Snobbery and indifference to stuff, or my love-hate relationship with the idea of buying pants at Lululemon

Is dislike of stuff - of shopping, of material objects - an admirable quality? Is liking stuff evidence that one is a bad person? Or is there more to it?

Graham Hill's account of having gobs of money but choosing to live with less helped me put my finger on what it is about the 'we have too much stuff' line of thought that can be so frustrating. Hill insists, and insists some more, that he's unusual for having had so much to begin with (tech-boom something-or-other), but that his lessons apply to regular-folk as well. And, well, yes and no.

First the yes: There's no point disputing that stuff tends to be bad for the environment, and to have been produced in unsavory conditions. Stuff plainly does not matter more than people. If, in a fire, you'd save your stuff and not your family, you have a screw loose.

But is the difference between the pro- and anti-stuff contingent really that the latter set care, while the former set are ego-driven and oblivious?

There are multiple reasons someone might join the anti-stuff bandwagon. Some people really are just hippies, and would rather meander in the wilderness than deal with the hustle and bustle of the mall. Others wish they could afford the $90 Lululemon yoga pants,* realize that they cannot (or can't get those and also buy cheese and, well, priorities), and then are all, screw Lululemon with its $90 yoga pants. Or: they think of all the amazing things they'd do with $90 (save the world, spend it on experiences, and/or buy even more cheese) and can't believe those with $90 to spare waste it on leggings.

Or - and here's the one we tend to forget about - there are those who could totally afford $90 yoga pants, but who are so secure in the knowledge that they could do so that $90 leggings don't feel special. If you don't have the concept of needing to save up for anything, you can afford, as it were, to be less materialistic. Status items lose their appeal if you already have whichever status. Result: they're associated with strivers. It's a form of status to have whichever handbag, but a still-greater form to not get one.

Now, this doesn't mean that everyone who doesn't own an Hermes (i.e. nearly everybody on the planet) stands accused of not owning one because they think they're too old-money or intellectual for something so obvious. Most of us can't buy the thing in the first place! It means that non-ownership of name-brand stuff - when it could be afforded, or when it's presented in a certain way - can have that meaning.

This came up in my post on weddings - that opposition to the big blow-out wedding seems very anti-one-percent, but is often snobbishness of a different kind. Spending up on a wedding seems low-class, crass, and McMansion-ish. Does this mean that everyone should have a conventional and expensive wedding, perhaps going into debt, in order to demonstrate non-snobbery? No. (Which I should have spelled out - many readers seemed to come away thinking this was my point.) But it means that we shouldn't have such a simplistic take on what snobbery entails. It isn't just the contests over who has the biggest wedding/ring. It's also the ones over who best demonstrated their distance from the bourgeois, mass-culture norm.

We kind of understand this when it comes to poverty (as opposed to middle-class-ness) and food (as opposed to stuff-more-generally). The whole lentil argument - why don't poor people eat more lentils? (Insert whichever observations re: buying in bulk.) And the requisite-if-oversimplified answer is, because the only treat available to them is fast food. But we really don't when it comes to status-seeking among the not-impoverished. Some commenters do, but on the whole, most who discuss this topic don't. To understand doesn't mean to celebrate, or to be all relativistic and say that there's no ethical problem with wastefulness. There just needs to be a better way of urging less-stuff, one that acknowledges why some care for stuff more than others.

There's a gender component as well - yes, men and their gadgets, but on the whole, materialism is associated with femininity. With men earning and women spending. Spending largely on their own upkeep, but also on decorating their houses. Conversely, getting rid of all your stuff - especially doing so to travel the world with "an Andorran beauty" named Olga - is a kind of classic macho fantasy. (Is it OK to write about women in this manner in the New York Times opinion section if you seem to be coming from the left?) I suppose the appeal of this article was partly that Hill acknowledged the male capacity to accumulate stuff. Too often, 'stuff' is equated with stuff women use to look pretty and save time on housework, when of course women should be naturally pretty and slim from all that vacuuming.

*Lululemon might be the clothing store closest to where I live. It taunts me, saying, 'Do you really think those Old Navy lounge pants, those Target sweatpants, do you any favors?' I tell it, 'But I just bought new jeans a few weeks ago, and finally, in friggin' March, got around to buying a proper winter coat (there's still snow, and it was of course now on sale). I'm not about to spend $90 on leggings.' Do you think it cares? It responds, 'But these pants, which you've never even tried on, would be amazing, so amazing as to inspire you to work out more often.' I tell it that I've tried this before, albeit with much cheaper workout wear, and it sits in the workout-wear drawer, the fantasy of going through that many workout outfits (five?) in one laundry cycle still unrealized.' And so it goes.

Suburban Square

It does seem appropriate that the endpoint of yesterday's experiment in seeing if I can drive on the highway for extended periods of time (as opposed to spending ten seconds on Route 1 panicking) culminated at a place called Suburban Square. This is a real upscale mall, not a derogatory description of the shoppers.

While I may be suburban and square, that mall was not our initial plan. (Of course my husband was present for this - did you think I was going to learn how to merge onto the I-95 unattended?) We were going to go to Narberth (unpronounceable!), a town in a place called Main Line Philadelphia. I'd long been intrigued by this "Main Line," whatever it was, and somehow refused to accept that it would just be wealthy suburbs. I'd read on Wikipedia about Jewish towns that to this day exist because Then (and maybe Now) the neighboring towns were too old-money for such riff-raff. That, and we're already quite far along in our list of possible excursions. How snooty would it be? Would it be like Passy/the 16th in Paris?

Effectively, yes, it would be a great deal like that. Narberth, despite being tiny, has two French bakeries, a consignment shop, a wine store and a cheese store. We saw not one but two bichon-type lap dogs. Paris, Pennsylvania, depending one's plans for the day, how integral the Louvre was to one's checklist...

The real goal yesterday, however, had been to visit Maido, the Japanese supermarket of the greater Philadelphia region. Not that it's so inconvenient to bring back groceries (and superior hair-care products) from lower Manhattan, but yes, it is incredibly inconvenient to do this. And I liked the idea of driving to some big-box store full of frozen tofu-skin and all my other favorites. There's a Korean version of this in Edison (?), H-Mart, which has some Japanese groceries as well, but this was going to be like Sunrise Mart in Target form. I was so excited. If this was it for the Philadelphia area, it would surely be immense. No doubt it was outside the city center because it was just that huge, zoning laws wouldn't permit it in central Philadelphia. I'd built it up in my mind to basically being Tokyo (as I imagine it) somehow housed in a Mid-Atlantic strip-mall.

And... it was a small grocery store in the center of a small town. No strip-mall, no outskirts. Japanese, yes, but with about the same selection in that area, or not quite, as H-Mart. A great place to have nearby if you live in Narberth, and one I'd welcome with immense enthusiasm should it open anywhere near where I live, but maybe not a destination for those who live an hour away. The bakeries had been more impressive, if also not worth the drive for those already capable of highway maneuvering. 

So we did have to go further down the destination list, bringing us to Suburban Square in nearby Ardmore. It sounded intriguing - an old-timey suburban town square-mall-thing, as opposed to the utilitarian strip-malls where we do our grocery shopping. 

The highlight of Suburban Square, in the end, was its grocery-shopping. (Confession: I like grocery-shopping.) The Ardmore Farmers' Market doesn't have anything to do with a farmers' market as in local farm involvement (at least not in this season, from what I could tell), but is instead an indoor food market like the food halls in Montreal or D.C., or, for a more local reference, a bigger version of the Stockton Farm Market. (Or, fine, the Reading Street Market, which everyone loves but me.) A fish store that looked great (and I can vouch for the gravlax), a branch of a high-end Italian cheese-and-more shop from Philadelphia, DiBruno's, which, well, cheese. A vegetable store with baby artichokes. Expensive? Posh? Yes and yes, but so is Princeton, and we don't have a food hall, so it still made for a change of pace. 

Other than that, it was a mall with whichever stores presumably spring up at the income threshold in Princeton and this part of Pennsylvania: J.Crew, Lululemon, etc. While I am not a stuff-rejecting saint, this I could give or take. There was also a Barbour store, which had particular relevance in light of this article. 

A contrarian, devil's-advocate-ish post on marital name-change

Name-change and marriage is back in the news, with Jill Filipovic's straightforward, largely unapologetic demand that women cease to take their husbands' names. It's not an essay I entirely agree with (and I'll get to why in a moment) but I liked it all the same - Filipovic says what she thinks, and doesn't hem, haw, and fuss about possibly offending the vast majority of women. And this is as clearly-put as I've ever seen the traditional feminist case against name-change (and choice feminism more broadly): your name is your identity, when you think you're choosing you're really just passively surfing the wave of the patriarchy. I think lots of women probably agree with this, even women who've changed their names or would do so.

Filipovic asks why, despite the growth of egalitarian marriage, this one holdout persists. I'd ask, meanwhile, whether perhaps the egalitarian-ish nature of marriage means that name-change wasn't, all along, the problem. I think there's a growing if largely unspoken understanding that gender is here to stay, but that what we want is equality, not 100% blurring of lines. We don't object to the tendency of women (even staunch second-wave-variety feminists) to wear their hair long, to wear dangly earrings, etc. Heels and makeup get debated, but we don't assume that for a woman to be a feminist, she must cross-dress. (Nor, I think, do we assume that a woman in a men's suit is wearing it to make a feminist point. We assume she just feels like wearing it, or is more comfortable dressing as a man.) What matters is who can do what professionally, who gets paid what, who gets taken seriously. Which is why, on some level, arguments about symbolic trappings fall flat. It really does seem that they can be kept around (and explored by same-sex couples as well) without this necessarily meaning the era of "Leave it to Beaver" has returned.

Anyway, Filipovic allows that name-change can be empowering, giving the example of transgendered individuals, whose original first names never matched their identities. She doesn't give the example of ethnic name change, likely because doing so would bring about WWPD levels of digression, but I will say that those are probably some mix of empowering and internalized-oppressive. But she does explain that in marriage, name-change is oppressive because it refers back to the bad old days of marriage, where the woman was property.

Here's where I'm not convinced. Marriage, name-change or not, refers back to bad old days, feminism-wise. Using feminine pronouns to describe half of humanity points back to less-enlightened times. But the anti-name-change argument seems like yet another case of a common-enough feminist error: that because something is 'what women do,' it's necessarily the inferior situation. Getting paid less, that's definitively worse. Obviously, very very often, the women's version of whichever lot in life is straight-up worse. But, consider makeup. Is it oppressive because men don't (generally) wear it? Or is it oppressive to men that if they want to experiment with their looks, or enhance their beauty, this isn't an option for them? Whatever penalty exists on (some) women (in certain circumstances) who don't wear makeup, it's zilch compared to that on men who do.

So. The line of thought - expressed by Filipovic and many commenters - that you never hear men saying they just thought their spouse's name sounded better, my thinking is, maybe this isn't about women giving some silly reason as a pretext for the 'real' one (patriarchy!) and actually more about the rigid gender roles men must contend with. A man might want to change his name - and for all these reasons: preferring his fiancée's name, wishing to set himself apart from his birth family, not feeling particularly attached to his name - but not see this as a viable option. Women experience some pressure to change their names, but it's probably nothing compared with the pressure men feel not to do so.

On 'weddings'

In my latest effort at sullying an otherwise fine publication with my ramblings, I wax ambivalent on bridal fauxbivalence.

As a rule, I do my best to incorporate even the trolliest criticisms of my writing into something positive. As a grad student, one can get used to all feedback on one's writing being couched in a great deal of positivity and support, so the harsh world of anonymous commenters can be - yes, really - of great use. It can be difficult, when, for example, the comments are along the lines of, ‘this is the dumbest thing I ever read,’ or are furious tirades based on misinterpretations of headlines I didn't even write. The lesson learned can feel like, more nuance! Always more nuance! Or someone will be upset that you oversimplified what is in fact a complicated issue! The addition of extra hemming, hawing, and cautiousness is probably the opposite of what would improve my writing, and yet.

But I want to take something from a comment at the Atlantic claiming that my latest post felt mean-spirited, although the commenter him/herself admits to not knowing why they have this impression, nor towards whom this alleged meanness is directed. This I can work with, even if I'm not exactly sure to whom I should direct the apology. When I reread my initial WWPD post on fauxbivalence, I found it far too snarky, although I continued to believe the basic premise. What I do in the more recent post, and hadn’t in others there, is position myself in the issue in question. I wasn't sure about doing that at first, but it didn’t seem right to pin it all on Jessica Grose and other writers who’ve put their fauxbivalence before a wide audience. (I have ample stores of anecdata on fauxbivalence, but prefer to cite publicly-available examples.) My own wedding involved a mix of good-feminist and bad-feminist moments - as I find they nearly all do. And I find myself playing up the good-feminist ones, playing down the bad-feminist ones, rather than simply owning (as another commenter puts it) the lot of it. I am not above fauxbivalence! If I'm hard on the fauxbivalent, I'm hard on myself. 

And... the following will address Caryatis's points in the comments there, which I'm reluctant to enter for fear of losing the week to that: I don't think the answer is to throw up one's hands and have the most 'traditional' wedding possible. We should all do what we're comfortable with, be less judgmental about what others feel comfortable with, and so on. Given that I got married at City Hall, I'm not about to tell people who get married in their backyards that they're not making a big enough fuss. We're all comfortable with different things. If you don't want a fancy-schmancy ring, more power to you. (My personal favorite in the non-traditional ring arena is this.) What I think is wrong is to turn who can be most low-key, most offbeat, into a competition in its own right. A wedding is by its very nature an unoriginal act, and I think there's a certain value to acknowledging it. Not acknowledging it by having a more 'traditional' event than you're comfortable with, but just, like, acknowledging it to yourself, in conversation, etc.

My journalistic niche: the obvious

There's a ground-breaking essay in the Guardian about how, if you live in a city with good public transportation, perhaps a car-sharing service as well, you don't need to own a car. An essay which it's revealed that one of the main reasons for having one is that if you don't, other, richer kids will tell your kids that your family is poor. (Welcome to my not-poor but car-less New York childhood!) I mean, yes, if you're in a big, dense city (and I get that London's spread out a bit differently than New York), a car starts to become an inconvenience and not worth the bother. But living in a city with a reasonable subway system and patting yourself on the back for not owning a car is not unlike living in a tropical climate and congratulating yourself for not owning a fur coat. When I lived in New York (or, for that matter, Chicago), no car. Here in the woods, where there's no public transportation to vaguely near where I live, not even a bus... car, finally, and thank goodness.

In other ground-breaking news, today I made the miraculous discovery that a pair of new (all-cotton! yet non-mom!) jeans that fit just right apart from gaping in the back did not need to be taken in, but rather to go through the dryer for the first time. For the best, given that this was the most I'd spent on jeans by such a long shot, even before the shipping and hemming. Also for the best that I didn't get this done when I got them hemmed - and I had been regretting this - as I now wouldn't be able to close them.

Save the fusilli!

Wait, were you going to eat that? Stop! Don't you know that every single food ever is incredibly problematic - to the environment, to the farmers/gatherers, to the organisms themselves? Why are you so arrogant as to think that piece of fusilli exists to be your nourishment?

So after assessing that I guzzle plenty of olive oil and, at least the week of the scientist dinner-dance, an appropriate amount of wine (other weeks, my devotion to seltzer wins out), I was left struck by the fact that I don't eat enough fish. I... go back and forth on fish, sometimes cooking whole snapper or branzino (or whatever they really are - 'snaggle-toothed poison-fish' or who knows), sometimes finding them kind of prehistoric and creepy, just a bit too close to eating lizard or frog, which I have thus far, to my knowledge, avoided. That, and fish is expensive, even if relative non-squeamishness allows you to buy them whole. Splurging occasionally, like every few months, on some minute portion of lamb chops makes sense, because lamb chops are delicious. With fish, it's more like, a really good lentil salad might have been better and cost 50 cents (if that) to prepare. But one needs solid food to go with the wine-olive-oil vinaigrette, and fish is the key to living forever like the napping Greek islanders.

Except you really shouldn't be eating fish. The same publication that brought us the Mediterranean Diet quiz is now urging us to find alternate sources of protein. Well, the panelists themselves are more nuanced, but the comments are going, leave the fish in the sea where they belong! And protesting human overpopulation, when it's like, perhaps so, but we who were born need to pick up something at the supermarket.

******

Meanwhile, I'm trying something of a diet experiment of my own. Not that I'm somehow above vanity and wouldn't want to wake up built like Miranda Kerr, famed Victoria's Secret/high fashion crossover model, and not that I think any voluntary change in food consumption in our society can ever be 100% non-vanity-related, but the goal here is meal-variation, not weight loss. (Kerr-ness would, for me, involve gaining a significant amount of height, and is thus futile.)

Thing is, I started to realize that I was eating a lot of pasta. A lot. As in, if working from home, this might end up being not just dinner most nights, but lunch as well. While I do combine the pasta with vegetables and cheese, it was still starting to get repetitive and kibble-like. I'd read recipes online and think, wow, that sounds great!, and then put up the water because it's easier.

So I'm trying to see if I can last a week without pasta. Not low-carb, low-wheat, low-gluten, anything like that. As much bread, pizza, dessert as I'd have otherwise. Just no pasta. I'm counting from Saturday night's ravioli. So far so good, but I'm not quite convinced I'll make it the whole week. But if I do, perhaps an announcement. If I do this and somehow emerge looking like Miranda Kerr, WWPD readers, you'll be the first to know.

Beyond guyliner

As a matter of principle, I must approve of the fact that the most enthusiastic makeup-and-skincare routine "Into The Gloss" has yet covered belongs to a 16-year-old boy. Male beauty! Gender equality! And yet, I can't imagine that too many women, if a boyfriend or husband announced his plans to begin each day exfoliating with some kind of hi-tech exfoliation machine, and then carefully blend "Armani Luminous Silk Foundation in #2 and #5," with "Givenchy Lip Liner #3" on dressier occasions, would consider that a welcome development. Some - it takes all kinds - but as much as I believe straight and bisexual women do care what men look like, we really have been socialized to find makeup on men (with the exception of eyeliner on rock stars) unappealing.

But who's to say this is about the female gaze? (Not, alas, that I could imagine terribly many gay men wanting a partner with this routine, either.) As it happens, Harry Brant, the 16-year-old socialite in question, says just that: "I don’t know a lot of guys outside of fashion that wear makeup, but I know hundreds [emphasis in the original] of girls who complain about guys that don’t." In other words, Brant's vision of makeup-for-dudes is not about men/boys signaling their lack of interest in women/girls - which is, I would say, how most women/girls would interpret it.

Of course, 16 is young, and despite Brant's extensive participation in fashionable society (his mother's a supermodel, his father a gazillionaire), he's also a kid in high school. Regardless of his sexual orientation (a similarly dandyish older brother is apparently out; Gawker somewhat jumped the gun in calling the both of them gay role models), regardless of whether he personally wants to appeal to girls (and maybe he does!), he may feel some pressure, in an interview, to make this be about pleasing girls.

And quite apart from the gender-and-sexuality angle, what Brant has would be a ton of ridiculously expensive makeup for an adult, and so is noteworthy from that perspective as well. I don't quite know if the fact that gender norms are being subverted means we're required to ignore the whoa-such-spoiling angle. As in, I'm really not sure. Maybe?

Anyway, I read the profile and came away from it first thinking, gosh, this kid probably looks just fine without all the goop. More power to him if he wants to sparkle, or to present an androgynous appearance, but nude eyeliner? Does Brant come across as almost pathologically insecure because of the amount of attention he pays to getting his cover-up just so, or because we don't expect this of a boy? Or: would a girl who was similarly concerned with her skin feel obliged to pretend that she didn't wear much makeup at all, because that's part of the script, whereas a boy in makeup, well, once you've made the leap, there's not much point pretending you're lower-maintenance than you are?

Today in schnozzery

Via Refinery29, a Guardian story on how Iran has the highest per-capita rate of nose jobs. Interest in international primping trends is maybe on the rise, what with the "This American Life" bit on Korea and the not uncontroversial Jezebel post on the same. And Iranian nose-alteration is apparently not a new story, but the degree of this surgery's popularity might be. And it appears to extend to some Iranian-Americans as well.

Now, hopefully no one's coming to WWPD for cutting-edge reporting on Iran. (On a good day I make it all the way to Wegmans.) But re: noses, I have some thoughts, coming as I do from the people most stereotyped as schnozztastic. With Jews and noses, my sense is that once the thinking is that Jews have big noses, even if no more Jews have 'em (Western Europe not being the sea of button noses one might imagine from Great Neck), those who do will feel this is a Jewish trait, and be more inclined to do something about it. As in, white non-Jews would get them as well, but only if they actually had (or, via a mental illness, mistakenly believed they had) remarkable noses. And - permit the digression - it's worth remembering that the definitive "Jewish" features vary by time and place. In the 19th C French documents I know so well, it's all about how Jews have "Oriental"-looking eyes. I'm not even sure what that entailed - not East Asian-looking, presumably. Point being, it hardly matters if the features in question are more common among whichever minority, if the main issue is what's associated with the group in question.

Although... do Jews still get nose jobs, outside the entertainment industry where seemingly everyone does? From what I can tell, and apparently the evidence agrees, the era of the Jewish teen nose-job has ended. No one, to my knowledge, showed up at my high school with a new nose, and what were we if not Jewish and Korean? And yet, in Iran, the de-schnozzification lives on. Why? 

Again, it could be that there's some obvious answer, albeit one someone as Iran-ignorant as I am would never come up with, but if there is, it's not in the Guardian piece. We do get a few clues, such as that if only one's face is revealed, one's nose is particularly key, and there are some hints that this is a desire to look more Western, as if in protest against a not-so-Western regime. (No reference to the possibility that what with Ahmadinejad, it's frowned upon to look Jewish, likely because that's not what this is about.) But in general, reasons given are not nation-or ethnicity-specific. In which part of the world do women not want to look beautiful, do women not think being beautiful will help them on the marriage market? Why noses?

My best guess would be that there's this sense, for Jews, and perhaps for Iranians as well, that one is this close to looking white, to 'passing.' If your ancestors are from China or Kenya, you on some level realize that even if you'd like to look Swedish, it's not gonna happen. But this still doesn't quite explain it - for postwar American Jews, the idea was to blend in with the non-Jews around you. And there were of course the unstated anxieties about what it meant to look Jewish not so many years prior, not so far away. Presumably there's no stigma in Iran on looking identifiably Iranian. Is there even a stereotype about Iranians and noses? (This is what I would have wanted from the Guardian piece.) There's at any rate no concern, as far as I know, that one will be rounded up and murdered if one has a big nose, but not if one does not.

Today in baffling YPIS

Jezebel threads are often a great source for examples of YPIS - of people who don't know anything about one another ordering one another to check their privilege. "Your privilege is showing" =YPIS.

Along the same lines, and yet kind of a new one: A commenter to a post about ideal-partner lists, identifying himself as a "gay feminist dude," produces the following:

Funny
Reasonably neat
Attractive (to me)
Curious
Aware of his privilege
Wants to make the world a better place
--But doesn't get discouraged by how hard that is
Loves Robyn

Emphasis mine.

This item - "Aware of his privilege," jumped out at me both because, well, YPIS, and because it seemed an odd thing to request out of context. How exactly is this imagined dreamboat to be aware of his presumably substantial privilege, if it's not spelled out in what capacity he is privileged in the first place? There's no indication that Theoretical Boyfriend is wealthy or well-educated, white or Protestant. He's male, one can infer, which means he possesses male privilege, but he's also gay or bisexual (or else what's he doing with "gay feminist dude"), which does mitigate some of that privilege, I'd think.

So, does "Aware of his privilege" mean that Theoretical Boyfriend is grateful for what he has, whatever that may be? In which case, fair enough - that's always a good quality, although if expressed too vehemently (think multiple daily Facebook status updates about how lucky one is, how blessed, apropos of nothing in particular), there's a way that it can seem either like bragging or, at the very least, forced and insincere.

Or - and this seems the ding-ding-ding possibility - does our gay-feminist friend have a recent major ex-boyfriend who was particularly clueless and entitled, who made frequent tone-deaf remarks that gave the impression he assumed everyone else also had a yacht? Because that's what this kind of list - no matter the gender or sexual orientation of the person making it - tends to be, a mix of grievances about one or more ex-partners (or bad dates), and an optimistic assumption that any future love will also have all the good qualities of all previous ones. Which means maybe dude's ex was aware of his privilege, although this seems like the sort of thing one would only notice in its profound absence.

"'Another gem'" UPDATED

Do your teach (at any level)? Do your friends teach? If so, half of your Facebook feed probably consists of anecdotes from class, cute snippets of kids' assignments, and examples of the more entitled emails sent by college students. The students in question are rarely (never, in my experience) named or readily identifiable, but it always struck me as iffy to share this type of info at all. On the one hand, the stories can be comforting to fellow teachers, the threads useful forums for advice, and yes, all of it can be immensely entertaining. On the other, students will find it. If you're in the class, certainly if you're the kid in question, you'll know.

So my inclination had always been to keep this sort of thing (and anything even quasi-confidential - I don't understand or trust the privacy settings, making me something of a paranoid curmudgeon, but anyway) offline. And then official policy in my department became that one could not share such stuff on Facebook, which struck me as reasonable. Everyone's qualms are different (and mine, given my feelings on parental overshare, are probably higher than most), so it's best if institutions have a policy.

On that note: An admissions officer at Penn just lost her job, seemingly over having made fun of parts of applicants' essays on Facebook. It's unclear what Penn's policy/her division's policy was on this, but it seems like the employee may not have seen these excerpts as breaching confidentiality, if the kids' names were not provided, and if the kids were not really identifiable. As much as I see this as problematic, it's not obvious everyone would (again, given the ample Facebook-newsfeed evidence), so yes, there need to be policies, clear ones, because common sense doesn't cover it.

UPDATE

And now, the second Facebook professional overshare of the day, this one also, strangely, related to circumcision. Lest you think discussion of male genitalia and its surgical modification is some facet of our modern TMI society, let me just say that a lot of the 19th C material I've had to go through for my dissertation involves matter-of-fact references to men getting circumcised, or references to them being or not being thus. To be circumcised (in this context) meant to be Jewish; when a non-Jewish man became Jewish, what would have to happen was not necessarily just alluded to.

I had one more beauty-post in me yet!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bringing glamor to the woods

Below, three recent or recent-ish things I bought but did not need:

-Galaxy-print leggings. At long last! And $20! Which might seem like a lot for what are effectively multicolored tights, but I promise, it's a great deal for this sort of thing, if it's what you're set on. Which, as you all know, I have been since forever. But not quite enough to send off for the pricey version from Australia.

-Neon-pink lipstick. A more recent and somewhat less challenging to track down wanty. (Didn't exist at Sephora, which was ultimately for the best, as MAC is ever so slightly cheaper than those brands.) I was mostly inspired by this Sartorialist photo - a bright-pink lip, a bit of blush, and (contrary to my usual approach) mascara (or nothing) rather than eyeliner. It just seemed like, yes, this is the look. The bare-face-bright-lip combo is one that usually seems better in theory (or looks better on someone else), but this seemed like a pared-down, everyday version that does not require the wearer to be a stunning Lithuanian, while at the same time, a bit more out-there and unexpected than a basic red. To be determined - haven't actually tried it on yet. If it makes me look either stunning or Lithuanian, you, WWPD readers, will be the first to hear about it.

-Iridescent-glitter nail polish. The best of these is apparently a discontinued Chanel, but such is life. It's fabulous and holographic in the right light, but like all glitter polishes, refuses to ever entirely come off. 

"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.

Recent scientific findings

-Underage drinkers enjoy beer.

-Otherwise lovely women were horrible people in middle school.

-Ballerinas are pretty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manhattan: because I'd never make it as a farmer

-New Brooklyn continues to represent aspirational farming by non-ethnic white people. On that front, we have Swedish Brooklyn obsession, and the expansion of already-suburban New Brooklyn to actual suburbs. (Brooklyn, in case you were concerned, has yet to reach Princeton. Although we are getting a farm-to-table restaurant, and already have a cheerily Park Slope-ish coffee shop.)

-Yesterday, in the tragically non-hip borough of Manhattan, a really long-standing wanty was achieved: galaxy-print leggings. These, I believe, so $20, and the price had thus far been the obstacle. The price I paid, however, was that these leggings were being sold in a store on lower Broadway that I'd have never entered had I not seen them in the window. A store for tween girls and/or club kids, the overlap's substantial. The overlap with what I wear, not so substantial, and limited, I suspect, to these particular leggings. In any case, there were several dressing rooms, each of which contained a clown-car's worth of the popular girls at that age, accompanied by a really enthusiastic mom of one or more of them, who kept bringing her daughter/all the girls more stuff to try on, seemingly unsolicited. It appeared they'd come into the city for this, and had unofficially rented the store for a coming-of-age celebration of some kind. I couldn't decide if the problem was that they were taking forever or if it was that I was shopping at a store whose shopping bag bears the slogan, "Girls Only." But the leggings themselves (to be worn as tights, thank-you-very-much) are spectacular.

-Soba-ya continues to be the center of the universe. Not only because for $14, you can get a "mini" lunch special that's a sashimi bowl, a bowl of handmade-soba-noodle soup (neither "mini"), and various extras (or, for less $, a more sensible amount of food), and it will be all of it amazing, two of the best lunches you've ever eaten, and for the price of a hamburger in Princeton, but also because there, eating alone at the counter with book-and-phone, as I sometimes would to treat myself after an especially long week, was a punk legend/literary sensation.

Today in judge-a-woman

I kind of loved Liz McDaniel's account of working as a temp at a bridal mag, just after being dumped by a fiancé. A darkly amusing premise, and well-told. It's a great first-person account, in part because the secrets of everyone but the author are left out. We know a dude left her, but not who he is, nor why things ended. If there's mockery, it's very much directed inward.

The NYT commenters, on the other hand, are up in arms. First off, why is this in the paper of record? (Why, I want to know, do opponents of lifestyle articles keep acting as though the one they've just arrived at is the paper's very first piece on something other than Mideast strife?) Then there are those who simply can't handle that a woman wouldn't express ambivalence (fauxbivalence) at the very idea of a wedding in the first place. This, eh. Just because this wouldn't be for you (and it wasn't for me, either - I got married at City Hall, in a short, white-ish dress from a non-bridal department store) doesn't mean anyone it is for doesn't deserve happiness. The author appears to be from the South. I don't know much about the South, but it is my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) that elaborate, "traditional" weddings just might be a bigger deal in South Carolina than among the Zabars set.

But then there are the really judgmental commenters, who accuse McDaniel of caring about the wedding, not the marriage. There's even this insinuation that she had it coming, getting dumped. A reiteration of the tired trope that a woman must show her worthiness of marriage by proving her utter indifference to the institution, especially to its trappings.

As for her not discussing the marriage,  it never happened, did it? We might assume that the author was very deeply mourning what must have been quite a close relationship, but maybe did not want to share the details of that with the paper. (As we know from Dan Savage, or common sense, the reason may have been very personal.) And what this job was reminding her of would not have been her ex's quirks, but the trappings of the wedding that never was. The details are there not to show that the author fetishized The Wedding, but because they show just how planned everything was, just how late in the game she got dumped. How is this not poignant? Do we need to translate this to something a hipper reader would understand? Like, imagine if she got dumped, and then a piece of bubble wrap reminded her of the dress she'd planned on crafting for herself for the casual backyard wedding she was going to have, that was going to be catered by the local taco place. Wouldn't that have counted?

Sigh

I think Instapundit did a close reading of my post about unpaid internships.

Intern-sectionality

Because the topic has interested me for so long, after writing about gender and unpaid internships for a wider audience, I did take a close-ish look at the comments, and have reflected on some of them here. Not, this time around, to apologize for having dared say my piece before a mass audience. I'm getting used to the scale of this, but am curious to see others' reactions. I haven't quite kept up with all of them, but there is one point I believe must be addressed:

Many feel that I missed the big picture, namely that unpaid internships are unfair to those from poorer families. (That they're often illegal fails to compel, because then you'll get libertarian sorts arguing that if these arrangements are voluntary, it's the law that's the problem.) While the general unfairness of life for those from poorer families is a point worth repeating, this is not the strongest case against unpaid internships. Against the ridiculous cost of going to college, yes - that very much is the rich getting richer, given that it still helps to go to college (and then some) to get a job, given the difference between graduating with and without debt. Against unpaid internships, no.

So it's not that I forgot to mention this, or that I don't think poor kids getting screwed over is an important social-justice issue. Indeed, as I say in the post, these internships are not of much use in helping you get a job. I'm not convinced that unpaid internships are this great destroyer of social mobility. Social mobility's lousy for other reasons.

Are they needed to break into specific high-influence fields? (This post is in part a longer response to Caryatis's comment here.) They're certainly perceived of in that way, and obviously there are individuals who believe that the connections they made and skills they learned at unpaid internships got them a paying job in their desired area. It obviously sucks to feel that you're missing out on an opportunity, even if in truth, employers only care about proper work experience, and may even prefer candidates who had real builds-character jobs. (I don't believe I've personally been held back by not having ever had an unpaid internship, but who knows - maybe if I'd had one I'd now control the media.) But I think we forget - and this I also mention - that many who had a chic internship and then got a chic job had connections in the first place. I'd like to see (or do?) some research on how many paying entry-level jobs in journalism/publishing/etc. go to ex-unpaid-interns, on how many people with positions of power at these orgs started as unpaid interns.

But also, compensation for work is not something one is only owed if one would be out on the street without it. That's the housewife connection. The gender angle. It's wrong to not pay a female employee, or not pay her properly, because she's got a husband who earns enough for the family. It's extra-wrong not to pay a female employee because she might not need to work to eat, and this is just being assumed on account of she's female, and lo and behold, she's not even married in the first place, or she is and her husband is an aspiring basket-weaver. But once paying women less/nothing becomes the norm, it becomes more difficult for any woman to get paid properly for her work.

What's bizarre is that this continues, only now the assumption is more that the parents/loans of a young woman will foot the bill. And... this does end up screwing over those who don't have some other source of cash. But it's not all fun and games for those who are working unpaid and still able to eat. Being channeled into a path where economic self-sufficiency always seems within reach, but never is, isn't a fluffy non-problem, even if there's a roof over your head, even if you're living in splendor. It's this odd quasi-intersectionality, a branch of misogyny that's about hating "rich girls," but that extends to girls, women, who aren't even rich.

Happy Valentine's Day?

-Do you have an engagement ring? Madeleine Davies of Jezebel probably hates you, but you may be an exception, or maybe your ring isn't as big as all that. Cue the responses: Suggestions that Davies must be jealous of women whose hands sparkle. Proud announcements that one's own ring is ethical, an heirloom, a crusty ponytail band. One really amazing complaint from a woman who unselfconsciously complains that her (ethical, she assures) ring is too big and unwieldy.

-Did you change your name when you got married? Jessica Grose of Slate did, except you may remember her as Jessica Grose - she still uses her maiden name professionally. She has invited you to use the Slate comments to tell her why she's a disgrace to feminism. (See also: why, the larger the audience I'm writing for, the less I say about myself. For any audience, I'm careful only to reveal what I'd be fine with the whole world knowing, and yes, that includes Facebook, but I'm reluctant to actively solicit comments on my life choices from quite so many strangers. If that distinction makes sense.)

-Are you a man? Do you ever approach women with romantic intent? Freddie asked for my opinion on a short film about a man pursuing a woman, and on the issues it brings up. And... I watched it, but it didn't make me think 'street harassment.' If anything, what was off-putting was that the man was entirely active, the woman entirely passive. Definitely interested, but exclusively the pursued. What Freddie writes here, and I'd emphasize that last bit, seems reasonable:

For me, it seems as though the current reality of street harassment, the culture of rape, and assumed privilege of heterosexual men to approach any women makes it clear that we need to be far more careful about approaching strangers, and to require far more in the way of demonstrations of attraction before we decide to talk to women we don't know, particularly when they're alone. Perhaps that means that women who are interested in being approached will have to be somewhat more demonstrative of that in this future culture.

I'd go further and say that we'd need to come around to the idea of women not just announcing approachability, but also approaching men. It's what I was getting at here - it's somehow both unacceptable for men to pursue women (creepy!) and for women to pursue men (desperate!) If he liked you, you'd know! Except if he let you know, he'd be sketchy! How does anyone ever get together? (Alcohol?)

In all seriousness, it simply doesn't work to have a culture of men not inadvertently bothering women who aren't interested in them and one of women playing "The Rules"-esque games. (Rape is another story, and is of course inexcusable regardless of game-playing or lack thereof. Same with stalking, harassment, etc. I'm talking about interest clumsily expressed, obliviousness, things of that nature.) As it stands, there's so much pressure on women to seem indifferent to the men they like that it no doubt can be confusing for men to know when a woman is interested. The whole hard-to-get thing is so ingrained that a woman's complete and utter lack of interest can be interpreted by an optimistic dude as an elaborate mating dance.

Let me repeat: this is not about women asking to be harassed. That's not it at all. It's about how the expectation of female passivity - the expectation that a woman will never actively want anything - is incompatible with it being abundantly clear when a woman isn't interested in a man, so that the flirtation or asking-out or whatever can come to a halt. And if it were more socially-acceptable for women to pursue, a man not keen on expressing unreciprocated interest would have the option of only ever accepting others' invitations.

Bitter baristas, disgraced designers, and unpaid interns

-There exists a blog entirely made up of the nasty thoughts a barista (well, ex-barista) has about his customers (seemingly written in real time). Even the customers who do seemingly innocuous things like order decaf or soy milk. It's not as clever as it could be, but if you're someone who appreciates being judged unfavorably by the person making your cappuccino, you'll get a kick out of it.

-Galliano-the-Hasid-gate. This is so my beat, but I'm late to it, and have nothing to add other than that it sure is something that Galliano dresses like a Hasidic Jew, and that Abe Foxman has no idea what he's talking about.

-Oh, and then this just happened! My thing about gender and unpaid internships is out there for all to see.

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.

On avocados, elsewhere

Autumn Whitefield-Madrano has kindly invited me to guest-blog at "The Beheld" (here and here) this week and next. WWPD is, as you know, all over the place thematically, but expect my posts over there to be more strictly centered around themes of beauty and feminism. My first post is about Gwyneth Paltrow's fears of avocado over-consumption.

14, 29

Tonight, Rufus Wainwright himself graced us, the rural 'burbs next to the famous university, with his presence. There was a very elderly crowd, which was not quite what I expected for a Rufus concert, but exactly what I expected for the venue. The evening began with a previously unannounced Wainwright sister who wasn't Martha, who Wikipedia tells me* attended the same high school and college as Lena Dunham. She first played a song, then introduced herself, and yeah, perhaps the word "nepotism" came to mind (as did the possibility that there are an infinite supply of musical Wainwrights), but she was actually quite good. She made it abundantly clear that she was well aware no one had come to see her, that everyone wanted Rufus or at the very least the sister they had heard of, whose talent had already been verified. And this kind of dragged on, with songs broken up by questions getting solicited from the audience. And the audience for the most part didn't have any, although this one guy wanted to know what her favorite Rufus song was, and then her second-favorite. She promised Rufus was imminent.

And then, Rufus! In a velvet-looking blazer, with a huge, vaguely holographic brooch, a massive scarf that was more winter-wear than accent piece, and what I believe were hiking boots. Appropriate for the terrain, I should know. His hair was short, but, like, Rufus-short, so still scruffy.

Oh, and there was music as well. He sang a bunch of songs at the piano and guitar, complained about a cold sore, forgot much of his own oeuvre mid-performance, seemed at various points on the cusp of a nervous breakdown, complained in possibly offensive terms that "Gangnam Style" was the reason his latest album never hit it big (which, fan as I am of "Out of the Game," no), and then made like he was done when he wasn't really done, as is done.

He then returned, in much stronger form, and "The Art Teacher," sigh. A song about male beauty, sung from the perspective of a woman, but by a gay man. I will spare you the 10,000 words I could toss off on that and just say that it's a lovely song. (Also "April Fools" - hearing it will always make me feel 14-ish, which is all the stranger a feeling the older one gets.) "Going to a Town" felt oddly out-of-date, very much a song of the Bush II presidency, certainly not of second-term Obama, but he sure performed it well. And "Hallelujah," a little treat for the not-as-Rufus-enamored in the audience.

And, Rufus will always be Rufus. Even if he's forgotten his own songs. Rufus is early high school, and as Jennifer Senior told us, that time stays with us forever.

*Also from the Wikipedia sink-hole: Loudon, and thus Rufus as well, are descended from Peter Stuyvesant. My mind is blown. Suddenly, everything makes sense.

SAHH

Slate has a story from a man who's a stay-at-home husband. Not dad, just husband. His now-wife got her PhD and (it can happen! though I wonder in what field, but could not find out in the requisite ten seconds of Googling so, so much for that) got a high-paid job elsewhere, so he came with, and kind of fell into house-husband-ness.

And, the response from commenters is... not so positive. Either dude is looking to be dumped (because every woman needs a man at least as ambitious as she is), or he's living the dream (which must also involve pot and video games), or he's simply not a man, or he's unemployed and pretending like there's more to it. Or - alas - he's taken to task for not devoting himself to charity. (We don't know that he doesn't volunteer, but it's not in the article.)

As for me, I think it's great. There are super-driven women, and things will go far more smoothly if there are male partners-of-women prepared to be the less ambitious party, rather than if every ambitious woman demands a still more professionally successful man. Granted, for income as well as sanity, less-ambitious partners-of-both-sexes are generally going to have some kind of job outside the home (which might well be from home, which is something else). We've reached a day and age in which it's considered bizarre for a woman to not work on account of being married, unless there are kids. But arrangements like these basically need to happen for women to have better representation in any number of fields, particularly those requiring frequent relocation. If more such couples existed, if we got that 'the less ambitious one' didn't always have to be the woman... yes, that seems like the way to go. Even if most often that person is likely to be the woman, due to whichever social conventions, difficult pregnancies, etc. But the idea is it shouldn't have to be the woman.

My only caveat would be that clearly dude isn't so entirely lacking in get-up-and-go, so content with just being a stay-at-home spouse, given that he's gone and written an article about this for a major publication.

"[W]hen the privacy at stake belongs to that writer’s teenage children, the equation is different"

To put parental overshare into perspective, it's useful to remember how we-as-a-society treat other forms of overshare. Such as: a gynecologist complaining about a patient on Facebook. But not naming the patient or providing identifying information. Apparently a gray area rule-breaking-wise, and still being investigated.

It's easy enough to see this and think (as I do as well) that ethically if nothing else, a doctor shouldn't be writing even this much about a patient on Facebook in the first place. Yet the (well-received, it appears) NYT Magazine cover story this week includes a child's (unusual) full name, photos of mother and son, and a confession from the author, early on in the piece, that when her son was three, "I already thought of him, in the way that parents tend to categorize their children even as we tell ourselves we shouldn’t, as a little clingy and not especially athletic." And then however many words on this boy's medical problems. This is celebrated - how brave of the mom to come forth and all that.

Meanwhile, the NYT Parenting blog appears to be rethinking this topic. I know that lead blogger KJ Dell'Antonia saw my post, although I or course can't know if it had any impact. Dell'Antonia prefaces a "Motherlode" post about a teenager's self-harm with the following disclaimer:

To protect his family’s privacy, the author of this essay has asked that his name be withheld, and because of the sensitive, but important, nature of the subject, I’ve agreed. This is the first anonymous post since I’ve taken over here at Motherlode, and I expect such contributions to be rare. Even when an issue is delicate, a writer who wants to be heard on a topic should be willing to speak publicly. 

But when the privacy at stake belongs to that writer’s teenage children, the equation is different, and in order to hear directly from a parent dealing with cutting, I’ve chosen to allow this parent to speak for himself, but without a byline.

There's a lot to unpack. First, it's definitely progress that an editor has seen it as possible for a parents to write about difficult topics - and to make other parents in the same situation feel less alone - without an actual child being identified. I can't remember having ever seen a child's privacy acknowledged in something like this - maybe there will be anonymity to protect a parent from shame, but the kid? This is new, and most welcome.

But I don't totally follow Dell'Antonia's distinction between this story, and the others for which she'd insist on a byline. Is it because these are "teenage children" and not toddlers? Because they might Google themselves this week, as opposed to in five or ten years?

Once the issue of children's privacy is put on the table, violations of it become up for discussion, in a way they wouldn't be had the subject never been raised. A commenter writes:

I disagree with this: 

"Even when an issue is delicate, a writer who wants to be heard on a topic should be willing to speak publicly." 

A parent's first responsibility is to protect his or her children. If you have verified the identity of the contributor, readers of this column do not need to know who the family is, and the family should not be required to divulge private information to the world - and their neighbors, co-workers, etc.

Once it's clear that such items can be anonymous, it starts to seem bizarre that any of them are not.

The thrill of the hunt

Sample sales. I grew up with them, and then, as an adult, basically lost track of them. Yes, it's possible to buy high-quality clothing for less, if you take a small-ish size and if you aren't put off by going to the Penn Station neighborhood without a train to catch (the sales tend to be up a flight of stairs on West 36th Street). And these days, it's even possible to do so without having been let in on the secret - i.e. there's the internet, with multiple blogs dedicated to this very pursuit, steering the uninitiated away from the now-ubiquitous "sample sale" signs in front of things that are probably not sample sales. 

But then Uniqlo came along, providing the same service but none of the hassle of discounted Theory or French Connection. That, and when I'm not teaching, I have very little reason to wear anything other than this especially comfortable pair of Target sweatpants. That, that, and for when I do dress up (i.e. not sweatpants), my tastes are very particular, and more likely to involve extensive online searches for a specific item (most recently: a red cashmere "French man" scarf) than the joy of knowing that something once $300 is now going for $50. Not, of course, that I'm immune to such a joy. I'm only human. 

But what I can't figure out is flying from Chicago to New York, and then heading to Long Island, and not just Long Island but somewhere sufficiently inconvenient to the LIRR that a special shuttle-bus is needed (sounds familiar!) and booking a hotel, all this to attend a sample sale. Lululemon, to be precise.  What is the discount on leggings that would possibly make this worthwhile? Especially given the limit on items-purchased? Wouldn't you be better-off (since the hotel in an obscure part of Long Island suggests this isn't being somehow combined with a broader trip to NYC) just going to a Lululemon in Chicago and buying the things you actually want (which are never at a sample sale) full-priced? Or is this like asking why someone would hunt, rather than purchase meat at the supermarket?

Philadelphia food guide-in-progress

Philadelphia holds certain entirely subjective advantages over New York. The former can be driven to in not much time, with no tolls, and with fairly straightforward (often free) parking. The latter requires a mess of expensive and inconvenient train travel from one of two stations neither of which is near where I live, and there are at least four compelling reasons why driving there doesn't make sense. And in Philadelphia, there's no chance I'll end up at the same places I went to in high school.

This post will be a list of best-ofs, and to-tries, in the food category because why not. Suggestions welcome.

Best-of:

-Nam Phuong. If there's Vietnamese food this good in NYC, I'd never found it.

-The croissants at Artisan Boulanger Patisserie, which is apparently moving.

-Bodhi Coffee, and (in season) the Headhouse Square Farmers Market.

To-try:

-9th Street Italian Market. The Reading one was all kinds of disappointing (unless you like gelatinous Amish pudding, and I say this as someone not interested in the desserts of my own heritage, either), but this one I've seen in passing, and it sure looked promising.

-Maido, a Japanese supermarket in the Philadelphia suburbs.

And more.

Weekend excitement

From the newspaper:

-The awfulness of Penn Station is difficult to convey, but Lawrence Downes has done a fine job of it.

-One step forward, two steps back: parents are urged to tone down their bragging about their kids... and to do so by adding caveats, ala, "My son is on the honor roll (but still wets his bed)."

-When does a civil-rights issue get classified as "Styles"? When the rights-seekers in question are gay and French.

From the Whole Foods:

From my spam folder:

-"No risk Natalie Portman." Is there any other kind?

On writing something unlikely to infuriate mommy-bloggers

If WWPD is not enough of my ramblings, you can read more elsewhere. Whichever powers-that-be choose photos for such things happened to choose one of Tina Fey as Liz Lemon, meaning it looks like a picture of me, but a) I don't wear glasses, and b) my wedding dress looked nothing like that. (Neither did Liz Lemon's, as I recall - this was some other episode.)

Thoughts of the morning-loosely-defined

-Ed Koch, whom I felt fondly towards (the first mayor I remember, and one with a striking physical resemblance - correct me if I'm wrong, relatives who read this - to my maternal grandfather), but whom I'm apparently not supposed to remember fondly a) because he was more center/contrarian-left than left-left, b) because he messed up wrt AIDS, c) because he advised Jews not to vote for a politician who'd made at least one famous anti-Semitic remark (from the NYT obit; unclear why this was a problem - Koch seems to have alienated black New Yorkers in other ways, which I'd be curious to hear more about, but this one seems an odd thing to criticize him for), and d) because he never came out, which is assuming he was, in fact, in.

-The car I saw being pulled over by the police down the street. Who knew the police ever came here? I wonder what that was about? (If I had to guess, it was about the 15mph speed limit that none of the cars follow.)

-How Bisou responded to my leaving her (for a minute! in the other room! at her sleepy hour!) by yanking down a glass of iced coffee from the table, one that was I suppose sitting on a paper towel, one that had some pumpkin muffin on it, and I'd forgotten that when Bisou can smell a trace of food, this miniature poodle becomes seven feet tall and can reach anything. She's fine, and the apartment's vacuumed, but ugh.

-How sometimes I have so many tabs open and worry I'll copy and paste the wrong one into the wrong thing. Like, instead of linking to some op-ed, I'll share the jeans I'm thinking of buying, or the episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show I was watching last night.

-How Obama denounced the Holocaust (yes, very controversial), and a National Review writer, Eliana Johnson, found a way to object. And the rest of the internet tries, fails, to make sense of the, uh, senseless. Johnson at first seems to be defending Nazism, but then, on closer reading (as well as, consider the source) appears to be claiming that because Obama didn't condemn the Holocaust in exactly the same language the author would have used, the president is basically a Nazi sympathizer. At first I thought maybe, buried in some of the most profound nonsense I'd seen in a long time, was a point I do agree with, one I even made here at WWPD: anti-Semitism, including the Holocaust, is far too often discussed as if it were a natural disaster. But no. This wasn't what Obama was saying - if anything, the aha! moment Johnson gives us, where we learn that Obama used "senseless" to describe Benghazi and the Holocaust, tells us that he uses the term as a synonym for "bad." Which, well, yes.

Almost finished I promise

OK, so I'm mostly done investigating my own navel, i.e. discussing the response to my parental overshare post. But, two things.

Thing one: There are parenting-bloggers who defend what they do by saying that they don't share naked photos of their kids. Well that's something. And toilet-training-blogging is a thing, complete with day-by-day accounts and photos of the poor child in his underwear. (On what I think is a high-profile blog?) No link, because ugh.

Thing two: They read me in Canada!

Office hours UPDATED

For the record, I did not write that letter (third and final) to Jezebel's new friendship advice columnist, Sara Benincasa. But there is some overlap to my own experience. Granted, I live two hours from the city (an hour at least of train-time, but once you add getting to the train, then getting from Penn Station anywhere else...), not 20 minutes, but it sure does a number on the social life to move somewhere where seeing friends requires serious planning. There's far less play-it-by-ear for me now that NJ Transit is involved.

While I also enjoy hearing Dan Savage's advice to polyamorous centaur fetishists or whatever, in this case, I read Benincasa's response in the hope of actually finding out what one is supposed to do in this situation. Practical and entertaining!

As for the advice, I'm not sure. Some yes, some no. The whole thing about finding out who your true friends are, I mean, fair enough, but the point of having friends isn't just Lifelong Friendship, but also having people to go do stuff with. Losing friends-of-convenience without gaining new friends-of-convenience can also be annoying.

The bit about how some city-folk won't visit you in the country, yes, I suppose, although I personally have been bad about taking people at their word when they say they do want to come visit me in the woods. Those who have done so seem to have enjoyed it. But overall, expecting anything like a 50-50 arrangement of whose locale you hang out in is unrealistic. (Although 20 minutes? Eh.)

And the "office hours" advice... how to put this? First off, this "friend Baratunde" is a legitimate famous-person, so no wonder "[h]e was visiting a city for a short period of time and knew that he didn't have the time to see all his friends individually." But I've seen not-famous people do this as well - periodically my Facebook newsfeed will include an invite to a bar where a long-lost acquaintance is "holding court" or however it's expressed. In any case, the problem the letter-writer gave wasn't that she's so popular that every time she goes into the city, she simply hasn't the time to grace all of her many friends with her presence. It's not that she's offending Friend C by having only seen Friends A and B. No, her problem is that she's out of the loop. If she's at brunch, and has no specific plans to see specific friends, she'd better be fine with brunching alone.

Oh, and yoga, etc., this is entirely appropriate advice that's easier said than done, but must be said all the same, as it's the only answer.

UPDATE

Read some of the comments. Yes, as many point out, a "20-minute drive" means nothing to urbanites without cars. Lots of places are geographically near each other but super far with public transportation (see: Williamsburg and Park Slope). But it's not entirely clear why the letter-writer, who presumably has one herself, can't go into the city later at night.

As for the commenters who find it devastatingly simple to make friends at any age, and who are all, what's wrong with you if you don't share that experience... I do wonder how such a lack of empathy would be consistent with such alleged popularity (except in the middle-school sense, in which "popularity" = nastiness). Is it really so hard to imagine how certain life situations can make it more difficult to make friends? Or that, while there are some people who make friends instantly wherever they are, this isn't everyone's experience?