Maintenance, high and low

-What must a man over 30 own? There's now this list... I guess the main thing about it is, it doesn't account for subcultures (or, as they said on this BBC sociology podcast I now listen to, "masculinities" - emphasis on the plural). In some pockets of society, masculinity continues to be performed through ostentatious disregard for shopping, even the kind of shopping that markets itself as investing in quality. The more holes in a garment, the longest stretch since the last haircut, the better. But the list does kind of nod towards that version of masculine self-expression, including as it does certain items (an umbrella, more than one towel) that it's just assumed a woman would have sorted out long before 30.

-Barilla, as you've seen many times via Facebook already no doubt, has recently been outed as the homophobic dry pasta. Which does summon the obvious question: Is DeCecco similarly problematic? Maybe someone needs to look into this, because that's whose sales will now skyrocket.

-Make-me-a-sandwich-gate. The thing where a woman has a blog whose premise is that if she makes her boyfriend 300 sandwiches, he'll upgrade her status to fiancée. So what of it? Is she merely another entry into the tradition of women being entrepreneurial under the cover of domesticity (ahem, Martha Stewart), digging as she so transparently is for a book deal? Is there maybe some element of role-reversal in the proposal - she's kinda-sorta proposing to him in an elaborate way, with these sandwiches. Maybe? Except not at all - it's gross both because of the make-me-a-sandwich trope and because it's this exaggeration of the idea that a woman must prove herself worthy of a commitment, whereas a man just kind of has to exist to be presumed husband material.

-Ugh, to the skeptics, yes, calling some random Jewish woman a "JAP" is a slur. (Referring to a "JAP" subculture/aesthetic, that might not be, given that some women do seem to identify as such.) No, being Jewish (and male) yourself doesn't make you an authority on this, because it's an intersectional slur - against Jewish women, not all Jews, not all women. (Unclear how central "American" is to this, as I think variants exist elsewhere.) And it's a slur precisely because of the way it's used, which is to say, against American Jewish women generally, regardless of whether they've exhibited any high-maintenance behaviors. If you haven't had it hurled at you apropos of basically nothing; if you haven't spent your life under the preemptive accusation of excessive primping (if only!); if you haven't, as a woman, found that everything frilly you do go in for serves to confirm an ethnic stereotype (woman paints nails, woman; Jewish woman paints nails, fussy princess)...