"Street"

The internet being enormous and all, I don't remember where it was I saw this, but somewhere I saw something, once, about how Idris Elba is the actor white women who don't much pay attention to black male beauty (or who don't consume much diverse or black-oriented media) give as the example of a good-looking black man. Like, to the extent that it is, if you are a white woman, borderline racist to say that you find Elba attractive, his name in this context having evolved into a trope of sorts, of the exception.

I have no idea if this is true, but if it is, that would seem like all the more reason he'd be a shoo-in as James Bond. If indeed they still make those movies (I've only ever seen one, years ago, on what was probably my only high school outing with straight 'guy friends'), which apparently they do, because this morning Twitter erupted with the news that Anthony Horowitz, probably the same Anthony Horowitz as is behind some of the better, earlier Midsomer Murders episodes, gave a not particularly borderline but rather straightforwardly racist (if coded) reason why Elba, in his view, shouldn't be Bond. The word "street" is used, which is going to seem particularly odd to anyone introduced to Elba via his role in the US version of The Office.

As tends to happen in these cases, intense, multi-hour research (or, rather, clicking the link from the Independent to the original Daily Mail interview) suggests a bit of outrage-stirring on the part of the press. The "street" remark had, it seems, been immediately preceded by Horowitz naming a different black British actor, Adrian Lester, as a possible Bond. While the thing it seems as if Horowitz said (namely, that Bond can't be black because any black actor, even Elba, is "too 'street'") and the thing he actually said (a sort of casting equivalent of 'some of my best friends are black,' and then the "street" remark) are both racist, the former is so much more so that it might be tempting to cry Misplaced Outrage and dismiss the whole thing, except... the outrage is merited. The "street" remark is still racist!

The trouble is outrage fatigue. After years and years and years of offensiveness going unremarked, there's now this flood of remarks. Justified ones, but the sheer repetitiveness of the 'can you believe X said Y?!' headlines has ended up numbing too many readers to what are, at least in my opinion, real and important concerns about representation, subtle bigotry, and so forth. People then end up sympathizing with the gaffe-maker, who will inevitably have said something a notch or two less offensive than first thought. And so the conversation will get diverted from issue at hand. My question, then, is really one of strategy. If you support the politics of the 'can you believe' headlines, but wonder about their efficacy... what's the alternative? Is there one?

Of GOOP and GOP

There have been brunch protests. They involve black people and non-black allies going into posh brunch places, speaking for a few minutes, then leaving. (From the video I saw, it's approximately as disruptive to brunch as when a live band suddenly starts playing at a coffee shop. No waffles, it seems, were harmed.) Gawker commenters are discussing whether the place anti-racists really want to target is upscale NY restaurants, whose patrons are (the commenters' assumption, ahem, not mine) progressives, and not the predominantly white, working-class establishments where one might (again, paraphrasing the commenters) find racists, cops, racist cops. That line of argument... makes me very pro-protesters.

Because when I first saw something about this, I wasn't sure - it sounded like hipster performance art. Hating brunch is cool, not because brunch is racist, but because it is - for lack of a better term - basic. I mean, this even comes up in an early episode of "Girls" - the Lena Dunham character is assuring her (also-white) on-again off-again dude that she doesn't want a guy to take to brunch.

But taking a broader view, the percentage of people avoiding brunch because they think they're above it is tiny in comparison to those who are avoiding it because it's expensive, because they have to work when it's brunch time (perhaps... at a brunch-serving establishment), because they have family responsibilities, because it's not a thing in their neighborhood, etc. The demographic brunching at these places... the Gawker commenters don't quite have it right. It's not that the customers aren't racist - it's that they probably aren't resentment-racists. It's a safe assumption that they're of the demographic that identifies neither with a young black man shot by the cops nor with the cops.

Protesting at brunch - and not, as the Gawker commenters suggest, a white working-class hangout - is a way of challenging the all-too-common view that systematic racism is upheld by the white people who, all told, benefit the least from (again, for lack of a better term) white privilege. Rather than addressing the GOP set, these protestors are talking to the GOOP crowd. Doesn't seem like a bad idea.

Imperfect but possibly useful historical analogies time

Léon Blum : Vichy :: Barack Obama : Ferguson/Staten Island

Stories of the weekend

-The buried lede here is that looks matter in dating, for men and women alike. (As in, nearly all people, regardless of gender, eliminate most of the human population on the basis of looks alone, before even considering such things as personality, kindness, accomplishments, etc. - "looks matter" doesn't mean looks can typically cancel out deficiencies in other areas.) So it's kind of amusing to see comments along the lines of, 'duh, men are visual creatures.' This would be a relevant point to make if Tinder involved women's photos and men's CVs, but, as I understand it, it does not.

-Pretty much everything I could possibly say about the Hollaback! video controversy is on WWPD already in one way or another, but the most relevant post is probably this one. Other repeating-myself points include the fact that street harassment is - as some seem to get - about power. (Thus why a plain-looking 14-year-old girl may find herself bothered far more often than a reasonably attractive 20-year-old woman.) I also continue to think the feminist focus on catcalls is... a bit like the feminist focus on issues like how young and thin fashion models tend to be. These are absolutely real problems, but they're also photogenic ones. Along with the more productive awareness-raising they accomplish, they provoke something that might be called concern-ogling. Depending how the coverage plays out, it can end up reinforcing the idea that to be female is to be young, beautiful, and the recipient of a continuous, admiring male gaze.

-Spot-on.

The "eating pant"

So many great articles, and no longer my official week of Dish guest-blogging, so you, WWPD readers, are in luck. We have:

-A Room For Debate I haven't yet had time to read, on parental overshare. Note that under my definition of the phenomenon, it's not about putting baby photos on Facebook, ideally with some privacy settings, but even if not, eh. That's... what a family photo album is these days, and I see no reason to be paranoid about hackers chasing after your baby photos for nefarious, baby-harming purposes. Parental overshare involves sharing the sorts of things that wouldn't normally go into some sanitized, public face of one's family. Parental overshare is "brave" and involves spilling the sort of info that's only actually brave if you're spilling it about yourself.

-Allison P. Davis's account of being a disappointingly slovenly-dressed daughter of a stylish mother. Another note: I totally own the J.Crew "eating pant" (there's no link or photo, I just know) and had given them a similar name. And had, of course, worn them to hot-pot.

-Monica Kim on eyelids:

Before blogs, makeup tips and tutorials did not cater to different eyelid shapes in the US. Even today, the issue of the eyelid is often swept aside by beauty bloggers like Michelle Phan, who like to remind people that Asian eyelids come in all different types. That may be true—my mom and sister were both born with double eyelids—but it’s unhelpful to us single-lidded girls, who must go it alone.

This is exactly what I was trying to get at re: Jewish-looking, and doubtless applicable to other '-looking' variations as well. It doesn’t do much good for those of us who are whatever-it-is-looking to be reminded time and time again that there’s no such thing as that-looking. We know that not all members of our group have exactly the same features, and can often point to people in our own immediate families who don't have whichever fraught traits we do. I have relatives just as ethnically Jewish as I am, who have completely straight hair, the kind that doesn't even frizz in the rain, as vs. my own, which does something different every day, depending the humidity. Does that make my own choices regarding hair-iron usage automatically apolitical? Does that make frizz-prone hair not a stereotypically Jewish trait, and one that's underrepresented in mainstream images of beauty? 

Even if one is delighted with one's single-lidded eyes (or frizz-prone hair), as Kim says, styling advice tends to be geared towards the less-'ethnic' way that even an 'ethnic' person may look. (And yes, I've read many times that eyelid and paleness concerns in certain parts of Asia are not about looking 'white' and predate any such notions. As for Jewish hair concerns, as a rule, they sort of are, although my own may stem from envy directed at the popular Korean kids at my high school.) Which is, in a sense, the issue. There's clearly an audience, if you will, for women of every ethnicity. The problem with not being 'mainstream' in whichever way really is - once one is an adult, and has gotten past the phase of imagining that the only people who ever find a boyfriend, ever, are blue-eyed blondes - one of figuring out which products to use in which way. 

What lurks beyond the bagel shop

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passing

-When first learning the rules of the road, I remember thinking of the dotted lines that allow one to pass on a two-lane road as... something you're supposed to know, but not information I'd ever have occasion to do anything with. It just seemed implausible that I'd ever choose driving into oncoming traffic over waiting patiently behind the slow-moving car in front of me. The idea that I'd ever have the skills to identify a situation where passing would be both safe and appropriate struck me as so farfetched as to not even think about it. Then today, there was this construction vehicle going like three miles an hour on a 45 mph country road, filled with some kind of mud or dirt or something that I wasn't super keen on driving right behind. Pondering this seemingly futile situation, I then remembered the phenomenon of passing zones. I wasn't in one, until a little bit later, I was. I could see far ahead that nothing was coming, and, as if I were an entirely different person, I passed the truck.

-As a white-ish person with unusual amounts of experience feeling out-of-place for not looking East Asian (Stuyvesant,* Japan, H-Mart...), I've sometimes wondered whether anyone ever gets surgery to look more Asian and less white. Not that I'm signing up for cosmetic surgery of any kind, thanks, but as a matter of curiosity. So I guess I'm obliged to link to the story of a very white, blond man who's surgically transformed himself into what he believes to be a Korean man. The results are surprisingly... something? I'm not sure he ends up looking Korean (we'd need to bring him to Edison and see what language they use to address him at the BBQ place), but... you'd expect someone who'd done this to emerge looking terrible. Not, to be clear, that actual Korean men look terrible, but surgical ambitions this radical tend to leave people looking sort of generically... operated-upon. He, in my highly scientific opinion, does not. If he looks a bit unusual in some of the photos, it seems to be more of a makeup issue than a surgery one.

*Sorry! Euphemistic Chambers Street.

In descending order of importance

-I suppose as a not-black American, I'm supposed to have a contrarian take on Ta-Nehisi Coates's "The Case for Reparations." But from what I could tell, reading it quickly late last night, it seems quite reasonable. Yes, other groups in the States, including my own, have faced racism, not just abroad but here. But anti-black racism is the racism in this country; if you doubted this, a good place to begin would be Coates's article. Or N.J. Transit. The only objection I could see having to the overall idea is if, on the whole (as much as this can ever be assessed of any group), African-Americans themselves find the idea off-putting. Anyway, curious to know what WWPD's readers, whatever your origins, thought of the piece.

-Banana Republic is for peasants. This was the not-all-that-between-the-lines message of Alexandra Jacobs's Critical Shopper column. I remember a scandal a while back, when a different Critical Shopper fat- and class-shamed J.C. Penney. Here, it's a bit of a different angle - Banana Republic is, after all, a somewhat expensive store. How expensive I couldn't say - like Jacobs, I haven't shopped there in years, but from what she writes, my guess is, she didn't just switch over to Uniqlo when that cheaper-and-better chain became a possibility. (Actually, we sort of know this.) But Jacobs's grievance seems to be with - for lack of a better term - mall stores:

“The Heritage label: what does that mean?” I asked one associate, who was talking smack about her boyfriend as she listlessly folded a stack of capri pants by the so-called concierge desk. 

“What do you mean?” she said with a blank look.

Horrors! That, and there's vanity-sizing. Of course, the question at this point is, compared to what? At this point, it's all mall stores, many lower-end than BR but others higher-. Basically anywhere you're going to get day-to-day clothing in Manhattan has a branch in at least one New Jersey mall. If you're a bit more fashion-y, maybe you choose J.Crew or Zara over Banana Republic or Ann Taylor, but these are the stores in even the most fashion-y parts of New York (ahem, lower Fifth). So this isn't even a YPIS of Jacobs - I'm genuinely curious where, if not stores like Banana Republic, anyone shops for most items.

-A rabbit has taken up residence on the patch of grass outside the living room. Squirrels are in mating season. I don't think the poodle can handle this.

The web of artifice intersectionality

This morning's poodle-walk accompaniment was the BBC Woman's Hour discussion on the "politics of afro hair." As someone with moderately politicized hair myself (on "Jewish" hair, see this essay; the point is not to question the Jewish authenticity of the Alicia Silverstones of the world, but rather to note that the women whose hair matches up with what's thought "Jewish" experience our own version of hair politics), I take a semi-personal interest in such discussions. Having spent about a week total of my life in the UK, and having never been black, this discussion was - as must always be disclaimered - not about me, even if I can personally relate to some of it, and not in the classic oblivious-white-woman 'sometimes I have a bad hair day, too!' sort of way. Disclaimer done, let's proceed:

Initially, my hopes were not so high - the discussion was introduced with a mention of how Lupita Nyong'o had worn her hair in an "unaltered state," I think was the expression, to the Oscars, which seemed an unfortunate conflation of hair-straightening and hair-styling. It would be like saying that because Nyong'o wasn't somehow painted lighter, she was wearing no makeup at all. This is, after all, the trouble with "natural" - we enter into a web of artifice intersectionality. Some forms of effort are not problematic ("problematic," argh, but no other word works here) in a racial sense, but might be in a gender one. More on that in a moment.

Then came the debate itself, which introduced further levels of intersectionality. Hannah Pool, a journalist, was pitted against Editi Udofot, a hairstylist; both are black. As the website confirms, Pool wears her hair in an afro, while Udofot has a blond weave. This was our starting point.

And so began one of those privilege discussions where the winner is, ironically, the person who's more educated, more upper-class (or whatever UMC is in the UK, because I understand there's also the aristocracy), more privileged.

Pool offered a critique of the ethics of human-hair extensions, explaining that only rich white men benefit from the sale of these, all the while talking to an apparently successful black businesswoman who sells hair extensions. Pool also announced to Udofot that she (Udofot) would look more beautiful with natural hair... this despite having never seen Udofot with natural hair, and despite Udofot's protests that this is not how she herself likes to look. Udofot explained - and having had equivalent conversations about my own hair, boy could I understand - that not all black women's "natural" is equally attractive. Her own natural hair, she explained, is thin, and incapable of growing into an afro like Pool's. She likes big hair, she explained, so whether she wears it straight or curly, she requires some kind of artifice. Nor, she went on to explain, when the topic returned to Nyong'o, is short, non-straightened hair some kind of automatic ticket to looking like a movie star.

Indeed. I've had they 'why the flat-iron?' conversation with people who assume that, barring said device, I'd surely have, I don't know, flawless ringlets, or cascading Pantene-commercial waves, or even just that insouciant French-girl hair. They're not imagining a less curly but somehow more voluminous version of this. Now, we may still say that it's unfortunate that women with meh natural hair feel they must alter it, but we need to be honest, and not claim that in all cases, "natural" looks better. For some women, "natural" means sacrificing beauty privilege a whole lot more than for, say, Nyong'o, who is maybe the most beautiful woman in the world.

And then... class. Often enough, for one's more "natural" state to be thought beautiful, one merely has to enter into some well-educated elite, simple as that. Easy peasy. Udofot explained that she prefers how she looks with the blond weave, but that she also prefers how she looks with makeup and nice clothes. Pool found this all just so sad, and wanted to explore the underlying issues (patriarchy, capitalism, and racism, I suppose?) that have fooled Udofot into thinking she must do all these things - some racially-problematic, some not - to her appearance. Udofot didn't seem particularly interested in being rescued from what is, after all, her source of income. But if she wasn't convinced, Pool nevertheless came across as the voice of BBC reason.

I mean, I don't know Pool or Udofot, and have subjected neither of them to extensive sociological examination. My knowledge of British-class-system-via-accents is limited at best. But my overall impression was that a look that's caught on plenty in more upper-class circles was being held up as superior. While there may be some objective truth to this - the cost! the chemicals! the impoverished non-Western women selling their natural hair! - it somehow leaves a bad taste when that-which-is-posh gets equated with better. And all the talk of what is or isn't "pretty" - this is going to vary by subculture, and perhaps that needs to be addressed.

Feelings revisited

But first, some more self-promotion.

With that out of the way, Gawker alerts us to a painful-to-read essay about what a black fellow-student in a white woman's yoga class might be thinking about said white woman, aka the author. We never leave the realm of the author's feelings, which are, as per the genre, projected onto another person about whose feelings the author knows nothing. All that's evident is that this woman is black, heavy, and not particularly elegant at yoga, thus possibly new at it. And yet, the feelings:

I was completely unable to focus on my practice, instead feeling hyper-aware of my high-waisted bike shorts, my tastefully tacky sports bra, my well-versedness in these poses that I have been in hundreds of times. My skinny white girl body. Surely this woman was noticing all of these things and judging me for them, stereotyping me, resenting me—or so I imagined.

It's a fine case of where to even begin. Is it, as someone just put on Twitter, "white privilege" that she's making this story about her? Or is it, as someone (else, presumably) commented on Gawker, a case of a young woman acknowledging her privilege, only to be berated for it? And with trendy, pseudoacademic privileged bodies and accommodating spaces jargon at that?

Or am I getting sidetracked - is this a story about Journalism Today, and how, if you want to go viral, it helps to say something both hyper-personal and wildly outrageous. 'That Time I Saw An Elderly Chinese Man Waiting For The Bus And Had a Feeling.' The essay can be about how the man is judging you for having just bought $500 worth of groceries at Whole Foods, for having gone to Vassar, for having come from Soul Cycle. You just know he knows this, even though as it turns out, he didn't even look at you. As it turns out, he's actually blind. As well as multi-generation Korean-American. You have no idea. But why stop this oh-so-fertile line of thought?

Retail woes and feminist infighting

-An inside account of what it's like to work at Lululemon. Mary Mann does more with this topic than one might imagine possible. But what's never really addressed head-on, yet seems crucial, is the way that the women selling these pants tend to look the part. Not exactly like Lululemon shoppers - more like younger, fitter versions thereof. Like the women one's husband will run off with should one not do enough yoga. So while it's the same deal, unsurprisingly, as other retail jobs in the U.S., in terms of paying badly and not offering benefits, you won't be helped by the same person who'd be doing so at Old Navy. You'll be getting a chipper, college-educated positivity-embracing sort, or, as in Mann's case at the time, an aspiring writer-editor, one darker/more cynical than the Lululemon brand would prefer, yes, but still someone whose apparent class (as vs. actual bank account) is consistent with the pants.

And I could ramble on (and on) about what this tells us about class being complicated. Is someone who looks posh but is scrambling to get by actually as posh as all that? Is it so different to work at Lululemon than at Old Navy? With endless time for this post, I'd find a way to connect it to Rebecca Schuman on the MLA, but I'll have to let you, my three holiday-season readers, draw your own conclusions.

-For reasons I myself don't entirely understand, but that I think relate to needing enough podcasts to walk the world's most energetic poodle, I'm very much up to date on the BBC Woman's Hour, perhaps more so than the hosts themselves. There was a year-end special on feminism in 2013, which... Was feminism big in 2013, or are the feminism controversies of that year the ones still fresh in our minds? The ones having to do with Miley Cyrus, or anti-airbrushing campaigns, or work-life balance. Or was having-it-all the concern of 2012?

In any case, 2013 seems to have been when BBC Woman's Hour discovered (or for all I know rediscovered) intersectionality. Scandal ensued. Reni Eddo-Lodge sums up the conflict, and links to the apology she received from fellow panelist Caroline Criado-Perez. While my U.S. vantage point - and this being audio-only would have assumed intersectionality might have applied to both women, I take it Criado-Perez is, at least by British definitions, white and nothing else. Eddo-Lodge is black.

The scandal was privilege-checking. Eddo-Lodge said yes, privilege should be checked, because intersectionality. Criado-Perez said no, because abuse. "Abuse" in this context meant something, although I'm not sure what. Online harassment, I suspect. I think she meant YPIS-hurling, in which case fair enough. YPIS has gotten out of hand.

However! YPIS-hurling isn't what's going on when someone who is actually a member of a marginalized group/in a marginalized position spells out that which out-group members don't understand. YPIS is when (to oversimplify) one rich white person tells another that their privilege is showing, and initiates a contest over which of the rich white people assembled is the true authority on being poor and black. That's where YPIS nastiness occurs.

Because the same terms are used by the YPIS brigade as by the legitimate-complaint-havers, I can well see how Criado-Perez reacted as she did once these terms came up. And there's a case to be made (if one that's just about impossible to make in sound-byte length) that the misuse of "privilege" has been so great that we need to scrap the term. But it's about context. "Privilege" as Eddo-Lodge was discussing it was a very different thing than the sorts of accusations Criado-Perez has apparently dealt with. Her grievance, while legit, isn't with what was being discussed, so Eddo-Lodge's interpretation of this as a derail seems about right. Not, that is, that it much matters what this white-by-U.S.-if-not-necessarily-British-standards American feminist thinks.

Urban artists, suburban moms

-Saw the Léger exhibit in Philadelphia. OK, not before a great deal of hemming and hawing ($25 a person!), and a fair amount of panicked driving (the whole bit between exiting the highway and parking near the museum), but still. Glad to have seen it! I like how many/most of the works look (as you can see, I was trained as an art historian), but I also enjoyed the whole rah-rah-cities mood, of the exhibit, but also, it seems, of Léger himself. When I think of the interwar years, I usually think of fear of modernity, with all the sinister things that often implied in those days.

As usually happens when I go to this sort of exhibit, I end up far too drawn to the works of some artist other than the one the show is actually about. In this case, El Lissitzky.

(One day, I'll be able to go to Philadelphia without including a trip to Artisan Boulanger Patissier. Or not. Could a branch maybe open in Princeton? I'd settle for New York. Lucky, lucky Philadelphians.)

-I know I should read the book reviewed here, and I suspect I'll have a different take than the reviewer.

-Arne Duncan's now-notorious "white suburban moms" observation is the latest entry into what I had called "feminism's 'white lady' problem," although it extends beyond feminism. What happens is, remarks/reactions that would otherwise read as straightforwardly misogynist are somehow cleared of that charge once "white" is brought in as a modifier. Then all of a sudden, bashing women seems progressive. It's not women who are vapid and entitled, just white women. As if society's most privileged aren't white men, but their female counterparts.

Because there's a strong case to be made that anti-white "racism" isn't even a thing, given society's power structures, it's easy enough to see nothing wrong with "white lady"-talk. After all, it's not a marginalized group being demeaned, is it? When in fact the problem with "white lady" comments isn't 'anti-white racism', but rather the way that 'white' functions in this context as a cover for anti-woman bigotry. That whole thing where women aren't assertive enough? This ends up being assertiveness-shaming. Not good for white women, but also not good for women generally.

Gagging, guy friends, and girl chefs

-Interracial marriage makes reasonable people want to "gag," or so trolled Richard Cohen. As someone in an inter... -faith? -cultural? definitely -national, and by some largely-outdated definitions, -racial marriage, I do so apologize for any nausea I may have inflicted. (Also - shouldn't traditionalist conservatives like that de Blasio's wife is a former lesbian? Isn't that just a non-ideological version of "ex-gay"?)

-"Guy friends"! Not an expression I'd much heard since all-girls middle school, when having them made you the height of cool. It meant you knew so many boys that not all of them had to be crushes. That your real social life was outside of school. My friends were, alas, my classmates, so no guy friends.

Male friends are just a normal part of life, but guy friends... To me, the term always sounds like, this is a guy you want to be dating - or who wants to be dating you, and you kind of enjoy that, but not enough to date him - and precisely because the friendship is somehow charged, you have to go out of your way to insist that it's not. As in, Dude A is your friend, whereas Dude B is your guy friend. As in, it really matters that the friend is a guy. Which, sure, if you're 12, but as an adult?

-There are, when it comes to women-and-work, two separate discussions. One - the one we know so well - is the struggle of women trying to make it in predominately male professions, who face being steered away from entry, as well as an old boys club once they've arrived. The other, somewhat less straightforward one is, what happens when men are in a traditionally female profession? Or: what changes when the same activity is done by a man as vs. a woman? Example: cooking. As so many have already pointed out, we expect women to cook, so when a man does, it's this big event. Second example: the humanities. If a man devotes his time to studying poetry, that must be because he has very important things to say about Literature; if a woman does, it's because she went with a girl-major and what with math being hard, couldn't have cut it as an engineer.

The clichés we have of The Chef, The Humanities Professor, these are very macho figures. The former, tattooed and drug-addled with a dirty mouth; the latter, tweeded out (no frivolous shopping for the bookish) and endlessly appealing to impressionable young women. What does it all mean? Perhaps after I've chef'd and eaten dinner, I'll have the answer.

"[T]wo different Rabbis wanted sex"

As is so often the case, another newspaper comment has managed to outdo the article it's appended to. Not in, like, research, nuance, etc., but in discussion-fodder. Susan Katz Miller's essay on raising children as Christians and Jews is plenty thoughtful, if unlikely to convince anyone whose concern is Jewish demography. Meanwhile, commenter "anonymous12," Jewish on her father's side, has this to say:

As the daughter of a Jewish father who was anti-religon and a mother who was from Christian stock but had no practice, I grew up figuring it out on my own. I have always been drawn to Judaism and in my thirties, I reached for it. I have never figured out if the rejection I experienced was because I was a pretty blonde single women who looked like a Swede ("Are you here for a new husband, dear?"). After making attempts to achieve an Orthodox conversion (and being accused of being a "xtian infiltrator"), I tried a Conservative conversion and wasn't welcome, and then Reform (two different Rabbis wanted sex), I gave up and stayed away. I once went into a shul to ask a question and the two women behind the counter actually nearly broke their necks trying to answer my question to my friend who had given me a ride, because she happened to have dark features--so perhaps Jewish people could drop their own stereotypes. Over and over I experienced a complete disregard for my interest, beliefs, heritage and sincerity.

Recently I moved to a new city and made a casual connection with a very mixed congregation that is very open and liberal. The Orthodox may howl, but I promise you that unless you "look Jewish", show up to convert in order to marry a Jew you already know (no shopping), and/or look like a troll, you're not actually very welcome at all. 

Every person deserves a faith community and after years of loneliness I have a place to go for the holidays where I am welcome.

For those who don't read the block-quotes, the commenter's claim is that her prettiness and blondness prevented her from being welcome in Jewish communities. Well, except that some rabbis wanted to sleep with her. (Wasn't there a "Seinfeld" about this?) She was simply too sexily non-Jewish for all but the most progressive of congregations.

Having never experienced life as a non-Jew, or as a stunning blonde, who am I to say if that's how it might have gone? Conversion to traditionalist forms of Judaism is a notoriously difficult process. And Jews aren't somehow magically immune to broader societal racism, so if someone non-white had a tough time, unfortunately I wouldn't be surprised.

But in this case, allow me some skepticism. The sticklers for Jewish law aren't concerned with your hair color (note the number of blond Hasids! and I don't mean married women with blond wigs), just with your mother's Judaism or lack thereof. Nor do you receive automatic Jewish status if you "look like a troll." (Sheesh!) I don't believe Bar Refaeli, Natalie Portman, etc. have been excommunicated.

There's a lot of particularity out there, and some of it's easy to take personally if you don't see that it applies across the board. A bit like when people will fly to Israel and think that the airport security were sizing up them for insufficient Jewishness, when it's like, no, they do this to everyone. That, and it's so ingrained in the culture that Jewish men would be weird around Swedish-looking women that a woman who fits that description may well attribute any weirdness she does experience to her physical features. Meanwhile, says Science, men are only looking at us from the neck down anyway.

For non-blonds UPDATED

By now, everyone's seen the story of the blonde girl found in a Roma home. Commenter Quasimodo asked for my thoughts, which I started getting into in the comments, but this may merit a whole entire post of its own:

-Let's please not start assuming blond children of not-blond families are somehow suspect. This, for so many reasons. Such as: Adoption happens across ethnic lines. Lots of light-haired children grow up to be dark-haired adults. Police of the world, don't start swooping in and removing blond children from families to which they belong.

UPDATE: Too late, via.

-There isn't some great, global 'blondness belt' where everyone's rich, extending from comfortably socialized Scandinavia to New England WASPs, Southern belles, and California surfers. There's also this little thing called Russia. (Closer to home: Appalachia. Also: the "Gypsies" of Ireland.) Other Eastern European countries as well. This matters in terms of how we try to make sense of this incident. It's being discussed as if there's obviously some Western middle-class or wealthy family whose missing child this is. When the full story may - in any number of ways, some more upsetting than others - relate to the family of origin being poor and desperate. Of course, there could well be an impoverished Russian family whose child was abducted, or a rich British one, say, who for some reason dropped their baby by the doorstep. But point is, 'blond' doesn't say as much about socioeconomic or global origins as we might think.

-We don't want to overshoot the mark and start talking about the privilege of abductees who happen to be pretty blonde girls. Abducted is still abducted, and is still unthinkably worse than being dark-haired and/or plain in the comfort of your own home. Same deal if the abductee comes from a well-off family. This came up (where else?) in a Jezebel thread about Elizabeth Smart, with commenters debating whether maybe the real message of the story was that access to services for the abducted isn't as equal as we'd like. When something truly horrific happens to someone rich, it's still horrific. It's not as if being abducted from your childhood bedroom at knifepoint by a deranged would-be cult leader and getting raped by him and abused by his wife is an ordinary poor or working-class experience, either.

-Every time a minority is accused of refusing to integrate, I get suspicious. Are we sure it isn't that the majority won't have them? This, in response to anti-Roma bigots who - like everyone who's been to a European tourist destination - has a story, but feel compelled to extrapolate from that story that they were mugged or near-mugged not because Roma have no other options in some areas, but because they're just like that. When looking at issues of integration, what matters isn't just whether the government has some plan in place involving schooling or who knows. It's also how a minority's received socially.

-Can we please not make this a discussion about how those terrible, selfish Jews insist on claiming that they were WWII's only victims? Who exactly are the Jews not aware that Roma, gays, and the disabled also had the Nazis to contend with? Or aware but denying this? I'll grant that what we learned in Hebrew school or whatever might have been about roundups of "Gypsies," so there may be some misuse of terminology, if no more among Jews than the general population. But really. It would be nice if, every time the Roma came up, anti-Semites didn't come out of the woodwork to hold forth on how Jews think they're so special, with their fancy Holocaust. On behalf of The Jews, I'll say that what we don't appreciate is when other aspects of that period of history are brought up in such a way as to deny the Jewish experience. As in, without an 'actually Jews didn't have it so bad' angle tagged onto the discussion of the suffering of other groups.

-While this really doesn't have anything to do with Jews directly, it does bring to mind the blood libel. Not that this couple was falsely accused of having a kid they hadn't officially adopted (that may be right), nor that they were at all accused of planning to serve the kid for dinner. (They do stand accused, by Internet commenters, of prostituting her out, based on no particular evidence as far as I can tell.) But just this idea that there's something particularly squicky about a blond child being lost to the blond community, and something particularly nefarious going on in the non-blond population.

Complexities of desire

-The NYT deems a recent murder of a white man as not racially motivated for the following reasons:

A closer look at the shooting shows it was not about race. One of the three suspects was white, another had a white mother and a third had many white friends, including a girl he had been dating. 

Yes, if one of the alleged offenders is also white, and there was no other detail suggesting racial animosity, this would be a strange one to investigate as a hate crime. But what interests me here is the notion that someone can't be racist against a particular race if they have a parent who's that race, if some of their friends are, or if their significant other is. As came up on occasion in my dissertation, anti-Semites with Jewish lovers or spouses were plenty common in 19th-century French fiction, and not unheard-of in life. And the more familiar American example: do we really think all black people with white ancestry are the product of unions born of interracial understanding? And, you know, the some of my best friends thing?

-So, the first Prudie letter here. While there is, once again, far more going on than the angle I'm focusing on, what's interesting for WWPD persistent-motif purposes is the way female desire sometimes gets expressed as the desire to be desired. The backstory for the too-busy-for-links/the "Dear Prudence" boycotters: a married woman has this outrageous, insatiable sex drive, but because her husband isn't available every five minutes or whatever, she fears that he doesn't find her attractive. Mismatched libido - or maybe it's just that she's not particularly monogamous, it's not clear (the "I fantasize constantly about having sex with others" bit, and the cheating on her first husband one...), but in any case, why does she articulate this as being about how pretty she is? Is this, as Prudie concludes, because of this woman's "shriveled and needy ego"? While I second Prudie's suggestion that the woman seek help, this seems only an extreme example of something that goes on even among the not-unhinged: women following whichever script it is that asks them to articulate their own urges for beautiful (which is subjective) men as a wish to be thought beautiful by men.

Tooth and nail

-Nail art had its day, and its day is, evidently, done. Nails may now return to the realm of skincare and haircare, where we are to seek out the appearance of 'health.' The fun days of glitter and neon for adult women are over, and now the trend is adhering to the dress code of some corporate law firm we don't even work at. I know because I read it on Into The Gloss, and because even before reading that, I'd painted my own nails a sheer pale pink. But if nail art brings up all kinds of appropriation issues, the "nude" nail has its own set of minefields. Specifically: "nude"? What's "nude" on one complexion isn't on another. Nail polish isn't the same as concealer or foundation, and a pale beige may look great on dark brown skin (although a dark brown polish may look not so amazing on pale beige skin). But yes, "nude" - acceptable for describing the color of something - nail polish, shoes, etc. - you yourself are wearing, maybe, but not for describing the color something is in the abstract.

-Canine dental care is expensive, is the understatement of the century. There's nothing even wrong with Bisou's teeth, but they must be cleaned to keep it that way. And we left with instructions on canine dental care that seem geared towards turning this - once combined with the half a day that must go to walking, fetch... - into a full-time job. Daily toothbrushing (this had been on an every-other-day schedule, along with brushing) and some kind of gel you're supposed to put on your dog's teeth before bed. I have trouble believing the 80-year-old women one sees walking 20-year-old poodles around Paris go in for all of this, but just as American women don't get to enter into a healthy, wrinkle-free old age on the wine-croissant-cigarette diet, American poodles can't live on Camembert and market-scavenging alone.

Bisou moonlighting as another dog's tail.

Bisou in the springtime, striking a pose.

Bisou mid-yawn, a menacing sight.

Feminism's "white lady" problem

Often, one hears the expression "white lady," used by those of various gender and racial demographics themselves, but certainly including white women. Who's a "white lady"? She has pearls. She clutches them. She has a breakdown of sorts at an Apple store and it goes viral. She thinks it's terribly feminist to work outside the home, but never thinks about the woman she's hired to do her childcare and household duties. She has this thing about gluten - no, not celiac, she's just not doing gluten these days. Of course you'll understand.

"White lady" - goes my not-remotely-polished hypothesis - is a way to be misogynistic (and misogyny can come from women) while seeming to be engaged in a kind of racial solidarity. It's a way of giving the impression that the bulk of white entitlement/privilege/whatever is possessed by the group's women.

Who what where when why?

Does feminism have a racism problem? In the abstract, it's easy enough to think of reasons why it does/has had one. The emphasis on the woes of the 'housewife' in years when women of color were working outside the home. The emphasis on the pressure on 'women' to be thin, when it's not really all women (if not just white women, either). The tendency of feminists to ignore issues that specifically impact non-white women - the famous intersectionality, which Jewish women (most of whom are 'white' by U.S. standards) should be plenty attuned to, given the 'JAP' stereotype, which is simultaneously misogynistic and anti-Semitic; there are more extreme equivalents for other marginalized groups*. Problems specific to the black-and-female, the Asian-and-female, etc., are too often ignored, if the big-deal feminists are nearly all white. And then there are questions of multicultural and multifaith feminism - is wearing a veil necessarily anti-feminist? And so on.

So it's not mysterious why feminism can have such problems. What's mysterious is what the problem is, specifically, here. I've been semi-following the Hugo Schwyzer Affair or kerfuffle or I don't know (he follows me on Twitter, I'm now reminded; am I implicated in all this, on account of that plus being white-ish and identifying as a feminist?), but Mikki Kendall's Guardian op-ed seems like it's missing a first paragraph or similar. (As, alas, does everything that I've seen written about this.) It's conceivable that Schwyzer has wronged feminists of color (as a group, or as individuals), and it appears he's confessed as much, but the question is, what happened? I hoped to figure this out from the Guardian comments (forget to bring a book on NJ Transit and this sort of thing happens), but most everyone there seems about as mystified as I am. Mystified not, to repeat, by intersectionality, but by what the particular controversy here is. The Google isn't of much help, either. It reminds that Schwyzer has a past of pretty extreme domestic violence, which is indeed an odd fit for Professional Feminist Ally status. But what's the racism story? There's this broad consensus that this man did something racist, and he himself is admitting as much, but it seems impossible to find out what. Anyone know?

*And arguably for white women of the non-hyphenated (blonde?) variety. The whole 'white lady' thing, where 'lady' is used (often enough, by other white women), and the individual in question will be referred to as entitled when an equivalent man would not have been. Not all intersectionalities or marginalizations are equal, of course, but there's still a kind of intersectionality that applies to the 'white lady' construction.

Race and the two-fellowship purse

Already old news, but here goes: Oprah wanted to buy a bag the cost of approximately two years' worth of PhD student fellowship. (Something to think about, would-be graduate students.) Because the market values Oprah's contribution to the world more than that of those slogging away at dissertations, she could well afford that bag and then some. But Oprah was unable to buy the bag in question, because the woman assisting her in some Swiss shop decided that this woman surely couldn't afford it. "This woman" being, as we all (well, not all, it seems) know, among the few in the world who, no matter what it is, could well afford it.

And cue the obvious: $42,000 (I think? the figure seems to vary) is a lot of money for a handbag! (For one named after Jennifer friggin' Aniston, one might add.) And made out of crocodiles! Think of the crocodiles! (Are we supposed to think of the crocodiles? I hadn't been paying attention, given that I wasn't in the market for crocodile anything. I'm barely keeping up with which salmon is socially acceptable.) Such egotism mixed with U.S.-centrism - why must retail workers all the world over know who some American TV star is? And she's crying racism?

Yet I'd have to agree with her assessment of racism. In a sense, the fact that Oprah is so advantaged in every other way, the fact that this is such beyond-first-world-problems territory, allows us to isolate racism as the root of what's going on.

Let me explain: Being ignored in a snooty store isn't about racism - it's something all of us who don't come across as fabulously wealthy (a category that includes virtually all Americans abroad, including the very rich - our high-end-casual world of $90 yoga pants doesn't really translate) experience. It's likely that being overweight reads as being too poor to buy anything in the place, depending the locale, and that this impacts experiences even in accessories stores, i.e. where sizes stocked isn't applicable. But being thin and pale, while it might lead to never having a free seat next to you on public transportation, isn't enough to get attention in many stores. Trust me on this.

But being preemptively suspected of shoplifting, now that is absolutely racism. And that's what it sounds like happened here. Why wouldn't someone be shown a particular bag? Fear of theft. Upscale stores correctly assess that I won't buy anything, but don't trail me, either. If we're to frame this in privilege terms, white privilege isn't being fawned all over in Zurich handbag emporiums. It's not being presumed a thief.

It's not unlike the where-are-the-black-models question. One might well point to the complete unfairness inherent in who qualifies for the job of "high-fashion model" to begin with. Whereas in any other job, simply having certain physical attributes either wouldn't be enough or (far more often) would be something your employer shouldn't be considering in the first place, with modeling, that's the essential. There is no inalienable right to be a runway model, any more than to owning some kind of endangered-material handbag named after Rachel from "Friends." But what does it say if you have the bizarre and arbitrary qualifications, but can't get hired for one reason only, and that's because you're black?