Faux-scarcity and is this stew I'm cooking ready yet???

Stop the presses: I think Jessica Grose has a point. But with the caveat that yes, her latest, about how frustrating it is to have to wait to get seated at trendy New York restaurants with her husband and their many cool friends who are constantly inviting them out for dinner, dinners they can presumably well afford but ugh the wait is sooo long, is yet another addition to this genre. It may even define the genre. But it's at least not about spending a lot for a shirt, or having, at around age 30, married a dude.

And I think there's a nugget within this latest piece that's applicable even to those with less fabulous existences, whose lives do not include jaunty jogs through DUMBO, namely: if you're someone who gets crabby when hungry, this is something you will live with your whole life. It's a blood-sugar thing, not related to whether one does appreciate food (like yours truly) or not (like Grose). People who don't experience this don't get it, and assume it's overgrown-spoiled-child behavior. When in fact, while the behavior can be controlled, the sensation cannot. Some of us experience hunger as cranky, as in we don't even know we're hungry, until all of a sudden we get kind of annoyed about something petty. We can, as functional, self-aware adults, not express this annoyance (at least around those outside our immediate families), but it's there. In any survival-of-the-fittest situation, we would not fare well, which is why it surprises me that Grose and I, presumably both of an ethnicity often historically required to be "fittest" to escape pogroms and such, ended up stuck with this trait.

Along with that nugget, another potential nugget, something that was barely alluded to in the article but would have added to it tremendously: the whole thing with the lines is marketing. Inaccessibility is basically how places in NY (and, as I will get to in a moment, beyond) sell themselves. This can be done via unmarked entrances (announcing themselves only, in the case of one place I remember walking by, with that letter grade the health department now puts in the window of every restaurant), by spreading the word that only the very glamorous will get a table, or by making sure there's a line. Other variants of this: hiring waitstaff whose main purpose is making all customers feel old, square and suburban. Putting up a list of "rules" patrons must follow, once mainly a fixture of independent coffee shops, now popular in restaurants as well. (And yes, I consider Dos Toros a restaurant.) Making sure the prices vastly exceed what one would expect given the decor, because if a burger costs $20 in this dump, it must taste amazing! All of this points to the phenomenon we at WWPD know to call hipsters-make-your-food.

And we, the food-lovers, buy into it, even if Grose, food-indifferent, does not. We think we're above it, but we're intrigued when a sushi place has its own version of the Ten Commandments at the entrance and, once seated, you get a menu with a somewhat different edit of the same list. (And no, this was not in NY.) We think that the pizza at Artichoke must be worth the wait, and even after waiting the wait and learning that no, it's not so wonderful, we still notice that a new branch opened near campus, and think that maybe we will use one of our precious few opportunities to dine in NY now that we don't live there anymore on a slice, because wasn't Artichoke supposed to be something? We wanted desperately to try Locanda Verde when we lived within walking (well, hiking) distance of it, and our desperation only increased when we were revealed time and again not to be cool (or forward-thinking) enough to get a table. It's faux-scarcity, kind of like how Amy Chua tried to raise her kids as if they were poor immigrants, even when they were neither poor nor immigrants. Powerful stuff.

If this trickery works, it's in part because so many of us are profoundly affected by our appetites, and remember as the best meal we've eaten recently the one we ate when we'd missed the previous meal and gone running that morning. Some of us are so set on the idea of preferring food quality to atmosphere that a hopeless atmosphere actually fools us into thinking food tastes better.*

Grose must really not care about food, to be immune to this manipulation. To accept it as manipulation and reject it would be something else, but to find it only comprehensible in this really abstract sense why restaurants have long waits - "if you’re a hot spot, you can serve more customers when you’re not reserving tables, and it always looks good to have a line" - suggests a genuine absence of interest in one of the five senses. Grose merely accepts at face value that her friends appreciate good food. While a real cynic would say that her friends are hipster foodies - "sheep," as commenters put it - and get on line for the sake of being on a line with others dressed ironically, I think it's more about this trickery.

But is it trickery, or rather, does that matter? Given that we're talking about a multifaceted sensory experience, what's the difference if we think we think the food is superlative, and if the food actually is?

*There are, however, limits. Today at the Whole Foods café area, the room adjacent to the tables was holding a staff training meeting. It was easy enough, what with the big glass doors, to see in. The lecture including things like, "True or false: [Disgusting pest the likes of which the mere thought of can induce nausea] manifests itself in [disgusting way you wouldn't have imagined]." I might have accepted the soft pretzel's weird aftertaste, but not after that.

A feminist triumph

More wedding-talk from Slate writer Jessica Grose, who got married not long ago and has evidently been gazing into the navel of the existential angst the idea of marriage gives her for some time. This latest piece begins in the traditional educated-woman-discovers-self-not-impervious-to-gender-and-age-appropriate-desires manner that all defenses of entering into a heterosexual marriage, as a woman, must:

In most ways, I did not fit the bridezilla stereotype: I did not care about the color of our tablecloths; I haphazardly filled our registry with the things my mom told me we should have (as I type this, dust collects on our Le Creuset mortar and pestle); I let my bridesmaids pick their own dresses; my on-the-cheap bachelorette party involved a stoned viewing of Clueless followed by a sleepover rather than a gaudy, overpriced, forced march through Las Vegas.

To which a skeptic might respond:

-She had bridesmaids.
-She had a bachelorette party.
-She had a registry.
-With fancy stuff on it.

It is entirely possible to be 100% married without any of those. Ergo, no low-maintenance-ness award. But we're to believe that, but for her intense quest for bridal bodily perfection in the months leading up to her wedding, Grose was laid-back about the whole thing. And who's to say if she was or wasn't? All brides compare themselves to a "bridezilla" extreme that basically no bride will meet. Anyone who did not get transformed into a human Barbie, who did not rent the entirety of Monaco for the occasion, is so totally low-key.

The article itself, though, made me cringe. Not because I'm opposed to girliness or wedding extravagance (as I've mentioned here before, I bought wedding-but-also-post-wedding shoes at Repetto that cost more than the dress, and they were/are spectacular), but because... this is just so, so much more of a problem from a feminist perspective (well, my own feminist perspective) than white dresses, name-changes, father-givething-daughter-away, and engagement rings combined. Grose, you see, opted for the bridal diet-and-workout makeover, and defends this in the way that someone who kind of realizes how ridiculous this was, but also kind of doesn't, might.

[My personal trainer] told me that before we would start training that day, he needed to weigh me and assess my body fat with a caliper. I should explain here that I wasn't embarking on this transformation as a total sloth—I ran or attended spin class four or five times a week and my BMI was already in the low end of normal. I was already in reasonably good shape. Or so I thought.

"It's not a complete disaster," the trainer said after looking at the digital read-out on the caliper. "And what are your goals?" he asked. I told him I wanted to lose maybe five pounds, but mostly I just wanted to look really good in my strapless gown. "We can do," he told me, "but you need to come three times a week, and follow the diet."

And:

My then-fiancé looked over my shoulder at the Spartan list of acceptable foods I was allowed to consume. I would come to refer to this as the "squirrel food diet," because nuts and berries seemed to be such a crucial part of it. Otherwise, it was the standard diet that women's magazines encourage month after month after month: Breakfast involved egg whites. Lunch and dinner were 4 ounces of fish or chicken and greens. The nuts and berries were snacks. No booze, no sugar, no fun allowed.

"This is insane," said my fiancé. "You don't need to lose weight." 

"It's not about losing weight," I told him. "We're going to have those photos for the rest of our lives and I refuse to have dinner lady arms in them! I promise to be sane about everything else wedding-related."

Ah yes. The woman who isn't even fat, but who's bought into the idea that women - particularly those about to get married - should be on diets. Annoying to read about from a YPIS angle for women with BMIs north of the writer's, especially for those without fiancés reassuring them that they're tiny, but also for those of any gender or relationship status who think it's kind of important for women to, you know, eat. Yes, yes, even the low-normal BMI sorts should exercise, but there's no pretending it's about "health" if you're already borderline underweight and your goal is, in part, to lose five pounds. (Relevant "Mean Girls" quote coming to mind.)

I'm sure some will say, it's her body, she should do whatever makes her happy, and being five pounds underweight for one's wedding is unlikely to cause permanent damage. (Natalie Portman, she of the temporary tininess for "Black Swan," has just given birth to a Millepied, so this must be true.) To which I'd respond, it's a bit like the whole thing with "ex-gays." If some folks would prefer to view themselves as straight, for religious reasons or whatever, and get more pleasure from that identity than they would from a same-sex relationship, so be it, in theory. But in reality, these things do not occur in a vacuum, and the "ex-gay" is likely contributing to making life worse for those who'd rather be openly gay than closeted and pious, not to mention for the women they play at being "straight" with.

Women who diet unnecessarily are not always evangelists for doing so, but writing an article like this, phrasing it as a "defense" of the pre-wedding body-overhaul, adds up to as much. I'm not sure what the correct language is to describe this kind of writing ("pro-ana"? "pro-orthorexia"? "triggering"? people more up-to-date on Jezebel - which Grose used to write for! - than I am, help me out), but, guaranteed, it will make other already-thin women wonder if maybe they could stand to lose a few.

But! Grose's overall message, the basis for her "defense," is that her exercise routine was about empowerment. Thus the reference to wanting arms like Michelle Obama's - how liberal and liberating! And thus this, the strangest bridal-makeover-as-empowerment story I've ever heard:

That I was willing to keep at it made me realize that this makeover was about more than just vanity. I was getting much, much stronger. After several sessions I could lift the heavy boxes of wedding goodies that were being shipped to us on a near-daily basis without the aid of my fiancé.

A feminist triumph!

Pretty ugly*

There's an entire category of fashion that gets labeled different ways ('ironic,' 'clothing men don't like,' 'fashion victimy,' etc.) but that amounts to the same thing: clothing that's intentionally ugly, yet worn by women who want to look pretty. Think Chloe Sevigny. Think one-pieces with harem-pant bottoms. Think... think absolutely any garment, worn on a woman who clearly pays a good deal of attention to her appearance. If styled in a way that implies This Is Fashion, or put on a model (see: why "models off-duty" is a useless concept), it's all fair game. Unitards, high-waisted jeans with pleats, men's workshirts, flannel...

The latest installment: Jessica Grose, a Slate writer, discovered German orthopedic sandals, which she's been wearing "for years," and which can now, and I've seen it myself, be found in trendy shoe stores in the US.**

Here's where things get tricky. Grose writes: "I don't know about other Worishofer owners, but my love for them is earnest—I genuinely think they are attractive." And yet! For the "grandma sandals" look to work, the wearer cannot herself be of grandma age, just as for the "boyfriend" look to be that and not simply "butch," the wearer must (go out of her way to) give off the vibe of someone who'd have, well, a boyfriend. This is the difference between menswear-as-trend and crossdressing. And these are fine lines, so to speak. Grose may believe she genuinely likes these sandals, but she first noticed them on a stylish (and presumably sub-80) friend. Indeed, she refers to the shoe's "under-40" wearers. What happens at 40?

Because the effect is in the contrast - pretty-young-thing in outfit intended for someone far older - or far more masculine. It all hinges on the visible non-membership of the wearer in whatever category of person one imagines the garment or look to be for. Straightforwardly pretty (or chic, or sexy) clothes, meanwhile, are quite obviously intended to enhance the appearance of the wearer. The message sent by pretty-ugly clothing is that the wearer must be the following to pull that outfit off: 1) naturally beautiful, 2) unconcerned with how she's seen (aka not trying too hard), 3) you get the idea.

I'm torn. On the one hand, I support all trends that permit women to wear the hot new thing without cutting off circulation or stumbling into train tracks or what have you. On the other, I don't like this whole 'let's not look pretty, yet in doing so show off how pretty we really are' strain of fashion, either. All of this brings me back, boringly enough, to the straightforwardly this-looks-nice gamine look so easily procured in Paris, and so conducive to wearing flat shoes and otherwise comfortable attire. Breton stripes and narrow (not "skinny") jeans, ballet flats, feels a bit costumey when actually in France, but basically, problem solved.

*Not to be confused with "jolie laide," which is French for either, this young woman's ugly but has rich and famous parents so we have to say something nice, or, this woman's all-around attractive but has 'ethnic' features that prevent her from fitting the Bardot standard.

**A well-kept secret is that some of NY's best shopping is on residential and untrendy West 72nd Street. Those sandals included, although in that locale it's a fair bet they're being worn unironically for real.

Fake America vs. Slightly More Authentic America UPDATED, TWICE!

Are you sitting down? Because you're about to have your mind blown: it seems that Slate writer Jessica Grose... recently got married. And she has thoughts on What it All Means that she has generously offered to share with us, we the people who don't know her personally.*

If the NYT is less than sensitive to small "flyover" towns, Grose's op-ed today in the paper offers up a crude and clichéd portrait of New York as well as its suburbs. The suburbs are kinda-sorta nature-y! The city is filled with spoiled rich kids! (For the record, I was tormented one summer at camp by spoiled suburban kids, who fixated on the fact that my clothing didn't match, and that I had not brought along a hairdryer - we were eight! The takeaway here is that there will always be richer and brattier kids then yourself at summer camp, and they will find a way to make what is no doubt a well-earned break for your parents a miserable month for you.)

Her main objection to raising kids in the city, let it be known, is that it might mean having to take a stroller on the subway. Given that she had not long ago written about her intense pre-wedding arm workout, it might strike us as odd that she would not be able to take triplets on the JMZ, tossing the stroller down the stairs with her pinky finger.

We're to believe that her parents raised her in the suburbs for the following reason: "They had spent three years as interns and residents in hospitals in the South Bronx, taking care of patients with gunshot wounds and reviving heroin addicts." Hmm. Presumably two doctors might be able to raise a kid in a kind of urban environment at a great remove from the South Bronx? I'm afraid I don't really understand having this conversation without bringing class into it - if you're at a certain threshold where you'd genuinely be safer/more upwardly mobile with what your income could get you school- and real-estate-wise in a suburb, that's a valid concern, but otherwise? How could someone be simultaneously concerned about raising "brats" and schlepping a stroller on the subway? Aren't these the concerns of two different people, leading two utterly different lives?

The piece continues:

"In the suburbs of my childhood, packs of fourth graders walked home from elementary school without adult supervision, playing tag in the park along the way."

I suppose I only started going to and from school unsupervised in fifth grade - city kids have it tough. I guess we didn't play tag on the (MTA) bus, though. I feel like I never had a childhood!

"Adolescence involved training runs with my field hockey team down Main Street, where I often saw someone I knew; largely innocent keg parties in the woods; and, above all, the joy of driving a car down an empty, half-paved road with the windows open on a late June day. You can’t do any of these things in New York City."

The driving, point taken, but my high school track team ran up and down the Hudson River path, and I'm not sure what's so radically different when it comes to high school parties if the beer consumption occurs in apartments when parents are away, and is served in individual bottles rather than kegs. If anything, the whole we-didn't-drive-around bit makes it not only "largely innocent" when city kids get together, but almost entirely non-fatal. And! And! As free and wonderful as it must be to be 16 and driving around on your own, from what I hear it's kind of miserable to live in a must-drive place when you're still too young to do so and thus must get driven, or if your parents won't get/lend you a car. From 14 on, I could pretty much go wherever the MTA would take me, as long as I called home and didn't stay out too late.

Anyway, as someone who grew up right smack dab in the middle of Manhattan, I have had to contend my entire life with people explaining that the city's no place to raise a child, that it's basically child abuse to procreate in an urban environment. When it's like, aside from the rather crucial detail that I never learned how to drive (which, FWIW, many - most? - of my high school classmates did, even if virtually none had cars of their own), I think I turned out OK. And, because I grew up with no particular experience of them, I'm more likely to get excited (field trip!) than to roll my eyes when I get to go to a strip mall or a big-box store.

*I probably write about this writer's writing too much. I should note that I have nothing against the writer herself personally, don't know her personally, and must on some level appreciate/identify with what she writes, or I wouldn't come back to it. As a rule I try to reserve my snark for those who are a) super-established public-figure-type writers, with platforms far greater than my own, as opposed to random bloggers, and b) if possible, although I guess this unlike the former might be unintentional, people of roughly my own demographics, as opposed to people who, if I were to single them out, it might risk offending some greater constituency. See also: my responses over the years Jane Brody's "Personal Health" column.

UPDATE 1:

Holy moly, someone actually makes the "almost borders on child abuse" claim, like for real. It's really not anything like child abuse to grow up without ever coming in contact with a tadpole. (Although we did dissect frogs at my high school.) And, dude (or dudette), if you're creeped out by "10-year-olds who eat sushi," you're not good country folk but a xenophobe.

UPDATE 2:

This I'd just meant to add to the post earlier: If Grose conflates different and seemingly mutually exclusive objections to city-kids - the fact that it's expensive to be comfortable in a city, and the chance that one's kids will be rich and snooty - so too do some city kids themselves, as kids or looking back fondly on their urban upbringings. You did not grow up amidst "diversity" if your only glimpses of the area beyond 57th-to-96th 5th-to-Lexington were on drives to your country house. If you're rich enough, you can raise city kids who basically never see the city.

That Guy, That Girl

There was an Onion Magazine cover recently which struck me as both spot-on (as they always are) and... off: "The World's 10 Most Powerful Women: We Make Them Discuss Fashion And Lindsay Lohan." On the one hand, it's insulting to female politicians and CEOs to ask them what shade of pink they prefer. On the other, who are the world's most powerful women, and how did they make their names? Oprah Winfrey? Discussing one's feelings. Martha Stewart? Domesticity. The most frightening female onscreen boss in recent memory would have to be Meryl Streep's turn as a pseudo-Anna Wintour (the editor of American Vogue, which is a fashion magazine, for those who don't keep track of such frivolity) in "The Devil Wears Prada."

************

There's another installment in the age-old debate about why women still aren't writing for the serious magazines in great numbers. Meghan O'Rourke asks "whether what editors consider 'important' is itself affected by gender," and I would say the answer is, yes, although editors are maintaining a status quo that extends beyond magazines.

There are, I suspect, many more men than women who will confidently hold forth on what they make of, for example, the events in Egypt. (Imagine a deep voice saying, 'Well, you see, what all this means is...') And what comes of Egypt is a bigger question than who designs Kate Middleton's gown. End of story?

Are women not reading and closely interpreting the front page of newspapers? Women (not with the initials S.P.) are doing this, but there just aren't so many women who believe that their take is so important that gosh darn it everyone must hear it. Same as the That Guy in a college seminar hasn't done any more of the readings than his quieter classmates.

If we grant that some issues matter more than others, it's still not clear that this means if you want to discuss Important, you're looking for a male interlocutor. There are 'women's topics' that are Big Questions - contraception and abortion, childcare, food policy. And 'men's topics' that kind of aren't: lengthy discussions of who's going to win a minor Congressional race, say, or anything whatsoever to do with sports or picking up women. And of course, there are men interested in shoes and birth control, women named Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.

But let's say, for the sake of argument, that there are far more men with thoughts they wish to write up about Egypt, and that one would find a few women interested in writing that story, but a whole lot prepared to write about, for example, women's window of romantic opportunity. (This does not strike me as a sexist assumption, given the role of socialization in all of this, and the extent to which boys, even not-all-that-bright ones, are rewarded for being know-it-alls, while know-it-all female Dreyfus Affair buffs are socialized into knowing things like which shades of nail polish are in this season.) Would we rather our serious magazines contain 10 articles mostly by men, on serious topics, of which two say something new and useful, or see a mix of the best serious articles and the best cultural commentary, where women and David Brookses could share the stage? Is the way to show that important topics are important to print exclusively on those topics, even if readers would (I suspect, given that this blog has some arguably serious people among its readers) prefer a mix?

(Alas, Flavia. Guilty.)

Obviously a magazine does not cease to be serious upon the inclusion of non-NYT-front-page material. There are ways of discussing relationships, fashion, etc. that go deeper than Clooney vs. Pitt, or than what we think of the future Mme Millepied's maternity wear. Take Jessica Grose's series in Slate on how newly-married couples split their expenses. It's girly - based on personal experience, complete with a cute photo of author and husband, an "overshare" if a not-so-racy one, and an invitation for the reader to speculate on the dynamics of her marriage, something female writers often enough face without in any way eliciting it - but gets at something that does affect people's lives, and that is difficult to discuss socially. I like that Grose didn't apologize for starting from (but moving beyond) personal experience, or for writing about a topic a man would probably not pick.

Point being, I don't believe it's necessary to wait for the Golden Age of there being an equal number of women as men wanting to write about international relations or Senate elections for these numbers to even out. I'm somewhat torn, because in ancient times when I edited a college paper's opinion section I was forever frustrated by the fact that the only other woman who wanted to contribute wished to write about what it was like to date a frat guy, but hey. She did, no harm done.

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.

Old and New

-Almost finished Old New Land. Fascinating stuff - more on it later. Post-orals leisure reading is all about the books it would be assumed someone with my interests would have read, but that somehow I hadn't gotten to yet, priority going to books someone has, at one point or another, been shocked I haven't read. (Next up: Foucault on sexuality.) The line between work and leisure, when work means reading on the topic of your choice, will be the subject of another post.

-NYT trend-piece alert: A campus that's 55% female makes it altogether impossible for women to find decent boyfriends? The fact that a slight tilt in one direction appears to anyone as making a college 'all-girls' reminds me of claims that a neighborhood with a tiny but nevertheless new minority population is now 'swarming' with members of said group. Are schools with just over 50% men viewed as all-male? That said, a genuine all-female environment can lead to an idolization of males that's just the opposite of what such places are meant to instill. My complaint is with the 55%-means-no-men angle. 55% lets whichever percentage of 19-year-old girls would date older men anyway do so, while allowing the rest of the campus heteros to pair off however campus culture permits.

-Speaking of man-woman relations, why is the comments section of a certain DC 'game' blog with that car-wreck-can't-look-away quality a Jew-bashing extravaganza?

I know, I know! 1) The obvious: once people get into 'we're all anonymous, so down with P.C.!' mode, it's a short trip from misogyny to bigotry of all kinds, because everyone, if so inclined, is a rich, tall, straight, white male on the Internet. 2) The slightly less obvious: 'game', at least on that site, is about cultivating a sense of victimhood among a population that has experienced a loss of relative privilege. Even if the posts themselves tend to be misogynistic first and reactionary mostly by implication, the overall tone is one of nostalgia for an Old Order, the good old days when they knew their place. Back when women were in the kitchen, men were men, and Jews hunched-over peddlers. Now they control the government and media! 3) The least obvious and most paranoid: the popular view of Jewish women - spread in part, initially, by some Jewish men - as ugly, pushy, frigid man-haters makes it especially straightforward for someone who has it in for women already to denounce Jewish women in particular. Hmm.

-And once more: I was with Jessica Grose in her take-down of Lori 'Settle' Gottlieb, until, after correctly taking Gottlieb to task for assuming female journalists can only write what their emotions dictate, she... brings up her emotional stance towards the topic at hand, explaining, "In reality, my piece was not written because of personal problems with marriage (I'm engaged)." First off, women (and men) might have issues regarding marriage for all kinds of reasons, whether they're single, married, or affianced. But more to the point - why stoop to Gottlieb's level? If what Grose is arguing is that hers was a just-the-facts refutation of Gottlieb's claim, it shouldn't matter what's going on in her own romantic life.

If you're writing on anything remotely girly, and you're a woman, it's only a matter of time till you start getting the 'but you think this because you're so obviously single/coupled/fat/thin' response, from those who may not even have this information about you. While I see nothing wrong with mentioning the personal if that's what you were doing anyway, the absolute worst reason to fess up is because it's been demanded. The answer to 'you think X because you can't get a man' isn't 'lookie-here, ring,' it's... either no response at all, or a clearer reiteration of whatever the point was in the first place.

Rhoda Studies 101

So I've now watched from the second (not the first - it's unavailable) episode of the notorious "JAP" Bravo reality show, up through I'm not saying what number. Possibly too late to write about it for a thing that isn't WWPD, unless I find a timeless angle, which... I think I might, so maybe more later, elsewhere. But for now:

The first thing I noticed: the "Princesses of Long Island" - most of them, at least - retain their original noses. A definite change from earlier generations of the same milieu. Is it that they really own their Jewishness? Is it just some kind of Ashkenazi-Sephardic divide, with the former (for some obvious historical reasons I could think of) more likely to have undergone this procedure?

I point this out not to gratuitously bring up noses, but because the original-nose-retention (in the midst of a great deal of artifice otherwise) seems somehow emblematic of the show. The whole unapologetically-Jewish thing. A few seconds hardly go by before we're reminded that the women - who seem basically like reality-TV women everywhere, and who one half expects to start speaking in Essex accents - are Jewish. Did they mention recently that they're Jewish? This, despite only one of the women being a practicing Jew, or seeming at all plugged into anything culturally Jewish, for that matter. The others have evidently been instructed by producers to play up the Jewish angle, to drop various Hebrew expressions that don't make any sense in the context, and seem incredibly forced. One asks all men she meets if they're Jewish, in a way that seems beyond artificial. So basically the same relationship to Jewish-Americanness as "Jersey Shore" had/has (?) to Italian-Americanness. Or the TV-show version of this.

Maybe the show is anti-anti-Semitic. It represents Jews as big drinkers and not remotely clever or intellectual. Overanalyzing everything? Overachieving? Overrepresenting the group in graduate schools? Not so much! Oh, and if the "JAP" is frigid, well, our pal Erica clears that up.

Should I be offended that this show kinda-sorta claims to represent me, a Jewish woman about their age, living not on Long Island, fine, but in New Jersey, which might be exactly the same thing? (There was an intro shot of a tristate-area strip mall that brought me right back to my most recent supermarket trip. And I'm half thinking, 'but I just bought groceries, how am I back there?') Probably. I'm not, but only because of a likely misguided belief that no one would imagine I belonged to that subculture. I'm about 50 primping-steps away from being socially acceptable in that world. But to someone from well outside it, by virtue of being American, Jewish, female, and not a complete hippie, I may well read as a "JAP." Which is why all American Jewish women effectively have to find this stereotype offensive.

As with all minorities, we're probably all the same to outsiders, yet small internal differences seem immense to us. Growing up, I virtually never encountered this subculture for any length of time (once at summer camp, at 8, and then not again until Birthright Israel, at 23), other than to have it drilled into me from day one that I was not and should not ever be that. That princessy-ness was simultaneously anti-feminist and repulsive to men. Not sure how I came to grow up with this message - it seems to more often come from Israeli-American communities. Maybe an urban vs. suburban thing? A clash between those with more cultural capital than economic and those in the reverse situation?

There's a kind of mutual class snobbery between whatever the thing I was brought up as and whatever that is. The only instance of bullying I can remember from my childhood involves that sleepaway camp, where I was harangued for not blowdrying my hair (I was 8!), and having clothing that clashed (is that still a thing?). But the very same Jewish women who are most attuned to issues of gender-and-marginalization are probably the ones most wary of coming across as "JAPs," despite this being nothing more than a gendered stereotype, with intersectionality written all over it. It's complicated.

As Jessica Grose pointed out, this show really harps on the age of the participants, displaying their age with their name, which is not a normal thing done on reality shows. (We don't get the ages of their dates, parents...) Grose sees this as highlighting that these grown women live like children, which they do. But as Rachel Arons picks up on, the age is what brings drama to the proceedings. Time is running out. They're all on the cusp of 30. Which has tremendous significance for them, because they need to be married by that age. The moment all the women are 30, some kind of timer goes off.

Which... I don't even know. That view is hardly unique to this one subculture. But they're stuck in a frustrating middle-ground, culturally. Traditional enough that it's a tragedy if they're 29 and single (and that it would be tragic if they married out), but not enough that someone in the community has it together to find them spouses.

And then you get the show's Snooki (the very short, quirky one) getting quasi-proposed to by her father, with a diamond ring, with her mother present, to mark her 30th birthday. One of those reality-TV moments you can only hope was scripted.

What is anti-Semitic about the show, I suppose, is that it perpetuates the idea of the perpetually single-and-desperate Jewish woman, the one whose very Jewishness somehow rules out the possibility of her pairing off, yet makes her all the more keen to do so ASAP. (You'd know about this if you'd taken Rhoda Studies 101.) The single woman in American mainstream culture virtually is a Jewish woman, so thoroughly has that cliché caught on. A certain New York-area accent and 'Semitic' appearance is shorthand for 'perennially single-and-doesn't-want-to-be sidekick'.

And yet! Women in this subculture do get married. Happens every day, I'd imagine. There are, after all, men of the same subculture, who contrary to what Philip Roth might have you believe, tend to prefer their female equivalents, and not to be running off with low-maintenance WASPs (whom they'd be meeting where, exactly?). These particular women are, one gets the sense, unusual in their milieu for still being single at their age. A subset of a subculture. Yet the show's message is, look at how repulsive Jewish women are to the opposite sex! Who would want anything to do with them? When it's like, a) not all Jewish women are anything like this, and b) of the ones who are, this does not seem to be an impediment to pairing off.

Transparency

This, as the kids used to say. Writers writing about writing not paying. Shall I join in? Places I've written for as a freelancer tend to pay between $50 and $100 an article. This can be parlayed into other things, and something is absolutely better than nothing (which is what my first regular post-college writing gig paid, back when I was too naive to know one was meant to ask for payment), and it's probably a different story for people who establish themselves on staff various places and then switch to freelance (I'm thinking of someone like Jessica Grose)... but it does say something about the viability of full-time freelancing as a career.

What the article unfortunately doesn't mention is how what "writing" consists of has changed. Yes, if you wanted to be a poet or novelist, this was always going to be a struggle if you didn't come from money or hit it big with something you wrote while still in high school. But now, anything however tangentially related to publishing or journalism likely won't pay. I do repeat myself on this, but it's important: The day job has become, for many, an unpaid, no-insurance-providing "dream job." Work that isn't particularly artistic (sorry but that first episode of "Girls"...) is somehow The Arts.

I could try to analyze this further - is this about places marketing themselves cleverly in order to get clerical work done for free? - but I want to make the most of this enormous stamp-card mocha and get some other writing done.

This is it, I promise

Perhaps because it tangentially relates to my dissertation, I'm finding the Jews-and-Christmas discussion fascinating. My attempt at tying up loose ends of earlier thoughts on the matter are below; to those who've had enough of the topic, there's always the next post, computer pinball, etc.

-The existence of a Jewishness defined negatively, as non-celebration of Christmas (to stick with this example), isn't something to be celebrated, exactly, but a little understanding is all I ask. Jewish ambivalence about the holiday shouldn't be conflated with whining or making a big deal out of nothing. It's certainly possible to make too big of a fuss, about this or anything else. But it's also possible to so greatly fear being one of those Jews (cue Mrs. Broflovski whining) that one is compelled to mention how delighted one is with Christmas and how one wouldn't dream of complaining. The problem with the accusation of being a complainer is that there's no way to refute it while holding your ground. Or, as commenter Geoffrey puts it, "That [telling it like it is] only works for white men. Women or POCs aren't plain-speaking, they're 'shrill' or 'grievance-merchants' or some such."

-The reason everyone and their mothers have now commented somewhere on the internet that 'Christmas is secular' isn't because the holiday is secular, 'has pagan origins,' whatever, but rather because America is a majority-Christian, culturally-Christian country. Christianity is the default, so we only recognize Christianity as 'religion' when it beats you over the head with a New Testament.

-Because there's no clear-cut divide between religion and culture, different non-Christians approach this in different ways. The way I understood Jewishness as a child - associating it primarily with non-celebration of Christmas, brown rather than blond hair, and theoretical persecution from theoretical Nazis - includes some elements that would be familiar to other Jews, but is far, far, from universal. I've had, I think, a total of two Jewish roommates, one of whom put up a tree, the other of whom kept kosher to the extent that, although my cooking was limited to pasta-and-cheese-based meals, we did not share dishes. (While these are two different people, it wouldn't be all that strange if one Jewish person both kept kosher to the exclusion of cheese and decorated a tree.) Which is just one of the reasons why the question of how to approach the holidays isn't, in fact, exclusive to intermarried couples - if some Jews celebrate Christmas and others don't, it stands to reason that some children are raised with two Jewish parents and are still not sure what they do come December 25th. This is even in Lithwick's piece in Slate, that she and her husband grew up with different Jewish Christmases. All marriages involving at least one secular Jew are mixed marriages.

-Which brings us to... In the interest of further nuance and further repeating-myself, it also bears a mention that Jews aren't the only Other when it comes to Christmas in America. But even if a Jew marries the WASPiest of Mayflower descendants, that person is also a person, also has particular family traditions they might want to preserve. (Which is why a debate between an in-married and an intermarried Jew on whether Jews should have Christmas trees, in which they use their own families as examples, doesn't hold. But Jessica Grose gets it: "And what would you suggest for a Jewish woman married to a Muslim partner? Whose minority tradition should be preserved then?") There's a difference between Jews embracing Christmas because they don't want to come across as killjoys, Jews who grew up with Christmas and would find it abnormal not to celebrate it, and Jews who are in relationships with Christians celebrating the major holidays of both members of the couple. Only the first of the three is about a will to assimilate. Re: the second - if you're already assimilated, you're not assimilating by doing what your family's always done - 'assimilated' is if anything a screwed-up term, because it implies that each and every Jew is born Hasidic and may, in the course of his own life, reject that life. When in reality, many many Jews are multigeneration 'assimilated' and would have to make an effort to be 'more Jewish' - being true to their origins might well mean Christmas. Re: the third - contrary to popular opinion, Jews do not typically enter into relationships with non-Jews as a way of intentionally distancing themselves from Judaism, but rather Jews who are already 'assimilated' end up meeting more non-Jews than Jews, end up having about as much in common with Jews as with anyone else they meet. The 'damage,' if that's how you care to think about it, has already been done.

-This from Britta's comment and my response. It's politically incorrect, socially unacceptable, etc., to refer to Jews as being anything other than a religious group. Why? Because to do so is thought to imply that Judaism is immutable, that it's a 'race,' that one is maligning converts and sympathizing with racists, etc. Same as why the Jewish "American Girl" doll has to have light brown hair. This explains both why Christians and atheists-with-Christian-backgrounds ask why non-religious Jews would give a crap either way, and why Jews themselves who have only the faintest recollection of something called 'Yom Kippur' choose, as the one way of expressing their difference in a country where they don't have a whole lot of difference to work with, a religious statement.

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.

Processed

Sometimes an example of something I've been holding forth about for some time just kind of falls into my lap, or laptop as the case may be. Food-movement proponents want us to eat seasonally, but they themselves travel the world and get to sample the local cuisines of wherever they damn well please. They want us to cook more for ourselves, but they themselves, while they no doubt cook some of the time when home, are off sampling every last restaurant in Paris, but nothing too old-school. Processed food is fine, if it's an up-and-coming Parisian chef processing it.

And it's the kind of Paris travel journalism aimed Americans who've tired of Saint Germain, and who need to explore the Canal Saint-Martin area. Or who have grown bored of that as well. Not, in other words, trip-of-a-lifetime tourists. Writing restaurant reviews for the sophisticated crowd is a tough job but somebody's got to do it, and I say this as someone whose own work has led to lower-priced but plenty delicious Parisian food adventures, so no, not bitter. (Slightly bitter, but so it goes, pursuing dissertation research, not food writing.) My point is merely, gently, that if your year includes X fantastic meals in Parisian (and Californian, and so on) restaurants, then you're really not in a position to say how much of a sacrifice it is to go week after week, making the most of leftover lentils.

******

Somewhat of a digression, but this cannot be emphasized enough, gender. Mark Bittman and Michael Pollan want a gender-neutral return to cooking. And it's just like Dan Savage's demand for a gender-neutral return to extramarital dalliances and looking the other way. We don't live in this gender-neutral world. So "monogamish," in the context of the world of actual people, means returning to the era of, men do as they please, and women don't dare divorcing them for it, because that wouldn't be nice to the children, as if the fault in such a scenario lies with the wife.

When it comes to cooking, same deal. As Jessica Grose recently reminded us, women still do far more of the housework. When men cook - and many do! - it's something special, something they've chosen to do, not something they feel obliged to do. The burden (and I say this as someone who enjoys cooking but knows enough to be realistic about it) could in theory fall equally to both sexes, but in practice, it doesn't. Demands that "we" spend more time in the kitchen are demands on women. Gender-neutral home-ec is a nice gesture, but it would hardly make a dent.

Food and beverage

-It's so tough to find good help these days. But actually, kind of? Service is indeed... I'm not sure I'd say bad, when a more precise term would be odd, at NYC restaurants-loosely-defined. The branch of the food movement I will refer to as Hipsters Make Your Food is all about a dynamic between server and served that used to be (as recently as 2008!) restricted to coffee bars. The taco place to which I swear undying devotion comes with its own complicated set of rules customers must obey, including the word "chillax." (Did I mention that hipsters make great food?) All of this is of a piece with paying more for "farm-to-table" ingredients, and having to tell yourself that it would be unethical for a small individual pizza from a stand not to cost ~$10. Oh, and with the food-truck phenomenon, one that's well and good for ice cream or if you're taking food back to an office where you make a salary so high that you don't notice when takeout costs the same as a meal in a restaurant, but otherwise... Under the HMYF regime, the diner must be neck-deep in liberal guilt, and must believe that the dining establishment is actually a kind of social-justice enterprise. The diner must understand that the server is not merely a version of himself too rebellious to work an office job, but someone with a deep commitment to compostable cutlery. My sense (from salivating over restaurant reviews when it's almost time for lunch) is that HMYF extends to restaurant-restaurants as well, but as I tend to eat at lower-end HMYF establishments, so my knowledge here is limited. But if service really is worse across the board, this would be my explanation.

-Jessica Grose, who not long ago attempted to frame her pre-wedding diet-and-exercise routine as feminist empowerment, now wants us to believe a $500 dress she bought (to be distinguished from her $400 blouse) is evidence that she's a professional, not a socialite. Gar! Can't she just admit to having some conventional desires, and, as the kids say, own it?

-My husband got me the water bottle I'd been talking about since forever, one with a filter attached, convenient for parks, etc., where the water taste isn't so hot. At the library, however, the fountain water is now specially filtered, making my water filtered twice above and beyond whatever's done to tap water normally. This is some fine-tasting water. And I own it.