less attractive than they are, as in others would be able to see it. As a rule (and Autumn's post I link to above also discusses this), people tend to pair off long-term with those similar to themselves. Supermodels with supermodels, and so on down. Ordinary-looking men who believe they're entitled to supermodels are rightly mocked, as are conventionally-bad-looking/badly-groomed men who contend that on account of being "nice guys," they're owed attention from pretty girls-next-door.

But! We tend to respect that men will only be with women who appeal to them physically, and that most men will be attracted to a certain number of the women within their own 'league.' As one commenter at the Huffington Post expressed it (and I'd anticipated this argument at The Beheld), there's this sense that for relations to be physically possible, a man needs to find a woman attractive, but not vice versa. (This commenter helpfully explained to me the mechanics of heterosexual intercourse, thereby ending that mystery. Thanks guy!) That friction and imagination can make things possible ... this is I guess not immediately obvious. Regardless, whether considered in graphic or abstract terms, there is a popular belief that men need to be physically attracted to their partners, but that women have the capacity to come around. That female sexuality is basically about being looked at, so if the person admiring you does nothing for you, admired is admired, and that's good enough. (To those inclined to be skeptical of such assertions-of-the-obvious, Google "men are visual.")

There are a great many benefits to acknowledging that male looks matter. Most obviously, the joy of being with someone one is attracted to is substantial, even if contrarians will point out that not everyone cares about this, that some people are asexual, etc., etc. Oh, and one can also add that perhaps men themselves want to hear they're attractive. As it stands, men benefit from rarely being judged entirely on their looks, but the vast majority of men who are not perfume-ad models may be interested to hear that they're gorgeous to someone. This isn't about the what-goes-around-comes-around revenge of women judging men negatively. It's mostly about women judging men positively. But yes, some acknowledgement that women are looking, too, would probably involve a little more grooming-type effort on the part of men. Ideally not 24/7 effort of the sort unfortunately demanded of women, although moisturizer-marketing aside, I don't believe that's imminent.

But there are less-obvious benefits as well. Specifically, the rom-com/pick-up-artist notion that any man can persuade any woman to get involved with him romantically rests on the idea that no 'no' is ever definitive. The reason women tend not to pursue men in this way is in part that women assume 'no' means this man is not physically attracted and won't come around, or even if he did, who'd want to be with someone who didn't find her beautiful? If men understood that women, too, divide the world into physically-appealing-enough-to-be-a-possibility and no-thanks - and if women, meanwhile, refused to go on 'he's a nice guy' dates, or to go through the charade of not being physically attracted to guys they are physically attracted to, as though this would be some radical gender-role reversal and would amount to coming on to strong - then this might put a dent in the kind of quasi-creepy pursuit many women must contend with.

"Orders which must be obeyed"*

The best article ever: Kate Connolly of the Guardian reports on a coffee shop in Berlin that has banned, among other things, strollers:

Ralf Rüller wanted to create a sacred ground for coffee connoisseurs in the heart of Berlin, somewhere devotees of the bean could sip their brews free from distraction. 

This purist – not to say militant – approach to coffee-drinking extended to a long list of rules at his brew bar, the Barn Roastery, including a ban on extra milk, spoons, laptops, dogs, mobile phone ringtones, loud phone calls and "media" (apart from newspapers). Sugar is strongly discouraged. 

Nothing like a coffee shop with rules! But so many rules. And in Germany? Anticipating your thought, person-reared-on-"Seinfeld"-and-Britcoms - Connolly helpfully adds:

Before moving back to Berlin several years ago, Rüller worked as an actor in London where he often played Nazi soldiers in British TV war dramas. He says it feels as if he has been cast as the Nazi in his own coffeehouse drama.

Apparently Rüller is called a coffee Nazi in Germany, which will come as news to those who hadn't realized the culinary use of the term would be kosher-as-it-were in those parts.

But I don't know. It doesn't sound as if children are banned, just strollers, which isn't so out-there. And all the insane attention to detail? All the superior coffee? I think it sounds fantastic, not fascistic:

The staff, who come from as far afield as Australia and Mexico, include Rob MacDonald, a dairy farmer from Australia who claims his tastebuds are so refined he can tell what a cow has eaten from the flavour of its milk. "I love this artistic approach to coffee," says the 27-year-old, who as well as training to be a barista is – perhaps inevitably – learning to play the jazz xylophone.

And thus bringing hipsters-make-your-food to a whole new level.

*Ironic, I suppose, given how much the Barn Roastery approach to customer service reminds one of Fawlty Towers.

A feminist case for teachers' unions

The Internet is split over whether liberals/progressives should support the Chicago teachers’ strike. The pro-strike side has the more obvious case – you know, labor organizing. But the anti- has a clear-enough-seeming case as well: teachers in Chicago make on average over $70k, while their students come from poor or working-class families, and it’s those very students – Think of the Children! – who suffer when there’s no school. A lot seems to come down to whether you view teachers as entitled members of a cushy profession, or as underpaid-considering-their-education do-gooders who know better than our nation’s best-looking mayor what’s best for our schools.

To weigh in on this issue, one is expected to provide one’s own biographical position with respect to education. So: my father’s mother and mother’s father were both NYC public-school teachers. I myself have been known to teach a class from time to time, but as a grad-student adjunct, which both does and doesn’t tell me what it’s like for teacher-teachers. The public high school I went to was on the one hand an exaggerated version of a teacher-tenure disaster (teachers arrived, as I recall, based on seniority, so we got the very old, who were not always the very competent. What they’d won was, in effect, a chance to teach kids without discipline issues), and on the other, a place where it hardly mattered that the AP economics teacher conducted class by copying the textbook word for word onto the board. Most students would go to college – many to top ones – regardless. There were some great teachers, but no one was under the impression that what made the school special was overall teacher quality. Maybe that's since changed, maybe I'm far off, maybe the other economics teacher wasn't so hopeless, but that's how I remember it. Oh, and I was at private school for nine years, but my memory of 5-13 is spotty, and focused more on social interactions with peers than Miss or Mrs. Whomever.

With that out of the way, why "a feminist case for teachers' unions"? Teaching, as I've said before, and as Nicholas Kristof gives me reason to say again, is a profession with certain... particularities, ones specific, I think, to primary and secondary ed, and that dwindle once we're talking about educating the 18-and-up. For one, we consider it unacceptable that any child - remember to think of them, those children - would be in a classroom with any teacher not in the top X% of teachers. Logically, it ought to be clear why, no matter which reforms are enacted, some teachers will always be the worst, within each school, within each school system, but never mind that - it's truly horrible that there would be children - sweet, innocent children - forced to contend with less than the best. 

For another, our (popularly-accepted, not talking social science) scale for measuring good and bad teachers is matched only, I think, by how we assess open-heart surgeons. As in, mediocrity is tragedy. So on the one hand, we talk of the "bad" teachers who are just bad, who conduct class as an exercise in autobiographical monologue, who offer a final course grade of "B+" without any explanation of where that came from (no feedback throughout the semester), or, of course, who break whichever of the legal and ethical rules governing the job, and get written up in the Daily Mail Online accordingly.

For yet another - and these are all connected - we imagine that teachers do what they do out of love. Love not of the material, or conveying the material, but of The Children. That teaching - and this really doesn't carry over to university teaching - is a thin, ambiguous line away from parenting. The study Kristof likes to cite, about how a bad teacher means that students are more likely to get pregnant during high school, to not earn much at 28 (does grad school count???), etc., reinforces this notion that a teacher is more than a teacher, but basically a parent. And "parent" is a commonly-used euphemism for "mother." A bad teacher, a mediocre teacher, is, in some primal sense, a mother who's failed.

Teachers' unions - separate from the pros and cons of unionization in general - exist to remind us that teaching is a job. Without this reminder, the feminine, nurturing image of the work (which presumably impacts male teachers as well) would allow it to readily slip into that nebulous world of tasks for which it would be greedy to expect something so crude as monetary compensation. And this is a real danger especially in this day and age, when increasingly everything is an unpaid internship. If no structure were in place to make sure teaching didn't go that route, who's to say that wouldn't happen? What, you want rent money? That must mean you don't care about children, you cold-hearted you-get-the-idea. 

A reminder that teaching is a job is also a reminder that as with any other job, there will be top performers, weak ones, average ones, incompetent ones, and so on. It's great, I think, to have a conversation about job security, about whether the incompetent have too much of it, and about whether a so-so teacher ought to be fired or retrained. But unionization helps us remember that this is a job done by real human beings, and that however selective the profession becomes, there will always be some teachers who are not Robin Williams in "Dead Poets Society" crossed with the sweetest mom that ever there was. That rather than thinking only of the children, we should think of the teachers as well. 

Sick as a dog

Profundity may be even lower than usual here, what with Bisou's predictable-in-retrospect stomach woes. Sniffing around on enough sidewalks, under enough café tables, and she's probably consumed several large German meals, along with the usual goose poop she must be yanked away from. I have not once but twice pulled a surprisingly-not-yet-chewed French fry from her mouth. Her secret to weighing a mere 12 pounds: she follows the time-old women's-mag trick of just tasting. She had actually been, until yesterday, far more robust here than at home, but luck can run out.

As for what caused this latest bout, with a dog, how would you ever know? Did we walk her too much when my husband's family was in town, taking perhaps a bit too seriously our landlord's request that we never leave Bisou alone in the apartment? Like, maybe climbing to the top of the mountain to see the castle was too much for her? (Am I projecting?) Was it the shred of Grana Padano I gave her? Does it in any way relate to the little boy with what may have been slightly-chocolate-splattered hands who appeared all of a sudden and wouldn't stop petting her because it was just love between this child and Bisou?* Was it the Sauerbraten? (Ding, ding, ding!)

The only possible way to know for sure which substance(s) would be to bring the vomit to a lab, but given that she's made it since 3:45 am without emptying her stomach onto the non-absorbant part of the floor, that may not be necessary. It appears that what works for humans with this condition goes for dogs as well: water but no food, lots of sleeping, lots of giving sad, pathetic looks. Poor Bisou!

The irony is that yesterday, before this had started in earnest, we actually took her to the vet, but just for the pre-trip official checkup. The vet here is a "small animal" specialist, and some of the other patients are rabbits larger than Bisou.

Oh, and to continue on the dog-ownership-you're-doing-it-wrong theme, it's worth mentioning that guidelines vary in different countries, and even the basics (which medicines to give, when to sterilize) vary tremendously. Whatever we did at the advice of the vet and whichever domestic research is precisely not how it's done in Germany.

*Something to keep in mind if you're thinking of getting a dog, particularly one with some resemblance to a stuffed animal: young children will assume your dog is a stuffed animal, and more bizarrely still, so will some of their parents. And you'll want your dog to meet kids, but in a somewhat controlled way, like where you can have your dog sit, the kid can first put out a hand to be sniffed, that sort of thing. Which will be how it goes with kids you know, but on the street or in a café, this sea of tiny children are continuously approaching unannounced, only (on at least two occasions) to start crying when Bisou responds to their lunging at her in a taunting way with a bark. Bisou's not aggressive (as demonstrated most dramatically early on back home, when under similar circumstances, an unsupervised toddler began trying to hit her with a stick), but when a little kid makes like she's going to kick her (a girl at the Sauerbraten establishment), she's not the sort to just start slobbering lovingly. She absolutely has the capacity to seem startled. She is a dog, not a teddy bear.

Most kids at least kind of get what to do, though, and I'm inclined for Bisou to meet as many people, children especially, as possible. But sometimes I'm walking somewhere, or Bisou's digestive tract is doing its thing, and it just isn't the moment. And the kid and parent will look so sad, like I'm taking this teddy bear away from them, so I do usually give in, unless, you know, the inanimate object they're admiring has already arched her back. What strikes me as odd about these encounters is that there's a popular (mis)perception that people get small, fluffy dogs instead of having kids. Why, then, are the owners of small, fluffy dogs imagined to be people who want to spend more time than usual with the young children of random passersby?

Grows on trees

It's now accepted wisdom that modern children's ignorance as to where their food comes from is something in desperate need of a remedy. If your child thinks vegetables come from the supermarket or, god forbid, the freezer, this must be addressed. Leave it to the NYT parenting blog to provide the most extreme example: a boy who, because of his (lactose-tolerant!) Northwest European ancestry, must milk cows as some kind of feats-of-strength bar mitzvah, so that his mother can write about it, which is, of course, what coming-of-age rituals are all about. (There's a video as well.)

Anyway, I'm still not sure why knowing where food comes from is supposed to be necessary. A certain amount of this knowledge might come from a biology class (what a plant is, how plants make babies, and the inevitable sprout-a-seed project), but why do we need to know more about farm life than any other? Why do we need to know how crops are harvested? It's not that farm knowledge is damaging, so much as that there are so many other things kids ought to know more about, things that are actually applicable to their lives, that might be more useful. Farm Studies is fine, but not necessarily pressing.

Counter and counter-counter arguments:

-Everyone eats. But everyone also... you see where this is going. We don't expect kids to have intimate knowledge of the sewage system. Everybody breathes, but we don't insist that kids meet with air-pollution researchers. Everybody wears clothing, but I have yet to hear of school trips to the sweatshops of lower Manhattan.

-It's a good life lesson for children - especially ones from wealthy backgrounds - to realize that hard physical labor makes their lives possible. But is the work that goes into growing organic carrots so much more strenuous than whatever factory-workers who make processed foods go through? Do we need kids to know how their houses were constructed? Roads?

-Kids who've been educated about what it looks like when a tomato's on the vine probably have more sympathy for tomato-pickers. But again, there are plenty of crummy jobs out there, and we don't try to teach empathy by having kids do a day in the life as a home-care aide, a day in the life as a Petsmart janitor. More likely, kids will come to have a romantic, and altogether unrealistic, idea of where the actual food they consume comes from, and will then think it's horrible that any food isn't produced in such charming conditions... and will, in turn, not know how to tell the difference between good and bad large- or mid-scale food-production systems. There's a degree of artisanalness necessary to not be on the Twinkie diet, but it's a great deal less extreme than tiny gardens, backyard goat cheese experiments, and the like. No processing plant, however great it treats its workers, however splendid the food it produces, will have the charm of scampering bunnies and so forth.

-If kids know where their food comes from, better yet, if they've grown it themselves, they'll eat fruits and vegetables. If they eat (super-duper-local) fruits and vegetables, they won't be obese. Childhood obesity is a problem. Gardens are the answer. To this, I'd say that if kids enjoy gardening, it's certainly a whole lot better than a lot of other recreational activities thrown at them (unlike football, little risk of concussion). If I had the space (technically the rights to what is in fact a great deal of outdoor space), I'd go vegetable-garden-crazy. But I'm not sure about this as a nutrition fix for The Youth. Even if it works in the immediate moment, and the home-grown peas are consumed, will this make canned or even frozen peas - or, for that matter, home-grown peas grown by someone else - more appetizing? Where exactly are parents going to be procuring all these garden-fresh vegetables, enough so to account for the greenery on the nightly dinner plate? Meanwhile, to repeat myself for a change, it's incredibly unlikely that the presence of local, seasonal, home-grown vegetables is making the difference for anyone's weight. There's correlation, yes, but causation seems unlikely, when not terribly many garden-growing yuppies are in fact subsistence farmers, or are otherwise managing, via farmers market or CSA, to only eat local/seasonal/organic.

-So let's accept that it's inconsequential if your kid eats tomatoes all his life without ever learning what a tomato plant looks like. But it can't hurt for a kid to learn that ketchup comes from tomatoes, or more specifically, roughly what's done to tomatoes to get them to that state, right? But this is really just a nutrition issue, or more simply, a teaching-your-kid-to-cook issue. It's inefficient for everyone to be a farmer, but everyone does need to know how to cook, at least until the nutrition and quality of readily-accessible prepared foods increases tremendously. This is a basic-survival, be-a-functional-person thing. But it in no way requires agricultural knowledge. If your kid will only eat vegetables he himself has bought and prepared, that's at least sustainable. Only ones he grew himself, less so.

An only modestly outrageous proposal UPDATED

WWPD's legislative branch proposes the following: a law that would restrict what parents can write online or publish about their own children. (See Item 2 of this post for links.) Not as outrageous as it sounds. Hear me out, and try your best (ahem, PG) to set aside that this law would never ever ever happen:

As it stands, speech is not entirely free, and is restricted if it causes undue harm. We already have a category called "libel." And a parent's criticisms of a child, offered not to the child, not in private commiseration with fellow parents, but to the broader reading public, really should count as such.

We already restrict a great deal of what can be said online or in print about young kids. The very young themselves are not, in principle, allowed unfettered access to the Internet, and tend not to publish books or articles, even if no law prevents them from doing so. Their teachers will (or should) be fired if they go online to rant about Jimmy, a student in their seventh-grade English class, and how he was raised by wolves. These kinds of speech are not, I believe, protected.

But when the parents are the authors, it's different. Why?

For one thing, we assume that we're reading an essay not about Jimmy and his C average, but about the trials and travails of parenting a child who's not Yale-bound. We think that there's a value in parents sharing their experiences, and that there's no way for this to be done authentically without referring back to those specific experiences with specific, readily-identifiable children. We believe that it's brave for Jimmy's dad to have told his story, as if the story were purely his to tell. We think Jimmy's dad is doing this great service, one only he could provide. And we assume goodwill. He loves Jimmy, after all. Plus, Jimmy reflects on him. What's his incentive to paint Jimmy in a negative light?

Children, who are in a position of near-powerlessness regardless, are in a particularly great one with respect to their own parents. Let's say your father writes an essay for the Washington Post about what a dimwit you are, but using a tone intended to make him come across as a really wonderful parent who's done everything. What's your recourse? You're not guaranteed to grow up to be someone with a platform on that scale, and at any rate it'll be years until you've grown up, period. And these people provide the roof over your head and so much more. Parents are meant to be a buffer between their children and the wide world of people who do not love them unconditionally, who don't think they're brilliant and beautiful, even if they're not. By putting their children's lives on display, in particular their moments of weakness, they're failing their kids. Ironic, considering that we're meant to believe the parents with an exceptionally strong interest in "parenting" are the ones producing this genre.

We assume that adults have thick enough skin that they might be publicly mentioned in some unflattering way without being utterly shattered by the experience. But the bar is far lower when it comes to children, who can feel shamed and humiliated so much more easily, especially by their own parents. Your kid did something embarrassing? In the fiefdom of WWPD, you'd have to keep it to yourself.

UPDATE

Yet another reason parents shouldn't be allowed to write about their kids: Parents can (and often do) look at everything their kids do online, including messages they send and imagine to be private. So we have to assume that parents know not only embarrassing things about their kids that their kids know they know ('remember the time I had to come pick you up from school because your menstrual cramps were so bad?'), but also things the kids have every good reason to think are secret. A father might know that his son was rejected by a girl, because he's reading the kid's texts. He might think, 'Aha, a wonderful opportunity to share what it's like to parent a child going through his first romantic rejection.' And because we (for some reason) accept that it's OK both for him to be following his kids' texts in the first place, and to write articles about his 'parenting,' we see no reason why he can't 'write what he knows' in this situation.

Wax nostalgic

A Styles masterpiece, in keeping with the theme of the post below: a story about how girls - young ones! pre-high-school! - are now getting expensive salon beauty procedures just to look good for summer camp. Summer camp! The height of childhood innocence! S'mores and swimming in the lake! Now you need to get waxed for this? Civilization has ended!

The other, perhaps concurrent intended response is, a hairdryer or razor, fine, but in These Economic Times, when grown women must D.I.Y. their own maintenance, hundreds of dollars spent at the salon girls too young to even have their own babysitting money feels, well, unfair.

We're meant to be horrified, in other words, in two diametrically opposed directions. To think of the 11-year-olds being prodded at as both spoiled and child-abused, to envy their access to superior depilatory techniques and to compare favorably our own relatively rustic childhoods, when kids were kids, y'know?

Contrarian mumblings:

-Legs get hairy, get shaved. But the bikini area! Does this mean that girls now need to look like porn stars to fit in at camp?

Obviously not. I take "outer bikini area" to mean what's still technically a part of the leg, exposed when one wears even a relatively modest, one-piece swimsuit. And some people are really hairy there, which I'd imagine they might be self-conscious about if they're 11. Puberty hits girls younger and younger, so this is probably an issue for many; the desire to have this hair removed wouldn't be about wanting to seem older, I'd think. Body hair does not always conveniently show up at the age at which getting rid of it is generally deemed appropriate. There's nothing sexual-as-in-the-having-of-sex about the hairiness or the demand, on the girl's part, to have it removed. Sometimes a girl starts needing a bra at 11, this we accept (although if she were fitted for a $300 La Perla, there could be a Styles article about it). Some girls, some women, never need/want waxing, some never need/want a bra; technically no one need-needs either. But the horror the story is meant to provoke comes largely from that word: bikini.

-Isn't it tragic that girls at summer camp would worry about how their hair looks after swimming?

If you take a step back, you see that we're only supposed to be shocked about the permanent-hair-straightening treatments because the girls getting them, we might assume, are white. It's old news that many black girls arrive at summer camp - and wherever else - with chemically-straightened hair. White girls, on the other hand, are expected to be low-maintenance about their hair, at least during Innocent Childhood, certainly during Carefree Summer. White girls are expected to offer clueless remarks to black girls about how much of a waste of time it is to fuss with your hair, at camp. So high-maintenance, sheesh. When it's like, easy for you to say, if you have wash-and-go straight or straight-ish or Botticelli-ringlet-ish hair yourself.

The girls profiled in this article, as is not spelled out but abundantly obvious to those of us from the same community, are white and Jewish, and Jewish girls at Jewish summer camp have long been dealing with our quasi-political frizz. While keratin straightening, specifically, may be problematic for reasons entirely separate from the pride-in-frizz-or-lack-thereof of likely-Jewish adolescents, there are not-as-toxic ways of de-poufing hair, and it's neither new nor strange that girls at summer camp would have this concern. It's unfortunate that not all natural hair textures are celebrated equally, but the answer is not as straightforward as compelling the conformist 11-year-old (which is to say, the 11-year-old) to go around artifice-free. Especially when her mother does not, and thus wouldn't even know how to instruct her to style that natural hair texture except to straighten it. Which brings us to...

-Sure, adult women have their insecurities. But do we really want to be telling young girls that they're bodies aren't just fine the way they are?

Embracing the natural look - whatever that means - is something that for most of us comes, if it ever does, with time, with exposure to communities where whichever forms of artifice are considered gauche. (Only to learn that, in these milieus, the aspects of artifice that are enjoyable and not tied to a desire to conform are also, often, condemned as frivolous, but I digress.)

If we're thinking about 11-year-olds and their beautification requests in terms of preserving innocence, we're thinking about it wrong. By the time a girl demands the means/permission to address hairy legs or frizz, that particular innocence - which, again, we need to remember is something entirely different from sexual/romantic innocence - is long since kaput. If a girl, once self-conscious, is told to embrace what's naturally hers... by a mother who's waxed and coiffed, in a community where frizz and hairiness as good as don't exist, you can see how that girl would feel something other than pride in her ethnic-ness, hairiness, whatever. If this mother refuses to support her daughter's decision, this will be 2% noble protest against those standards, 98% making the daughter feel powerless, infantilized, miserable.

-If there's anything to protest here, it would be: a) cases where the impetus for follicular artifice - as opposed to merely the money facilitating it - comes from the parents/mother; or b) the fact that back in the day, girls taught one another how to deal with unwanted/unruly hair, and bringing parental supervision and adult-level funds into this might take away a different sort of childhood innocence, the one that's about Becoming A Woman. Maybe the mothers of girls are under a particular responsibility in terms of halting the proliferation of "necessary" beautification procedures. But this would need to change via their own choices first.

"The findings stated that 90per cent of Manhattan children are spoiled while 67per cent of children living in Brooklyn are as well."

It's official: children in New York are the most spoiled in America. Must be, because it says so in the Daily Mail. Measured by how much parents spend on their kids.

Which is, as I'm sure I've said here before, an oddly persistent definition of "spoiled," and one that rings utterly false when I think back to how things went among my peers when I was a young child, or to that which I've witnessed since. A child who's spoiled is one who's indulged and raised to be entitled. This means that the kid gets what he wants. Which will sometimes mean expensive stuff (video game consoles? Nike sneakers? am I dating myself?), but is essentially about control. Permission to do this or that, to have ice cream for breakfast, to talk back, to use curse words, stay out late, etc.

Meanwhile, parents who spend spend spend on their kids are often spending on things the kid is indifferent to (private school, if that's been the default since age 5 and the kid doesn't know otherwise; international vacations because those are the vacations the parents take, not because the kid necessarily prefers this to going camping) or ones the kid actively protests (expensive children's clothes are, or were when I was a kid, super dorky, not because it was cool to wear inexpensive clothes, but because the expensive ones always had that my-parents-made-me-wear-this look to them; bringing a lunch made from organic kale is not the status symbol at 11 it is at 41; going to a different tutor for nearly every academic subject, as some of my wealthier classmates would, is not something children themselves are known to demand). Sometimes spending on a kid is discipline, sometimes it indicates a lack thereof.

How civilizations end UPDATED

-At their new Manhattan branch, Montreal-themed Brooklyn deli Mile End lets you order an $18 deluxe sandwich platter to stay, but doesn't offer any seating whatsoever. No bar-stools, nothing. If coffee places can do this, why not giant-messy-sandwich shops? With coffee, at least there's the glamorous precedent (pretend it's Milan!), and at least you can sympathize with owners who have to deal with a clientele that thinks a coffee shop is a second living room. With smoked-meat sandwiches and matzo-ball soup, there's no precedent and no excuse.

-Someone, somewhere, thought that what was missing from middle-school dances were VIP areas.

-Here, some inspiration for how to dress for your unpaid internship. Save up enough from your $0 paychecks and you, too, might be able to name as your "summer must-have" the "Burberry Prorsum trench."

UPDATE

Or try the Louboutin "intern" flat.

Middle-school followers

I've written here before that I think one thing repelling many from the (primary and secondary) teaching profession is the expectation that every teacher be, well, a saint. I was reminded of this not long ago when listening to some public-radio podcast about the teacher who'd been fired for posting a picture of herself having a glass of wine on vacation in Europe. The incident itself was by then old news, but what was remarkable was how vigorously a guest on the program, in some position of power in this field, was defending the firing. The guest explained that even though the teacher's behavior was legal, as well as uncontroversial to many, teachers must be held to a higher standard, and it's up to communities to decide what that standard might be. If your community abhors alcohol consumption, a thimble of Champagne to mark your 55th birthday crosses the line.

Which is, I think, a deterrent to becoming a teacher, because who among us couldn't point to aspects of our own lives that are entirely legal as well as ethical within our own milieus, that some community somewhere in the country might think made us unfit to influence the youth? I'm not much of a confessional writer, nor does my married life in the rural edges of the suburbs, with the alcohol tolerance of an Ashkenazi sparrow, offer much in the way of scandalization-of-the-youth. But my coffee consumption - well-documented on the Internet - would cross the line for a devout Mormon community. A strict Jewish community probably wouldn't like that I'm an atheist married to a Belgian who, alas, isn't from the Antwerp shtetl. An anti-materialist hippie community might not like my Pinterest account. And so on. (I'm now thinking my tameness is underexploited unless I become a school-teacher, which is not my plan. Oh well.) 

Something along these lines, and yet not, came up in the latest question to Slate's Digital Manners:

[M]y sister-in-law recently requested to follow me on Twitter, but after looking at her Twitter feed, I denied her request.

The majority of her tweets consist of what I feel is inappropriate banter with her much younger brother and his friends, who are all in high school, swearing (sometimes very explicitly) and calling him inappropriate names. She also tweets a lot about how drunk she got and how hung-over she was the next day. The worst part? She’s a middle school science teacher and many of her students follow her tweets.  

This is of course a less clear-cut case than the wine-on-vacation-in-Europe one, and, for what it's worth, I agree with the Slate duo that this teacher's being an idiot. The teacher here is doing several things wrong, most glaringly having a personal Twitter account followed by her middle-school students, who probably shouldn't have Twitter accounts in the first place, let alone have this extracurricular connection with their teacher. Even if the Twitter account were just an informal online meeting-place set up specifically for the class, that in itself would be toeing if not crossing the line.

The stuff about the younger brother is less straightforward. What constitutes "swearing" is subjective (anything exceeding 'gee golly'?); "inappropriate names" even more so. But let's assume this refers to R-rated language. If the brother and friends are high school seniors, and not at the same school she teaches at, it would still seem that this is foolish behavior mostly because she knows her own middle-school students are reading it. If definitive lines here were being crossed - if she's flirting with her brother's 15-year-old friends, or expressing bigotry - presumably the letter-writer would have mentioned it. Even assuming none of that, bad judgement? Probably, but how bad - setting aside the question of middle-school followers - is hard to say.

Now. The drunkenness and hangovers. Whether a dozen drinks were downed, or whether bragging and exaggeration influenced the description, maybe not something to announce online. But even there, what if what's being confessed is a bit too much fun at a friend's wedding? (Remember: anything more than one drink for a woman is officially excessive, and it's entirely possible to get a hangover from even less than that, rumor has it.) It's easy to think of a thousand ways "drunkenness" might be alluded to without anything approaching the level of, say, a bad-boy chef's memoir of hitting rock-bottom. If the letter-writer is an abolitionist, any reference to non-sobriety is "Girls Gone Wild."

Where does this leave us? In a sea of ambiguity. What if whichever postings took place before someone decided to teach middle school? What if the students are following the account using pseudonyms, and the teacher, assuming no one on the site is underage, because the site doesn't allow it, posts away? What if - leaving the specific example of Twitter aside - with enough digging,  students are able to find out that a teacher exists as a person after school and on the weekends? While this teacher seems to fail on enough counts that her job might rightly be in jeopardy, it doesn't seem obvious where the line might fall, or whether a combination of good judgement and discretion would suffice.

I suppose the question we need to ask is whether tameness should be the main trait we look for in teachers. If not - if, past a certain tameness-and-discretion minimum, there are other qualities more important - something is presumably lost under the the-tamer-the-better hiring strategy. You might, if you're lucky, still get some hard-working and talented instructors, but you'd exclude a good many others, and valuable time might be lost to pursuits like making sure dress straps are thick enough.