Latkes in literature

Just read and really liked Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs. Goodreads people were less enthusiastic about it. I'll make the case:

Spoilers below, so click on the post title for the rest...

What lurks beyond the bagel shop

Lawrenceville, which I previously knew as the boarding school next to the so-so bagel shop we'd go to before discovering the far superior one in the Montgomery shopping center, is apparently more than just a bagel-adjacent landmark. It's also the most expensive high school in the nation. And - I learned from Jezebel and Twitter - it's the site of the race-and-privilege scandal of the moment. The student body president - black, female, and gay - had to step down after taking to the Instagram to make fun of the douchier elements of the white, male, and straight student population. If I had a thesis-driven sort of argument to make about this, I'd pitch and fast. As it stands, too scattered for that. So:

-This part of NJ is maybe not the least racist place ever. Even I, someone female and paler than most, have seen firsthand how young black men are questioned by the police, how black men of all ages are avoided and hassled on the train. If this is what I'm seeing, I'd imagine there's more I'm not seeing. There's also preppy culture, which is hard to explain, but which goes beyond whatever's experienced at any particular private school or college in the area. It's so white that even white people notice the whiteness. Friends even whiter than I am (being, as regular readers know, pale but ethnic) have pointed this out.

-Private schools are weird. They can end up this odd mix of rich white kids (getting in through the usual rich-white-person channels) and poor non-white kids (getting in through some mix of intellect, hard work, and having adults around devoted to their education), in some kind of tremendous exaggeration of society at large. As in, "white" becomes associated with wealth, "black" with poverty, in a way that far exceeds the situation at a regular public school. (From Buzzfeed: "Lawrenceville students say racial and class divides — which frequently work in tandem because minority students often come to boarding schools through scholarship organizations [...]." So it went at my private elementary-and-middle school in New York.) The numbers may say "diversity," but the reality can be something more complicated.

-The specific black, female student at the center of the controversy, the student-body president who had to step down after mocking douche-bro classmates on Instagram, was not on scholarship. Commenter Pronetolaughter, if you're reading, this begins to get at how "privilege" as a term can fail where "racism" succeeds at conveying a problem. As the half of the internet that's already weighed in on this has noted, if you're at an elite high school that costs $53k a year, certainly if you're not there on scholarship, you have just a touch of unearned advantage. As in, you're richer and probably better-connected than most. But! That doesn't mean you're not also the victim of some other sort of oppression - in this case, racism. Confederate flags, insistence that she didn't really win the election, and other racist incidents cited in the Buzzfeed piece suggest that the young woman in question had good reason to be fed up.

-But oh, social media! It's bad judgment - if entirely age-appropriate bad judgment - to have an Instagram mocking your classmates, particularly if you want to lead your classmates. Back in the day, the mocking of entitled douche-bro classmates happened, sure, but in private. Buzzfeed reports that this wasn't even the student's first blip of this nature - she'd already been in trouble for pot photos (real, and forwarded by someone trying to sabotage her) and racist tweets (invented by someone trying to sabotage her). If someone's out to get you - perhaps because you're a black lesbian in a position of power in a traditionalist environment? - then you, whoever you are, certainly if you're high school aged, have probably left incriminating dribs and drabs all over the internet and even if you have not, they can be created.

-The Jezebels are arguing about reverse racism - is it a thing? The usual argument - that you can't be racist against a group with more power in society than you have - is mostly right, but not entirely. For example: anti-Semites believe Jews to be more powerful than they are. That's how that form of racism works. For another example: one group may have more power than another in society at large, but not in, say, a particular community. It doesn't seem impossible that the only white kid at a high school would have a tough time. But yes, in usual situations, it holds. And here, I suppose I'm not entirely sure why this is being cited as an example of anti-white anything. What this young woman was mocking was a subculture, not a race. Is the idea that a white person mocking a black subculture would come across as racist? Perhaps, but this is exactly where the power-imbalance thing enters into it. No one thinks all white people are douchey lacrosse players (with all due respect to non-douchey lacrosse players), whereas conflation of minority groups with equivalent subcultures is definitely a thing. (I guarantee that every American Jewish woman has, whether she knows it or not, been called a JAP, no matter how hippie-dippie her routine.) But more to the point, she was making fun of white people who fly Confederate flags, in the North at that. Regardless of where one stands on it being possible or not to be racist against white people, I don't think you can be racist for mocking certain white people's racism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The perverse pride of the pale

So, being ancient, and having devoted the bulk of my 20s to the 19th century, I'm not up on Tumblr or memes. It's possible that I actually said "the Twitter" the other day, although that one I sometimes use and mostly understand. Anyway, I only just now learned of the Me vs. Other Girls meme and associated controversy. It turns out that being pale, dark-haired, and literate is a meme! Or only if you're defining yourself in opposition to dim-witted spray-tanned bleach-blondes. Seeing as I live at a science compound in the woods, where I'm as much the Penny as anyone, I, at least, am not.

It's an interesting conversation, though, or the start of one. Some of this seems to be socioeconomic humblebragging - like, yes, you're pale and stayed away from the peroxide, and read Great Books, and don't fuss over status-y brands, but that's because you're an upper-class white person, not because you resisted temptation to go all TOWIE'd out. Yes, being upper-class means a certain degree of alienation from the mainstream, but if it comes from a place of feeling better than the mainstream, and if you sit around feeling superior with others like yourself, so what if a state-school sorority you're never interacting with anyway would have shunned you?

Some of it - because this also comes from people who really did grow up feeling like outsiders - really is about feeling like an outsider, but in that cringe-inducing adolescent way where one misses that everyone feels different. ("Daria" works because even pretty sorority girls feel like Daria.) If the "women" on Tumblr comparing themselves to others in an emo fashion are in fact girls between the ages of 10 and 16, fair enough. If grown women are doing this, I'd be more concerned.

Shaming-shaming-shaming

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

"Orangutan sounds"

There are potentially valid arguments against the SAT: that it doesn't measure anything important, or that it simply reflects socioeconomic background.* Then there's Jennifer Finney Boylan's take:

Boylan found the SAT stressful, thus "The SAT is a mind-numbing, stress-inducing ritual of torture." While she's by no means alone, plenty of students don't find the test all that torturous. Meanwhile I've had classmates who find any number of assignments too stressful to bear: essays, long and dense readings, lab reports (ahem). Should these, too, be chucked? And this is... supposed to be cute? It can't possibly be serious:

As the mother of two former SAT takers (one a sophomore in college, the other a senior in high school awaiting the result of his applications), I can also point out another problem with the test: It usually starts around 8:30 in the morning. I don’t know if the members of the College Board have ever met a 17-year-old at that hour, but I can tell you this is not the time of day I would choose to test their ability to do anything, except perhaps make orangutan sounds.

Yes, how terribly unfair. How biased in favor of morning people. Never mind that work tends to start in the morning, as do plenty of college classes. As does high school. The ability to suck it up and accomplish something in the early morning isn't some abstract skill of no use later, but quite handy if, say, you find yourself living in Central NJ and commuting into NY. If all the SAT measured was the ability to show up for the SAT at groggy o'clock, this would probably measure something worthwhile.

*While the socioeconomic thing is a good point, I never cease to be amazed by the frequency with which those who repeat that argument turn out to be advocating on behalf not of the underprivileged, but the snowflake, hidden-genius children of the upper-middle class.

How to clean a carrot

Young People Today don't know how to do their own laundry. Apparently. This has been the thing - the meme before memes were a thing - since forever. And I've never understood how this caught on. Is laundry so difficult? If this hadn't yet come up, you get to college, you see the machines, you figure it out. It will be the very least momentous challenge you face as an adult.

Of course, you may make mistakes. When I last did laundry, I noticed tiny bits of carrot greens in the washer where I'd included a tote bag that had, evidently, once held carrots. Then sure enough, after the dryer runs, I open the door and out pops what it took me a moment to realize was a carrot - a full carrot that had been through the wash-and-dry cycles. It looked really odd and I regret not taking a picture.

This was in any case quite, quite far from my first time ever doing laundry. If I were 18, we might blame helicopter parenting; I'm 30, so we're instead going to blame my not having noticed a carrot remained in some tote-bag fold. But with all my laundry-doing experience, I could very well see that the clothes (and, let's not forget, tote bags) were just fine. Once you have the basics (keep red stuff away from the whites, and don't put sweaters or bras you care about in the dryer), laundry is tough to screw up.

Well! It turns out that 30-year-olds with laundry issues are this great sign of the times. Or something? I feel as though this sort of thing has come up before, but should we really be looking to a therapist to diagnose a generation? Aren't the people who seek therapy inherently unrepresentative - more troubled and likely wealthier than the norm? Brooke Donatone tells us, re: the 30-year-old laundry-phobe, "Her case is becoming the norm for twenty- to thirtysomethings I see in my office as a psychotherapist." Perhaps so. But of twenty- to thirtysomethings more generally?

Here's the bit I found most baffling:

A generation ago, my college peers and I would buy a pint of ice cream and down a shot of peach schnapps (or two) to process a breakup. Now some college students feel suicidal after the breakup of a four-month relationship. Either ice cream no longer has the same magical healing properties, or the ability to address hardships is lacking in many members of this generation.

Feeling or becoming suicidal after an objectively minor romantic disappointment seems if anything a kind of ancient approach to love, at any rate not especially millenial. Certainly not in the alleged era of hook-up culture.

But more to the point, the difference here isn't generational but just a more general matter of well-being. If you're typically happy and have friends (as is the implication) to share the ice cream and schnapps with you, a breakup is less devastating than it is if you're already on the edge of some kind of crash. Some young people will always be in one category, others in the other, many somewhere in between. (The gap between suicidal and so blasé as to need only a dessert and a drink to get over someone you were hung up on is, needless to say, tremendous.)

What I'm missing, I suppose, is where the millenial angle fits in. The relevant questions would seem to be a) whether more people today are depressed than used to be, and b) whether today's depression manifests itself differently than earlier variants. Doesn't depression traditionally entail a sense of hopelessness, a feeling of just the kind of incompetence that would make a task like laundry seem impossibly daunting?

"[F]unding [...] entry-level positions"

David Carr takes on internships. He seems to mean well, and I like his conclusion, but I can't say I follow his argument. How exactly have interns who've sued the places they worked for free "won the battle but [...] lost the war"? Because now these companies don't have internship programs? Many programs as they exist do need to be chucked, certainly now that "internship" is a word that can be tacked onto absolutely any task anyone wants done for free. (As parodied on "Seinfeld," so not all that recently, when Kramer had that NYU intern; it's just gotten worse since then. Although my favorite remains one from a real NYU listing, some vaguely famous person looking to take on the unpaid services of an "aspiring personal assistant.") Certainly when what's meant is full-time post-college employment.

The internship discussion always seems to go off course at the same place: people accuse unpaid interns of thinking they're too good for menial tasks, of being ungrateful. This is the sentiment Carr evokes with "Pity the poor interns, or tell them to get over themselves [...]" But the grievance is with not getting paid for these tasks. "Paying your dues" shouldn't literally mean paying for the opportunity. People seem to miss that non-payment creates a sense of entitlement. The idea with an unpaid internship is that you get something else from the experience - connections, a line on a resume that matters, and/or knowledge of an industry. Someone might expect the same of a paid job, but if it doesn't deliver, at least there was the paycheck. Remove that and you get perfectly reasonable entitlement.

In any case, it seems obvious that organizations getting rid of unpaid internships will still have lowest-rung positions. Does Carr think getting rid of them means companies will hire mid-career and on only? "The people who know someone who know someone will probably still get a low-paying gig," he writes, which is partly true. As long as family connections don't account for all hiring - and as long as those with connections but without the ability to do the job keep getting gently channeled away - this is something it's more or less futile to address. Carr admits that his own 17-year-old daughter had a three-day unpaid internship at a fashion mag. Nepotism along these lines isn't actually the greatest concern. If anything, unpaid internships can exist as favors to important people, without any promise that the kid ever actually gets a job or has any influence in an organization. Once a salary's involved, a company may be more inclined to go by merit. I mean, one would imagine.

"The people working with only their bootstraps will be out of luck," Carr adds, but there I'm not convinced. Low-paid - assuming something above and beyond the proverbial Metrocard - is fundamentally different from unpaid. It's possible to budget once you have a small salary to work with (ahem, grad school); not if you're working full-time for no pay.

Which... Carr then seems to get, when he switches over to praising paid internship programs, which then becomes a discussion about how this will make journalism less lily-white. But isn't this precisely the idea with getting rid of unpaid internships? He encourages "funding fellowships and entry-level positions," which just seems odd. Funding entry-level jobs? Isn't that just... paying employees? Is it something akin to charity, or a scholarship, to pay someone for their work at a for-profit organization? Is there some reason diversity couldn't be taken into account when recruiting for jobs? How would lawsuits against companies that don't pay interns in any way threaten the kind of opportunities Carr rightly encourages?

I suppose what I can't wrap my head around is how what Carr wants to see is any different from what would inevitably result from scrapping unpaid positions. Businesses would still need people to do menial tasks, as well as a first rung on the professional track. There is of course "value" in recruiting new employees. Each business/industry would need to sort out for itself how much to merge the two - whether there's any sort of advantage to forcing the future professional elite to demonstrate willingness to get coffee for higher-ups, or whether symbolic dues-paying is a waste of time and division of labor means hiring someone not on that track to do such jobs. Which is how it already works with internships - some are more 'substantive' than others, but it's not necessarily an inaccurate picture of what really needs to be done at a company if you're running errands. The only difference would be that the first rung would be paid.

In praise of walls

Longtime readers are familiar with my objections to obligatory shared rooms in college. While I agree that there's much to be gained from putting a bunch of people from different backgrounds in close proximity (although, meningitis...), I've never understood why the sharing of a bedroom is supposed to be necessary. You can - I promise! - make great friends with people who live on the same hall, in the same apartment. But room-sharing causes all kinds of problems, from roommates having to be a couple feet away from an adventure to which they didn't consent to, more menacingly, cases where one roommate is meant to be a "learning experience" for the other, for some cultural reason. Put the gay kid with the homophobe, and... progress! Or... quite the opposite. There's something particularly unnerving about how, if something goes wrong in a roommate (as vs. suite-mate) situation, there's no space to escape. This person who hates your kind is sleeping next to you every night.

So think how much worse this already horrible story would be if all had been sharing one room. I'm at any rate inferring that this was a suite-type situation ("Barricaded the claustrophobic student in his room"; and "he'd been locking his bedroom door at night because he was scared of his roommates").

Commenters, please do point out that dorms have space constraints. And we can then, in the thread, have a whole discussion of how I don't think that's actually what's at stake here. Space constraints aren't limited to college students - the issue is the norm of it being socially acceptable or even considered advisable to have freshman, at least, share rooms with total strangers.

And This Is How You Don't Make Fun Of Random People On the Internet

There are certain categories of behavior the internet was basically designed to mock, all of which fall under the heading of douchiness. The people who use their blogs and the various newfangled whosawhatsits that came after blogs to post photos of themselves in designer clothing, in bathtubs full of $100 bills. The people who park their cars so as to take up two spots (and it may be a life's work, but if I can manage not to do this...). The people who throw fits on commuter trains, bragging about how educated they are, belligerently, to their fellow commuters. We can have a discussion of the ethics of these pile-ons, particularly when the individual in question is identifiable, and maybe just having an off day. That discussion would conclude with me saying that it's iffy-to-plain-wrong to engage in this behavior at all, however douchetastic the recipient. But the issue here is, the rule of this is, douchiness is what one might plausibly call out in this context.

Which is why this post - "And This Is How You Don't Follow Up To A Job Interview" - fails so miserably as an addition to the genre. It's a letter from an applicant to an entry-level job. The applicant is furious about having not heard back after two rounds of interviewing, and fires off the email to them that is in the mind of people in that situation, but that should - and this is supposed to be where the humor comes from, I take it - obviously not be written, let alone sent.

The hilarity of this is supposed to be, whoa, look at the entitled millenial! But the comedy fails, because of the utter powerlessness of this young person who, it seems, is all kinds of desperate for an administrative job. The tone of the letter might be entitlement, but the gist of it is worker rage - or, I suppose, unemployment rage. Would I want to hire this applicant? No - unhinged is never appealing. But how can you read the letter and - no matter how ridiculous you find it that the email was sent - not feel kind of sorry for the person who sent it? How can you not think of the tough times for post-2007 graduates? The email was certainly ill-advised, but it fails the douchiness test by such a long shot.

So Betch

Oh, the New York Times, always the last with trend stories. Except when they're not. Like Jezebel's Katie J.M. Baker, I'd never heard of Betches Love This until seeing the NYT profile of the same. Also like Baker, I wondered if this was all in the proud tradition of things-being-about-Jews-without-spelling-this-out (see also; if these ever go online in a legal capacity, I'll start watching and responding); also like Baker,  I had to ultimately conclude that this is a category that overlaps with "JAP," but is its own thing. Perusing the site, I kept thinking of very much Gentile examples (some very "old-money") of women who fit the bill.

The site is more or less the exact opposite of the one where the (adult) children of the One Percent self-flagellate behind placards. Or is it? More on that in a moment.

Who is a "betch"? She's basically an anti-intellectual (those who don't read the news don't suffer, as I do, from the fate of finding that 30% of white men between the ages of 20 and 50, including 100% of those who are trying to help you fix your computer, look like this Snowden) rich young woman from the suburbs, who may have been one of the out-of-state, higher-paying "coastals" (a possibly anti-Semitism-tinged term, but not necessarily) at flagship state schools in the Midwest. (A sentence I wrote before even seeing this post.) Sororities and Uggs enter into it, as does some kind of borderline eating disorder. I don't think there necessarily was an all-encompassing term for this know-it-when-you-see-it phenomenon, so the various commentators calling the site "anthropological" are onto something.

The problem with the site, or its genius, is that it can't seem to decide if it's a dark, secretly Marxist satire of the "betch," or if it's a gently self-mocking but ultimately sincere expression of that which it's describing. I'm leaning towards "genius" - it has a built-in audience of the women who identify (and who participate in forums and threads, offering one another sincere advice on "betchiness", or snarking at one another for being posers or poor or I don't even know) as well as of the women (and men?) who find it all kind of horrifying.

Because - here, Caryatis, is the cultural-capital question - there's this other set of women from more or less the same demographic who are raised specifically not to be princesses. Some kind of internalized "JAP"-o-phobia, passed down across the generations. Yet they - we - are maybe not so different after all. (Do "betches" read "Into The Gloss"?)

I looked at the list, and much of it applies to women who'd see themselves as much higher-brow or more mature than the described category. Alternate explanation: I'm lower-brow and less mature than I might fancy myself. Iced coffee? (I tend to prefer D.I.Y. cold-brew or made-by-a-hipster over Starbucks, but same thing, really.) Sushi? (And other Japanese food! Sushi-and-only-sushi is so passé. But ugh, yes.) Neon? (Nike Frees? I never.) Equestrian chic? And argh, I don't even get an out for having married someone from a different country.

I'd be disqualified from betchiness, it seems, if for no other reason than that going out to dinner at an upscale restaurant with a large group of expensively-dressed girlfriends doesn't sound like the absolute best possible way to spend an evening. (Why? Because that was all-girls middle school. I experienced a lifetime of "sorority" in the Greek sense between the ages of 10 and 13, which was enough.) And fine, for financial reasons as well.

The best thing about the site - also, needless to say, its worst - is its lack of sensitivity. Sometimes this unquestionably veers off into wildly offensive. Other times, though, there's a frankness, a telling-it-like-it-is, not often found elsewhere.

Student scrappiness as class signifier

A little while back, the NYT ran an exposé about today's spoiled college students. How spoiled? So spoiled that in anticipation of beginning their freshman year, they bought shower caddies at Target. Sorry, their parents bought them stuff at Target. So fancy! Also: so schmancy.

I had trouble reacting with appropriate horror to these trips to big-box stores, given the scale of the cost of college and the drop in a bucket this represents. Also given how unremarkable if not modest this kind of spending would be if done by adults for themselves or their under-18 children. People buy towels and stuff. Curtains are now sometimes a part of "stuff"? Yeah, fine, not when I was that age, but so it goes.

But a shrug was clearly not the response one was meant to have. Which, to some extent, fair enough. I mean, outrage - or at least annoyance - seems a fair response if your parents weren't able or willing to put a cent towards shower caddies, upon realizing that your roommate's parents had gone all out. Still, it seemed a bit disingenuous for a NYT lifestyle article. There are no doubt kids being shipped off with $300 shower gel. Was this the best target for generalized rage?

It's for whatever reason easier to rage at more middle-class decadence. Maybe because that's meant to signal a generational shift - this might be kids-these-days, in a way that the schmanciest 0.01% are not. Or maybe it's because there's a certain amount of respect granted to those who spend gobs, but not at a place as shabby as Target, because that's supposed to be chic. It's that second possibility that concerns me.

*****

We now meet the similarly fancy and schmancy students of the University of Missouri, Columbia, who live in "luxury" apartments. What is luxury, though, in this context? Luxury is, these are apartments, not dorms. They actually cost less than the dorms, but are nicer. Key paragraph commenters seem not all that keen on reading:

The monthly rates for the modern units in Columbia generally start at $700 per student for a spot in an apartment, about twice the cost of older housing in the area. Yet they are on par with the price of on-campus housing, which equates to about $1,000 a month per bed, meals included.

So this does sound kind of steep either way. (Dorm food: world's biggest rip-off, unless Alice Waters is somehow involved.) Fascinating, really, that people are paying more to live in Missouri off-campus housing, however luxurious, than one could not that long ago to live in Greater Park Slope.

These apartments are "luxury," though, because they have flat-screen TVs, instead of professors giving lectures. Which is... apparently something we're to believe is a normal thing that happens in a dorm? I went to a somewhat intellectual college (understatement) and lived in its dorms. No one was giving any lectures, unless you count the occasional midnight mansplaining among the undergrads.

"Luxury," though, seems to be mostly code for things that weren't ubiquitous back in the day, but have become so. Or things that didn't exist, period. College students today are mighty luxurious with their smartphones, but note the lack of record players, records/tapes/CDs, video cameras, regular cameras, address books... Similarly, various accoutrements of an earlier age that haven't been replaced with smartphones are also obsolete. How much formalwear are students bringing to college, for example, and no, we don't just get to compare this with whichever peak of hippieishness from the 1970s.

The article inspired what might well be the most mean-spirited comment in newspaper comment history. One college student is interviewed and explains that she's covering some of the cost of living in one of these evil luxury buildings herself, and is not - as the journalist clearly wants to portray her as - a brat. Which gets this response:

Ironic that the bearer of such an infamously aspirational, tacky and upwardly-mobile-stock-broker-fave name as "Courtney" would dispute the notion that student residents of these upscale off-campus resize denies are entitled and spoiled jerks. 

And when she says "I wouldn't say I'm spoiled by any means," methinks the lady doth protest too much.

Charming!

Further complicating things from an amateur-sociology perspective: there are a) the dorms, which sound like the biggest rip-off, but which have some kind of implied academic atmosphere, and b) the new "luxury" housing, with their "stainless steel appliances, granite countertops and balconies," but there is also c) the Niedermeyer Building, which is apparently old, quaint, and in far better taste than dorms with their own tanning salons. The Niedermeyer Building - furnished, one imagines, by Karl Farbman himself - is clearly for a better class of person. A recent grad who lives there refers to Option B as "mass-produced, soulless luxury." So is it that some students are too poor for in-house tanning, or that some are sufficiently lowbrow as to seek this out? (Both?)

And another commenter has this to say:

My own kids go to top colleges and stay in dorms that are austere and basic. [....] I'd be interested in finding out if there is a direct inverse relationship between the status of the college academically and the luxury housing and other perks they feel compelled to offer. If you are secure in your status, you don't need bells and whistles.

Never mind that it's not the college offering all this. But this commenter may have a point. Student scrappiness is its own class signifier - sometimes the result of a badly-funded school with working-class students, but sometimes the very height of posh. (If you want to make this international, check out the dorms at Sartre's alma mater in Paris.) Maybe those raging against the One Percent would want to look somewhere other than at state-school kids in Missouri, granite-countertop-having or otherwise.

2013, the end of anti-Semitism?

Nick has found that Young People Today - U.S. college students specifically - do not know from anti-Semitism. His undergrads were unfamiliar with anti-Semitic stereotypes. "Jewishness, so far as I can tell, and perhaps only in the eyes of these particular students, is a slightly differentiable form of being white, and so therefore not particularly interesting."

When I saw Nick's post, I almost immediately thought of the Albany high school teacher who decided to assign his/her class an essay in which they were to argue why Jews are awful. What if, rather than finding the assignment offensive/upsetting, the kids were simply at a loss? Could it be that today's youth are really so far removed from Jew-hatred?

My scattered thoughts on this below:

-Anti-Semitism was never the racism in the States, the way it was in Europe. That doesn't mean it didn't/doesn't exist. But if you're looking to compare anti-Jewish and anti-black sentiment, well, they're not comparable in this country. So it isn't obvious to most Americans (other than Jews steeped in Holocaust education to the point that they had recurring childhood nightmares that involved being chased by Nazis) that Jews would have ever been the Other.

-Anti-Semitism is widely perceived of as touchier than other -isms (because Hitler, also because one anti-Semitic stereotype is that Jews are touchy), so it's possible college students know full well about the Jews-and-money or Jews-control-the-media stereotype but would rather not announce this in class.

-I'm about ten years older than Nick's students, but I will say that when I was in college, anti-Jewish - as well as "positive" Jewish - stereotypes were alive and well and exhausting. Jews study all the time! Jews aren't real Americans! Jewish women are "JAPs"! Maybe this has changed - those were, after all, the days of neoconservatism-hint-hint, all that talk of a "cabal" - but I doubt it, because...

-Popular culture continues to provide anti-Semitic stereotypes. The obvious example: "The Big Bang Theory," an immensely popular network TV sitcom, as mainstream as it gets. There's Howard Wolowitz - a weakling momma's boy with a thing for "shiksas" - settling down with one eventually. There's the offscreen and implicitly repulsive Jewish mother, so horrible that a TV audience may only encounter her huskily whiny voice. And "Girls"! Shoshanna not only is a "JAP," but is referred to as such.

Still, pop-culture examples of Jews-and-money from the last couple years aren't coming to mind - lots of pop culture about Jews comes from Jews (who may be reluctant to go there), thus the quasi-persistence of the working-class nebbish paired with the highbrow WASP. Meanwhile one finds plenty of old-school anti-Semitism in comment threads across the internet. I don't know how old the people posting are, but those reading? All ages, I'd think. And... that's about as much as I can know about what those who don't know Jews/aren't talking to a Jew (certain limitations of perspective!) would think about this sort of thing. I Googled around but didn't see any poll that would tell us what anyone who's 18-22 now would think about Jews.

-Re: Nick's concern that if anti-Semitism isn't properly laid out and understood, there's no fighting it, I'm of two minds about this. Obviously, I research this sort of thing, and am hardly against spreading knowledge about modern Jewish history. The opposite! Please, world, hire me to tell you about 19th century French Jews.

But! I will repeat the imperfect analogy I provided in my post about the Albany school-teacher: when that lady comes in and tells the class of 10th-graders what bulimia is, you can bet that a bunch of girls (and, in our modern times, a good number of boys) will think, whoa, you can throw up after meals to lose weight?, and will go do just that. That act having never occurred to them spontaneously. And so it might go with anti-Semitism. If it had never occurred to kids today to believe that Jews control the media, an education in the matter might end up planting the idea in their heads. The amount of contextualization you need, to educate people who genuinely arrive at this topic with no preconceived thoughts, might be beyond the scope of anything but a Jewish-Studies or more advanced European-history class. And a brief, ill-conceived explanation - not what Nick says he did, but oh, say, what the Albany teacher did - can be worse than none at all.

Pulverization

-Sometimes vows of positive thinking aren't enough. There's a pill - legal! - that will take a person from Rhoda to Mary. I suppose I had heard of such a thing. If it also expedites dissertation-completion and preempts sunscreen-induced breakouts, and comes with Mary's wardrobe from the "Dick Van Dyke Show" days, and helps with learning how to merge onto the highway, I'm interested.

-Speaking of negativity, teacher-rants are so-very-now. Re: the second one, the consensus is that the prof is right, but I'm going to say he isn't entirely. Yes, it's irritating when students meander in and out of class as is convenient for them. Yes, the student email is of the sort that sets off instructors' uh-oh-another-entitled-one alarm bells. But this "course shopping" period - at least for the undergrads - is something they seem to think they're supposed to partake in, while instructors are instructed not to allow it. Because it clearly wouldn't work - the course has already started once it's started. There is no wishy-washy month of discussing what the course will be. The prof's substantive beef might actually be with whoever it was at the university who gave students the impression that the beginning of the semester is come-and-go-as-you-please. That, and as much as we-the-teachers wish it were so, I'm not sure that the kids who don't give a damn in school are equally apathetic at work. There are a lot of young adults in school because that's what one does, but who'd be thrilled to be at some job.

-The problem with scrapping negativity is, sometimes it really is called for. For instance, this new (or not?) emphasis on "clean eating." It's on the one hand a positive development - no longer are people assumed to be unhealthy for being overweight. "Health," we must agree, is independent of weight. So take that, thin privilege! On the other, now even those who are normal-weight and who eat plenty of vegetables are apparently poisoning themselves if they also consume sugar, refined flour, or very blended wheat flour (and that includes whole-wheat pasta, Petey), or wheat of any kind, or dairy, or any animal products, or anything cavemen didn't eat, or who on earth knows. What "clean" consists of varies in all kinds of contradictory ways - either everything must be pulverized, or nothing. 

The only constant is that not worrying about it - not obsessing over meals - isn't an option for anyone. Real food - as in, foods not engineered by Doritos scientists - is not enough. Healthy eating and a healthy attitude about eating are incompatible. But, well, consider the source. There are beauty and personal-style bloggers who, after some caveats about how they're not experts, give "health" advice that is, let's face it, advice on how to go from thin to thinner. But you're not even allowed to say that, because what they're doing is noble and pure. And according to Science, the GOOPitariat is kind of... right. Perhaps I'm the one with the problem, gambling with my health every time I open a box of DeCecco. Perhaps my defiant, feminist, but unglamorous not-worrying-about-it places me in the same category as those who really, truly don't worry about it, and who go down with whichever chain-smoking, fake-tanning, motorcycle-riding ship. 

Bad kids

I hadn't written anything about Steubenville thus far because I felt I had nothing to add. Rape is terrible and deserves to be punished. You do not need WWPD to tell you this. Institutions don't like making a fuss and allow terrible things to happen. Indeed, indeed, but my anecdotal evidence in that regard is sufficiently different from the Steubenville case that I had nothing to add on that account. I was prepared to find this upsetting, to discuss it privately, and not to respond to it on here unless I thought I had something to contribute, some way to better explain what happened and how things like it might be prevented. The big issues - victim-blaming, football culture, and more - have already been addressed elsewhere.

Then something occurred to me listening to a report about the case, where someone was calling in to say that whoever gave or sold these children alcohol needed to be held responsible. While there may be nothing to it, which could be why I haven't seen it addressed elsewhere, here goes:

Under the most ordinary of circumstances, teenage behavior in America is criminalized or deemed illicit. Teenagers (20-year-olds) who have a beer at a party, just the one, regardless of their car access or lack thereof, are bad kids. In my life, to my knowledge, I've met exactly two people who waited to drink until they were 21 (others, of course, didn't drink before or after). That's a whole lot of bad (nerdy) kids! And teenagers (anyone not yet married) who have entirely consensual sex with a significant other are engaging in premarital sex and are thus not being abstinent, and are thus bad kids, if not criminals like the underage drinkers. How strongly these taboos are felt depends on which region, but if they made it to the godless cities where I spent my youth, they're out there.

In some other parts of the West, too much drinking is bad, sexual assault is bad, but there's no sense that one can cross over from pure to impure simply by acting like everyone else your age. But for teens in the States, as I remember it, this leads to an atmosphere at parties and such where it feels like simply hanging out is being bad, breaking rules or laws, being a Youth, a criminal. Even the good kids feel they're being bad. Much that happens, if were to emerge on social media (which, I shall repeat for the zillionth time, happily did not exist in my own youth), would be devastating. A good kid with a drink in his hand! A photo of a party where a whole group of kids are acting silly - does that mean they're drunk? A reference to contraception announcing not responsibility but sexual activity! Things that having nothing to do with blacking out drunk, let alone with rape.

Once there's a sense among teenagers that a normal weekend is a weekend of illicit activity, lines can blur. Kids baseline feel like criminals, baseline feel like their behavior, if it reached authority figures, would damn them for life. If kids are at the top of some hierarchy (football or other), their being able to drink without punishment will already place them above the law. But the "law" threshold is so low that, while I don't believe there's genuine confusion over the difference between a beer at a party and sexual assault, there's a sense in which the mindset of 'I'm being bad' may contribute to how kids who do genuinely bad things justify their behavior to themselves in the moment.

None of this, I should note, is a policy prescription. For all I know, lowering the drinking age would so increase the number of fatal traffic accidents as to render all of this almost irrelevant.

"Young and impulsive"

Caryatis pointed me to this (relatively tame) Savage Love letter, from a 28-year-old man with a 28-year-old husband he'd been with since they were 24. I had known Savage to make arguments like this, and had tried to dig one up to link to here, but the trouble with podcasts is searching them, and I hadn't found any in his searchable oeuvre. Anyway:

These two men, apart from being 28, have a messed-up and possibly unfixable marriage. Sad, but seemingly unrelated to their age, which is unremarkable. As in, not worth remarking on, since as per the document Savage links to, the median age for a man to marry is 28. As Caryatis notes, we don't learn when this couple got married. For all we know, they married after five minutes at age 24. But "together" from 24 and married at 28 does not mean married at 24 and together since 17. To marry at a so-called reasonable age, after a so-called reasonable amount of time, you need to have met your spouse while too young to marry. Nevertheless, Savage takes the opportunity to launch into a speech about the "young and impulsive" who enter marriages all but doomed to fail:

According to the Pew Research Center, early marriage correlates strongly with divorce. The younger a couple is when they marry, the likelier they are to divorce. There are often other factors at play, of course, and there are plenty of people out there who got married in their teens or twenties and are still with their first spouses.

Well. It's good to know that on rare occasions, people who get married in their twenties do not divorce. Their twenties! You know the NYT Weddings pages, that sea of highly-educated 27-29.5-year-old brides? Some of those couples just might make it.

I mean, gah! How is this meant to work for women, this rule by which one cannot marry or even begin dating one's future spouse until age 30? Fertility isn't everything, but it isn't nothing, either. I'm not aware of a study saying that it's better to marry at 32 than 28, but I do remember hearing somewhere (intentional understatement - this is all one hears about) that IVF is best avoided if possible.

If Savage were talking only about gay male couples, fair enough, although same-sex marriage is kind of new to start imposing window-of-opportunity restrictions on it as well. (And are gay male college sweethearts who start thinking about marriage at 25 rightly considered "impulsive"?) But he's not. He's saying that 30 is the age at which anyone, male or female, straight or LGBT, can start even thinking about settling down without that being foolish.

Again with the lattes

You who are young and broke, did you know that buying coffee out every day costs more than not doing so? For what is, I estimate, the ten billionth time, the NYT is passing along this useful information.

Having already, in the linked WWPD post, listed my objections to this advice (coming, let me reiterate, from the standpoint of, I'm not commuting and I live in the woods, and thus am not defending a personal daily-coffee-out habit), I won't repeat the whole thing. 

This, though, is worth repeating: the first step, frugality-wise, should always be to cut that which you wouldn't miss. The money you spend on things (or upgrades) you don't notice. What that is will vary from person to person, and maybe it'll be coffee (or switching from lattes to drip), but chances are, if you're getting coffee out, this is something you actively enjoy. If that's where you cut (as opposed to, for example, realizing that there's no particular reason to buy t-shirts from J.Crew rather than Old Navy), you'll feel you're depriving yourself. 

Recent scientific findings

-Underage drinkers enjoy beer.

-Otherwise lovely women were horrible people in middle school.

-Ballerinas are pretty.

The wedding not dreamed of since one was a little girl

On today's Savage Lovecast, Dan advises a mother (who's anonymous - this is not a post about parental-overshare) who thinks her 11-year-old daughter might be a lesbian. In the course of their conversation, Dan decides that the girl is a lesbian, and there's this neat aha moment where the expert convinces the parent of the truth right before her eyes. And... while I'm totally on board with Dan's advice on how to raise children who might or might not be gay (i.e. all children) to feel as though either is great, I'm not at all convinced that this girl is gay. For one thing, there's no mention whatsoever of the girl being interested in other girls, which, if there were, would be something of a giveaway. Why, then, do we think she's gay?

-She has announced she doesn't want to marry or have kids.
-She's closer with her father.
-She's bullied for something (unclear what precisely), but is the "queen" of the mostly-male alternative crowd.
-She's sarcastic.

She is, in other words, a Daria. A Liz Lemon. A brain rather than a princess. What I'm getting at is, when a boy shuns conventional masculinity, this might tell us more about his burgeoning identity than when a girl shuns conventional femininity, because much of conventional femininity is kind of unappealing to anyone with half a brain. She might turn out to be a lesbian, and it's great that her mother wants to be prepared should that be the case, but the odds are against.

As the owner of exactly half a brain, this has, at any rate, been my experience. Frilly clothes, squealing enthusiastically or being passive, 'just a salad for me', who needs all that? And I say this as someone who was never a tomboy. Just not a girly-girl. I mean, I'm not not sarcastic (heh), and boots like these (and not those dreadful Louboutins) are at the tippy-top of my curent wanty list, but... yeah.

(You can read more of my musings on male beauty here or here - how's that for discreetly-segued self-promotion?)

But back to this eleven-year-old. She doesn't want to marry or have kids - this is Exhibit A? In our culture, there is this huge pressure on girls to dream of adult female "desire" (i.e. for a husband, kids, a well-decorated home), to act out wedding scenarios, so that as adults, they can go on "Say Yes to the Dress" and talk about the wedding they've dreamed of since they were a little girl, and how if this one dress has an empire waist but not a sweetheart neckline, the dream shall never come true. Well, not all women who grow up and happily marry a man were the kind of girls who dreamed of weddings.

Indeed, the trappings and scripts of conventional female heterosexuality can be repellent not just to women who like women, but also to women who do quite straightforwardly like men, who will be expected to want not a man, but My Big Day. (This totally came up on the Lena Dunham "Fresh Air" interview that I listened to on the previous poodle outing.) It can all seem like a mockery of what one is experiencing, thus - as I've said approximately 10,000 times on WWPD, why many straight women claim, half-joking, to be gay men trapped in women's bodies.

Or, the short version: there are so many reasons a girl of eleven might find womanhood and what it seems to entail off-putting that have nothing to do with being on the LGBTQ spectrum that this seems a bit of a leap, in a way that it might not if the parent of an eleven-year-old boy came to the equivalent conclusion.

Coffee politics

Remember the young woman so privileged she was applying for food stamps? The detail readers honed in on was the $1.50 coffee-shop coffee the author mentions drinking at the top of the piece. Search the page for "coffee" and you see the rage in the comments. There's a whole genre of condescending financial advice geared at The Youth, telling them that coffee out adds up. Why is it always coffee? Let's unpack that one author's cup of coffee's significance, and that of coffee and class more generally, setting aside the question of where coffee itself comes from and that whole set of labor concerns:

-Telling a broke middle-class person to give up lattes is, as we established in this thread, very much like telling a legitimately-poor one to exchange fast-food for lentils. It's ignoring that this purchase is a pleasure as well as a convenience. And you just get the sense that part of the tsk-tsking does come from the fact that advice-givers are uncomfortable with whichever caste enjoying themselves, or having the audacity to believe their time has value.

-Britta brought this up in the earlier thread, but it also bears repeating: Debt changes everything. As does parental assistance. And the economy is such that you can perfectly well be college-educated, employed in an office-job, and not earning enough to live on in your locale. If you're starting from negative $, it's less obvious what 'living within your means' means than if you're budgeting a salary. Does it mean not a cent other than what's needed to maintain your nutritional requirements and look reasonable at a job interview?

-No one needs coffee. Yet coffee isn't bad for you, either. That might make us think it would seem less decadent than the obvious comparisons (alcohol, tobacco, non-diet soda), but if anything, that coffee's only sinful in its gratuitousness makes it the most appealing target for anti-decadence crusaders. There's this kind of noble, respectable quality to actual self-destruction, like you're a devil-may-care libertarian relic of the hard-living days. (Maybe less so with jumbo soda, but even there there's the nanny-state concern.) That whichever self-destructive products cost money is secondary. But there's nothing hardcore and stick-it-to-the-man about foamy espresso drinks.

-Someone who thinks $1.50 coffee is cheap probably comes from a wealthy family, or at least not a truly destitute one. A coffee at a coffee shop will, in my experience, nowadays cost $2 in posher areas, far more in a restaurant, but maybe still less from a cart/deli, and definitely much less at home. A couple relevant facts about YPIS: 1) a speaker who identifies as privileged, who acknowledges privilege, basically invites accusations of privilege, and 2) one easy route to a quick YPIS is to hear someone refer to X as 'not that expensive,' and to be like, dude, if you think X isn't absolutely the most expensive thing ever, your privilege is showing.

-The classic job of the otherwise-unemployable humanities BA is barista. We associate coffee shops with underachieving middle-class white kids, friends' children who by all accounts should have real office-jobs by now. This (see footnote here) helps explain why baristas make at least minimum wage and still get these odd sympathy/solidarity tips. But it also tells us part of why coffee, that fueler of productivity, is seen as a slacker beverage. If you're on the coffee shop and not headed to the office, that changes everything.

-The fetishization of coffee exemplifies the food thing. Something ordinary is now artisanal, and vastly more expensive. And the food thing is what's wrong with young people today.

-Someone who can hardly afford $1.50 for coffee - brace yourselves for this - is actually not doing so great financially. I would go so far as to say that if you are a college-educated, coffee-drinking adult and weighing the pros and cons of this purchase for reasons other than whatever joy you get from thrift, this is indicative of a larger problem, one that coffee-or-not won't solve. While privilege is multifaceted, and includes race, able-bodiedness, level of education, and intangibles like which class you come across as, it would seem, if we take our liberal-arts-grad hats off for a moment, that someone out of school who's scraping together a buck fifty for a coffee is not privileged. Maybe even really, really not privileged.

-What readers are reacting to, the ones who are horrified that an unemployed person would spend $1.50 in a coffee shop, is that the indulgence in question is so painfully middle-class. It's a future-oriented indulgence that won't impair your ability to mesh with a white-collar office environment. But there's also the schadenfreude, the element of watching the mighty tumble, or simply regression to the mean. As in, look at her, with her middle-class trappings, thinking she's so fancy all the while not being able to afford groceries. And it's also just so depressing, if you're unemployable, and your great pleasure is this thing intended to make office-workers more productive on too little sleep.