Extremes of consumption

When I read Ellen Ruppel Shell's Cheap, I remember being somewhat shocked by her finding that factory-outlet stores sell clothing special-made for those stores, and not leftovers from usual production. While outlet malls were not a big part of my childhood, I did grow up with the urban-and-carless version thereof: Century 21, Filene's, sample sales. Part of me felt vindicated, having always suspected that bargain-hunting led to greater spending than simply going to regular stores and buying only things you're actually sure you want, full-priced. Of course, as an adult, if I learn of, say, a Petit Bateau sample sale, something I know I like, for less, I'm there in no time.

Or so it went when I lived in New York. These days, my leisure time centers almost exclusively on learning how to drive on the highway. And... having run out of ideas, we (do you think I'm learning how to merge alone?) ended up with a nearby outlet mall - a short trip involving not one but two highways, and thus the perfect advanced-basic driving lesson. And yes, living far from normal stores (Lululemon doesn't count) has meant that nearly all my clothing is incredibly worn out, so this had a practical component as well.

The mall itself looked like everything else in these parts, but more so - an enormous strip mall. There were announcements over a loudspeaker in a bunch of different languages, including - Coco Chanel is turning over in her grave - French. But there were French-speaking shoppers, so this wasn't some kind of pretentious affectation. Nike pas cher!

If you want to spend under $50 for a pair of new sneakers with a swoosh, without getting in trouble with European counterfeit law, this is the place. I tried on a couple pairs of running shoes, and one fit fine but looked weird, although no weirder than pairs costing twice that. But still, at $60, and not attractive or woods-compatible-seeming, had to say no. Next!

Next was the Brooks Brothers outlet, where I was hoping to find some of those boys' oxfords that are apparently super-chic on women. All I found was the biggest urine stench of any store I'd ever been in. Next! Levi's, for a moment, but we'd already had more than enough. So I can't comment on the relative denim quality as vs. the $30 jeans I've had from the retail store for many years, that are only now on the cusp of falling apart.

Eventually, there was a J.Crew factory store. Which - horrors - has clothing that looks like J.Crew but is significantly cheaper and quite as high-end-seeming as the stuff I admire but don't buy in town. The lower quality was a problem insofar as every single pair of these chambray shorts I liked had a weird crease in them.

Verdict? I need more highway practice. As for the stores themselves, if there weren't the aura of deceptiveness, as if one is getting the same thing but on sale, it wouldn't bother me at all that there are lower-end versions of whichever stores. The criticism I've seen of these stores that seems the most compelling is that their location - middle of nowhere - all but compels browsers to buy something so the trip was worth their while. For me personally, the trip itself was the point, and I'd like to think the striped shorts and neon-pink belt I ended up with - both items I'd already wanted, and cheap - were not make-the-visit-worthwhile purchases. But, could be.

******

At the other extreme, foraging. After listening to the Leonard Lopate Show interview with Tama Matsuoka Wong, professional forager and New Jerseyan, and then doing a bit more Googling, I figured I'd be able to correctly identify a weed that grows in these parts called wild garlic. Given my obsession with all things allium (ramps, but better yet, green garlic or, mmm, scapes), the possibility that this was just everywhere was intriguing. And indeed, once you know what to look for, and how to confirm (break a piece of this hollow "grass" in half and it smells like garlic), you see that it's everywhere. The woods here are covered in a plant that I'd probably find delicious. And... I took some home, rinsed it off, and tasted a little piece, found it pleasantly garlicky, only to have this incredibly neurotic/sensible moment where I thought, what if this isn't edible? should I believe everything I hear on NPR? what if it was sprayed with pesticides? what if there's an anti-foraging law in these woods? And so ended a brief career in amateur foraging.

Paid to read books

"I get paid to read books!" This sentence - always with the exclamation mark - is the easiest way to identify a new humanities grad student. I used to say it myself. When you're used to college (and maybe a masters program) where you paid to read books, the thought that someone would pay you anything at all for the same work seems too good to be true.

What follows isn't a don't-go. (Started this post before seeing Rebecca Schuman's great-if-bleak article. Guess something's in the air?) I don't regret going, and even if I do end up doing a joint degree in computer-science and air-conditioner repair once I finish my dissertation, I'd say it's overall been a positive experience. If you have humanities-ish strengths, and want/need to pay your own way/have your own health insurance, there's a lot worse you can do than end up in a funded grad program, researching a topic that fascinates you. And the problem with the don't-go genre is that it never answers the question of what else someone who ends up in humanities grad school might have done.

But, assuming the question isn't answered for you (i.e. assuming you do or likely could get into a good, funded program) these are some things to... consider:

-Whatever you're getting paid will seem like a ton the first year, and like a joke or an insult the last. When I started grad school, my rent was under $700 a month, and my stipend more than covered it. I taken a year off and worked prior to grad school, and worked during college, so I knew a bit more the-value-of-a-dollar than some, but mentally, I was still at the life stage when my working meant mochas, H&M, and lessening the burden I was on my parents. Self-sufficiency - with its electric bills, broker's fees, Metrocards - was something else.

-At most jobs, if you're doing well, you get something called a raise. If you do well in grad school, what happens is, they don't stop paying you. You will see things on Facebook from college acquaintances about how huge the seats are in business class, or one of your high school classmates will be one of the Facebook billionaires, and none of this will even matter, because you're too busy being jealous of other former classmates who are pulling in, what, $40-50k (in NYC - maybe less somewhere else) at an office job whose title means nothing to you but doesn't that sound wonderful.

-Even if no one in the history of your grad program has taken under seven years, by the time you've been in school for longer than four years, i.e. the expected length of an undergraduate degree, you will be asked all the time if you're going to finish up any time soon. You will hear about how you've been in school for so long, and not in a way that suggests a comprehension of this just being how long the program you're in takes. It will seem, to those around you, like a personal failing. What exactly have you been doing all those years? You will internalize this, and start to think there's something wrong with you that your dissertation didn't take five minutes. You will imagine that others are judging you even when they're just being friendly and asking what it is you do. It will get old. You will get old.

-Even if you go into your program already jaded, already aware that you probably won't end up a professor, this does leave the question of what you will end up doing. As this is WWPD and not career-counseling, I will refrain from going into the particularities of my own situation - a long and boring story about the pros and cons of interdisciplinarity. (Anyone hiring in French-Jewish Literature-and-History?) But the fact that I am and always have been open to alternatives to being a professor is either my saving grace (so many who aren't spend years adjuncting before changing course) or evidence that I lack whichever Sheryl Sandbergian ruthlessness is needed to for goodness sake teach novels in this job market.

Meanwhile, while I don't feel any particular shame in going and doing something else - bills must be paid somehow, right? - and am indeed actively interested in various routes other than "professor," I'm not sure what to make of a general job market in which "entry-level" means an internship one might apply for if one has previous related internship experience. Is any of what I've done thus far transferrable? I mean, in principle, yes, and I can-and-will make that case, and my sense is that professors understand this (or do if it's explained to them) and can serve as references for things other than tenure-track jobs, but will employers agree? Is this my fate, or does the fact that I don't have the full year's food-service experience TGI Friday demands mean... what, exactly?

And with that, back to the dissertation.

Friday's assortment

-We've established that Rejected White College Applicant is entitled, just as we caught a similarly barrel-dwelling fish when we confirmed that Princeton Mom is simultaneously sexist and elitist. But if there's any message to take from this high school student's cringe-inducing essay, it's absolutely not that young people are entitled if they don't take (often unpaid) internships.

-The famous writer who's lost it and his particular brand of losing it is Gucci. Sad, really. That GQ essay now joins Zola's Ladies Paradise as the document to read if you find yourself with a shopping urge, however slight, you'd rather not have. I had, as you all remember, lost even the vague interest I'd ever had in Lululemon yoga pants once the scandal broke. I ended up with some much cheaper running tights, and none of the deer I pass on my jogging route (the ticks, the ticks!) have remarked on the material. But I did have my eye on a bottle of $8 pale-blue nail polish. Now? No.

-The New Brooklyn involves houses with space for the wife to "get dressed and go to work in the morning without waking [the husband] with the sound of clomping Louboutins."

-What was that you said? You want something about something I didn't read or listen to? Something from... life? Not as much material at the moment. My husband and I had a fun dinner party last weekend, and lately I'm taking a break from Chapter 7 to work on the Conclusion, which means having to reread Sartre on The Jews... which is almost identical to Zola on The Jews, which seems relevant. 

More on the eternal must-art-be-nice question

I have no intention of seeing the movie "Spring Breakers," having been traumatized at 15 or so by Korine's "Kids," and having no particular interest in watching nubile young women writhe around. So I wasn't going to say anything about Heather Long's review of it, until writing the post below and thinking more about how one should and should not criticize art that offends.

It's an odd review that walks this line between condemning young women who dress skimpily and act naughtily, and condemning male filmmakers-and-audiences who wish to see women doing that onscreen. There's another conversation that might be had about whether "rape culture" should be used to describe a movie which, by Long's own account, does not include any rape or attempted rape, but this is a conversation that needs to be had by people who've actually seen the film. (Does this highlight the potential seriousness of objectification and a line of continuity of male entitlement, or is it conflating ogling with assault? Kind of depends what "ogling" consists of.)

But this is what jumped out at me in Long's review has zilch to do with whether "Spring Breakers" is or is not the most terrible movie ever made:

What's particularly frustrating with a film like this in 2013 is that it comes on the heels of Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In and the push to get women to aim for the boardroom, not the boardwalk. And never mind the fact that thousands of college students are spending their spring break not on a beach, but volunteering with groups like Habitat for Humanity and the United Way, especially after Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. Empowered women aren't the stereotype. That's not the story Hollywood wants to portray.

Thing 1: Why are boardroom and boardwalk mutually exclusive? Who goes on spring break if not well-off and socially-connected college students, and who, if not such students, has a realistic shot at growing up to be an executive? Or can young men frolic and succeed, but young women must choose? Thing 2: How exactly are we going to restrict cinema to depictions of college students volunteering for Habitat for Humanity? This is not only never going to happen, but why on earth should that happen? Thing 3: What do hurricanes have to do with any of this? Why not Syria? Why not overfishing? Why stop there?

Broader point: How does one talk about representations without demanding the impossible/undesirable and opening one's self up to accusations of pearl-clutching? I mean, I've watched "Modern Family" and thought, yikes, here's an ostensibly progressive show - racial diversity! homosexuality! - and both of the women on it are SAHMs. (Which is briefly addressed - I believe the blond one tried and failed to get a job, and is now refurbishing a house with the "househusband" member of the gay couple, who also has, or had, a job outside the home - I haven't really been paying attention.) No one work of art (and yeah, I'll include sitcoms) needs to be everything to all people, but how can you comment on the culture lagging behind reality, or on the culture promoting certain reactionary values, without asking for the PC and ridiculous, without denying Art its freedom to go in whichever direction the Artist sees fit?

Sweeping

When the "Girls" backlash (and backlash to backlash...) first broke, and everyone was saying that the show was too white, my thought - and that of approximately 10,000 of the 300,000 weighing in - was that the problem wasn't so much "Girls" being too white as that shows by-and-about white people are the only ones getting made. A TV show about a small group of friends is never going to be a sweeping portrait of society, or even one borough.

What is frustrating, however, is when a work that does claim to be a sweeping portrait of society manages to be one, but only to a point.

I just finished - and am going to reveal the plot of, if you haven't read it and were planning to - Tom Wolfe's 1987 The Bonfire of the Vanities, a sweeping portrait of New York in the pre-Giuliani age of puffy-sleeved evening gowns, back when the Upper West Side was plausibly scrappy. One of the book's great strengths is, we get all these characters separately, but also how they perceive one another. But we only get three perspectives: McCoy, the white Protestant banker, Kramer, the insecure Jewish government-lawyer, and Fallow, the alcoholic British journalist - all three white and at least middle class. We get a bit of a glimpse into the mindset of various working-class white (Jewish and Irish) men, but anything beyond that is too unknowable-Other. Obviously, no work can address the entirety of human experience. But when a work is about themes like race, class, and heterosexual intimacy, but only manages to convey the range of viewpoints of white men, this is distracting. Not as in distractingly un-PC. Distracting as in, it feels somehow incomplete.

Women in the novel are on the one hand central to the action - an affair is what ultimately brings down McCoy - and on the other, at best sketches of characters. They exist in two varieties - wife whose looks are fading, and pretty-young-thing love interest. Which is no doubt how many men see it. But a novelist might want us to have the perspective of McCoy's wife and mistress, and so forth. Particularly the mistress, who, you know, killed someone. One does not need to have been especially influenced by Women's Studies 101 to want to know what's going through this character's mind. Zola, who Wolfe apparently admires, and who (if I know anything, I know this) certainly wouldn't meet 2013 standards of political correctness, would jump around to different perspectives, male and female. There's this one moment in The Bonfire of the Vanities when we get a glimpse of how Kramer's mistress sees him, and it's brilliant. Obviously Wolfe is capable of such observations. Why aren't there more?

More to the point: African-Americans! Specifically, this is a story about a confrontation between the poshest and most sheltered parts of white New York and the most dangerous and tragic parts of black New York. Black characters - mostly male ones - are incredibly important to the plot - a community leader/Al Sharpton stand-in; a hit-and-run victim in a coma who, fine, can't say much; a teenage crack dealer; and an aspiring middle-class mother stuck in the projects. The only thing we learn about how any black people feel is, they don't like it when one of their own is killed. Well, go figure. But the idea that we might know what a black character is thinking is somehow well outside the bounds of conceivability. This is a problem not because, for some anachronistic and PC reason, I'd like this to have been a book about black New Yorkers. It's a problem because it is a book about black New Yorkers. See the difference?

It would be one thing if the book honed in only on McCoy, looking at only at how the hierarchy looks from the precarious top of it. But then there's Kramer, and Fallow - the jumping-around. It would also be something else if the stance of the book was that the fall of McCoy is an unmitigated disaster, that some lives really are worth more than others. If, in other words, the book were a racist comment on societal decadence. And some well-written novels (see: late-19th C France) have, alas, been along those lines, and what to make of those is its own conversation. But McCoy is a douche, an overgrown dudebro, in modern parlance. He's an entitled Wall Street fool who thinks he can get away with murder, or close. He's not entirely unsympathetic, or the book wouldn't work. But the reader is also supposed to feel a bit of schadenfreude, a bit of, he got an exaggerated version of what was coming to him.

At any rate, I was wary of reading this what with having really disliked that Charlotte Simmons book, but overall, I suppose, despite the caveats above, a recommend.

It's spring o'clock somewhere

There was a time - it was warmer out, and I lived in the city - when the idea of eating strictly local seemed, if not practical, exactly, then theoretically possible. It seemed like the sort of thing I could feel ever-so-slightly guilty about not doing.

Those days are over. In May, a seasonal farmers' market will reopen, but in the mean time, there's... not much. The year-round Trenton Farmers Market is definitively in sausages-and-Amish-baked-goods hibernation mode. Because my apartment is not in fact a hippie supermarket, there's no industrial freezer full of the local produce from the past summer season. It is what it is.

In the past month or so, I've become the culinary equivalent of mugged by reality, and completely reverted to a pre-food-movement mindset. I mean, I still eat fruits and vegetables - I just don't have any qualms when I see that the strawberries come from Mexico. The apples, after all, are hauled in from Washington State. Asparagus grown somewhere other than New Jersey? Fine by me! It's not as if there's a from-NJ option - for asparagus or anything in the produce section. From what I can tell, other than white onions, none of the produce - this even at Whole Foods - is grown nearby. Even the things that might have been (the aforementioned apples, also kale, carrots...) were not.

I had arrived at this conclusion and been happily stuffing my face with whichever combination of pasta, cheese, and trucked-and-flown-in produce, when lo and behold food writer David 'used to work for Alice Waters' Tanis suggested to NYT readers looking for a spring-veg fix that they "cheat." And he continues:

Yes, it’s important to eat local, but there’s no way to really cook spring meals now except by using vegetables grown in places where the season has already arrived. 

For spring, you see, is a relative term. In coastal California, it has been spring for weeks already, and the new artichoke crop is producing on schedule. I’m not suggesting that you buy produce that came all the way from South America, or that you abandon your neighborhood vendors. Consider this permission to pamper yourself with a bunch of asparagus.

Retroactive permission appreciated. Or something.

The ultimate busman's-holiday post

-There's a new production of Romeo and Juliet, and while Romeo is white, controversy of controversies, Juliet is black. Having not given much thought to Shakespeare since high school required this (I somehow made it through college without taking a single English class), I'm not sure what race Romeo and Juliet have been in earlier productions. I remember something about men playing the male and female roles, but that was a very long time ago. Presumably their are Shakespeare-auditioning actors of all races. Is this pairing a first? I have no idea, but would doubt it. All I know is, Dodai Stewart of Jezebel isn't pleased, arguing that this casting was a way to cause controversy and sell tickets. Which... seems not very Jezebel. The problem here - if a problem there must be - is that Condola Rashad is the daughter of famous people, and therefore - however talented - a likely beneficiary of nepotism. The problem is not that a black woman has been a) cast in something, or b) cast alongside a white man.

-Stanley Fish presents Naomi Schaefer Riley's new book (that, fine, I probably have to read) on inter-religious marriage in America today. And the findings are... basically the same objections one found in 19th century France. (Although Riley herself is apparently intermarried, and therefore presumably OK with intermarriage.) That even those who think they're secular will, with Life Experience, find that they are, deep down, super-religious after all. That secularism is a childish flirtation, and that once one is a real grown-up, the desire to worship latkes or peeps or whatever will set in and not budge. Well. As a fake grown-up, one who's not yet 30, doesn't have kids, and is still technically a student, I may have to wait for my inner Hasid to emerge.

One thing not like 19th C France - Jews, Riley found, are actually the religious group most likely to marry out. And yet, the stereotype of the insular, intermarriage-fearing Jewish family (esp. Jewish mother-of-son) persists. Discuss amongst yourselves, while I track down this book, as I will probably need to cite this tidbit in my dissertation.

One thing I can't quite wrap my head around:

[F]aith has become “racialized”; that is, we have come to think that “like skin color [it] is a trait that need not divide us.” But, Riley demurs, believing that faith “is a superficial characteristic the way race [and] ethnicity are” doesn’t make it so. In fact, “religious identity … can and should be considered” as more substantive than racial identity; and like any other substance it remains in place even when the commonplaces of multicultural doctrine tell us that it shouldn’t really matter.

Given that it appears "interfaith" in this conversation appears to mean Jews marrying people who are either Catholics or Protestants, it would seem that Judaism was "racialized" long, long ago. Nazism? Dreyfus? Spanish Inquisition? But for most everyone, religion, culture, etc. are all wrapped into this one thing called Your Background, and it's tough to say what's what. The Christmas tree example Riley brings up - is this about religion? What if, as happens often enough, a non-Jewish spouse who never went to church nevertheless expects a tree? Is that atavistic Christianity? Isn't the far more likely explanation that, in otherwise secular couples, the tree is desired - or not -  for cultural reasons?

Holistic and its victims, sympathetic and otherwise

Gawker reports that a scorned college-applicant has taken to the Wall Street Journal to complain that "just be[ing] yourself" is not enough to make the cut at Harvard or whatever. (Maybe Princeton, where she might have been a freshman by the time Princeton Mom's younger son made it to senior year. The life she might have led!) The op-ed is intended as humor, which Gawker conveniently ignores, which is maybe fair, given that it's not all that funny.

The one useful, general point that comes out of this (one girl's resentment at not being marginalized enough to get into college being, well...), which is that some kids/families take "holistic" seriously, and don't realize that "holistic" is only the difference between why one perfect-SATS-and-grades kid has an edge over another.

We might want to separate out this particular girl giving the impression that she wants to appear in an encyclopedia section for "entitlement" from the fact that likely a lot of kids make this mistake. And mostly kids who aren't so advantaged. "Holistic" isn't a problem because it keeps entitled but unimpressive well-off white kids out of top colleges. That's arguably holistic doing its job. It's a problem because it makes it so that only those who have it together (or realistically, whose schools/parents do) will understand that you need to check whichever boxes to get in.

April showers bring frizz

Seemingly in honor of today's date, there are not one but two declarations that curly hair is something other than an imperfection to be dealt with ASAP. Simon Doonan's talking about the Afro, and Molly Young a hairstyle called "curly bangs," but if the racial-political implications are different, the hairstyle itself is the same: tight curls, some of which drape over the forehead. Because wouldn't it be hilarious if curly hair - and not straight hair given a few mermaid waves - were socially-acceptable or even mainstream-attractive?

An Easter Monday-not-April-Fools post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Potato-sack

The Jezebel ring-threads I find so fascinating now have a companion piece: the comments on a personal essay about one woman's journey from expensive Bergdorf's wedding dress to a somewhat cheaper Bergdorf's wedding dress. The essay itself is... as good as an essay on that topic is going to be.

The comments, however, are spectacular. Wouldn't you know it but NYT comment-leavers and their spouses/mothers/whatever got married in "a simple white drees [sic] that back then probably was a hundred bucks," "a $75 dress I'd found on the clearance rack," "a lovely regular length white dress (a hand-me-down given to me by another friend)," "a very inexpensive, non-wedding dress I got from an amazing little shop in Antwerp, Belgium," "a $35 vintage 40s black dress," "a very simple, white, almost 'peasant' number with flared sleeves and a scooped neck," "a beautiful used wedding dress at Value World for about $10," and however many more.

And it's very much like the ring competitions, except that here, the woman is actually deciding for herself what she wants to wear. The oneupmanship over who has the cheapest and most ethical and most original engagement ring are a big harder to take because many (most?) of these rings were selected for the woman in question. It becomes this pseudo-feminist competition over whose fiancé/husband is the most sensitive to his fiancée/wife's progressive, independent spirit. Unless there was a gender-neutral or gender-reversed proposal and both spouses got a ring. Then there can still potentially be sanctimony (as well as ignorance re: the provenance of gems that are not diamonds), but there's at least consistency.

The dress version is, for those reason and others (namely my subjective assessment of such matters), less off-putting. I mean, this is a dress you wear once (twice if you celebrate with family in two different locales, or this was my approach), and there is a huge markup on bridal-looking white dresses that are officially wedding dresses - one that's readily avoided either by just buying that kind of dress at a normal (even high-end) store, or by going with other formalwear. Or a potato sack. As wary as I am of fauxbivalence, the Cheapness Studies angle might cancel it out. 

"How could anybody not like you?" - Helen Seinfeld

At the intersection of parental overshare and the window-of-opportunity problem: the Princeton University mom who wrote a letter to a Princeton publication about her Princeton sons' eligibility, or something, and caused the internet to explode, or at any rate the website with her letter on it to crash. Then New York Magazine interviewed her. The internet exploded some more. I'm not sure if I've read the entire letter, because as I said, the original is unavailable, but as it was apparently quite short, it could be that the NYMag excerpt is the thing in its entirety. In any case, as a self-proclaimed expert in related areas, and a resident of the town of Princeton but not for reasons related to that university, my very important thoughts on this are below.

First, some defending-the-indefensible:

-According to the official WWPD definition, embarrassing parent-writing is not parental overshare if the child is an adult. It's always awkward to write about living family members, but if they're old enough to give consent, or to write their own tirade without fearing being grounded/getting cut off/worse, it's not quite the same. Nevertheless, the first example I ever gave of the phenomenon, before delving into its nuances, involved a mother writing about her 19-year-old son. And if the "child" is an adult as in over 18, but a financially dependent young college student...

In this case, we don't actually learn anything much about this woman's own two sons. Only that she thinks highly of them, in that very specific way the mothers of sons often do:

I am the mother of two sons who are both Princetonians. My older son had the good judgment and great fortune to marry a classmate of his, but he could have married anyone. My younger son is a junior and the universe of women he can marry is limitless.

Are we all now cringing on behalf of these two golden boys? Yes. But the only controversial thing we've learned about them is that their mother is quite something, which is actually something about her. And parents are under no ethical obligation not to be ridiculous, lest that ridiculousness be off-putting to would-be dates, employers, etc. While the letter could be read as an attempt to get her younger son a girlfriend, I'm not sure anyone interpreted it as evidence that he needed this help.

-The Princeton mom made a bunch of outrageous assumptions, but assuming that women will one day want to marry men wasn't one of them. Yet one response I've seen to this letter has been that not everyone is straight. Which... fair enough, but most people are indeed heterosexual. Full legal and social acceptance of LGBT individuals will not bring about a time in which the bulk of men don't want to marry women, the bulk of women don't want to marry men. (Even if we call it something other than "marry" in that progressive utopia.) Along the same lines, it is harder to meet someone once you're out of school, and women's romantic options do decrease with age relative to those of men.

-The answer to a what-year-is-this? demand that female college freshmen husband-hunt so as to avoid being single, haggard 22-year-olds is not to say that college is too young to find a spouse. As came up here recently, to marry at a 'sensible' age, and after getting to know your future spouse a sensible amount, you need to have gotten together with that person while still too young to have possibly been thinking about marriage. (Or you can meet at the 'right' age and marry 'too late' - thus why these categories themselves are the problem.) That's where the window-of-opportunity issue occurs - women of 22 are told that it would be insane for them to look for husbands... but come 25, and it's a disaster they haven't already found The One. It's certainly reactionary to shift the window-of-opportunity down in age to freshman year of college, but the answer isn't to keep the window as elusive but place it at 29.

Now, I join the chorus:

-That a man has gone to a top-three Ivy most certainly does not mean his romantic options are "limitless." Some men do think this, which makes it all the more fun for the women who get to disabuse them of that notion.

-"Men regularly marry women who are younger, less intelligent, less educated." The first, kinda-sorta, but the second two, not so much. That may have once been the case, but no more. Fancy-college (what Princeton Mom is using as a proxy for intelligence) is now a gender-neutral class signifier, and there's not much socioeconomic intermingling. A cashier at Wawa might be stunning, but a Princeton undergrad dude isn't going to even notice that (or, at least, isn't going to bring her home for Thanksgiving), because that's how it goes in class-less America.

-Do 18-year-old women have the most romantic options? On paper, it seems like they might, but in reality? If we're talking marriage, very young women probably don't have as many options as women further into their 20s, because the bulk of the romantic interest they attract (or seek out!) tends to be of a more casual variety. (Older men interested in very young women tend to have that interest in part because they're trying to avoid settling down.)

-Straight women who are college seniors do indeed have fewer options at college, unless they're prepared to date freshman, which, as a rule, they're not. And at colleges on the whole, it can be difficult to meet people who aren't fellow undergraduates. But! In this particular case! Hello! There are so many slightly-older single men in Princeton, most with a Princeton affiliation, who will happily date 21-22-year-old Princeton women. Graduate students! Postdocs! I find it hilarious that there's a man shortage down the road, given the profound woman shortage in this neck of the woods.

Demure

Back in the day, a certain cult-of-personality English teacher (not, I believe, in the sinister sense) at my high school, in a class dedicated largely to the purported genius of one male classmate, told my mother that I was "demure." I've gotten feedback like this over the years, if rarely phrased so... memorably. While a reserved-in-a-gender-normative-sense personality (perhaps not evident on-blog, or perhaps, who knows) might increase my allure in the realm of coffee-shop pick-up artists, it's not such a boon professionally. I have a whopping to-do list of editors and such to follow up with, writers I'd like to get coffee with in person to find out more about the profession what with everyone around me being an academic, but there is The Demure. It creeps up, this Demure, and makes me think that rather than pestering very important people who are, we can safely say, not sitting by their phones waiting for my email, I will... go for a run. Go grocery-shopping. Spend a week longer than absolutely necessary on a dissertation chapter. I'll be somehow productive, I'll stay off the streets, as it were, but I won't be heedlessly ambitious.

I really do think this is less about fearing rejection (internal grad-school funding competitions taught the win-some lose-some life lesson, if I hadn't learned it already) than a really ingrained sense that if a magazine editor contacts me out of the blue wanting me to write for it, or a literary agent expresses interest, and I reply enthusiastically and never hear back, I should do nothing. Not nothing - there's a friggin' dissertation in the works, people! But nothing in that particular situation.

Things like this do happen to me every so often, always in clusters, and, in anticipation of being told that my writing and ideas are in fact the very weakest to have ever emerged from a human brain (and writing for any place with lots of readers, there will always be commenters prepared to assure me of that), I opt not to bother those other than my three readers here at WWPD with my blather. And these are situations where someone who's a big deal definitively does like my writing and, presumably, topic-selection. What of all the decision-makers who don't even know who I am? Well, I'm not flooding their inboxes, to put it mildly.

I'd thought this was just me, or just me being appropriate. (If whichever entity desperately wanted me published, it would have happened. Which does sound "The Rules"-ish as I type it...) Then, on a Slate DoubleX discussion of... Lean In (which, Flavia, I do plan to read, but so do all other members of the local public library, and I'm demurely waiting my turn)? That survey of women's representation in major magazines?, it emerged that there's a huge gender disparity in who pitches articles, and in how persistent writers are in getting published. Women will pitch, hear 'no thanks,' and never pitch again. Men will pitch, hear 'no way,' and ask to be made editor.

I exaggerate slightly. But on this podcast or somewhere similar, it also came out that men will expect job-jobs when equivalently-credentialed women will shoot for - you guessed it - an internship. So it's not exactly that women aren't pursuing that career, or putting themselves out there. They're just doing it in a way that isn't quite so entitled. And "entitled" is apparently what you need if you don't want a fate of jogging, grocery-shopping, and slow-motion Chapter-Seven writing.

All of this seems the bleeding obvious, Gender Studies 101, but it hasn't been, for me, as I've been living it.

So! I think I know what I must change, and it's not turning a half-hour jogging routine into an hour-long one. I have not addressed whether aggressive women are then penalized in the workforce. They say it's true, but in my experience, it sure beats passivity.

On "Josh" and "Seth"

I will admit that I first read this reference to TV writers as "white dudes with names like Josh or Seth" as a bit Jews-control-the-media. But then I thought about it and wasn't sure. Is Seth a Jewish name in this context? Maybe yes, maybe no. (I have no Jewdar, as Seth Adam Meyers is apparently not Jewish.) While half of all Jewish men of my generation are named Josh (I exaggerate, but slightly), it's just a common name all-around. Right?

But if not "Jewish," what are those names meant to indicate? "White," maybe, but since that's already in there, it would be redundant. But these things are complicated. If I can't say offhand whether "Seth" and "Josh" mean "Jewish" to most Americans, how on earth do I know if this Jezebel writer (whose name only tells me "female") is or is not someone who'd even know that these names would read that way to many people, that this would fit into a really fundamental anti-Semitic accusation. And not just some accusation one reads about in history textbooks - I've seen this criticism recently regarding the writing staff of "Girls" - that the show is not merely white but Jewish apparently does the opposite of mitigate the problem for some observers. Hmm.

Back to Jezebel. A reply to a comment calling this post anti-Semitic is both helpful-ish and itself possibly offensive: "This tells me that you have never been in the US of A ever. Josh and Seth are pretty stereotypical White non-Jewish frat boy names these days, just like Zack." The second sentence, helpful. (Old-Testament first names are confusing! If you're Jewish and you mostly know other Jews, or know mainly Catholics, these sound to you like Jewish names. And then you start wondering whether all the British Davids and Rachels could possibly be Jewish, and you realize, ah, Protestants!) The first, purest anti-Semitic assholery - a provincial American Jew from whichever Jewish coastal/suburban enclave is just as American as a provincial Methodist from Kansas. Ugh that this needs to be pointed out.

Your friends, your politics

The anti-same-sex-marriage-from-the-left arguments keep on popping up (along with passionate arguments about whether it is sheep-like or a nice gesture to replace one's profile picture with an equal sign, but these I don't find so interesting) on the ol' newsfeed. This, most recently. And somehow, reading this latest installment, it occurred to me what this reminded me of: anti-Zionism from within the Jewish community.

In both cases, what happens is, communities do - should! - determine for themselves what it is they want. LGBT rights shouldn't mean marriage just because straight people think that's how it goes, nor should pro-Jewish mean pro-Israel just because non-Jews not too educated on the issue assume The Jews everywhere want what's best for Likud. Internal debates are important.

But! Those who argue internally and only internally can lose sight of the broader debates about the issues that pertain to their community. With Israel, if you're only ever arguing with fellow Jews to your political right on this topic, you can miss the extent to which 'plight of the Palestinians' is, from certain non-Jewish quarters, code for anti-Semitism; unrelated to sorting out the actual problems facing any actual Palestinians, and; I should add, entirely compatible with anti-Muslim or anti-Arab bigotry. Similarly, if you're only ever discussing same-sex marriage in friendly environments where nobody doubts the humanity of gays and lesbians, perhaps only in spaces where everyone is him/herself gay or lesbian, you may naturally minimize the significance of hatred to the broader debate on this issue.

So what happens, in extreme cases, is the famous extreme-left meets extreme-right. While I am far from the first to mention that phenomenon, I haven't seen this particular explanation for how it comes about anywhere else.

"My muffin-top is all that, whole grain, low fat" - Jenna Maroney

Ron Rosenbaum has written a contrarian defense of fat-the-ingredient. (Via Mark Bittman, who so could have torn this apart, but must have better things to do.) The only problem is, Rosenbaum's straw-man is non-existent or, at best, long-gone. These days, there is no war on fat. There's a war on sugar. There's a war on "carbs." There's a war on processed food, including trans-fats. There's shaming of fat people. But there's no war on "split-shank beef marrow." Hardly!

Rosenbaum speaks of "another world of fatty foods, a world beyond bacon and barbecue—not the froufrou fatty foods of foodies either, but basic, earthy, luxuriant fatty foods like roast goose, split-shank beef marrow and clotted cream," as if it's 1992 and everyone who was anyone sought out 'gourmet.' What he mentions as the honest middle-ground are the "foodie" favorites. Has Rosenbaum missed farm-to-fork? Local-seasonal? Michael Pollan? Is he not as up-to-date as I am on Leonard Lopate's "Food Fridays," and if so, who's walking his hyperactive dog? (Thanks to Bisou, I am beyond up-to-date on podcasts.)

Or perhaps he's conflating today's food-movement with an earlier yuppie approach to food, albeit one it diametrically opposes:

Eating fatty foods has become the culinary version of "Breaking Bad": a dangerous walk on the wild side for the otherwise timid consumers of tasteless butter substitutes and Lean Cuisine. Soon the fear-of-food crowd will leave us with nothing but watery prison gruel (whole grain, of course) and the nine daily servings of kale, collards, spinach and other pesticide-laced and e-coli-menaced greens and fruits on the agribusiness-promoted "food pyramid."

The kale people and the margarine people, so not the same! The kale people are telling you to add lots of real-food fat to the kale!

Except when they're not. Jane Brody and others do continue to preach the gospel of lite, because old habits die hard. Rosenbaum's addressing something that hasn't entirely disappeared. There certainly was an anti-fat-the-ingredient time, and it wasn't that long ago. I was raised in those Tasti-D-Liteful years, when sugar might be added to salad dressings in lieu of too much oil, and some of that still lingers. I went off diet Coke (and onto SodaStream seltzer - plain water, in time) ages ago, and add plenty of butter or olive oil to my food. I wouldn't think of alternatives to ice cream. But I still buy skim milk, because that's the taste I'm used to. Because that's what I buy. I only ever think about this when baking, and it will occur to me that cannelés probably won't work with skim. However, given how often cannelés have happened (that would be once), I'm not too worried about it.

News and commentary

I know I should follow the Supreme Court news from the newspaper. And I am. These are exciting times!

But the Facebook response is so compelling. Friends who've replaced their profile photo* with equal signs of different colors. Some, I think, post one, then switch the color. Some of these profile-switches get more likes than others. Is this about how gay-friendly their friends are? Or how many friends they have, how much their friends like them? Or how late in the day they got around to doing this? Time zones? Is Facebook advocacy inauthentic if not backed up by in-the-trenches support, or better than nothing? What does it all mean?

More substantively, a friend of several friends, a person with I suppose not so strict privacy settings, has produced an epic tirade attacking same-sex marriage and straight allies... from the left. And not just the usual critique from the left, that marriage is a limiting, religiously-tinged institution for boring straight people. This person seems to think straight support for same-sex marriage is some kind of conspiracy to deny AIDS patients medical care, and that to be an ally, you need to fight capitalism. 38 people, last I checked, like this. (So much for the gay, married, and capitalist.) I was on the cusp of considering posting something myself - against my general rule of not getting involved with solving-contentious-issues-on-Facebook - until I realized that the thread didn't originate with anyone I know or even know of, and thus that settings were such that this thread was, for me, read-only. For the best!

I've seen no evidence of anyone on my list (which does have some political diversity, what with my own political meanderings over the years, and what with UChicago) opposing same-sex marriage from the right. I remember a NYT story recently about the existence of young anti-SSM activists, but there are NYT stories about people who eat only farmers'-market food year-round and other ideological micro-minorities. Is my newsfeed devoid of opposition because it's become socially acceptable for conservatives/Republicans to support gay marriage, so whichever percentage opposed it for party-line reasons (as opposed to religious reasons, why-has-sexuality-been-split-from-reproduction reasons, or simple bigotry) now get to either support it or not care either way? Yes, fine, an unrepresentative sample if there ever was one, but it's uplifting all the same.

*My profile picture is my dog in profile, but I am, for the record, in favor of marriage equality. I asked Bisou (note to self: dissertate from a library or coffee shop, not home), and she's on board, although she remains miffed that the boy-dog she chases around the dog run definitively prefers being chased - and caught - by another of his kind. In this way, poodle female adolescence resembles the human variety.

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.

Too brilliant to bathe, home edition

Emily Shire, weighing in on the gender-and-messiness debate:

And just think about how messy men are portrayed in popular culture. An unkempt space is a sign of a man’s strong work ethic, as he’s too busy dealing with “real” problems to bother tidying up. It’s endearing when President Obama mentions how his Washington, D.C., apartment as a junior senator was piled with pizza boxes. At worst, messy men have a lovable, “absent-minded professor” quality.

On the other hand, messiness in women usually denotes a life in disarray. In the movie Bridget Jones’s Diary, an opening scene of pajama-ed Renée Zellweger going through a fridge that is mostly empty—save for a few expired items—establishes how pathetic her professional and personal life are. Think of the countless romantic comedies that cut to a shot of a woman’s bedroom strewn with clothes and a half-eaten pint of ice cream to connote depression after a breakup.

I've already infuriated the internet with my thoughts on gender disparities as they relate to personal appearance. But I hadn't thought about how this relates to household maintenance. Probably because I'm one of those people who cares about cleanliness but not neatness. But as Shire explains it, it's effectively the same - men can be too brilliant to clean, but women cannot.

As with too brilliant to bathe, this probably does mean that men who don't clean because they're depressed are more easily overlooked, so this isn't all a great boon for men, either. But on the whole, this is clearly better for men than women. I'd be more inclined to say here than re: looks that the answer is less caring-about-it all around, but I suppose it depends how much squalor we're talking about.

Great moments in fashion cluelessness

"I think she is a great reference for young professional women." So says the Sartorialist, and just below is a photo of the woman in question. Chic? Sure. Young? I suppose so. Woman? The certainty with which we can affirm this is the giveaway regarding where this outfit - which kind of works on the woman in question, in the context of her work environment - might not constitute "professional."

$90 yoga pants revisited

In a recent post on materialism, I gave Lululemon yoga pants as an example of a desired but not that desired purchase. I would like to be able to readily afford said pants, but can't. But the pants themselves, eh. If they were my dream item, I'd have bought them and scrimped in other areas over the course of however many months. They're not, and I haven't. But knowing that perfect workout (lounge) wear exists, and that I'm not in a position to upgrade, reminds me of my, ahem, life choices (grad school, the light, the end of the tunnel...), and thus makes said pants more special than they'd be if I were in the $90-no-big-deal income bracket.

Well. Shortly after that post, not merely Lululemon, but the very pants I was referring to (actually more like $98) became the center of a scandal. Not only were the black yoga pants recalled for being too sheer (inspiring an internet-wide laughing fit), but the stores are apparently so inept at PR that they're asking customers to bend over and show just how sheer the pants are if they want to return them. There are evidently still more problems with the pants (pilling, dye-bleeding), such that we who own inferior workout (lounge) pants get to be all smug.

In any case, scandal and personal-finance concerns aside, I also realized that the pants I was quasi-coveting would be no good for another reason entirely: they flare at the bottom, and I live in tick country. If I'm going to run in the woods (or justify the purchase of loungewear with that twice-weekly occurrence), I need to wear something in the leggings/running tights family. Which are never incredibly flattering, and thus not worth spending much on.

"Close proximity to livestock"

Today I finally made it to the nearby Cherry Grove Farm, which is the only sort of farm in the area of much interest in this produce-barren season: one centered around cheese! And it was one of those 'that was there all this time?' moments. There were baby goats. There were adult goats, cows, pigs. Chickens and cats just meandering around. (Drive carefully!) Calves so adorable that if I were ever seeking out veal in the first place, I might have to stop. (Chickens, not so adorable. Pigs neither. This is not an ethical treatise on animal consumption, but a beauty contest. I win no award for eating very little meat, on account of I'm not often up for it. Cheese, however...)

There was some very literal farm-to-mouth happening, when all of a sudden, at the farm store, there was this cheese tasting it would have been impolite not to participate in. I'd tried cheese from this farm before (thus, in part, the reason for visiting the place), but on-site was something else. I ended up opting for the Herdsman variety, which I will melt over everything. That and a dozen eggs, although I had just bought a dozen at the supermarket, because the proximity of chickens demanded it. These are special eggs, and thus will be soft-boiled and not turned into brownies. Big plans, big plans. 

Chicken, office.

Baby goats, not unlike fully-grown miniature poodles.

When you travel internationally, they ask you on the customs form on the flight back if you've been in "close proximity to livestock." It appears that I have, but this was domestic, so the government's not interested.

"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.

Goes around, comes around

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

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

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

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

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

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

"On paper" UPDATED

Sometimes we all make assumptions. For instance, I'd assume an American Jewish woman of a certain generation would be familiar with what the "Jewish American Princess" stereotype consists of. As I have been informed that not all readers of my blog are American Jewish women around my mother's age (that my blog is read by more than just my mother), I will link to the Wikipedia entry on the phenomenon, which is incomplete but gives some sense. What it doesn't get into is the sexual aspect of the "JAP" cliché. The "JAP," according to tradition, wants a husband desperately for money and status, but is frigid and uptight. She's preoccupied with what she looks like, but her husband needs to be a hard-working pushover, and Jewish, and that's about it. 

Which is why I'm completely flummoxed by (JTL, avert your eyes) this recent Dear Prudence exchange:

Dear Prudence, 

I am a 31-year-old American Jewish woman who has been studying veterinary medicine and working in London for the past several years. I am ready to start a family. I recently ended a casual relationship with a man I desperately loved, but who wasn’t ready to commit. Enter David, a tall, blue-eyed Jewish doctor I would be proud to introduce to my family (the antithesis of the dark, hipster man I still think about). David is sweet and kind and everything I could ask for, on paper. We are a couple of months in and he wants to meet my mom, but I'm scared my family will love him so much I will be pressured into marrying him. Here’s my problem: He's bald. When we have sex it just sometimes feels like I'm banging an infant or grandpa and I get weirded out. I have never imagined being with a bald man for the rest of my life. I'd also like him to work out more than he does—I’m a workout junkie. All superficial things, but isn't passion and attraction an essential ingredient to a happy relationship? How do I improve a man without demoralizing his ego? How do I get past the baldness without resorting to asking him to wear a hat?

—Self-professed JAP

Dear Self,

I despise the Jewish American Princess stereotype, but in your case, you deserve the crown and scepter. Out of nowhere, just as you feel your egg timer ticking, comes a tall, kind, blue-eyed Jewish doctor who’s crazy about you. I’m ready to plotz! But you want to kick him out of bed because of a weak follicular showing. Surely you know that one day, no matter how much you can bench press, your breasts will deflate. I sincerely hope that your husband—if you find one—won’t complain that he feels as if he’s having sex with his grandmother. [....]

OK, so. Several issues here. One being that baldness and/or paunch are kind of the name of the game if you're a heterosexual woman over the age of 16 and not a supermodel. Heck, even if you are a supermodel. And even if your dude is currently musclebound and with a full head of hair, look around at men of various ages and it will become clear that what's common at 20 is less so at 50. So I wouldn't think to anchor male beauty to either of these. As Yoffe notes, aging happens to us all, and in predictable enough ways. That said, men don't seem to have a problem anchoring female beauty to qualities more often found in the young, even when assessing women they perfectly well know to be middle-aged. A further that-said: there's a case for being attracted to your partner initially, and then taking what comes aging-wise later on. Blather blather blather, but allow me to get to the point:

How does Yoffe, given her professed familiarity with the stereotype (and she's from the generation most plagued by it, I suppose), not see that it is in no way "jappy" to care what a man you're intimately involved with looks like? The "JAP" is utterly uninterested in intimacy or sexual pleasure. It is the precise opposite of the "JAP" stereotype to meet a nice Jewish doctor and think not, OMG when am I getting the ring, but, does he do it for me physically? And life being unfair, part of sexual attraction for the non-blind is, do you like looking at this person while you're having sex with them? Does this add to or detract from the experience? Obviously, not all women will consider baldness and paunch detractions - just as there are gay men who prefer the bear look, there are probably that many more straight women who simply associate that look with masculinity and would be suspicious of a never-aging Keanu Reeves type. (Poor Keanu, must be tough for him to get a date.) But the letter-writer, for whatever reason, is not one of those women. She spells out that she does not like looking at this guy while they are having sex.

These are, then, two separate questions: a) is she being a "JAP"? and b) is she being reasonable? Re: the first, it's an obvious no, this is exactly what a "JAP" does not do. If she cared what he looked like to her friends, if there were a status angle, maybe, but if this is about their most private moments together, nope, definitely not. Re: the second, it's less straightforward. It kind of hinges on whether "I am ready to start a family" refers to her desire to do so, in which case it might be time to reconsider an aversion to what heterosexual men in a 31-year-old woman's dating pool tend to look like, or whether this is something she feels she must say, but the occasional fling with a Keanu would be more to her liking. And I'd kind of guess the latter - the 'too-picky' single woman is often enough a woman who doesn't want domesticity but feels somehow obliged to pretend that she does.

UPDATE

So the consensus in the comments (which are, btw, impossible to read what with the scrolling, and mostly about the other letters) seems to be that a Jewish doctor with a British accent is the prize of the millenium. There are female commenters prepared to run off with him sight unseen. And it's readily agreed that this woman is a "JAP," because apparently "JAP" just means a single Jewish woman not aware that her kind ("JAPs" or Jewish women generally?) is so repugnant to men that she must take what she can get. The consensus is that a woman who expresses preferences for what the man she's sleeping with looks like is being superficial, that these preferences are something to be embarrassed about.

The only reasonable points around were that a) the guy deserves to be with someone who finds him attractive (although the reasonableness was mitigated by the accompanying assertion that this guy - sight unseen, remember! we have not heard him speak, observed his manner... - would have a million women lined up to marry him), and b) she might want to hold off introducing this man to her family.

Mostly, though, it's the usual man-shortage nonsense directed at single women generally and single Jewish women in particular. All of which leads me to revise my initial take - this woman should move on. Better for everyone involved.

Six

When I've written about parental overshare, my focus has been on published articles and memoirs written by the parents themselves. It's only there that you get the mix of writerly ambition and irreproachability. A parent cares, and has his kid's best interests at heart. So if he's written a memoir about his kid's most private moments, this is not the airing of dirty laundry. It's an act of courage. And so on. I've made this argument enough times (since 2008! this post gets a "persistent motifs" tag) that I'm not going to repeat it any further.

What I haven't looked at so much (some, but not much) is the question of articles written about real-life children, articles that name names, but where the author is a journalist not related to the subject. My feeling is, was, that these are a different animal. We don't assume the journalist has the same intimate knowledge of the child's worst moments, nor that the journalist is trying to show off her own parenting skills. No preexisting trust has been violated, and if, years down the line, the kid resents the journalist, this does not also destroy the kid's relationship with his parents. There's something really specific, as I see it, about what happens when the "journalist" is the parent.

But it's still bad form to forever lock a child's identity with information in an article the child can't have possibly consented to, and if there's any way to use pseudonyms and leave photos of the child out of it, why not? This came up recently, when a NYT story on a transgender six-year-old inspired controversy enough to get the paper's public and national editors involved. And... the case for making the child super-identifiable wasn't so strong. That this kid's story had appeared elsewhere doesn't mean the paper doesn't get to make its own decision whether or not to further publicize, or to what degree. According to the public editor, Margaret Sullivan, "parental approval, along with the child’s own willingness, should rule the day." I've emphasized, because the child in question here is for goodness sake six years old. What, in the world at large, can a child that young consent to? What can a child that young possibly have thought through in terms of repercussions of an article in the New York Times? How is this even a question? Six!

Sullivan adds that she "can envision other situations in which parents advocating for a child in this way – those with autism or Down syndrome, for example – would not raise these kinds of questions." The difference there, though, depending on the severity of the autism or Down syndrome, is not just one of stigma (although arguably there's stigma there as well). It's also that a child who could never conceivably read an article about herself in a newspaper is arguably different from one of average intelligence who will one day Google herself.

But re: stigma, precisely because being transgender is stigmatized, this is the sort of thing individuals should get to reveal about themselves in due time, and not have revealed for them to a national/global audience. (Shall we also shed the stigma around rape by providing names of individual victims without their consent?) And with six-year-olds, there's the distinct possibility that they will not identify as transgender as adolescents or adults, and are in fact showing early signs of being gay, or not showing signs of anything in particular. This doesn't mean families and communities shouldn't allow a child to cross-dress, or otherwise be open to the possibility that the kid will be transgender. They should do all of that. But it does mean that an article in the NYT about "a Transgender 6-Year-Old" (from the headline of the post about the controversy) raises extra flags. As would, I suppose, an article about a heterosexual, cisgender six-year-old.

Anyway, in the NYT comments of all places, I found a link to this excellent post by Zeynep Tufekci in response to the controversy. Seems she and I (and a whole bunch of NYT commenters - perhaps a tide has turned?) agree.

Holistic's winners and losers

Miss Self-Important has a post up on affirmative action and holistic admissions. WWPD readers may be familiar with my apparently bizarre stance - in favor of or at the very least neutral to affirmative action, but not in favor of holistic college admissions. I don't think racism is over. I do, however, think there's something ridiculous about telling 17-year-old applicants that they do or don't get into a school on the basis of what they're like as a person. What I've said about this in the past is that it's then unnecessarily devastating to kids when they don't get in somewhere. It's not that you flaked out on too many math homeworks to get into Yale. It's that Yale examined your deepest soul and found it wanting.

But what I hadn't considered was what this process does to those who do get in. MSI nails it:

[T]he opacity of admissions is actually an asset for the most selective schools, a kind of metaphorical analog to the statistical reality. [....] It's because we Harvard students are all so amazing that you can't ever prove that you deserved to dwell among us. No one deserves such favor; it is a pure act of divine sovereign grace to be admitted.

Rather than taking pride in the achievements that got them in, those admitted to top colleges are basically asked to believe they were selected as individuals and are simply better people than the other high-GPA, high-SAT applicants, better in an unquantifiable way. Not more/better leadership positions, sportiveness. No, just plain better. What does this mean for the egos of the meritocratic elite? Can't be good.

Emerged adulthood

Lena Dunham's New Yorker essay about how puppies are nice was what finally permitted me to articulate what it is about Dunham's persona that grates. And no, it wasn't that I too think puppies are nice, and yet the New Yorker didn't ask meeee to write about it. Nor even that her face is there looking at you every time you open the magazine's app, for reasons I don't entirely understand. (She made a video explaining it? and one must be alerted to its existence every week?) Nor is it that she comes from privilege* (she is, as we all know, next in line for the British throne), nor that she doesn't resemble a "Friends"-era Jennifer Aniston.

No, it's something much more simple than that. It's that the Dunham persona is a child. A child in whom we must celebrate any glimmer of adult competence. The essay ends with Dunham saying, of her new dog, "He is mine, and I am old enough to have him," adding of herself, her boyfriend, and her sister, "We are all adults here." And this seems consistent with the tone of other Dunham alter egos elsewhere in her oeuvre. The reason for the Marnie character.

Now. Dunham is 26 years old, nearly 27 (thank you, internet, for such trivia). That is not emerging adulthood. That is emerged adulthood. It's adulthood even for those who aren't as well-established in their careers as Dunham famously is. Why should we be surprised that a grown woman has a boyfriend, or is able to care for a dog? Why, more generally, should we be surprised that Dunham isn't a child anymore, any more than we're surprised when anyone else comes of age and then some? 

It's because of an aw-shucks persona of sorts, this idea that Dunham and the alter egos are such messes, such eternal bratty children, that we should be impressed when they reveal themselves capable of tying their shoes. And this is grating for several reasons. We who are about her age have felt like adults for a good long while. Moreover, we suspect that Dunham has as well. We suspect that the self-presentation as an overgrown (age! not a body-snark!) petulant teen is calculated, with two aims: first, to make Dunham seem like a child prodigy ala Tavi Gevinson (who was legitimately famous at, what, twelve?), and second, to tap into cultural anxieties about adult children living in the proverbial basement. 

Re: the first, this is a bit like scrappiness oneupmanship - all achievements are more impressive if done by someone from a poor background, or if done by a child. If Dunham is a pseudo-child, and we're impressed that she tied her own shoes, we need to be positively awed that she's on HBO and in the New Yorker. The hype about Dunham being so young to be that successful needs to last as long as possible. Re: the second, the possibility that you or your adult child (depending your age) will never quite make it to self-sufficient adulthood is really the concern of the moment. Dunham embodies that, all the while having her act together far more than most definitive adults decades into adulthood. So some of the eye-rolls the Dunham phenomenon inspires might not be resentment over her being successful at a young age (or the expected gender/privilege/looks angle), but rather annoyance over her persona's reliance on eternal youth. 

*Dunham is not helping matters, referring to her Tribeca-loft upbringing as follows: "We didn’t have a proper home. We lived in what was essentially one big room, on Broadway." 

"[O]pportunities to work for free"

Matthew Yglesias has been defending unpaid internships with a lesser-evil argument: they're better than pricey grad school. Specifically, Columbia's journalism grad program, which doesn't come cheap.

I know a bit about about NYU's journalism grad program, which doubtless also doesn't come cheap (although there are scholarships, as there probably are at Columbia), because my own program overlaps with theirs. (French Studies, in its various permutations.) And... journalism grad students also do unpaid internships. Quite possibly the for-course-credit kind.

And this is how it tends to work. Unpaid internships don't replace the need for extra education. Finding them in the first place - getting an in, figuring out which are legit, even knowing to look for them - often requires that you be a student. Maybe in an ideal world (more on that in a moment) an apprenticeship system would make it easier to go less-credentialed, but that's not what happens.

But would this be such an ideal world? School is not work, and paying to go to school is different in several ways from paying to go to work. (Which is what working for free means, all the more so if "free" is happening in a city like New York. Grad school with a stipend that allows you to break even at best might count as "free.")

1) If you pay to work, you're paying to increase a company's profits. Your work, then, however much it may incidentally benefit you (the much-vaunted learning experience), is selected according to what the company needs. Whereas if you pay to go to school, a) the company you're paying is (FWIW) a non-profit, and b) the work you're doing has been chosen according to how much it will benefit you.

2) Degrees are transferrable in a way that work experience is not. That's one reason work needs to pay - because all you take from a given stint might well be the pay. Once you have "MA" affixed to your name, this... may count against you at the Starbucks you're applying to work at, may be in a not-so-lucrative subject area, etc., etc., but it's there. Whereas a line on your resume might mean absolutely nothing more than that you filled your time. I say "filled your time" and not "were employed" because my understanding of this is that time spent unpaid-interning is not necessarily (not usually?) considered time spent employed.

3) If work doesn't always pay, if that isn't just what work is, who's to say when it does pay? After how many weeks, months, years of a position does it begin to offer a paycheck? After how many weeks, months, years in an industry can a "worker" start demanding compensation? Not to get all "Girls" on you, but it's clear enough where this can lead. You can work somewhere for free for ages, but if you're starting from zero pay, negotiating up to even minimum wage can seem a lost cause. It becomes that a worker who demands pay is entitled. It becomes something above-and-beyond to expect from one's employer. (And who's likely not to want to make a fuss? Women. Also those of both sexes not raised to expect to triumph professionally.)