"Bitches be crazy"

A while ago, I mentioned that Simon Rich had written one heck of a misogynistic humor essay for the New Yorker. The well-known problem with misogyny intended as humor is that there's no way to call it out without learning that one is a humorless feminist for not laughing along. More on that in a moment. In any case, I'd kind of forgotten about this, until I was out walking Bisou, listening to this week's live-taped Savage Lovecast. Special guest, Simon Rich. Reading one of the stories from his new collection. And which one? The very same one as had been in the magazine, the one about God having a girlfriend. She works in fashion, she's gossipy, needy, diet-crazed, and doesn't like it when he works late at his job, which is creating the world in six days, and thus kind of a big deal. But she's all, why don't you spend more time with meeeee, because that's how the ladies get, y'know? A stale set-up, with an original conceit. But because that's how it goes when one walks a dog in the middle of nowhere, I kept listening.

Anyway, re: laughing along, I probably did some of that, but I'm fully capable of laughing if put in front of an old episode of "Two and a Half Men." The bad-sitcom chuckle. Put me on an airplane and the bar drops lower still. Because of this character flaw, I can laugh at a joke about how women enjoy "lo-cal yogurt," just not in the same way as I laughed when Sarah Haskins mocked the yogurt-as-woman-feed phenomenon.

(This is all of it a separate phenomenon from appreciating great art that happens to have been created by a bigot, or that expresses bigoted views, an issue that itself needs to be divided between an understanding that everyone from back-in-the-day would fail at modern-day political correctness and a possibly different standard for that which is contemporary/recent. Rich is obviously talented, but this is not the kind of literature where that sort of thing applies. Contemporary literature where you are compelled to at least temporarily overlook bigotry, to me, means some kind of new insights or style or something. I could go on, but will save that line of going-on for my dissertation.)

This was my typically longwinded way of saying that there was that story, on a podcast ostensibly about being at the cutting edge of gender-and-sexuality awareness. Which seemed just odd. A term like 'heteronormative' doesn't even begin to describe the piece. And yet, not odd - very much of a piece with Savage's frequent portrayal of women as prim or naive killjoys. Savage reacted to the story/essay thing by asking Rich if, after reading this story (part of an anthology dedicated to said girlfriend), the author's girlfriend still performs oral sex on him. (Savage-speak for, 'she hasn't left you yet?') As in, Savage got that it was insulting, but what he did with that knowledge perhaps wasn't so helpful.

The podcast also included the usual advice component, and near the end, there was a question from a woman who knew she was a lesbian but wanted a second kid, and wondered if it was OK to stick around with her husband and only come out after having said child. Easy answer: no. But Savage answered instead with some enthusiastic, "Bitches be crazy," adding that when "bitches" want a baby, they're crazier still.

Here, I'm afraid my ridiculously low bar for finding something bad-sitcom amusing wasn't even met. I may have cringed slightly on account of Savage's painful attempt at sounding young and hip (even if he was possibly riffing off a Stephen Colbert routine?), or his ironic pose as a straight-guy misogynist, which we of course know is hilarious because Savage is gay and enlightened and does so much good (and he does!). Was it supposed to be OK within the context of a live performance that included a female dominatrix demonstrating something that must have made more sense not in podcast form? Whatever it was about, the "bitches be crazy" ending was just gross. But yes, it fit with the choice to have Rich read "Center of the Universe."

More thoughts on what this all means soon, perhaps, when the haze of the head-cold lifts, or bring yours to the comments.

"And I was like, ‘No, no, no—it’s for my skin.’"

There is something kinda bleak about a profile of an immensely successful, impressive, talented young woman that tells us not how she got where she is today, but what she eats. Not because it's superficial - I'm happy to hear about clothes-and-shoes, makeup routines, skin-smoothing snake-oils of choice. "Into The Gloss," when it sticks to the usual (fashion-industry women talking about which beauty products they use, and making gaffes along the way), is a lot of fun.

But ugh, what the Internet does not need is yet another 110-pound woman describing how a switch to cleaner foods led to her current sveltitude. OK, it's ostensibly a story about changing one's diet (in vain, we learn) to get better skin and accidentally losing weight in the process, and I suppose it never hurts to send the message that it's never too late to learn to like vegetables. And yet. As at least one ITG commenter astutely points out - it's going to be read as the story of how a woman lost 20 pounds by cutting carbs. In Jezebel terms, this would probably count as "trigger," if not necessarily, not intentionally, at least, "thinspo."

It's certainly an interesting piece of writing, though, with the ambiguity about whether all of this is or is not about weight. Short of serious illness (and at times even that), anything that causes a woman to lose weight, even a woman who is already thin, even a woman sufficiently thin that if she lost more weight, she'd look worse (remember that models are models because their faces can look good despite their thighs being that non-existent - most women, certainly past a certain age, can very well be too thin) is on some level about weight. Gluten intolerance, vegetarianism, mild food poisoning, stress- or busyness-related under-eating, and, evidently, a diet that's about clearing up acne, none of these need be about weight, but - as Edith Zimmerman certainly conveys, and as a less seemingly self-contradictory post wouldn't have managed -  it's never a value-neutral thing when a woman does. This is never not part of the equation, precisely because of the (internalized and usual) societal validation women get for losing weight.

The question, then, is how to deal with this. On the one hand, yay honesty. The more open women are about these pressures, the more the myth about there being some significant category of women oblivious to this will fall apart.

But on the other, we are not powerless against these forces. Once once we're aware of them, there are a range of possible responses, everything from gathering around the salad bar and confessing to having been "bad," to basically saying, yes, I live in a society that's like so, and I'm going to push such concerns as far back in my mind as possible, to the point of having only a vague recollection that they're out there. If you're someone who faces neither medical nor societal issues on account of your weight, be glad you have nothing to worry about on this front and find better things to fuss about. By all accounts you probably already have greater concerns - being thin or not-fat or whatever does not solve all of life's problems. (Read Rachel Hills here if you haven't already.) If you are someone whose life would benefit in some tangible way from losing weight, maybe do this, maybe not, but you too probably have more important things to focus on as well.

Crimes of fashion

Even though I'm not a lawyer, even though my "work" clothes are dissertation sweats, for some reason, I keep coming across the question (see the comments) of what female lawyers can and can't wear. This seems to be a subject of endless fascination for many in that profession. The limits seem both strict and contradictory: women must wear flat shoes, or must not. Suit jackets are de rigueur, or too masculine if paired with pants. And the great question of 'what to wear in front of a judge,' my goodness. One would think the 'judge' was there for the express purpose of judging not whichever case, but whether a dark red nail polish is or is not an acceptable choice for a lawyer to wear in court. (For the record, I could not care less what colors are permitted in this situation, so please, let's not make this a thread that.)

What does interest me, however, is what the appeal is of this genre. Is it simply that it's hard to sort out what the rules are, which produces anxiety, and this is not unlike forums springing up to address nervous  grad school applicants? Is this a Quinn-and-the-Fashion-Club thing, as in, are people getting sadistic joy out of pointing out the fashion crimes of their peers, all the more so when the "crimes" are things like wearing black instead of navy, or navy instead of black? Is it genuine fun for fashion-oriented women to figure out how to look chic while still obeying what some post about this somewhere referred to as the Talmudic rules of dress for female lawyers, the way some girls with a uniform will do everything possible to dress it up/down? Is there some kind of perverse thing going on, such that women who've entered a high-powered, still-gendered-male profession enjoy following the evidently quite sexist rules when it comes to the superficial? On this, enlighten me. But again, on the specifics of "business casual" versus "business formal," I already know more than I care to.

Venerable magazine reveals: women are like so

I'm not sure if Simon Rich's recent "Shouts and Murmurs" is offensive to women who work in fashion, but if you remove "who work in fashion," it strikes me as a reasonable - the reasonable - interpretation. Oh, yes, of course, it's in fact witty commentary on the kind of men who think they are more important than everyone else, who inevitably find themselves with women in the fluffy-and-low-paid-yet-respectable-and-readily-ditchable-upon-marriage professions. It's not meant to be demeaning to those women, or to women generally, but as a gently self-deprecating (this "Simon" being a dude, and New Yorker writer) jab at the kind of men who see themselves as Big Deals. It's skewering that attitude, not celebrating it, and only a humorless feminist - only an intellectual-lightweight woman, oxymoron alert! - would miss that level of nuance. The essay is a riff on God's creation of the universe, but God has this pest of a girlfriend who demands attention, and is into stuff like clothes and bitching about other women. But God has important work to do! A dynamic that might strike you as familiar from life, or perhaps from "I Love Lucy."

Read the delightful romp of an essay alongside the same issue's (subscribers-only) fiction, and you may find yourself wondering how the New Yorker came to devote its January 9th issue to the pressing issue of Men's Rights. John Lanchester's story about a banker (the protagonist Is The One Percent, it's so timely!) with a wife who's spoiled, parasitic, lazy, vindictive, entitled... you get the idea. He's expecting a huge bonus, she's expecting him to get this huge bonus, he doesn't because 'in these economic times' it's not happening, etc. Ah, but the story is in fact a searing critique of capitalism! Capitalism gets critiqued, whereas Woman isn't so much critiqued as dismissed outright. A frivolous, unpleasant nothing. The wife craves the finer things in life, and who complains that her husband doesn't get how hard it is to order around servants all day. Ah, but you want fiction to challenge, this is a story, and it's missing the point if you read it with an eye for the PC! To which I'd respond, if the New Yorker copied and pasted a long-ish rant from a misogynistic blogger, tightened up the language, and ran that, calling it fiction, would we give that the "art" out?

This could be the segue to other thoughts on feminism. On how the shift towards referring to "spouses" when what's really meant is "wives" both does and doesn't help matters. On how the feminist issue for upper-middle-class give-or-take sorts these days is less that women are kept from reaching great heights and more that women are spared, for better or worse, the sense that doing so is the only option.

But I will let you ponder this yourselves, and will instead add something entirely unrelated, tied to the above only in that this is also from stuff I read travelling to and from Tucson. Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Manor, which turned out to be such busman's-holiday in terms of the ol' diss., as well as too short to fill the amount of flight time I needed it for, includes a reference to a Jewish child in late-nineteenth-century Poland owning - get this - a pony.

America, 2011

I decided to trade sleep for a quicker, earlier train into New York. As you might imagine, it’s more popular to spend one hour getting into the city than two, so the train was packed. But more packed than I’d ever seen it – this was rush hour plus Christmas shoppers-and-tourists. Car after car, there were either no seats or families who managed to take up so much space with their stuff and food (who’d have thought fast-food bagels could have such an odor? I guess in a closed space, most food does) that the occasional one seat available would have meant crashing a jovial early Christmas party of perfect strangers with whom one has nothing in common other than living in but wishing to spend time away from New Jersey, and asking them to move their stuff to space that simply wasn’t there. Stuff ought not to take precedence over people when it comes to seats on trains, what with people and not stuff spending $33 on tickets, but it’s one of those things where you can make a fuss, but then you end up at the bottom of the avalanche of American Girl dolls, and standing starts to look like the way to go.

So car after car, same deal. I joined the horde of preppy types looking for seats, figuring that if a horde was looking, I wouldn’t find anything. I then see one prime aisle seat, not one of those no-window spots, facing the right way. I asked the man in the window seat if the aisle was taken, he said no, I sat down.

Now let’s think for a moment. Why was this seat free? No one in the general vicinity smelled or was eating anything. No one was projectile vomiting or visibly struck with a skin-eating bacteria. Yes, the man in the aisle seat was wider than he was narrow, but this is ‘merica, so was almost everyone else on the train. Yes, some of the horde was made up of families who wanted to be seated together and were holding out for a group of empty seats, but others were just the regular businesspeople. So what on earth could it have been?

Any guesses?

I’m going to speculate that the fact that this one seat was available has something to do with the fact that the man in the window seat was, unlike the others on the train, black. Dark-skinned, with dreadlocks in a ponytail. Otherwise utterly unremarkable, maybe 30, maybe 35, and spent the trip playing with his iPhone like all the other yuppies.

********

In other, less depressing, news from the world beyond the woods, my mother and I met a dog that was like a tiny Bisou - a dark gray toy, whose tininess really drove home that Bisou's on the gigantic side of miniature, the "medium" size poodles come in. As inevitably happens when dog owners connect, the question of provenance arose. No doubt because of this dog's similarity to Bisou, my mother asked if it came from a breeder. "We wanted to get a rescue dog," the owner began, and I figured, here it comes. Instead, what came was a "but." But, she and her family live in a very small apartment, and were not approved for one. Instead, they went with a "reputable pet store," and we learned what that means, and no, I'm not convinced it means anything in particular, but she seemed to have her story straight. I am convinced, however, that there are rescue promoters who take their work so seriously that they're going around telling people their apartments are too small for a toy poodle, a breed it's hard to picture existing anywhere but a small apartment.

"Professor [...] toured shopping centres in Europe and Israel, taking candid photographs of people with interesting noses."

Friggin' dissertation, always getting in the way of important things, like responding properly to an article about the "14 types of noses" and what they mean. Instead, I'm going to write up my response to Bourget's Cosmopolis, an 1892 novel about, roughly, the 14 types of noses and what they mean.

Bonobos in Paradise*

Uh oh. Now men finally know the secret, that during sex, women are thinking not about them, not about George Clooney, not about Carla Bruni, but about our evolutionary predecessors. (Or whatever monkeys are. If bonobos are even monkeys. Forgive me, I'm in the humanities.)

I realize that's not at all what the most-discussed article of the moment is about. As it happens, I have nothing worthwhile to say about the article, other than that this post title needed a post to go with it.

*Apologies to David Brooks, and Jo, whose phrasing it is, although he came up with it in a different context entirely.

A lesser kind of white

Amber's post just led me to Ta-Nehisi Coates's take on interracial dating. It's got plenty to think about, much of which Amber explores, but here's the part of his post that struck me, surprise surprise:

"Black women who oppose interacial dating have different reasons than most. I think it's closer to the manner in which some Jewish women must hate the idea of a Shiksa. But even that doesn't quite get it. The opposition comes out of a specific, and yet broad, historical experience of never being held up as anyone's flower of virtuosity, but instead as un-feminine and oversexed."

I'd have to disagree with Coates and say that his comparison does "get it." Jewish women can look to a "specific, and yet broad historical experience" that's unpleasant from all angles. Jewish women have been stereotyped as whores (by 19th century European Christian men) and as prudes (by 20th century American Jewish men). Historically, oppression of Jews has led to rape of Jewish women, as has oppression of blacks led to the equivalent situation. And of course, as Coates implies, things look better for exogamy-friendly black and Jewish men than for their female counterparts.

However, here's one difference: to say that a woman appears to be black is not in and of itself an insult. To say a woman 'looks Jewish' is. Here's why:

In America, since (Ashkenazi, i.e. most American) Jews have been defined (and defined themselves) as white, it's considered racist to say that one can 'look Jewish,' the implication being that it's racist to say Jews do not look like undifferentiated white people. Which we often enough do. (Yes, there are black Jews, Asian Jews, and so on, but exceedingly few in the States. What's meant when an American says, 'there's no such thing as looking Jewish' is you can't tell a Swede from a shtetl descendent. Often you can. Except for me--I lack Jewdar--but I've heard I'm unusual in this regard.) Instead, we end up getting classified as white but on average less likely to be conventionally good-looking. We're a group of white folks among whom blondness, manageable-hairedness, and delicate-featuredness are underrepresented. We could look at this as, no problem, we're not exactly white-- members of all other non-white groups share this tendency not to fit white beauty ideals, and find ways to cope with this. Instead we're stuck with being a lesser kind of white.

What this means is that, while saying a woman is black is not an insult, it's definitive. You can see she isn't white, so there's no need to specify that she 'looks black'--in nearly all cases, she just is. Whereas a woman can be 100% ethnically Jewish but not 'look' so, which I'd imagine I join 99% of Jewish women for having heard in reference to myself, in that few among us are universally identifiable.

WWPD: the women's mag edition

Is it better for women to:

1) Wear girdles,
2) Diet themselves into the shape a girdle provides, or
3) Think of something better to worry about?

Daphne Merkin's ability to stretch (pun intended-ish, given the topic) the above possibilities, minus possibility #3 which apparently does not exist in her universe, into a lively, readable article for me to consume along with an almond croissant is, let me just say, impressive.

That said, Merkin (indirectly) called me zaftig, and while I'm a firm (pun intended-ish) believer in #3, I will not have it. She explains, "[...] the era of zaftig was over, except in the subordinate boroughs." From the joggers in Park Slope to the chain-smokers of Williamsburg, the 'new Brooklyn' is hardly pro-zaftig; the 'real' outer boroughs neither. Merkin's "subordinate boroughs" apparently consist of communities unchanged since the 1940s, in which Old Country mothers urge their daughters to down an extra helping of schmaltz. (If zaftig's not italicized, does schmaltz need to be? Discuss.)

Merkin lost me with the following: "[...] I’ve since passed the smaller of the two [girdles] on to my 19-year-old daughter, who had been eyeing it for its erotic potential." I can't decide if it's worse a) that this happened, or b) that the NYT readership gets to hear about it.

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In other girly news, via Arts & Letters Daily, here's a fun piece about the "Toxic Wife," a lady with her banker man only until the market crashes. Actually, the article's kind of bizarre--what author Tara Winter Wilson calls a "toxic wife" is what's traditionally referred to as a "trophy wife." Certain men want to parlay their financial success into well-maintained women, which works out because certain women enjoy spending lots of time at salons. The agreement is such that if the woman lets herself go, or the man loses his kesef, party's over. The term "toxic" is Wilson's way of taking male agency out of the equation. Well, not entirely: "Men, it seems, have got wise to the potential Toxic Wife and don't want to end up with someone who is going to bolt the moment they experience some financial bad luck." Yet these same men, when finances were good, declared themselves worthy of a league they'd otherwise not have a shot at. There are no trophies "for richer or poorer." That's kind of the point. Again, a strange article indeed.

Some of her best friends are black

In "Rachel Getting Married," Anne Hathaway plays the Gwyneth Paltrow character from "The Royal Tenenbaums." Sulky, chain-smoking, with fabulous haircut and just a touch too much eyeliner, Hathaway's Kym is a brunette Margot. Which makes sense, because the two movies take place in the same over-aestheticized, surface-only multicultural world.

"Rachel" also has an element of a more recent Wes Anderson film, "The Darjeeling Limited." Both movies are of what could be called the Dave Matthews Band school of interracial harmony. We can all just get along, so long as the camera focuses on the non-threatening white person, the one whose story gets to be told. Recovering drug addict and reviver of heroin chic Kym sits at the movie's center, with her sensible sister Rachel and their parents the supporting actors. Rachel's best friend Emma, a stock preppy and unsympathetic blonde, jarringly out-of-place in what appears to be for the most part a family of artistic types, is icy and predictable but at least gets to speak.

Though her stepmother, Rachel's husband, and countless bit parts are played by black actors, it's clear that none of these characters matter in the least to the film's plot. They are presented as purely decorative, often musical, adding, quite literally, color to the proceedings. You end up hearing about as much out of the black characters as you do from the exquisite (and also, alas, black) family poodle. If the point of the film's treatment of race were that it simply didn't matter in the context of the story, as A.O. Scott suggests, then it's unlikely the silent characters would have also turned out to be the ones with dark skin. How reviewers could interpret this film as progressive in how it deals with race is fully beyond me.

A sort of pan-exoticizing, Orientalist stance sits either in contrast to--or in surprising harmony with--Kym's bourgeois white girl blues. From the little we know of Kym's family, they grew up in a big suburban house, had youthful escapades on 96th Street in Manhattan, and have enough money to send their daughter to one stint in a fancy rehab clinic after the next. That Rachel is getting her doctorate gives us a sense of where Kym would be, in socioeconomic terms, had she not gotten involved in hard drugs.

If Kym's story hasn't been told, a million like it have. I wanted to know who Sydney, Rachel's husband, was, and what (other than his movie-star good looks) brought him into the film. The extended family was so clearly more interesting than the poor-little-rich-girl cliché on whose pug nose and pale skin the camera remained so stubbornly focused. I wanted to know what was going on with any of the characters who the movie permitted only to dance.

The couple whose wedding we attend is meant to usher in a moment of hope; allusions to Obama abound, from the bride and groom's more than passing resemblance to the Democratic nominee's parents to the couple's choice to move to Hawaii following the ceremony. One can only wish that once in Hawaii, perhaps a child will be born to this couple who will lead the country into better times.

Orientalism today

The J.Crew catalog arrived, and it has a theme: Morocco! This means that the models and their polo shirts are ostensibly in Morocco; the clothing itself is no more Moroccan than usual. It takes some suspension of disbelief to imagine that anyone would pack for Morocco and bring along exclusively clothes from J.Crew. Some of the photos, though, are really something else. I can't seem to find a way to link directly to the image (it flashes briefly on the J.Crew homepage, and is in the catalog), but there's one shot of one of the blonder models, in full prep garb, encountering an exotic water salesman, a dark-skinned 'native' complete with all manner of headgear and layers. The catalog includes a description of this colorful character--the man, of course, not the model. Needless to say, there is no mention of where one can purchase the man's rather impressive hat, or whether it also comes in Heather Gray in the size of your choice.

If you are looking for postcolonial-minus-the-post attire, you could always go with Banana Republic, on account of the name, but a better choice might be Tory Burch, whose line was "inspired by outfits her mother wore while vacationing in Morocco." It's hard for me to picture what this even means--what an American (I'm guessing Burch's mother is/was American) would wear in a specific foreign country. Does tourist clothing vary by destination? I'm thinking of what my classmates wore while studying in Paris--more scarves and artfully messy hair than they'd have gone with at home, although it could also have had something to do with unseasonably cold weather and lukewarm dorm showers with minimal water pressure. I'm also picturing Edina and Patsy's Maghreban adventure. So I guess what a Westerner dons in Morocco would be something vaguely 'Oriental' but not so much so as to appear to be trying to blend in.

Some Westerners, however, blend in with the locals so much that they serve their kids scorpions instead of raisin bran! On the one hand, as a slightly picky eater, I'm jealous of Matthew Forney's kids, growing up in China without the option of plain pasta for every meal. On the other, I was put off by the fact that the article was basically the author congratulating himself on his benefiting from having the best of both worlds, being well-off in a place where others are starving, and thus having kids who are not fussy like those whose parents commit the child abuse that is raising children in the suburbs.

I don't think of myself as especially touchy about things that contradict PC, and I am most definitely not Chinese, so this is not personal, but the confident declaration that China is a country "where people eat anything" threw me for a loop. Really, in all of China? Anything, or just things that aren't sold at Zabars? It might be on balance a good thing that we as a society have gotten enough past political correctness that I feel almost ashamed to have found the J.Crew catalog and the piece on Chinese omnivores at all disconcerting. That said, there's something to be said for admitting that at least part of the PC era's influence is worth keeping around. Like a bowl of scorpions, Edward Said is best not swallowed whole.

Next stop, paper plates

You can learn a lot about different neighborhoods from what realtors tell you about why you should not bother looking for a dishwasher. Because they all say it's hopeless--and I get it, it is--but for a wide range of reasons. In the Village, and in Manhattan generally, realtors will explain that there are dishwashers, but (insert sneer) not in that price range. If you have to ask, and all that. In Queens (still not totally clear on the borders of neighborhoods), you will hear again that there are no dishwashers, but that a good woman doesn't complain about having to do the dishes. One realtor, his wife cooks for a large family, what am I doing complaining about doing the dishes for two? It was apparently a given that I do my boyfriend's dishes. I cook, he does the dishes (remember, two incomes, thus how we are capable of paying rent). But I decided not to explain this and just to agree that dishwashers are totally useless appliances. Because demanding a dishwasher is the very height of princessy uppitiness. Well, I don't go in for rhinoplasty or Manolos, door-manned buildings or hardwood floors, but I'm not afraid to admit this one materialistic dream.

After some investigation, I've learned that there do seem to be some apartments with dishwashers in the sad little price range that is ours. These apartments are all in the middle of highways, half-hour bus rides from subways, or in neighborhoods where getting shot veers from possible to probable. Turns out my old place had a dishwasher because although my rent was low and the block had only a moderate number of shootings, I shared with two roommates, putting the total price of the apartment in the big-numbers range at which dishwashers begin to appear.

Spinsters in stilettos

Precisely how did "Sex and the City" contribute to "easing [...] thousands of women from the shackling fears of spinsterhood"? If anything, that show gave women of my generation a fear of being 40 and single we would otherwise have never thought to develop. Women my age were not raised to believe we needed to marry to be happy, but one episode of SATC made the point better than a lifetime of nagging would have done.

Once you took away the shoes (which were never much to my liking) and the men (same thing), these women led pretty miserable lives. Their primary interest was talking about men, and this line of discussion is simply no more interesting when the people involved are 35 than when they are 14. One of the benefits of being in a relationship is the fact that you (ideally) spend less time talking about relationships, which, along with talking about weight, is inevitable but should never be the only thing female friends discuss. If the show depicted women who were single and capable of discussing, if even for one moment, something other than the men to whom they were not married... but that never happened. At least not in the episodes I've seen, and my apartment only gets TBS, not HBO. Perhaps in the "unsanitized" episodes Miranda discusses her law-firm work, Charlotte her taste in art, and so on.

Another smashmortion, UPDATED

this time in the Gossip Girl season finale. First, when Dan thinks it's Serena who's with child, he explains both to his father and to a baffled Serena that he'll stick with her no matter what she decides. So far so reasonable, although it's extremely unlikely a real-life Serena would do anything but have an abortion. But again, realism is not the GG way. But then there's Serena, soon after, telling a reluctant Blair to take a pregnancy test, explaining that her friend needs to know if she and Chuck are having a baby. Birth control is presented as a choice made only by the slutty (Serena and her Pill, Chuck and his condoms). As with "Knocked Up," it's vaguely clear that abortion exists as an option, but it's a given that pregnancy means there will be a baby, as though it would be too tragic to state outright that a 17-year-old might not go that route.

Surprise--no one's pregnant, Dan and Serena fight and make up, Serena and Blair fight and make up, and otherwise this episode left the imaginary Upper East Side unchanged. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that a show that is essentially set in a nostalgic fantasy of the 1950s would not be on the cutting edge of feminism. But in some ways, it is. In tonight's episode not one but two beautiful women aggressively ask out Dan's father Rufus. Being a mother stops almost none of the women in show from sleeping with whomever they please. The adult women are unrealistically enlightened, or skanky, depending on one's take on these matters. So really it's only the high school kids whose prudery makes the show seem to come from another age. Social conservatism may be a lost cause for the middle-aged, but the youth are on board all the way.

UPDATE

The academic applicability of Gossip Girl never fails to impress.