The Kramer Is Now

The Former Angry Young Man: A Gendered Character Study

2012-02-10T15:30:00.002-05:00

Cool weird old poster of an Angry Young Man. By James Montgomery Flagg [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Maybe you've encountered this guy: the Former Angry Young Man.

When he was young, the Former Angry Young Man (FAYM) (yes, "Man," we're getting to that) was full of piss and vinegar. He was ambitious for himself, and idealistic for his world. He took shit from nobody. He spoke truth to power; he raged against injustice. He had no time for niceties like planning birthday parties, listening to long pointless stories, or being nice just for the hell of it.

The FAYM, though, has changed. Now that he's older, he recognizes that "no man is an island." Maybe he went through a divorce, and needed his friends. Maybe he had kids, and realized that someone has to buy the birthday cake. Maybe he got sober and realized he was being an asshole. Now, he knows that life is too short for all that negativity. Now, he knows what really matters: other people.

This narrative has attractive elements, and the classic FAYM doesn't hesitate to play them up. The idea of the FAYM brings together worldly sophistication and down home values. It has the sheen of learning and wisdom. Like the parable of the prodigal son, it engages our love for the reprobate who finally learns his lessons. It makes a person seem fun and good at the same time, which is never easy.

But attractive or not, the FAYM thing is a guy kind of thing.

For one thing, young or old, nobody likes an angry woman.

The only teensy loophole to this law is that if you're very attractive or very young your anger can be interesting and legitimate, because it is sexy. When Courtney Love got plastic surgery back in the 90's, she said she had to do it because she was angry, and only physical beauty would legitimate her anger. Like, if a babe goes on MTV and shouts a lot it's "hot" and interesting but if some regular looking girl does it she's just a mess and someone we feel sorry for. Say what you want about Ms. Love, but that is true.

For another thing, some of the stuff that happens to guys to trip the "no man is an island" brain wire in men happens to girls when they're like 14.

The reason I got thinking about this is that I'd been reading or hearing about some FAYMs and kind of half-heartedly absorbing their narratives, and it kind of came to me like a flash: you know, I'm not Formerly Angry. I'm Angry right now. All the stupid idiocy in the world, the wars, the pointless suffering, the stupidity ... I'm probably ten times more angry about that now than I was when I was younger.

Where we're going to go with that Cultural Icon-Wise, I don't know. The "Currently Angry Middle-Aged Woman" doesn't have a lot of style or panache.

I guess you'll have to just call me a Feminazi Boner-Killer.

Writing Is Too Much Like Stripping

2012-01-28T14:03:00.003-05:00

Gaston Bussière (French, 1862-1929): “Exotic Dancers”, c. 1880; oil on canvas, 45” x 35”

This post has three main themes: Writing is a lot like stripping. Writing has become too much like stripping. Writing on the internet is like stripping at a party full of strangers.

Writing is a lot like stripping.

We all know that part of the pleasure of reading is encountering authors through their words. And we all know that part of good writing is letting enough of your inner secret self shine through.

I recently read Sam Lipsyte's novel The Ask -- which is excellent, by the way -- and there's a scene where a father with a toddler is dropping off his kid at a daycare, or trying to anyway, because they daycare is closed, and he encounters a mother trying to drop off her toddler, and they start talking in a way that is sort of jokey and flirty at the same time, and the father gets really caught up in it, and his marriage is sort of in trouble, and he thinks to himself, Hey, Are We Going Back To Her Place for Sex?

It's a great, great, scene. When I read it, I had the predictable experiences of Oh It Made Me See The World Differently and Oh I Felt Some Feelings! but in addition to that stuff I had a powerful sense of knowing something very intimate about Sam Lipsyte. Not something I could pin down. Not something crude like he had those particular thoughts or whatever. But something. Let's be honest: that feeling is a big part of the pleasure of reading.

The reason it's like stripping and not like simple undressing is that you have to keep the reader engaged. Someone who tells you everything right up front: that's boring. Someone who tantalizes you with just enough so you need to know more: that's the stuff of literary crushes.

Writing has become too much like stripping.

Much as I'm down with the whole yeah-you-gotta-show-yourself-dude! aspect of things, I think the revealing of the personal is way out of control. Readers -- and watchers, too, for that matter -- are obsessed less and less with the artwork and more and more with the person behind it. Memoirs are taking off. Reality TV is everywhere. Novels are in decline. Even novel writers are expected to be on twitter saying stuff about themselves to get readers interested.

I'm not afraid to say it: excessive interest in the producer of art is a serious moral failing. It's intellectually lazy, and it's often the product of a mind made soft from too much social networking, too much TMZ, too much Real Housewives, Top Chef, and Project Runway, and not enough -- well, not enough novel reading and sitting quietly thinking about stuff.

I mean, it's nice that y'all are so curious about one another. But this shit is out of control.

Writing on the internet is like stripping at a party full of strangers.

It's one thing to reveal stuff about your inner life on a piece of paper, where someone is going to be sitting quietly in a room alone and it's just the two of you having this intimate thing going on. It's another thing to reveal your inner life on the web, where there are zillions of people sharing a conversation in the comments about whatever personal thing you happened to share.

The whole internet comments thing is something I really did not see coming. It's especially weird to me when it's commentary on the news. I mean, I wasn't so surprised that people would want to share music and use Facebook and watch videos online. Seems natural to me. But the idea that people would be clamoring to make comments, dying to express their opinions, in short form, on random stuff in the news -- this just seems to me really surprising and strange.

For instance, this morning I got interested in a Globe and Mail article about open marriage. At the time I'm writing there are 281 comments on this article. Some of them say things like "Well, this might work for some people but not for very many" and "I wouldn't be able to do this I'm too jealous" and "An 'open marriage' isn't a marriage at all."

Leaving aside the quality and content of these comments, I just don't even get what motivates people to express ideas like this on the internet. Do they feel like they're talking with one another? Are they trying to connect? Do they just have a need to express something and have no other outlet? I just don't know.

If good writing is always like stripping but the revealing of the personal is out of control, there seems to me to be only one solution. We'd have to keep the striptease aspect of writing on the internet, but scale back the context and particulars. Like, you know how the Victorians were so covered up and weird about sex that they saw sexual excitement in everything? An uncovered ankle, the touch of a hand? Maybe it could be like that: everyone reserved enough about their personal lives that the merest detail would seem like a huge deal?

And now you're thinking "Seriously? Are you living on planet earth?"

I know, I know, But a girl can dream, can't she?

The Kramer Is Now, Book Links, and Google+

2012-01-28T14:03:00.002-05:00

A new thing on The Kramer Is Now. You know how on the right hand side I have a list of what I've been reading? Well starting with Paul Murray's book Skippy Dies, clicking the image of the book will take you to a post on my Google+ page about the book. You can comment; we can discuss.

Also, I always post a link to new TKIN posts on my Google+ page. So if you want a convenient way of finding out when something is new here at the blog, just circle me there at G+.

I post on other stuff on G+ too. Check out my profile and recent posts here.

I For One Welcome Our WTF Overlords: Marc Maron And Modern Life

2012-01-06T14:25:00.000-05:00


	Marc Maron

I recently became obsessed with the podcast "WTF with Marc Maron." I knew as soon as I heard Maron as the celebrity guest on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me (another of my obsessions) that I would have to check out his podcast, and I knew as soon as I'd finished listening to my first episode that I would be obsessed with it and would have to listen to every episdode, in chronological order.

In the WTF podcast, Maron interviews comedians. But saying that the WTF podcast is a comedian interviewing comedians is like saying that The Wizard of Oz is about a spot of bad weather. Because these are not so much interviews as mini-plunges into the darker and scarier parts of human nature.

These plunges are made more bearable by the fact that it's a "comedy podcast" -- so you never really know to what degree the performers are joking, embellishing, exaggerating on purpose. In fact one of the most squirmy moments I had listening was when one interviewee said something sad or mean or something and then said "I'm just kidding." Thus immersing me into the possibility that the rest of what she'd been saying was just true.

Maron says being a comic is about being "autonomous, angry, truthful, and funny." He prods, pokes, bribes, nudges, and aggresses his guests 'til they, too, are being autonomous, angry, truthful and funny -- often about subjects like love, lust, envy, neediness, and despair that people just don't discuss in public, and maybe don't discuss at all. I've always thought the great thing about comedians is that they will say things other people will not say, and here it is true.

The "I'm just kidding" moment comes during a frank discussion of the horrors of marriage: married couple Annabelle Gurwitch and Jeff Kahn come in together to talk about the day to day misery, anger, envy and moments of petty revenge that come from living with and parenting with another person. Maron opens episode one by talking about stealing from Whole Foods in an act of rage against everything they stand for. In episode seven, a comedian confesses to using made up stories of the deaths of loved-ones to get girls to have sex with him, and there's an in-depth discussion of the way marital counseling is set up to fail.

That whole "truthful" thing -- it shows how close this kind of comedy is to philosophy. Long time readers will recall that I've commented on the parallels before, writing about Tina Fey. Actually, I think we professional philosophers would do better if we talked more about things like stealing from Whole Foods.

And indeed, Maron says he's "tackling the most complex philosophical question of our day - WTF?"

Note that WTF? isn't the most important philosophical question of all time, it's the most important philosophical question of our day. Doing a little inspired cultural and intellectual history, Maron says in episode one that the great philosophical question once was, "What is the meaning of life?" Then for a long time it was, instead, "How am I being used and am I okay with that?"

"How am I being used and am I OK with that" --that's brilliant. It's Kantian respect for autonomy, Lockean individualism, and the dismal science, all rolled into one.

Maron says the question for the coming era is going to be WTF? Actually, he says, WTF is two questions. It's the WTF of shock and indignation, like, what do you mean you're proposing that people with no health insurance be allowed to just die? WTF?!! But it's also the WTF of "Whatever" or "Yeah, Why The Hell Not?" As in, should I eat this whole carton of ice cream right now? Yeah, sure, WTF.

Can I just say that this sounds like a huge fucking improvement? I mean, the how-am-I-being-used-and-am-I-OK-with-that era has been really grim. The possibility that it's going to be replaced by WTF -- I don't know what that'll be like exactly, but it sounds like it could be OK. In fact, it's a possibility that makes me feel more hopeful about the future than I have in a long time.

If that's what's coming, bring it on please.

Let's Make The War On Christmas A Reality

2011-12-22T14:38:00.000-05:00

It's OK dude, you won't get hurt: cats are officially non-combatants.

Was there ever a more eye-roll inducing concept than the absurd purported "war on Christmas"?

If you haven't been too bored to pay attention, you may know that the idea, propagated by certain religious and conservative factions, is that the effort to be inclusive -- by saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," by reining in the relentless Christian imagery and music, by neglecting our Shopping Duties -- somehow constitutes a "war": on Christmas, and by extension, on family values, decency, and all that.

I thought it was one of those things that if you ignored it it would just go away. But the counter-attack has been strong. There's more religious music than ever, and to my amazement, people have started to seem like they get a weird kick out of saying "Merry Christmas" -- like this is some kind of dangerous and subversive act. Oooh, political incorrectness!

So I'm annoyed by that. But the truth is, I'm also kind of annoyed by Christmas itself. I'm one of those atheists who was always happy to go along with decorated trees, presents, friends, food, and drinks -- all excellent things in their way. But Christmas is out of control.

Shopping and gift buying are especially out of control. Presents make sense for kids, and maybe in certain circumstances for adults. But the idea that you should go on a massive shopping spree guessing at what all the other adults in your life would like -- how could that fail to produce piles of expensive, unwanted garbage? Just thinking about all that stuff cluttering up people's homes and then getting shipped off to landfills gives me the horrors.

Stores are opening Thanksgiving night; workers are there from midnight to early morning; The New York Times actually had a whole news story about whether "the Saturday before Christmas" was the 17th or the 24th. People, if you were looking for signs of the materialism apocalypse, well, here they are.

So let's kill two birds with one stone: let's make the war on Christmas a reality.

Maybe you're thinking, "War? Isn't that going a bit far?" Who is this lunatic? Is there really someone so grouchy and curmudgeonly that they'd actually prefer Christmas not to exist? What about ginger cookies? What about the star on top of the tree? Won't somebody think of the children?

You know, it's not the Christmas spirit I'm against. It's the Christmas crap. The great thing about Thanksgiving as a holiday is that, because it's based on a universal and secular human concept -- that of gratitude -- it's inclusive, flexible, and non-materialistic.

So I'd like to see Christmas -- Sorry. I'd like to see a late-Winter holiday -- based on something like that. As for that universal human concept, why not take a page from Christmas's playbook, and make it joy?

Instead of religion and shopping, we could do Joyful Things, like making snowmen, flying kites, and playing music.

Now doesn't that sound nice?

Sexism, Homophobia, Sex, and Groping

2011-12-18T13:13:00.001-05:00

I was talking with my friend the other day about the idea that there's some important connection between sexism and homophobia. We agreed: there is.

Probably there are a lot of important connections, actually, including obvious ones about discrimination and so on. But I think there's a less obvious one too, having to do with sex, gender, and sexual agency.

Here's a constellation of ideas that I think forms a part of some sexist and homophobic men's view of the world. Men need sex, and women provide it. Women aren't rational, so it makes no sense to put them in charge of decisions about something so crucial to men's well-being. Women shouldn't really be treated as sexual agents, making decisions about what's best for them. It's more like, keep the pure and domestic ones for home and babies, and treat the female rabble however you want.

This may sound extreme. But how else to explain the otherwise extraordinary ways some men defend other men's assault on women's sexual agency?

Just as a single example, I recently learned about the Ada initiative to get more women involved in open technology and culture. The executive director and co-founder says the reason she got involved with starting the Ada initiative is because her friend went to an open source conference and was groped -- and that she herself had been groped twice at such conferences.

Worse, when the friend wrote about the experience on her blog, "hundreds of people made comments like, "Women should expect to get groped at conferences," and "It was her fault." The comments came from her colleagues in open source, presumably highly educated and pretty thoughtful people. If you're a reader of comments on the internet, you know this is not an isolated occasion.

So it's surprising the extent to which some men will defend the appropriateness of just touching women in inappropriate ways when they feel like it.

But such men don't want to be touched this way themselves. And they really don't want to be touched this way by other men.

You can see the groping-double-standard playing out in the recent upset about TSA groping. I mean, women get groped on the subway all the time, and I feel like the general cultural reaction is a kind of collective shrug: jeez, girl, you're out, you're on the subway, what did you expect? Get over it. But once the groping happens to men, and once it happens to women who are married moms, it's like OMG! Crisis! There's inappropriate touching! Call your congressman, right away.

I know it's not quite the same -- because the TSA gropes you with the long arm of the law -- but still, the estimation of harm is obviously very different.

You can see where I'm going with this. If you're a guy who thinks that it's OK to treat women as having no sexual agency, that treating women this way is an essential aspect of male sexuality, and that being treated this way in turn would be an outrage, you're going to have a big problem with gay men right off the bat. Because by turning that male sexual attention on you, gay men threaten the whole logic of your position.

So even the existence of gay men is a problem for your sexist world view.

The answer seems obvious to me: equality and respect for everyone, and when it comes to sex, if you're not sure, ask.

Why there's so much resistance to this basic set of human goods, I don't know.

The Harmony Myth Of Human Nature

2011-12-04T13:35:00.001-05:00

I took this a couple of years ago at a bookstore near my home.

Sometimes it happens when you're watching Oprah at the gym or reading some advice columnist while surfing the net. Sometimes it happens when you're just trying to mind your own business but someone starts talking to you and you can't run away.

It starts when a person is talking about how it's "OK" that their dog died or that yours did or that their sister got sick or that they lost their job. And they'll say that it's OK because, really, at the end of the day "everything happens for a reason."

And you'll be like, "Wait. What?"

I was going to say that this is a version of the "just-world fallacy," which is "a cognitive bias in which people believe that the world they live in is one in which actions have appropriate and predictable consequences" (thank you, Wikipedia).

But if you think about it, it's not so much a "just world" fallacy as a "utopian world" fallacy. Because when people say that everything happens for a reason, they usually don't mean that bad stuff happened because a person deserved something bad to happen. They mean the much more radical idea that what seems like "bad" stuff is actually good, and will reveal itself to be so in some unspecified "long run."

It's easy to make fun of the utopian world fallacy. But I think it has a close cousin belief that is harder to ferret out -- and even more widespread. This is what I call the "harmony myth" of human nature. This is the idea that that there is some naturally coherent way to put your life together so that all the pieces will fall into place.

If you can just get things properly organized and get yourself free of weird addictions and neurotic attitudes, so the thinking goes, there'll be no more cravings for doughnuts and quarter-pounders and no more lolling around the internet, looking for the latest Snooki news. Instead, you'll be dying for organic carrot juice and spending all your free time taking free online physics courses or informing yourself about the history of the Balkans.

I might notice the harmony myth more than other people, because it is contrary to one of my most deeply held convictions about the good life: that it is, at bottom, a series of trade-offs.

The reason to eat more carrots and fewer doughnuts isn't that carrots are inherently good and doughnuts inherently bad; it's just that there are other things you want, like health, that happen to be hampered by too many doughnuts. If you're just waiting for things in your life to get organized so that the doughnut desires go away, trust me: you'll be dead before that happens.

I was so pleased recently to hear Peter Sagal say on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell! me a couple of weeks ago that the one lesson kids would learn from having apples as a compulsory half of the french fry portion of a Happy Meal was how much better french fries are than apples. Because that is true. But it doesn't matter. It's only if you're in the grip of the harmony myth that you'd think that nutritiousness and tastiness have to be tightly correlated.

Two manifestations of the harmony myth particularly drive me nuts. One is in education. I often hear parents telling me how important it is that learning in school be "fun" and what a failure it is when it's not. And I tell them: sure, it should sometimes be fun. But it isn't always going to be fun. And isn't that an important part of what kids are learning in school? That you can do things you don't particularly feel like doing, in order to reap some longer term reward? Isn't that lesson the foundation of achieving stuff?

The other is in the whole "cook fresh meals at home" movement. I have no quibble with the idea that it is good to cook fresh meals at home. It is. But why on earth this massive pretense that cooking at home is actually more fun and pleasant than going out or getting take-out? I'm sure there are exceptions, but for many people, cooking is boring, repetitive, and kind of stressful. And when you're done, there are pots and pans and dishes to clean.

Why not call a spade a spade, and say, Fun, Maybe Not, but Worth Doing, Obviously.

Once you get rid of the utopian myth you realize that coherence in life isn't about magical harmony, but rather about making sensible tradeoffs and compromises. Cake for breakfast on Christmas: fine. Cake for breakfast everyday: insanity.

It's tempting to do a little armchair psychology about why people fall into the harmony myth trap. But I'll limit myself to just one comment. As the end product of millions of years of evolution that proceeded by survival of random mutations, how could we fail to be anything but a patchwork of varying drives, tastes, needs, and appetites?

It just wouldn't make any sense that we'd be anything else.

Are There Babes In A Feminist Utopia?

2011-11-23T11:32:00.001-05:00

Short answer: I hope so.

I took a flight on Porter Airlines yesterday. Maybe you know, Porter is all about the style. They got the elegant and comfy waiting area. They got the free espresso, snacks, and bottled water. They got the cute raccoon character in their ads:

And they have the most amazing flight attendants:

I love this sort of thing. Elegance and beauty transforms my mood and the whole way I feel about human existence.

Actually I was reflecting on this the other day when I read the New Yorker story about Steve Jobs, and how he was kind of an asshole. One of the items described how he obsessed over the fonts in the headings area of the Mac user experience, making his staff redo them like 17 times.

This really resonated with me, because when I'm using my Mac I often look at things like fonts and think to myself, "Ah, now isn't that lovely." I'm like the perfect consumer for this kind of mania. Just the other day the latest OS update radically improved the way the Times New Roman font looks in the "Pages" software. The update gave me a couple of glitches, but did I mind? No. I'm like, "People, would you look at that font?"

So yesterday I was there, sipping my espresso out of a lovely ceramic cup and I started reflecting on those flight attendants. Because these women -- they look amazing. And I have to say, it's a real pleasure to me to see them.

Philosophers are trained and socialized to ask annoying questions, even of themselves, and so found myself wondering, So, is that a guilty pleasure?

Because obviously there's a certain connection between these elegant uniforms and anti-feminism. These women are on display, being valued for their physical attributes and ability to wear certain kinds of clothes, even while they're doing the ultra serious work of keeping passengers safe. Isn't that just what feminism tries to eliminate?

Just so, yes. But there's a difference between being valued only, or primarily, for your appearance and being valued for your appearance along with lots of other things. And there's a difference between being able to decide, for real, to participate in something like this in a way that makes it fun, and having it forced down your throat. And there's a difference between a world that values only women's appearances and not men's.

So let me float this idea -- an idea that sometimes comes up in feminist scholarship. There's nothing inherently wrong with the female beauty on display thing, even when it's being used, like this, in a commercial setting. What makes it wrong, when it is, is that it plays into certain extremely common stereotypes, forms of discrimination and control, and occasions for inequality.

If this is right, the male version of babes on display wouldn't raise many difficulties -- assuming, of course, the men aren't being exploited because of race or class or whatever. And you know, I think this is right. I live in a gay neighborhood, and the men who live around me seem to love to go out looking good, to love to look great while they're on the job, to love being a kind of a babe.

If you could have a world free of sexism, of all the -isms -- a feminist utopia, indeed -- we could all be free to enjoy beauty, style, and spectacle without having to feel like we're letting down the side. So, yeah, there would be babes in a feminist utopia. Female, male, intersex, trans ... babes of all kinds.

After I thought all this, I was checked in for my flight by a Porter airlines guy. And you know, he was just as elegant and beautiful as the women.

The only thing that gives me pause about this is, Does it suck to have to dress up for work in this particular way? I hope not. But you'd have to get that information from the horse's mouth.

The Hedonic Stairmaster

2011-11-10T15:02:00.001-05:00

The "second most expensive watch in the world," at least according to these people.

A couple of weeks ago my watch broke, and I decided to buy a new one. I knew -- at least, I thought I knew -- what I wanted: something rugged, large-faced, aggressively styled, water-resistant, and not to expensive.

At the store I found it -- it-who-will-remain-nameless. It was large-faced, and water-resistant up to 30 feet. It had a simple face, without one of those little "date windows" that I've come to feel are so annoying. It was 35 dollars. Canadian. I bought it.

But two days later, it was broken. I brought it back, and I was back in the market.

That's when I started climbing. I wanted "something nicer," maybe something a bit more expensive. First, I wanted a cheap diving watch, maybe 100 dollars. But then I thought, well if you're going to get a diving watch, get a nice one. You could spend, what, 300 dollars. But then I was at these websites where 300 dollars is the "clearance" section and I caught sight of some real beauties, and I thought wow, a person could really enjoy that watch. And it's, what, only 1,000 dollars.

Then I was listening to that song "Hot" by Missy Eliot which is such a hilarious send up of wanna-bes and con artists, where she calls out a guy who tries to rent a Bentley and pretend he's rich. "Yeah boo you know you a joke, wear a fake Rolex, call it a Ro." I like hip hop music, and though I know this shocks some people, I kind of love the crazy materialism of it, the lux brands obsessions.

And so I thought, Yeah. A Rolex. Turns out there are even Rolex diving watches. I can't tell you the price because the site I looked at took a distinctly If-you-have-to-ask-it's-too-expensive approach.

Then I remembered an old friend who was kind of into watches and how he told me about these antique self-winding watches with super craftsmanship and I thought "Yeah, wow, that's what I want." And then I though of all the even cooler really old beautiful watches and how spectacular it would be to own something like that.

Before I knew what hit me, I had decided that only the Nicest, Most Expensive Watch in the World could possibly be really satisfying.

In a way I'm not surprised, because much as I love it, that's what consumer culture is like. As long as N+1 object is nicer than N object, how can you be satisfied with any N? You always know there's something better.

I call this The Hedonic Stairmaster.

Maybe you've heard of the Hedonic Treadmill? This refers to the fact that people constantly adjust to the current status quo. So that to feel the same happiness or pleasure, you can't just continue with the same state of affairs, you need that state of affairs to get better and better.

The Hedonic Stairmaster is different; it's a distinctly consumerist problem. The Hedonic Stairmaster means you have to keep climbing. It's never enough to have a mid-range thing, it's never enough to have a really-quite-nice thing; it's never even though to have a really nice thing. Whatever it is, it'll seem shabby next to the even nicer thing, which you know is out there.

There is only one way I know off the Hedonic Stairmaster, and that's to have a sense of cool that does not track expense. Real rebels do this, as do punk rockers, hippies, and goths. Wonderful if you can manage it. But like other ways of being Against The World, it gets harder as you get older.

Sex In The House Of Holes: Cute Or Sad?

2011-11-07T14:56:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading Nicholson Baker's House of Holes. Maybe you know, it's a novel about a sexual theme park. Not just dildos and 360 porn movies, but rather a place you can go and exchange genitalia in a "crotchal transfer," or trade your arm for a larger dick, or have sex with just the arm the guy forfeited in the exchange.

I like Nicholson Baker's work a lot. He wrote the highly amusing U and I, which chronicles his obsession with John Updike; Vox, which is the transcript of a very long phone sex conversation between a nice guy and a nice girl; and The Fermata, which is about a guy who learns how to stop time for everyone else but do as he pleases while no one knows.

Many images from The Fermata have stuck with me for years. Especially vivid is a scene in which Our Hero talks to a taxi driver, who says that if he could stop time, he would force a woman down, lubricate her with black grease from NAPA auto parts, and have his way with her. Our Hero is appalled. In addition to being appalled, though, he's disappointed by the fact of how little he and the taxi driver have in common. We want, he says, to think other people are like us. I think that is true.

In The Fermata and Vox, the characters have a distinctly Bakerian style. The guys are Good Guys with Large Libidos and a Wholesome Attitude Toward Life. They want to have a good time; they want their partners to have a good time, too; and even when they have kinks and obsessions they are good-natured and cheerful about them. The Bakerian women are GGG for sure, but they're also not shy about saying No, Sorry, That's Not For Me.

So that's . . . nice.

To some extent the same nice atmosphere pervades House of Holes. But when you think "sexual theme park" -- well, when I think "sexual theme park" -- you tend to think not just adventure but also something utopian. Like, if it's a theme park, you can get right to the really good things without any anxieties, fears, or whatever getting in the way.

And it is like that, in some ways. There's lots of funny, good-natured sex. The woman who has sex with the forfeited arm is very satisfied, and eventually gets to meet the owner and return the arm. That's cute. There are lots of funny puns and names, like when a guy calls his dick his "Malcolm Gladwell." Also, cute.

But for a theme park, there are some surprises. Most surprising to me was the the fact that it's expensive. Men have to pay. A lot. And if they can't cough up the cash, they have to perform some service. Like the man with a nice body and ugly face: he has to do time as a headless man -- desired, of course, by the women who want to have hot sex with a guy without being sized up, criticized, found to be too fat, whatever. With no head, the guy can't even see you.

Expensive? A theme park? What is up with that?

I was also surprised by the rules and punishments. One man isn't supposed to put his finger -- well, never mind. But he does. And I don't remember, but I think he gets his dick taken away or something. This, mind you, not because the woman in question didn't want, but somehow just because it was some rule about how his involvement was supposed to be structured.

Maybe there is some deep point lurking here about sex, cost, and inevitable sacrifice. I'm not sure. In any case, it's a little sad.

Also, surprisingly heterosexual, the House of Holes. This is also a little sad.

My favorite thing in the book is the "Deprivos," who haven't been allowed to see nude breasts for three full weeks. After doing their time, they line up in the places that naked women are likely to be, dying for a glimpse. After a ride on the "pussyboard" on the White Lake -- known for its magic rejuvenating powers of clitoral healing -- some women feels so good they want sex immediately. Fortunately, there's a line of Deprivos, at the edge of the lake, just waiting.

A group of people, in a highly appreciative and uncritical mood, eagerly awaiting your appearance, anticipating your arrival, and really happy to see you. It's a pleasant thought.

The Five Stages Of Nitrous Oxide

2011-10-29T12:41:00.003-04:00

Mondrian was a great utopian. This is his Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow, 1930.

I had nitrous at the dentist the other day. For me, nitrous mostly changes a frightening and painful experience into a fun opportunity to take legal drugs.

But then it always leaves me wondering: why isn't more of life like being high? And why do drugs have to leave you feeling so crappy afterward?

It's kind an emotional roller coaster. So here are The Five Stages of Nitrous, According To Me.

1. Joy. The initial feeling is joy. The world is funny, pretty, interesting. Even the crappy pop music on the sound system seems somehow cute and lively. Amused wonder, switched on. Critical negativity, switched off. Glimpse of utopia.

2. Conviviality. It's not surprising. With all those positive feelings coursing through you your next thought is, "I gotta tell someone about this." I always have the impulse to make a joke, try to fell a funny story. I have to remind myself: not only are you in no state for being witty, you're at the dentist. It's not a party. Dentist and Assistant are working hard, don't want to hear your senile reminiscences.

3. Existential Crisis. As I settle in, I start thinking. Why isn't more of life like this? Why is ordinary life so sucky in comparison? I mean, how many opportunities do you have to feel a combination of total Well Being and total Non-Boredom? In ordinary life, things are always harassing or dull. But not so on nitrous. You're feeling no pain, and with your critical faculties fogged, the most banal observations and thoughts are totally engaging.

This past visit, I found myself thinking about religious people and how they must feel in this situation. I mean, I'm an atheist, but if I were a believer I think I'd start having some seriously profane reflections at this stage. If God loves you, why isn't there be more of this awesomeness in ordinary life? I think he's hiding something.

4. Paranoid Fog. This might be just a dentist phase and not inherent in the experience. But when I've been under a while, and the dentist is asking me things, like "how does that bite feel, OK?" I get a little freaked about trying to seem "normal" when really I'm so f-ed up. I know it sort of doesn't matter. But I also know that if I were to do or say something incredibly goofy under the influence, I'd never hear the end of it. "Good-natured teasing," and all that. So I try to be cool.

It always makes me laugh how much this is like trying to be cool in other, non-dental circumstances.

5. Crash landing. Eventually it's over. They shut down the gas and pump you full of mind-clearing oxygen. And you realize you're starving, because you're not allowed to eat beforehand, and you're cold, because the nitrous does that to you somehow, and your head aches. Crash-landing, back to reality.

Artisitic Interpretation And The Fear Of Human Nature

2011-10-19T17:55:00.002-04:00

I went to see Rigoletto at the Canadian Opera Company a couple of days ago. Maybe you know the set up? Rigoletto is the court jester for the Duke. The Duke is a big time seducer, who sets his sights on Rigoletto's pure and virginal daughter, Gilda. The Duke follows Gilda home, and tells her he is a poor student; she falls for it and falls madly in love with him. Rigoletto tries to have the Duke killed, and in her passion for the Duke, Gilda substitutes herself for him. She is killed instead.

David Lomeli as The Duke

The opera itself is an amazing piece of art, and musically the performance was great. So I couldn't help but enjoy myself. But it wasn't because of the staging, which drove me nuts.

The staging was complicated, metaphorical, and weird just where it should have been simple, literal, and normal. When it comes to opera, you should often just play it straight. Because if you play it straight, it knocks you over. That's what opera is like. If it's complicated, metaphorical, and weird, that gets in the way of what is going on.

Worse, it distances the audience from the narrative. It says, "Hey, it's OPERA. You're at a PERFORMANCE. We went through special efforts to STAGE it so it would be THOUGHT-PROVOKING. Are we awseome?"

In this particular staging, the Duke woos Gilda while they're standing and sitting on the dining room table. There's a scene in which the Duke and Gilda are clearly having sex, and this is depicted as happening on a sofa in a living room with the courtiers all gathered around. Gilda spends half the time in a white bit of underclothing. And all this in ninetheenth-century costumes and scenery. A nineteenth century in which obviously Gilda would be in her clothes in public; sex happens in private; and wooing happens on sofas.

It might seem that these techniques would involve the audience, through indirect allusion. Maybe that can work, but it didn't in this case, and I think with opera, it often doesn't. Because the emotion of the stories is made most vivid by their seeming real: when you can really believe that you're watching the Duke promise the world to this young girl and then throw her away. And the effect of these complex weird things is really the opposite.

I have a dark theory about why this happens so often here (I don't notice it in Europe, but I have before at the COC). It has to do with the fear people have of actually presenting the story itself. So often in opera when there is something horrifying or extreme or outrageous, it gets this treatment, and I think the reason is that people are scared to play it straight.

They're scared to say something about how horrible people really are, how evil and corrupt they can be. Making it into a "show" makes those things seem less real -- like, Oh, look, the nineteenth century, oh, a virgin, oh oh oh.

As opposed to having the story remind you of things that happened in your own life and that of your loved ones.

Which of course is a scam. As if that crazed thirst for vengeance, the using of the poor by the rich, and the possible loss of all you value in life was all, somehow, behind us.

Dilemmas of Modern Life

2011-10-17T15:05:00.000-04:00

My kitchen cabinets are falling apart. The cabinets are old, cheap, and ugly anyway, and now the hinges have stopped working properly. They make an incredibly annoying crack-ing sound when you open and close them. Also, inside, the paint is peeling off. What to do?

From the environmental point of view, the answer is clear. Replace the hinges and, if necessary, paint over the inside.

From the common-sense real-estate point of view, though, another answer is clear. Get need new cabinets, and since the dishwasher also doesn't work and the oven is old and crappy, might as well "update" the whole kitchen. It's an "investment," right?

I hate carrying a backpack. It's a pain, and it looks ridiculous with a nice outfit. But I do it anyway because I want to carry my laptop and no other system seems workable for this. I'm constantly trying to keep down the number and weight of the things I have to carry, so I can carry a slightly smaller, slightly more stylish backpack instead of a bigger, bulkier one. I'm already carrying a water bottle, and carrying a reusable coffee cup will put me over the brink. What to do?

From the environmental point of view, the answer is clear. Carry a bigger backpack.

From the fashion and life comfort point of view, though, another answer is clear. Forget it. Why should I have to walk around like a pack mule, walking through the desert, carrying all my daily needs on my back? I'm living in a city, for heaven's sake. In civilized places, when you stop to get coffee they put it in a ceramic cup while you sit and drink it. Then they wash and reuse it. Is it my fault that places in North America can't get this sorted out?

I could go on and on, and we haven't even considered the conflicts between femininity, practicality, equality, and health. But it would get boring. I'm already bored, thinking about it.

There are things about consumer culture that I love. But these things reflect its f***ed up nature. There are vast forces committed to getting you to do what, all things considered, you think is probably for the best, and forces that arise from nowhere, making your sensible choices seem stupid.

And then you pick up a newspaper or magazine, and in section A you read a story that says how the new style of kitchen is retro, or the new thing in shoes is the super high heel, or the new "it" bag is the Prada Glace Calf Degradé Top Handle (see above!) for only $2050, money that if you had it you could never justify spending it on a handbag anyway, and then in section Q you read how kitchen renovations are the biggest contributor to landfills or high heels will ruin your body forever.

I mean, can't they get their story straight? Is it too much to ask?

_1984_ in 2011, Redux

2011-10-09T16:31:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago I started rereading 1984. Last week I finished.

This book is many things, but one of them definitely is a horror story depicting Life After The Humanities. You want to know what it's going to be like when you get rid of the Philosophy, English and History Departments and keep only Engineering, the Health Sciences, and "Transformational Leadership"? Read 1984.

Probably you remember that in 1984, the Party controls everything, and they make sure people believe what they're supposed to believe. But do you remember how sophisticated they are about it? They don't just fuck with your head; they fuck with the actual evidence.

Indeed, Winston (the main character) works at writing corrections into every edition of every newspaper to make sure the record reads to fit the current regime. If Oceania is at war with Eurasia they have always been at war with Eurasia. There must be no proof of anything to the contrary.

Winston is perplexed throughout the book by the problem of evidence and truth. He knows that it matters that Oceania hasn't really always been at war with Eurasia. He knows that it matters that the Party destroys all evidence of the truth about the past. But how the "evidence" part works he can't quite figure out.

At one point he recalls a moment seven years before in which he held in his hand a mistake: a piece of paper showing, conclusively, that what the Party said happened wasn't what happened. He destroyed the paper. But now he thinks: it actually really matters that I held that paper in my hand, because it proves ... well, what? He can't figure it out: how can a moment that has disappeared into the past show anything about other moments that have disappeared into the past?

At the end, Winston is tortured and reprogrammed to believe what the Party wants him to believe. His old pal O'Brien, his intellectual superior, needles him about his beliefs. "Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?" Winston isn't sure. O'Brien forces him to acknowledge that the past doesn't exist "concretely," but only in records and in people's memories. And as long as the Party controls those, they must therefore control the past.

Among the many profound ethical and political morals of this story, surely one of them is the affirmation of the importance of thinking for yourself, making up your own mind, and taking into account the evidence. One thing that is terrifying and horrible about Winston's story is that he is prevented, unable, to do this.

And this -- this sacred activity, so basic to democracy and freedom -- is what we teach in the humanities every day: how to think about complex matters for yourself, how to make up your own mind, rather than believing what some person put on a powerpoint presentation or in a textbook; how to consider and question evidence for yourself, about what you ought to believe.

Now I know scientists do this too, but there are serious differences. First, in humanities teaching we do this all the time, with every level of student, about everything. There aren't years of simple information you have to get through before you can become critical of what is already believed.

And second, in the humanities you do it for yourself. You don't need a lab with a bunch of people and equipment. You just need you and your own brain. You can question anything, and you can do it yourself.

This is one reason I am skeptical of the push toward large collaborative projects in the humanities. If you're going to stand up for what you believe against a bunch of other people, and defend a literary interpretation, an ethical principle, a belief about the nature of the universe or the causes of the French revolution, you're pretty much going to be doing that all alone, not as part of some giant research project.

Thinking about what to believe based on the evidence: often you have to do it for yourself, and thus by yourself. Please support your local humanities education! I can only say this: if you don't you'll be sorry.

Some Graphic Novels And Comics You Should Read

2011-10-02T14:51:00.000-04:00

“What are the ten comics works you consider your favorites, the best, or the most significant?”

That was the question recently posed by The Hooded Utilitarian (The what? don't ask me, I don't know). I'm not sure who they posed the question to. But the answers were collated, or edited, or something, and then presented here.   I learned about this from the always awesome Ted Rall, who posted about it on his blog.

I was pleased to see Rall mention and praise Alison Bechdel's Fun Home ("the first graphic novel to fulfill the form’s potential as literature").   But I was really weirded out -- OK, maybe even appalled -- to see that as far as I could tell no other women comic artists or women writers mentioned by anyone. I don't know all the names so I could be overstating. But not by much. Weird, since many of the best graphic novels and comics are either drawn by or written by women or both.

So, this list. This list is not "BEST COMICS" or "BEST COMICS FOR GIRLZ" or even "MY FAVORITE COMICS EVER."   It's just a list of some comics, authors, and writers that are so good you should read them and that aren't your everyday super-hero stuff.

In no particular order:

1. Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.

Fun Home is a memoir of growing up, a reflection on gay and lesbian identity, and a gripping story about a relationship between a father and daughter. The drawings give the story an intimacy you can't imagine experiencing in reading a regular novel.

2. Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie, Aya (a story in six volumes)

The story is about life in Ivory Coast in the late 70s/early 80s, and focuses on the young adulthood of three young women: Aya, Bintou, and Adjoua. The author, Abouet, who moved from Ivory Coast to France when she was a kid, wrote these books partly to show people that Africa is not just a place of violence and famine but is also a cool and interesting place where regular life happens. The story and the drawing are both incredible beyond belief. Available in French, English, and other languages.

3. Marguerite Abouet and Singeon, Bienvenue

Also written by Abouet, Bienvenue takes place in Paris and tells the story of a nervous young woman whose parents gave her the awkward name of "Bienvenue" (which means "Welcome"). I love this book because you never get to see a heroine who is kind of grouchy and says what she thinks but is also really likable. But that's what Bienvenue is like.

4. Anything by Julie Doucet

I wrote about her on my old blog. Julie Doucet is like nothing you've ever read: free associative, a little crazy, and a girl's eye view of the world. This cover of one of her books will give you some idea what she's like.

5. Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 1 and 2

Satrapi's amazing books describe growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. The drawing style is amazingly suited to conveying conflicting and complex emotions and the weird atmosphere surrounding the characters.

6. Lynda Barry, like, everything, but I love the Maybonne and Marlys books best, like Come Over, Come Over.

Everything you need to know about that very confusing thing that is life as a girl on planet earth. It's here.

7. Roz Chast

Chast is more a cartoonist and comic artist than a graphic novelist. I think her comics are hilarious and in addition to being funny they always make me feel at home in the world, which for me is really saying something.

8. Delaf et Dubuc, Les Nombrils

I don't know anything about these authors and I had trouble even figuring out where this story was taking place, but it centers on three girls: a kind of ordinary looking tomboy and her two super-popular and glamorous "friends" -- who abuse her but get abused in turn by the fates so it all evens out. Somehow I found the crazy obsessions of "les filles" -- boys with motorcycles, super short shorts, etc. -- massively charming.

9. Alison Bechdel, Dykes to Watch Out For

Recently issued in a convenient collection as The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. You'll laugh, you'll cry, DTWOF has everything anyone could ever want in a comic series.

I've probably forgotten some things. But as I said, these are just some things you should read!

_1984_ in 2011

2011-09-27T15:56:00.001-04:00

George Orwell, obviously a serious-minded young man.

I wanted to reread Orwell's 1984 so I downloaded it from Amazon [yeah, yeah, I know]. I happened to open and start reading when I'd just gotten on the subway. Even the first two pages bowled me over. Wow, what a book!

One thing I hadn't remembered at all was the atmosphere of dingy, dirty, broken down surroundings with no comforts or pleasures and with the rationing of chocolate. There's a smell of cabbage everywhere, and worn carpets, and Winston has a sore on his ankle that won't go away, and one of the first things that happens is that he has to go fix the old gross stopped-up sink in his neighbor's apartment.

Somehow I'd remembered the telescreens, always on, always watching, always listening, but I'd surrounded them in my mind with the look of the dystopian but computerized future: clean white walls, clean white carpet, you know.

I think one reason I hadn't remembered the filth and decay is that in the modern world I've come to so powerfully associate the political sheepiness of the populace with the consumer pleasures of the E-Z-Capitalist lifestyle.

I mean, I've always figured that one reason we can't get it together to get upset about the unjust wars, the constant surveillance, and the dismantling of our legal protections is that, well, as long as we've got a new phone, the internets are working OK, and we can afford whatever A-line skirt/GPS device/whatever is hot for Fall, it's just too much trouble to get all upset. But if Facebook went down, well, there'd be some uprisings.

There was actually some evidence for this in The New York Times about a week ago. There was some story about Netflix charging extra fees or raising their fees or something and I happened to look at the comments (I know! I know! Don't look at the comments!) and there were like 200 really angry and really outraged comments. People were like, We're Mad As Hell and We're Not Going to Take It Anymore! These people are fascists! Mister Netflix Guy is going to pay!

I seriously haven't seen that level of indignation since Paul Krugman suggested that the US had misbehaved in the decade since September 11th.

Anyway, I had been reading quietly and happily for about four stops when suddenly a huge crowd of kids got on. I think they were about 11 years old, and boy were they making a racket -- shouting, jostling, making faces. This happens occasionally in a big city, usually as part of a school trip, and usually I'm slightly grouchy when it does. Like, stop bumping into me and shouting in my ear! And turn that music down!

But it's a sign of how immediately frightening 1984 is that in the grip of its atmosphere, I felt exactly the opposite. These kids were completely irrepressible, unfrightened to express their every whim, accustomed to the world being a source of pleasure and happiness, and immersed in a world of gadgetry, fashion, stupid jokes, and internet memes. In short, they were basically full of the qualities opposite to the qualities of every person in 1984.

My heart, it was filled with joy.

Mary Shelley Was Ms. Interesting

2011-09-22T15:37:00.000-04:00

Mary Shelley

I was reading a book by the philosopher Peter Singer and he mentioned a nineteenth-century guy named Godwin who proposed a crazy thought experiment in which you are outside a burning building and inside is a famous author and also your father who is the author's valet and you have to decide whether to save the author or your father and Godwin said you should save the author because morality requires impartiality and impartially the author will bring a greater amount of happiness and well-being to the world than your father ever would.

I went home and I looked up Mister Godwin and I found out that he was the husband of feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft and the father of Mary Shelley author of Frankenstein one of the most philosophical novels ever written (IMHO) and a book I've always taken to be profoundly critical of the impartial worldview and I also learned that not only did Mary run away with Percy Shelley when she was seventeen and he was married and write Frankenstein when she was twenty she also wrote other novels including one about father-daughter incest which she sent to her father Mister Godwin and he never sent it back despite her begging and pleading because he thought it was disgusting and it never was published 'til after he died.

Also she had a "non-exclusive" marriage with Percy and a miscarriage and two children who died young and then finally another son who lived and as we all know her husband died young but Mary lived long and unlike all the "Mr. Interestings" out there she spent a huge amount of her time taking care of her son and making money for his school fees and moving to Harrow on the Hill (don't ask me) so that her son could attend Harrow without paying boarding fees and later she lived with her son and traveled with him and his wife and meanwhile she wrote a bunch of books and stories and political stuff and edited some of her late husband's work.

You can read all about it on Wikipedia here.

We love you, Ms. Shelley.

Don't People Get Tired Of Competition And Negotiation?

2011-09-21T18:48:00.000-04:00

Simone de Beauvoir

You know that whole individualistic world view we inherited from the enlightenment? I think it's wearing us out.

It's pretty much part and parcel of that individualistic world view that people have to compete and negotiate with one another. I mean, if you want something, or even need something, the individualistic world view says you should try to exchange something you already have for it, presumably seeking out the "best deal" you can.

If you think of this as just having to do with some contexts of "commerce and business" it can be OK -- good, even. But when it takes over everything, not so much. For one thing, being in constant competition and negotiation is exhausting.

When I think about the exhaustingness of competition and negotiation, I'm always reminded of teaching Simone de Beauvoir in my Intro class a few years ago. This was the old translation, and it's just my memory ... but I remember her saying that one reason men had to create women in the nurturing passive image they did was so that they would have people around to support and love them. People they didn't have to compete and negotiate with.

Like, if you're a man, you're out all day competing and negotiating, and that means when you get home you need something else. Some nurturing. And so it was much in the interests of men to remove women from the competition and negotiation zone. They did this by making laws restricting women's rights, by rewarding them for passive nurturing behavior, and by punishing them for other kinds of behavior.

Women, naturally, were all, "Are you kidding me"? Even though the transformation isn't complete, it has happened. Women work outside the house, they pay for stuff, and they're generally expected to do all the same competition and negotiation crap men have always had to do.

But this means intimate relationships are no longer a competition- and negotiation-free zone. Couples have to negotiate over housework, over whose career will take precedence, over whose crazy obsessions the bank account will go toward, and so on. Especially if they have kids.

I remember a discussion in the Chronicle of Higher Education about how the higher you go in the university hierarchy the fewer women there were. The article said one main reason was that women were doing more housework and more childcare and thus didn't have as much time for research. What might the university do?

And this one commentator said something like, "Nothing. If a woman fails to NEGOTIATE properly with her husband about domestic duties, how is that anyone's problem but her own?"

So, yeah.

For a long time I wondered why so many people who were "conservative" in the sense of wanting tighter fiscal policies were also so often "conservative" in the sense of wanting women at home not working. But this suggests, I think, a connection. Tighter fiscal policies means the competition and negotiation game is especially tough. Having the game be especially tough makes it tougher to have it take over your whole life. Indeed, if you have kids, it might be frightening to think that someone being home to care for them would depend on having played the negotiation and competition game properly. But women's-place-is-in-the-home: solves that problem.

David Brooks Wishes Kids Had More Problems?

2011-09-13T18:44:00.002-04:00

Today David Brooks talks about a study showing today's young people are bad at thinking and talking about morality and values. Some of the evidence he gives for this is that young people can't recount any moral dilemmas that they themselves have experienced.

I know this isn't what he means, but it sure sounds like he's saying he's upset that kids have so few difficulties in life. Some of the evidence from the study, as he describes it:

When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.

Well, yeah. I mean, aside from the fact that people of all ages are hazy on the concept of "moral dilemma," it's funny to say What's Wrong With These Kids, Having So Few Problems in Life!

I mean, the classic dilemmas are situations in which you face a difficult choice because you have multiple obligations you can't meet. You have to lie to keep a promise, or you have to neglect one person to help another, or you have to decide whether it's better to protect your friend or to tell a truth that will cause her pain.

But these are young people. They haven't had many professional duties, or complex life relationships. For them, the obvious causes of dilemmas are: cheating friends, unintended pregnancy and children, neglectful or ill-behaved parents, and adults who mistreat one another.

I can see why the fact that kids couldn't think of personal experiences with these as a real cause for handwringing.

Kids these days. When I was their age, I had to decide whether to save my father or a famous writer from a burning building, whether to join the resistance for my country or help my ailing mother, and whether to flip the trolley switch, killing one but saving five. All before breakfast.

Those softies.

What Is Wrong With Girls Going Wild?

2011-09-12T12:00:00.001-04:00

There's a lot of disagreement about women's sexuality. But one thing tends to bring people together, and that is a belief that when young women take off their clothes, kiss one another, and go back to the Girls Gone Wild tour bus for further fun, something has gone wrong.

Men call them sluts; feminists call them manipulated by a sexist debauched culture. The TV show Arrested Development calls them "Girls With Low Self-Esteem."

But what exactly is it that is regrettable? These women are choosing to participate, they seem to be having a good time, and they don't seem coerced. Indeed, it's often noted how small any material rewards are: they get a cap or a T-shirt or something.

I think one standard thoughtful response to this question is something like this. What's regrettable is that these women are "objectifying" themselves, or permitting themselves to be objectified. Even though they are choosing to participate, they're being objectified because they're giving sexual pleasure to other people, via their bodies, and not getting any "authentic" sexual pleasure for themselves.

Insofar as it is "sexy" or "fun" for them, it must be because of the attention, and not because of something they're getting for themselves. Whatever they are getting out of it is other-directed, rather than self-directed.

But it seems to me there's something not quite right about this.

One part I really can't run with is that there's a problem with other-directedness. Because when you move away from the sexual domain and into other domains, being other-directed is often a good thing not a bad thing. Suppose I want to throw you a party, and I become really focused on wanting you to have a good time. Imagine I feel like your having a good time will make me have a good time -- indeed, that I could not have a good time without your having a good time.

If this is just a party and not my whole way of life, there's obviously nothing weird about that. My enjoyment follows from your enjoyment, my preference is not for some thing, but for you to have a certain set of feelings and experiences. If anything, we'd say that's an excellent part of human interactions. If we go out to dinner once a week and I can't really have fun unless you are having fun, that's a nice thing not a regrettable thing.

In the New York Times discussion of women's sexuality a couple of years ago, one of the researchers talks about how much she thinks women's desire is "narcissistic" in the sense that women desire to be desired. I don't know if that's right, but if it is even a little, then the women who participate in GGW can certainly be acting on their own "authentic" desires -- those desires just happen to be desires about the desires of others.

But having other-directed desires is not narcissistic! Why not say, "generous," or "other-directed" or any of the million other nice ways to describe people who are concerned with other people's feelings?

There definitely is something regrettable when women's desires are only other-directed, and social and cultural pressures tell women they ought to have other-directed sexual desires -- to be sexy, rather than to feel sexual desire and pleasure. And this is true about our world, and it is bad.

Like, this Salon article about sex from the economic point of view basically makes an assumption that women's sexual desires don't even exist -- women just have sex to get other stuff. Jeez, people.

And so, insofar as things like GGW foster and promote this vision of women's sexuality, that is bad.

I think that is right, and I think it's important. But it's not the same as saying that other-directed desires are second-rate, or bad, or inauthentic, or rooted in low self-esteem. Ideally, in sex everyone would have a mix of other-directed desires and self-directed desires.

A Spoonful Of Sugar Makes . . . You A Better Person?

2011-09-08T08:17:00.000-04:00

Glucose

The "ego depletion" theory of self-control is based on a very plausible idea: when you use your self-control to make yourself do stuff, your self-control gets all worn out and you do stupid things. Your "ego" gets "depleted" and you can't make yourself do what you know you should do. To anyone who has had a piece of cake or a cocktail after a long day, sabotaging an otherwise successful effort at healthful eating or sobriety, this will have immediate resonance.

In their studies, the psychologists who created this theory -- Roy Baumeister and his colleagues -- make people do annoying things, like sit hungry in front of chocolate and not eat it, and then they test how long they're willing to exert their will -- say by forcing themselves to work at a puzzle.

There's a good article by John Tierney about it here, focusing more on decision-making. And there's a good review of Baumeister's new book, co-authored with John Tierney, here, that's more of an overview.

The metaphor of ego-depletion is that of a muscle that gets worn out. If you don't want to use up your self-control, don't force yourself to do too many difficult things at one time. But if want to have more self-control, you can strengthen it with exercises.

Supposedly, if you use your willpower to keep your room tidy, keep a diary of what you eat, or speak in complete sentences, and you'll have more of it when it comes time to quitting smoking or studying your German or whatever.

Like muscles, self-control needs food. Ironically (as we say nowadays), self-control feeds on sugar, and an influx of glucose will help you make better decisions. Sugary soft drinks? Yes. Cake, yes. Diet coke? No. Tuna plate with lettuce, hold the carbs? Not so much.

They connection between self-control and glucose is so powerful that, as Tierney says, "The mere expectation of having to exert self-control makes people hunger for sweets."

The jokes kind of write themselves, don't they?

Anyway, there's one big thing at the center of ego depletion theory that doesn't seem right to me. Sure, it's plausible that when you have to exert self-control, your ability to exert self-control goes down. And sure, it's also easy to believe that when you have your act together in small domains like keeping things tidy you're more likely to have your act together in bigger ways.

But the muscle metaphor fails in one crucial way: there's nothing like "falling off the wagon" for your muscles.

With self-control, it seems like you can be going along in life with everything in order when a wave of difficulty just knocks everything out of whack. People who've returned from war have been massively exercising their self-control, but it does not always seem easy to transport that "strength" back home.

Muscles aren't like that. When they get weak, they get weak slowly.

I have another theory. Isn't it possible that what depletes your self control, really, is being harassed, annoyed, and unhappy?

Then using your self-control can make you harassed, annoyed, and unhappy -- and if I had to sit hungry in front of chocolate I'd be harassed, annoyed and unhappy. But other things can make you feel this way too. Don't you think a person who just received bad news, or got yelled at, or was contemplating death, would also find it harder to work on the puzzle?

Why not just say, being in a bad mood makes you have less self-control, and using your self-control is one thing that can put you in a bad mood? And that sweets put you in a good mood? Nothing surprising there.

That would at least explain the falling off the wagon problem. As we all know, the causes of bad moods are vast and varied.

And let me just close by observing that if the ego-depletion theory, or anything like it, is right, then the situation we have is this: people whose self-control is worn down by having to select good options from among bad, together with massive industry forces devoted to wearing down our self-control to make us select bad options instead of good ones.

From that point of view, it's a miracle we're not even less healthy and more in debt than we are.

Fixing Fashion

2011-09-07T08:32:00.000-04:00

New rule for the world: only athletes can be fashion models.

Honestly, I used to love fashion. It always annoys me when people are all "Oh, I'm really into architecture" and then go on to put down fashion as frivolous. Guys, it's the same thing: art in a practical context.

But the fashion skinniness problem is SO out of control. It's just nuts. You can't even enjoy looking at the ads anymore.

My proposal addresses the problem. Athletes are obviously super healthy. They'd be good for us to emulate. They look great.

Plus, they're a pretty racially diverse group. There are plenty of disabled athletes. And the athletes -- female athletes, I mean -- could use the money.

You see? A bunch of problems, solved.

Or, you know, this approach is OK too:

This is a large Guess ad in the shop window near my home. More like this please!

If I Were A Boy

2011-09-06T08:59:00.000-04:00

Today I'm thinking about this question: How would my scholarly life be different if my name were Paul Jennings and my author photo was this:

I got to wondering about this reading Larissa MacFarquhar's recent profile of the philosopher Derek Parfit in The New Yorker, which I really enjoyed.

In particular, the reflection was prompted by the description of Parfit's feelings of admiration for the "dazzling" Bernard Williams. I, too, am an admirer of Williams's philosophy, though I didn't know any of the personal things the article describes: that he flew Spitfires in the Air Force; that he had an affair with another man's wife; that he wrote about opera.

In describing Parfit's admiration for Williams, MacFarquhar suggests it's not just Williams's writing that Parfit admires, it's also his whole way of being in the world. That "way" is captured partly in a photograph, in which Williams is described as looking aristocratic, worldly, godlike. Williams just somehow seems like fascinating guy.

I know this feeling. It's good when you have it, and of course, it's even better when someone else has it about you. And it is common and natural for intellectuals to be fascinated by one another like that.

In our discipline of philosophy, fascination and its lesser cousin "interest" play an unusually outsized role, because the first crucial step in anything is getting people interested in what you have to say. Even if you're right, it gets you nowhere if no one finds you interesting. Indeed, part of Parfit's interest in Williams seems to have stemmed from thinking Williams was completely wrong and mistaken in his basic ideas.

Now the problem. Have you considered how difficult it is for a woman to fit into this world of intellectual fascination?

Men just don't seem to be fascinated by women in that way. Sure, they might admire women intellectually, and they might have crushes on them and want to sleep with them, but intellectual hero-worship? No. It doesn't really happen.

Even if it did happen, it would never be described in as intellectual hero-worship, because everyone would be falling all over themselves saying it was some kind of sexual or romantic fascination, not a genuine intellectual fascination. The woman would be at best demoted to "attractive" and at worst accused of playing her sexuality for attention.

Of course, if a young woman is intellectually fascinated by a man -- well, this just seems to strike everyone as completely as it should be.

So, really, is it any wonder we have an "inverted pyramid" gender problem in academia?

Food Courts: The Unsung Heroes Of Modern Life

2011-09-05T12:27:00.000-04:00

The new twenty-first century food court at the Eaton Centre

There's a lot of hating on food courts. People are always dumping on them like they're a symbol or manifestation of everything that's wrong with capitalism and consumer culture.

But if you could just improve the food and get rid of the styrofoam containers, the food court is a wonderful thing and a triumph of modernity.

They're egalitarian. At the food court, everyone sits next to everyone else. Mr. Subway is next to Madame Poutine; Ms. Sushi is next to little Sbarro.

They're community oriented. Have you noticed how much people like to be near other people? One of the best and nicest things about people them. Hilariously, for many people, their favorite way to be alone is to be with a bunch of other people they don't know. Why read or surf at home when you can do it at Starbucks with a million strangers?

I'm not making fun of anyone here: I love the feeling of being alone with my thoughts and surrounded by a bunch of people I don't know.

But most importantly, they're accepting. Often at the food court I see various kinds of social misfits, or just people who are alone in life and don't have other people around them who love them. Maybe they don't want to cook. Maybe they don't have someone to cook for them. Maybe they just don't have anyone to share their meals with.

These people are sitting alone at the food court. But it seems they're having an OK time: they're enjoying some Chinese food, maybe having some coffee after, and watching the scene. At a real restaurant, it would be awkward and expensive, and weird to be alone. But at the food court, it's totally normal.

Wouldn't it be so much worse if the social misfits of the world had to eat alone at home, day after day? Doing what, watching TV?

I was prompted in these reflections by having just been to the new food court in the North part of the Eaton Centre. The picture is above. I didn't even know this was in the works, but it's like the food court of the twenty-first century: beautiful, gleaming, with fancy espresso places right next to the MacDonald's. There's good food. There's even a special room just for nursing moms.

And the crowning glory: real plates and reusable silverware!

Gods of the food court: I thank you.

Dickens, Death, And Domestic Disturbance

2011-09-02T17:48:00.000-04:00

In last week's New Yorker Jill Lepore wrote about "Dickens camp": a place ordinary people go every summer to talk about Dickens.

She seems to have had a great time. Me, I've got no plans for Dickens camp. To be fair, there does not seem to exist any X for which I would want to go "X camp." But it's also true that part of why I would never go to Dickens camp is that I've never really liked Dickens and I've never understood his popularity.

It's not that I don't like long nineteenth-century novels, because I do: I am an absolute fanatic for Trollope. And you know, you might think that in the Venn Diagram of the world, the area of "likes to read long nineteenth-century novels" would be so small that there wouldn't be a lot of room inside for non-overlapping categories. But, there is. Here I am: like Trollope; don't like Dickens.

Part of what I don't like in Dickens is the caricature aspect. OK, I've gone on about this before. But even this year at Dickens camp, one of the first questions that comes up is "Why is Pip such a little shit?" Indeed, why are the people of Dickens's universe all either saints, or devils, or morons, or children? How can this be considered good?

I was appalled to learn from Lepore's article that when they were in their forties, and had had twelve children with ten living, and the youngest kid was just six, Dickens basically kicked his wife out of the house and "all but forbade the [nine younger] children to see their mother."

How does something like this happen? How can you have twelve children with someone you can't bear to live with? Lepore says about this that "domestic tragedy, like domestic happiness, is ineffable." But, you know, not in Trollope it isn't. If Trollope were writing the story of Dickens's life, he'd easily describe this story to you so that it makes sense that two seemingly normal people can come to despise one another so deeply, despite having lived in such intimacy for so long. It's Dickens who can only tell this story by making the wife into a shrew, or the husband into a monster.

The one thing in Lepore's article that gave me insight into why the Dickensomania was a quote from Thomas Carlyle, who said that in Dickens the reader finds "dark, fateful, silent elements . . . the elements of death itself."

Darkness and death: there's something to that. Certainly the character of Miss Havisham makes you feel the dark and the death. Remember Miss Havisham? Jilted at the altar as a young woman, she spends the rest of her life in her wedding dress, with the clocks stopped and the wedding cake uneaten at the table. Frightening.

Miss Havisham, drawing by Harry Furniss

It's true, there's nothing like this in Trollope. The main jiltee of Trollope's fiction is Lily Dale, and though she never really recovers from being jilted by the only man she loves, Lily has a very normal life: she's a companion to her mother; she helps out her friends; she makes a second man who wants to marry her very miserable, because she can't give up her love for the first. She is, indeed, utterly determined to live out her life as a reasonable and friendly, if sad, person.

The standard reason people give for why they think Dickens is great where Trollope isn't has to do with politics and class: it's true that Trollope writes mostly about the aristocracy, and Dickens writes about poor people. That's all to the good in its way, I'm sure. But I can't help but feel that among poor as well as the rich, there's a million Lily Dales for every Miss Havisham.

I mean, to live out your life being a good friend and helpful person, trying to be cheerful despite some very bad luck and some deep sadness: that is a completely universal experience, and not at all restricted to the upper classes.

Lepore quotes a camp attendee who says that the reason Trollope was so exasperated by Dickens was that "Trollope mistrusted rhetorical power." It has to be admitted, as Trollope admitted, that if we go by literary fans and majorities, Dickens clearly has the more succesful rhetorical style. But maybe in this case the majority is just wrong.

Capitalism And Fraud

2011-08-27T13:57:00.000-04:00

Recently I read Michael Lewis's book The Big Short, which tells the stories of a few people involved in the financial shenanigans that led to the economic crisis of 2008.

It's a complicated story with a lot of parts, but one of the recurring elements is intentional deception. I mean, cases in which banks and investment companies intentionally mislead, lie to, and try to deceive their trading partners and customers.

This got me to thinking about lying and fraud in business in a more general way, and about why you're not supposed to do it, and about why any particular business person would be motivated not to do it.

When you're in a normal moral context, it's natural to think of morality as a kind of "looking out for the other guy." I mean, you take other people, and their needs and desires, into consideration when you think about how to act. From that point of view, the reason not to lie is pretty obvious, because you're in doing so you're harming someone else or their interests.

Does this normal moral context disappear when you're in a business context? Sometimes it doesn't. Some transactions, like selling coffee or whatever, don't seem in tension with that point of view. If I have money, and you have coffee, and we want to exchange, we're each going to be better off after we do so, and this is consistent with each of us looking out for the other guy. So you might have some interest in putting the best face on your coffee that you can, but there would be nothing strange about your telling me the truth about its particulars and why you want to sell it.

But what Lewis describes in the finance industry doesn't quite seem like that, because everyone wants the same thing -- money -- and everyone's just making different and competing judgments about the best way to get it. If your reason for wanting to sell me certain stocks for money is that you think they're going to be worth less in the future than they are now, then there's a sense in which our interests are opposed, and it makes no sense to "look out for the other guy" in quite the same way. Why would you reveal your reasons for thinking the stock was going to go down? Doing so would make no sense. In this context, it would be strange for you to tell me why you want to sell.

So the prohibition against lying must have another source in that context. And I take it it does: the system depends on people being having good information about what they are buying; the system doesn't work when people lie; the mechanism of capitalist exchange, investment, and all the good things that come with it are only possible if people tell the truth.

But if that's the real reason why one ought not lie in finance, isn't it really unsurprising that in the absence of meaningful oversight and punishment, people do, in fact, lie? Because, really, even though I take it this is a powerful and good reason not to lie, it's also an awfully abstract and emotionally non-pressing reason. A reason it's pretty hard to get motivated by. There might be some people who might be worse off at some unspecified future time? Whatever.

And the temptations to lie must be significant: you're trying to keep up, and your job depends on making a certain amount of money for your company or its shareholders, and everyone else is making money, and you think that everyone else is lying. Against these temptations you have something like: it's wrong for me to lie because if people lie the system breaks down? You'd have to be Mr. Spock to put that sort of reasoning into action against your own immediate self-interest.

It might be thought that the motivation not to lie, even in the absence of oversight and punishment, comes from some self-interest: that the person who lies is going to get a reputation for lying and people won't do business with them again. But this would only be true if a lot of people had information that -- especially in the absence of oversight -- people just don't have. Without someone looking over your shoulder, you can actually get away with it.

One of the other main themes of the book, of course, is how pathetic and weak any actual oversight is these days. But that's another story.

Social Networking Anxiety

2011-08-03T11:34:00.000-04:00

You've heard of Social Anxiety. But what about Social Networking Anxiety?

The possibility that I had Social Networking Anxiety first flitted across my mind when I signed up for Facebook. As I chronicled here, I felt immediately that Facebook was too much for me. Too much information, too much immediacy, too many minute decisions to be made about how to interact with people.

I said to myself, "Facebook, it's not me, it's you. You're the one trying to ferret out where I went to school a million years ago -- what's it to you, Mister Aggressive? You're the one with the conversation skills of a two-year-old -- I mean, who doesn't know that putting funny pet pictures next to reflections on national tragedies is in poor taste? You're the one with the gall to pick on my poor friends for not having a wide enough social circle -- you think I didn't notice that plaintive and pathetic call to 'help So-and-So find his friends?'"

I'll have you know that So-and-so is an interesting, personable, and savvy guy. He's just not that into you. So you don't have to act all superior.

Then I met Google Plus, or as he likes to be called, Google+. He's like Facebook, but with a little more social tact, a little more reserve, a little more cool. He doesn't try to push stuff down your throat, but kind of lets you take the lead. More of a gentleman, I guess. And we're definitely getting along better.

Still, I retain a feeling that social Networking is too much Social and too much Networking for me. The other day I saw a post by an old friend -- something innocuous and nice, and there was a comment by a person I haven't communicated with in over twenty years. My mind was filled with highly charged emotive thoughts. Warmth: remembering this person and how cool they were when I spent time with them. Guilt: that I never do anything to keep in touch. Fear: that I'd be called on to say something kind and warm and thoughtful, something that could reach across the decades to show I still care. Dread: because honestly, I don't really like communicating with people I never see and I'm not close to, and I don't want to do it.

All this mixed together with a longing to just log out and get back to what I'd been doing before.

When it comes to posting, profiles, and all that, I fear being That Person. You know, the one who posts "Just got back from my interview with MSNBC! Heading off to Nobu!" Or That Other Person, the one who is always posting about their involvement with some super-cool, totally unknown band. Not that I ever do those things, but you know what I mean. And if you're not one of Those People, what are you? Just living a boring life, out there on the web for all to see?

I used to think Social Networking Anxiety was very rare, and I was almost the only person who had it. Because almost everyone uses Facebook. But then I started to notice something odd.

Because I work in a University, and go to a lot of coffee shops, I often walk by people engaged in actual Social Networking. I mean, I catch a glimpse of their laptop screens, and more than anything those screens say "FACEBOOK" and the person is staring intently at a list of tiny pictures with tiny bits of text next to them.

And these people Social Networking, how do they look? Do they look happy?

No. In fact, their faces are often masks of anxiety. They look pained. They look nervous. They look like they're measuring out their lives with the measuring tape of other people's success. Oh, look. So-and-So was interviewed by MSNBC. Um, cool.

So now I think Social Networking Anxiety isn't one of those rare dysfunctions. I think it's more like a Silent Killer Epidemic. What it's going to do to all of us I don't know. But assuming we keep social networking, and I'm sure we will, whatever it is will not be good.

Work, Money, Fairness, And The American Way

2011-08-01T18:46:00.000-04:00

I'm always surprised at how many people seem to believe both of these two things which seem incompatible to me.

(1) If you work hard, you should be able to have a decent life.

(2) When it comes to economic exchanges, people should generally be left alone to do their thing without outside interference.

(1) means something like, "If you work hard, and play by the rules, you should be able to live reasonably well." In America in 2011, "reasonably well" seems to mean something like being able to have a house, a TV, and a decent car, and to be able to educate your kids.

I take it that in (1) the "should" is generally not the predictive "should" -- like, "the bank should be open when you get there," but is rather the normative should. As in, if it doesn't happen, something about that is not right, or not fair. Not many people would put it this way, maybe, but the idea seems to be a kind of basic social justice or extended social contract. Like, play by the rules, do your thing, and you won't be screwed.

But then there's (2). I assume (2) means that if a person or corporation wants to engage in some economic transaction, they should be free to do so on whatever terms they choose and should be free from external interference. Most people may not draw out the implications of this fully, but I take it (2) means getting rid of regulations and the institutions that set them up, as much as possible.

It seems to me evident that these are incompatible. In the absence of a role for some interfering institution or other body doing all those things, in what sense could there possibly be a "should" involved in how successful you are?

There are a million reasons you might work hard and not benefit very well economically. What you have might not interest anyone. What you are able to do might not be the kind of thing anyone wants to pay you to do. You might have been born with few abilities or talents, or low intelligence, and thus not be able to do anything that is considered valuable by others. You might have chosen poorly when you got education or training, working for years, say, to become a typewriter repair person at the dawn of the internet.

If people get to make their own unfettered decisions, to suit themselves, about all economic transactions, then it will certainly would be, in part, a matter of luck and circumstance whether you are able to earn enough to live a decent life. Indeed, if you happen to live in a time or place of limited resources, it might be a matter of luck or circumstances whether you even have enough to live at all.

If you're disabled, it could easily happen that, work as hard as you might, you would be unable to earn the -- actually quite substantive -- kind of money that one needs for American housing, cars, gadgets and TVs. For that matter, you might just be someone people hate. People hate for all kind of famously irrational reasons: racism, sexism, homophobia, the list is endless. If you're hated, you aren't going to be on the receiving end of a lot of opportunities.

Now some people who are committed to (2) seem to me to acknowledge this incompatibility and accept that (1) doesn't follow. Circumstances don't care about justice, and it won't be "unfair" if the way they work out sucks for you. It will just be, well, Sucks To Be You.

But a surprising number of people seem to believe both (1) and (2). I don't know what kind of "should" or "fair" these people are referring to. The correlation between hard work and a decent life only comes about by either luck or by some interference making the correlation happen.

Modern Eating

2011-07-17T14:21:00.000-04:00

Paris Hilton eating a burger, presumably from the Carl's Jr. ad campaign

A week or so ago I went to see Fellini's Roma, made in 1972. Awesome movie. A great moment from the movie stuck with me. In the opening sequence, two Italian people are walking together off camera and chatting, and one says to the other something like, "Did you know Americans eat food out of cans?"

So funny and so true. What is up with modern American eating? There are obviously a lot things to say, and the topic is hardly original. But for whatever it's worth, here's The Kramer Is Now perspective.

If you're eating out, portion sizes are too small.

Portion sizes of actual food, that is. Portion sizes of caloric items in general are, of course, through the roof. But when it comes to actual food -- like cucumbers, or broccoli -- your typical American meal is positively anemic.

Suppose you want to go out to lunch. Your typical lunch out in America gets you a sandwich or burger, with potato chips or fries, and a drink. The bread, the chips or fries, and the drink: all empty calories. The only food is whatever is inside the sandwich or burger: a bit of meat, some hummus maybe, a leaf or two of wilted lettuce, and a tomato. A tiny amount of food!

You really appreciate this when you start trying to eat only actual food. You think to yourself, OK, sure, there's a lot of empty calories here. But I don't have to eat it. I'll just eat the food. And lo, it's like 300 calories and two hours later you're starving. You need a snack. And American snacks are, if anything, worse than American lunches, consisting mainly of sugar, flour, and salt.

In fact, you have to act like a freak to get a normal meal of actual food in most restaurants. A recent study found that potato chips were the number one contributor to weight gain, and that french fries were second. The morning after the study results were announced, I happened to go out to breakfast. I ordered an omelet with various vegetables, and told the server I didn't want any home fries or toast, and asked, Is there something else they could substitute?

You'd think I'd asked for ketchup with my apple pie.

Food technology.

I don't know what it is with Americans and food technology. When you think "food" do you think "technology"? No. But there it is.

I've never looked at processed foods in the same way after reading this incredible 2009 New Yorker article about companies that make processed edible substances. The author, Raffi Khatchadourian, explains that about ninety per cent of money that Americans spend in the supermarket goes toward processed food, and that this food is the product not of normal food companies but of "flavor companies" -- people that mix chemicals and materials together to try to make edible stuff. Money quote:

"'Most of the food-and-beverage companies have become marketing-and-distribution companies,' a flavor company executive told me, only half in jest. I understood what he meant when, in one of his laboratories, I saw a number of his colleagues working on a tasteless "slurry," consisting largely of starch, oil, and salt, which a client was hoping to transform into a marketable product."

A "tasteless slurry!" To be "transformed" into a "marketable product" by the addition of chemically produced compounds that mimic "flavors!" How disgusting is that? Will you ever look at Doritos in the same way?

We don't care about food?

I'm always amazed when I travel Air France, and along with the quite good meal, I am offered a truly delicious and fresh mini-baguette. And I always think to myself, how can it be that if Air France can provide wonderful fresh bread on every flight, other airlines can't even manage a passable muffin or sandwich? I mean, the flight from Toronto to Paris on Air Canada has the same access to the same suppliers and ingredients as the flight from Toronto to Paris on Air France. So why is our food so bad?

Do we Americans just not care about food?

It may be so. You often hear that people buy crappy food and empty calories because it's cheap. And for some people, this is a perfectly understandable reason: if you are poor, for example, you don't have a lot of options. But people were buying as much crappy food during the economic boom of the 1990s as they are now. You always hear that people don't have any disposable income any more, but obviously there's something not true about this, given that the people who make GPS devices are doing fine, and who really needs a GPS device?

It's no secret that the US spends a smaller percentage of disposable income on food than other countries (see interesting chart here). It's sometimes suggested this is because we have such excellent and efficient production, and certainly high income is part of the story. But clearly it is also true that you get what you pay for. And in this case, what you get is french fries, more french fries, and the occasional flavored slurry. Yum!

A Guy Walks Into A Lingerie Store ... Studies In Gender Miscommunication

2011-07-11T17:47:00.000-04:00

The other day I was in a kind of fancy bra and lingerie store, completing a complex transaction. Unfortunately it was not a "complex transaction" as in "Oh, but don't you have this in the chantilly lace in Tequilla Sunrise Orange?" It was just a complex transaction in the most boring way, as in "I'd like to return this and use the credit to order these other things you don't have in stock."

It was one of those situations where the woman who knows how to do the transaction was in the dressing room providing some Excellent Customer Service of the kind you get in these kinds of stores, and the woman at the register was a little befuddled. I wasn't in a rush though: the afternoon was broiling and the store was air-conditioned.

As we stood there together, me the model patient customer and she the increasingly nervous sales person, a guy came in, alone. No big deal, but this guy was wearing mirrored sunglasses, responded to an offer of assistance with a gruff "no," and went on to . . . well, I'd have to say he went on to fondle the panties in a box that was sitting on the cashier table.

We stood there aware of his fondling as we tried to sort out the transaction. I found myself feeling creeped out and nervous, but initially unable to explain to myself why I felt creeped out. I mean, if you're going to buy some panties, touching them to see how they feel, checking the texture and size, is completely normal and appropriate -- whether you're shopping for yourself or for a gift for some woman. What's the problem exactly?

What was the problem?

Well, part of the problem is the way certain guys sometimes give you a feeling like they are going to fly off the handle. Sometimes you get a feeling from a guy that even though they're acting very patient and nice for the moment, something is going to make them snap and when they do it's going to be bad. One of the things that makes guys snap, it seems, is rage over sex -- I mean, the feeling that they want to have it with someone and no one wants to have it with them. So a guy with mirrored sunglasses on, experiencing who knows what mood, in this lingerie store with all these women -- is he going to fly off the handle somehow?

This is the sort of thing that you'd think statistics and empirical facts might help you assess, but for me, somehow it doesn't really. I mean, it might be statistically uncommon for a guy to fly off the handle in that particular way, but somehow that fact -- it doesn't make it feel different. For me, I just sometimes get the feeling like a certain guy is going to fly off the handle at a certain moment, and I get scared. And I'm a relatively fearless person, generally.

You often hear women say "I was scared to say No." And you might wonder: why exactly? Did someone threaten you? Was there a history of violence? Often the answer is Yes. But even when the answer is No, guys can be scary. This feeling one gets from them when they're angry may be part of the explanation for why they can be scary, and especially in those kinds of contexts.

On this occasion, the guy was perfectly patient and polite; he waited 'til we were done, then paid for his panties. And he was probably just shy and nervous. But honestly, mirrored sunglasses indoors? It sure makes you think a guy has something fishy going on.

Fathers In The Public Eye

2011-07-05T17:58:00.000-04:00

Han Han, this week's Mister Interesting, and a father

Do you ever have this experience? You're reading something about a "Mr. Interesting" -- an art guy, or a surfing master, or a crazy world traveler, or a double-agent. Maybe in a magazine. And you're thinking, Hm, wow, that's kind of an interesting guy. Pretty crazy life that dude has, though.

And then smack in the middle of the story, or even toward the end, you read something like "Mr. Interesting has two daughters who live with his wife in Southern California." And you're like, Wait, this man has children??

Because, really, whenever you read about "Ms. Interesting," either she doesn't have kids, or the whole article is about Wow, how do balance being The Most Interesting Woman in the World with being A PARENT?? And indeed, the answer is always pretty complex and detailed, because being Interesting and being A Parent are things that it's not easy to combine.

So you'd think now with the whole, like, feminism and equality thing going on, that being Mr. Interesting and being A Parent would also be pretty tough. Like, who is picking these kids up from daycare at 5? Who is making sure they eat five servings of vegetables every day? Who is cooking dinner, washing dishes, all that crap? Who is watching over the endless piano lessons, soccer games, and swimming classes that characterize modern childhood?

But somehow with Mr. Interesting, it doesn't come up.

I was just reading the great story in The New Yorker about Han Han, who -- I just learned -- is a writer, activist, general famous person, creator of magazines, extremely popular blogger, AND successful race car driver. Race car driver! And he's only 28.

Halfway through the article you learn he is married and has a daughter. The daughter is maybe a year old. There isn't the tiniest suggestion about how Han Han is able to make all this work. The reporter never asks, "Ooh, how do you juggle it all!" There's no information, and no suggestion that the lack of information is strange.

The only time the daughter comes up later is when the reporter asks about her, before the start of a car race, and Han Han says, "I've accomplished my job as a human being ... I don't feel any pressure any more, even if I knew I was going to die in this race."

Well, WTF? I mean, I'd have thought when the kids a year old you're just starting, not finishing.

But I'm willing to give Han Han the benefit of the doubt, that somehow the reporter twisted his words or took them out of context. Who knows? The weird thing is there's never any, Wow, who is taking care of her while you travel around to car races? How often do you get to see her? Do you miss her? Questions that, if Han Han were a woman, would have been the first eight questions and the last ten questions with just a few things in between.

I had this same experience reading about Julian Assange. You're reading along and you're like, Wow, hacker, then political guy, travels around in deep secrecy, geez, Mr. Interesting. Then outta nowhere you find out Assange has a kid, that he had a huge custody battle over. I mean, doesn't having a kid get in the way of being Mr Super Secret Government Rabble Rouser? And most importantly, if not why not?

Often when things are different for men and women it's the way it is for women that is weird. But in this case I think it's weirder not to ask Mr. Interesting these questions than it is to ask Ms. Interesting. Because really, you got billions of people out here, trying to live interesting lives and trying to raise their kids. Any practical tips you got on doing them both effortlessly, inquiring minds want to know.

Critical Notice: RuPaul, Workin' It

2011-06-26T12:56:00.000-04:00

The full title of this work is Workin' It: RuPaul's Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style. I bought it after hearing RuPaul as the celebrity guest on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!

I didn't know much about RuPaul, but I found his philosophy of life very appealing (his? hers? from what I understand, they're equally appropriate). Basically, that philosophy combines a kind of insistence on living in the moment -- not as "mindfulness" but more as "fabulousness" -- together with a healthy dose of "also, don't be an asshole."

Not everyone appreciates the important distinction between being "sassy" and being "bitchy," but RuPaul puts it front and center, explaining in Chapter One of the book how, early in his career, he had to rewrite the whole script for the VH1 fashion awards in 1996 because the writers thought a drag queen had to be bitchy and mean. I'm committed to anti-meanness, so I'm all over this. I also liked the way, on the show, he talked about the politics of drag, and how he got into performing that way as a transgressive political act, which I thought was sophisticated and smart.

So I bought the book, thinking it might have some real life advice for me on living fabulously.

Results: overall, a little mixed, but definitely some great and intersesting moments:

Most Mom-Like Advice

Be punctual! When you're late you're disrespectful of others and disrespectful of yourself. Also, stand up straight and don't smoke!

Most Surprising Intimate Moment

This would be the description of RuPaul's first colonic irrigation. OK, I wasn't surprised a discussion of this weird trend appeared in the book, because there's lots of "health" advice of the kind you typically get from celebrities, and who knows why, but celebrity health is all about removing everything from your intestines in whatever way possible.

What surprised me was that in the middle of a description you would almost call "family friendly" in its blandness, we get the following: "She then instructed me to insert the tip of the hose into my rectum. Well, I'm no stranger to ass insertion. 'Just the tip?' I asked."

It's pretty much the only reference to sex in the whole book, which makes it awesome. You go, RuPaul.

Most Actually Useful Advice

The most actually useful thing in the book is the reminder that you can't be fabulous without being healthy, and health is often boring. OK, she doesn't put it like that, but it's the same idea. Go to bed early, get plenty of sleep, eat right, and don't drink too much. Only then will you have the basic materials you need to put on a pair of huge false tits and two huge wigs (yes! two!) and get through the day. Or do whatever other difficult thing you need to do in life.

Also useful is the emphasis on effort that is worth it. If you love beauty, it's worth it to work at making yourself and your surroundings beautiful. It may be kind of a pain, but most good things are kind of a pain.

This view of things is, I think, important in its contrast to the "harmony" view of life, in which all the good things are sort of similar and fit together. I've never bought that. Some things are bad, but you do them because the outcome is so good. That is not mysterious, so I don't know why it's so often denied.

Anyway, if things are a pain, you can count yourself lucky that, unlike RuPaul, you don't have to get up at 4am, wear super-giant false eyelashes all day, and get regular colonics.

Also, stand up straight and don't smoke!

Most Depressing Detail for Femininity and Feminism

I was distressed to learn that RuPaul never eats in public when she is in drag. Not distressed because of anything this says about RuPaul, but distressed to think that femininity involves ideals that are actually incompatible with basic activities needed for survival. This is shocking, but I think it is true.

Traditional ideals of femininity and feminine beauty involve a certain kind of delicacy that's impossible to combine with anything that verges on being a little gross. Indeed, RuPaul says part of the problem is if you're trying to talk and eat at the same time, it's kind of disgusting. Just so. And it seems to me that somehow it's OK for masculinity to be a little disgusting -- indeed, if current movies are any guide it is part of masculinity to be a little disgusting. But not for femininity.

Now that women live in the world, this is a problem.

I don't know what the answer is. I'm not ready to give up on femininity altogether. I take it the very existence of drag shows femininity has interest and appeal beyond functioning to harass women who want to do things and eat in public.

So maybe a combination of changing ideals and more workable compromises. Certainly we can say that with respect to changing ideals, having someone in the public eye who is six foot four and buff and wearing a dress can only help.

Modern Reading

2011-06-20T09:41:00.001-04:00

I got an iPad -- an iPad 2, to be precise. I got the black border and the pink polyurethane cover, so it looks like this:

Nice, huh? I love my iPad and I use it all the time. I use it to read and mark up student work with a stylus; I use it to read scholarly papers with my "Papers" app; I do the Times Crossword on it, and I use it to find my way places with the maps feature.

But mostly, I use it to read. Books, that is. I use it to read books. Remember books? I'm always amused when people are like What Do You Use That For That You Can't Do On a Laptop because the answer seems so obvious: I read books.

I don't know about you, but the idea that I would read a book on my laptop sitting at my desk ... it's almost laughable. I read on the sofa, I read on the bed, I read on the subway, but I don't read at my desk. I mean, I'm at my desk all day working. I'm not going to spend my leisure time there too.

Reading books on the iPad is fantastic. I would say for me it's better than reading books on paper.

HOWEVER.

There is one thing I don't like about reading books on the iPad, and that can be summed up in one word: e-bookstores.

There's no problem for works out of copyright, which you can download free from Gutenberg.org. And, of course, I do this all the time, and it is amazing. I would never read the lesser-known Louisa May Alcott books if I had to buy them from a store and carry them around.

But for books in copyright, it's bad. The main problem is DRM, or digital rights management, and the way it affects your "ownership" of the book. There's an informative wikipedia discussion here. But the essence of the difficulty is perhaps better conveyed through a descrtiption of the mechanism and the story of Orwell's 1984 on the Kindle.

When you buy a book on a Kindle -- or on the Kindle app on the iPad, as I do -- the book is downloaded to the device by a syncing mechanism in which the device syncs with your account at Amazon.

It's not like iTunes, where you can move the file around yourself. You can't move this file anywhere -- you can't copy it from your laptop to your device, or from your device to your laptop, or from one computer to another. All you can do is sync with your account. You can sync any device -- I mean, I have my kindle books on my laptop, in the Kindle Application, and on my iPad, in my Kindle app -- but in both cases the books come from my account at Amazon and cannot be directly moved. Obviously, this is to prevent you from giving the book away to all your friends for free, posting it online, or -- OMG, pirates! -- distributing it over some peer to peer network or whatever.

This means that your books on your device are always syncing with the books on your account. As
this article in The Times explains, syncing giveth, but it also taketh away:

"Digital books bought for the Kindle are sent to it over a wireless network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic books between devices — and apparently to make them vanish."

And that's what happened with 1984. [Insert your own observations and jokes about "irony" here]. I guess the publisher who made the books available on Amazon didn't have the rights, and when whoever did have the rights complained, Amazon responded by taking the book out of people's accounts, and thus, next time they synced, off their Kindles.

Amazon says it'll never do that again. But really, is their assurance sufficient? Don't you think it's creepy that whoever sold you the book can control it at any time, indefinitely into the future? Obviously they could change things around, delete smutty or politically sensitive material at any time. What if they're asked to do so by the government? Surely they'll comply.

Sorry, but this arrangement is completely nuts.

All the ebooks companies I know of work this way -- at least, all the ones with books I want to read. I made a vow that I'd buy only scholarly books on the iPad and that I'd buy new novels on paper. But I've already broken it. Who wants to cart a bunch of paper and cardboard on a transatlantic flight if they don't have to?

We need a new system altogether, but until we get one, e-bookstores should throw people like me a bone by offering "bundles." With a bundle, you buy the ebook and the book book together, for more than either separately but less than the two would normally cost together. I get convenience and peace of mind, the bookstore gets more money.

Obviously I'm alone in a wilderness here, since no one is offering these.

When I first got my iPad, I tried out books on three of the big systems: Kindle, iBooks, and Kobo. Though I love Apple I gotta say the iBooks system is the worst, on grounds that you can't even read your book on your computer, only on your iPad. Sorry but that is dumb. The Kindle system is pretty good -- though they have some weirdo format they use, instead of the standard ePub. Not that that matters, since given the DRM insanity just mentioned, you can't transfer the file or do anything with it anyway. Still, wouldn't it be nice to at least know the book was in some standard readable format?

I had high hopes for Kobo -- books are in standard ePub format, and they company is proud of the way their books are available on a range of devices. So far so good. On the other hand, they don't have all that many books. New bestsellers, fine. Books on moral particularism, not so much.

At first I was committed to going with them whenever I could, but then I discovered something about the Kobo app which made me stop dead in my tracks and run screaming back to Amazon. And it is this: the Kobo app actually congratulates you on making it through a book.

It's worse than this, really, because the Kobo app also encourages you by congratulating you on making it partway through a book. It's like, "Hey, You've Read Some of a Book! Way to Go! Do You Want to Post this News to Facebook or Twitter?!"

That's just about the most depressing approach to reading I can imagine. I was reminded of it yesterday when I encountered this similarly depressing thing at the Times --actually called a "Riff." The theme is that we have Stockholm Syndrome with long novels. We don't want to finish them, but we feel we owe them. We slog our way through.

I'm a reader, and just in case anyone thinks that's what modern reading is like, let me tell you, it isn't. If I don't feel like finishing a novel, you know what I do? I put it down and stop reading it. Yes, that's right: if I don't feel like finishing a novel, I put it down and stop reading it.

This doesn't happen often. But it happens sometimes. Just often enough to remind me that I'm doing tihs for fun and I don't need a gold star on the fridge for finishing a novel. Kobo People? Are you out there? Are you listening? I'm trying to tell you. Modern reading: it doesn't have to be a status update.

Timothy Ferriss And The 15 Minute Female Orgasm

2011-06-13T10:15:00.001-04:00

The Four Hour Body is like a fitness book written by a highly curious, experimental, obsessive-compulsive control freak. That sounds funny, except in many ways, who better to write a book about fitness? The author, Timothy Ferriss, is not only willing to try anything and experiment on himself, but also obsessive enough to carry out the experiments -- doing nutty things like testing his blood sugar every five minutes as he eats minutely varying amounts of various substances.

The book covers a lot of ground. And since Timothy Ferriss not only wants you do be fit and healthy, but also to live The Good Life, there's a certain amount of discussion about how to Have A Good Sex Life.

Honestly, as a female reader, my hopes weren't high, because in the early chapters of the book he describes hanging out with the guy who wrote that book The Game. Neill Strauss. You know, the book about picking up women that gives advice like "always say something insulting to a beautiful woman." The book that assumes only 8s, 9s, and 10s are worth bothering about and if you're a man doomed to date a 6 you've really got problems.

But I was pleasantly surprised. Ferriss doesn't just want to tell his male readers how to pick up women; he wants to tell them how to make a woman have a good time. I suppose it's a pretty sad indictment of most pop culture that you get points for not just wanting the girl but also for wanting her to have fun, but there it is. Really, reading magazines like Maxim you get the impression that not only does your average guy not know what to do to make women happy and sexually satisfied, he doesn't really care either.

So points to Ferriss for that. And, I would say, further, points for the way he goes about finding out his answers. I said that he's experimental and obsessive. Basically he goes and talks to a whole bunch of female experts on female orgasm to find out what exactly is needed to get a girl off, and then he practices. Because he's curious, he's willing to go to the ends of the earth to ask informed people what the answers to his questions are. Because he's experimental he's willing to ask actual girls to let him perfect his technique. Because he's obsessive, he's willing to practice and hone his technique until he has a Sure-Fire-No-Fail-No-Mystery Technique for making sure a woman has an orgasm during sex (my phrasing, but that's what it is). In 15 minutes or less.

Again, pretty sad indictment of the rest of pop culture that you get props for asking women about women's orgasm, but I think you do. Your average nutty guy experimentalist is so much more comfortable talking to other guys than talking to women, they'd rather talk to Dr. Male Sexresearcher than Ms. Female Sexologist any day of the week. But Ferriss goes right to the source: women who know what they're talking about. And he listens to what they have to say. So that's good.

The only question I had about the whole thing was: Sure-Fire-No-Fail-No-Mystery 15-minute orgasm?

Because as you can imagine, the technique is pretty specialized. There are diagrams. You have to have the woman staying pretty still and and the man doing a series of very precise things. It's kind of like, I don't know, repairing a pocket watch, or polishing a really really tiny and delicate piece of silver, or getting the last piece of paper out of a jammed photocopier. Just to give you a sense of things, Ferriss says, "Limit the session to exactly 15 minutes. I used a kitchen timer."

I get wanting knowledge and technique, I applaud the way he goes after it, but isn't it weird that even with all this there's no part of the activity that involves just asking the woman in question what she'd like? Sure, maybe she wants a Sure-Fire-No-Fail-No-Mystery 15 minute orgasm with a kitchen timer. But then, you know, maybe she doesn't.

Funny how hard it seems to keep in people's minds: if you want to know what a woman wants, why not ask her?

Boredom

2011-05-29T18:56:00.000-04:00

There's a review of a new book on boredom in the Times today (Boredom: A Lively History, by Peter Toohey). One of the things I learned from this review is that there's simple boredom, the kind you get listening to a boring speech, and then there's existential boredom, the kind you get from being bored with life. I don't think I have existential boredom -- I'd really like to live forever, and presumably if you feel that way you can't have existential boredom. But man, do I have simple boredom.

Did you know? Simple boredom

"is typically transient for most people, though there are chronic sufferers for whom boredom is very frequent. Psychologists try to diagnose chronic boredom with questionnaires: the Boredom Proneness Scale, developed in 1986 at the University of Oregon, asks patients to rate 28 statements (like “Time always seems to be passing slowly” and “I am good at waiting patiently”) on a seven-point scale."

I googled "Boredom Proneness Scale" and I found a page with the questions but in my impatient and easily bored 21st century way I was all frustrated and annoyed that it wasn't an actual "click here" online quiz but just a list of questions you could ... what, print out?

I went to the Wikipedia page and found this message:

"Boring" redirects here. For other uses, see Boring (disambiguation). For the Buzzcocks song, see Spiral Scratch (EP).

Wikipedia: always interesting in surprising ways.

We Anglophones have a way of talking about boredom in terms of understimulation but I've never thought that could be right, since surfing the internet is often massively boring while listening to a song you've heard a million times is not boring at all.

I've long thought the French had it right, with their word for "to bore" -- "ennuyer" -- meaning both to bore and to harass or annoy. I thought they were trying to convey, correctly I think, that boredom in the sense of "I'm bored" is a way of being harassed or annoyed, even if it feels also like "having nothing to do."

But now I read on the internet that it's not that they think these are related things, but rather that the word is ambiguous, just meaning two different things.

Can this be true?

Rand Paul On "Compromise"

2011-05-28T19:40:00.000-04:00

Wikimedia commons drawing of a gadfly.

In describing his single-minded approach to Senate matters recently, Rand Paul asked rhetorically, "Is compromise the noble position?"

I guess the answer is supposed to seem like No, but I thought it was Yes. Many of the noblest and most sensible things we do in life are compromises.

You want to protect your children and keep them safe. But this would mean not driving them around, since driving is very risky. You also want your children to do fun and interesting stuff in the outside world. So you compromise between these two aims. You drive them around, but you pay attention and you choose a car with safety features.

Noble? Yes. Compromise? Yes.

You want to test a new drug. It might have terrible side effects and it might not be effective, but it might work and it might save thousands of lives. The aim of not harming people means you couldn't give them the drug. But this would mean foregoing the benefits. So you create a complex system that involves informed consent, together with a set of standards for how to implement the test.

Noble? Yes. Compromise? Yes.

The reason we have to compromise is that there are lots of good and valuable things in life and they don't always fit together in easy or simple ways. We want peace and we want justice, but they seem to recommend different actions in the short term. In the long term, we try to get as much of both as we can. It's a compromise.

The Times story with the quote mentioned Paul voting against a law that would punish people for aiming lasers at aircraft. Apparently the lasers interfere of the pilot's ability to see and thus pilot the aircraft safely or something. He was the only Senator who voted against it.

I mean, I don't know the particulars. But this seems a good example of a noble compromise -- well at least a sensible compromise -- between the aims of protecting individual liberties and protecting unsuspecting and innocent people from a threat of harm and death they couldn't foresee. If not, it's not hard to imagine how something like it would be a sensible compromise.

Compromise gets a bad rap because people think of compromise between a value and something that isn't a value -- like a whim. So sure, if you compromise on your workout and do 10 pushups instead of 20 because you're just lazy, you might think Gee, better not to compromise. Or maybe Paul was talking about compromising with other people you disagree with, just because they disagree with you, which can also seem unsavory.

But many compromises are between values and other values. And these compromises? Totally essential to getting along in life.

So, Mr. Paul, I'm glad you're upset about the Patriot Act, because I am too, but I can't run with you on the whole Noble Uncompromiser business.

Mencken's "Mixed Martial Arts" For And Against Women

2011-05-27T21:07:00.001-04:00

H. L. Mencken. Funny, angry, and good-looking. Why hasn't there been a major motion picture about this guy?

I knew going into it that reading H. L. Mencken's In Defense of Women was a high risk activity for me. Not because it was written in 1918, and not because the writer is known for his brutal honesty, but because you just know when there's a "Defense" of that kind there's going to be trouble. It's going to be "ironic," or it's going to actually be a defense of virginity, or it's going to be horrible in some other way you could never have foreseen.

And it's true: it is a mixed business, though not quite in any of those ways. It's main good quality is that like all Mencken's writing, it's hilarious. The main thesis is that women are smart -- really smart, like competent and intelligent and artistically sensitive. Mencken hated posers, and he gleefully points out all the ways in which women are more realistic and open-eyed judgers of what is going on, unlike men who are blinded by vanity. He thinks it's hilarious that women's superior judgment is called "women's intuition" instead of just, Hey, women are paying attention and have good practical judgment.

Money quote for this part of the book:

"If the work of the average man required half the mental agility and readiness of resource of the work of the average prostitute, the average man would be constantly on the verge of starvation." -- Mencken, A Defense of Women.

There are some other good parts, like when he talks about the moronic myth that women don't actually enjoy sex and just submit to it in marriage. He's merciless about the pretensions that keep the myth alive -- the way in which the myth functions in the pressures for monogamous marriage. It's admirable the way he tries to provide evidence for his claim -- which, indeed, in 1918 in a book for publication is not easy.

The book is also full of rage and hatred. Mencken was driven crazy by the ways in which he thought marriage benefited women way more than men, and furious about the fact that a woman who doesn't hold up her end of the marriage contract by cooking good meals and stuff wouldn't get in any trouble.

Not that he supported any changes to the system. It was appalling to him that women were so dependent on men and lived off of them like parasites, but it also was appalling to him that ugly, mannish suffragettes were trying to fight for voting, equality, work and all those sorts of things. That, for me, was probably the worst part of the book, that sense that sure, a woman could work, and could certainly be good at it, but only if she was going to give up on being attractive. What a sucky choice that is. And yet, I feel like you see it all the time, even now, people who think that way.

But the best aspect of this book is that in it, men and women both come off as The Other, both are The Second Sex, and truly, this is something only someone with Mencken's crazy clear-eyed and brutally honest approach can succeed with. Even now, when you read about the sexes, women are always The Other sex -- always discussed as if men are normal, default, human, and women are somehow interesting in how they diverge from that.

It drives me nuts, and I was thrilled to see Mencken treating both men and women as if they were absurd deviations from anything that would make any sense. I've already mentioned male vanity, which Mencken found preposterous and relentless. He is also merciless on the subject of men's inability to govern their concerns with practicality, noting with scorn that any man with a mistress on the side necessarily gets into hot water -- unless, as the French do, they simply let their wives manage everything.

The most striking example of this is when he talks about male nobility and honor. He notices the way that men are constantly going on about fair play this and honor that, and acting like this proves their essential superiority to women who naturally just fight tooth and nail. His theory about the source of this is that men feel manipulated in the marriage chase, in which women come after them with honed techniques, deception, and really, everything they've got. They express their aversion to this practice in a confused way, by saying that "women have no sense of honor."

But men, he says, also have no sense of honor -- as long as anything real is at stake. It's only in gambling and such nonsense that men really act honorably. "The history of all wars is a history of mutual allegations of dishonorable practices, and such allegations are nearly always well-grounded." As long as anything is really at stake, men fight just as tooth and nail as women. One sees it in women's social interactions only because it is in social interactions that women's very lives are at stake -- in 1918, indeed, a woman's ability to marry was frequently her means of staying sheltered and fed.

Mencken admires the fighting spirit of women, which he takes as evidence that they're less civilized than men. Since in true Nietzschean fashion he took civilization to be " a mere device for regimenting men," whose "perfect symbol is the goose-step," this seems to be high praise indeed.

Mencken was merciless about the idiocy of marriage, saying that no man of any intelligence would ever get caught up in it, and that it represented "the end of hope." So it is, of course, amusing that he did eventually get married himself: to a woman named Sara Haardt, who was a writer, a professor of English (at Goucher college), and a gentle and genteel Southern woman. They were very happy, and wrote lots of letters, and traveled around quite a bit, before she died a few years later at a young age of tuberculosis.

For some reason, Sara Haardt doesn't have her own Wikipedia page. Surely if the minor characters of Beavis and Butthead can have a page, we can spare a few electrons for Ms. Haardt. Can't we?

Is Amiability a Virtue?

2011-05-16T12:41:00.000-04:00

Is amiability a virtue? I think Yes. Not only is it a virtue, it may be the most important virtue of the 21st century.

I figure the canonical text for thinking about amiability has to be Pride and Prejudice, and what it teaches us is instructive -- indeed parts of the book read like a philosophical treatise. Most obviously, we have The Moral of the Story -- or one of them anyway. You remember Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, in an initially fraught relationship, teach one another a couple of lessons on their way to romantic happiness. And you remember that throughout, Darcy, who is cold and proud, is contrasted with his friend Mr. Bingley, who is the picture of amiability. The simple version might be: Darcy starts off being less amiable, he becomes more so, and this is good.

I think this is right, but it's a little complicated. Because Darcy's qualities are complex. His early qualities present a combination of things. He doesn't ask after people; he doesn't dance at balls; he has total confidence in his own judgment and never seeks advice; and he has a keen sense of his own superiority.

When Darcy changes, he doesn't change all of these qualities. Far from it. He learns to be gracious to people. He asks after Elizabeth's family; talks to her friends -- indeed, makes her family and friends feel valued, welcome and respected.

But he is still a man who knows his own judgment and never seeks advice -- and we think he probably has a sense of superiority. Even after the transformation, Elizabeth's father says something about how even if he had his doubts about the impending marriage (which he doesn't, really), Mr. Darcy is a man to whom one can refuse nothing.

So in this context, amiability need not mean being flexible or accommodating in any deep way. This view is supported by the amusing and philosophical exchange between Darcy, Bingly, and Elizabeth about whether it is better to change one's mind solely on the urging of a friend -- a friend who offers no reasons or arguments one can assess for one's self.

Darcy of course suggests not. To which Elizabeth says, "To yield readily -- easily -- to the persuasion of a friend is no merit with you." And Darcy replies, "To yield without conviction is no compliment to the understanding of either." Elizabeth protests: oughtn't friendship itself go for something?

It might be thought that in Darcy's transformation, this is one of the things that he changes: that he allows the persuasion of a friend alone to have merit with him. But I don't think so. This is, instead, one of Elizabeth's changes. She trusts Wyckam, but when she yields to his persuasion of what to believe, she makes a fundamental error, and comes to see it as such.

So I think the book presents the view that amiability is good, but amiability does not mean listening to your friends and taking their views into consideration without reasons.

But neither is amiability merely a matter of nice manners. It goes beyond nice manners, because in addition to being pleasant, amiability is a way of respecting people. This, it seems to me is the sentiment expressed here. Darcy's problem is partly that he doesn't respect people who aren't in his high class of society. But his problem is also that when he does respect them, he fails to communicate this to them. What he must learn is how to do this, and one does it by asking after people, dancing with them at balls, making people feel welcome.

The reason this is a twenty-first century virtue is that we're sorely in need of communicating respect for others through kindness, attention, and interest. "Respect" for people has somehow come to be associated with leaving them alone, but everyone knows how it feels to be left alone -- it feels awful. And I'd venture to say that the worst days of most people's lives come from being treated without amiability. Someone is just dismissive, or ignores you, or doesn't smile back, or acts like they're in charge or better than you. It's a horrible feeling.

Being amiable isn't always easy, and sometimes it means being kind and attentive when you're in a bad mood. But this just goes to show: it's not a trivial thing, it's an actual virtue. Try it out for yourself: at the mall, at the post office, at work, even -- gasp! -- on the internet. You'll make the world a better place.

The One-Sex Solution, Or, What If Men Could Get Pregnant?

2011-05-08T16:58:00.000-04:00

This statue is called Sleeping Hermaphroditus, it's a Roman copy of a Greek original. Pretty, isn't it?

I've always thought that human life would be substantially improved if there was only one sex instead of two. I don't mean doing away with the whole sex concept. Au contraire. I mean every person would have the full sexual equipment of both women and men. As for pregnancy, you could mix and match it however you wanted: in a partnership of A and B, A could be the pregnant one or B could.

Think of the advantages. No gender inequality. No books like that "Men are from Mars" book. Shared magazine racks. Total non-mystery about how the genitals of other people work. With a full set of your own, you'd know just what was going on with everyone else.

One of the huge advantages, I think, would be the way things would change if everyone could get pregnant. Because even just being in a state of being possible to impregnate -- a state most women live in for most of their lives -- gives you a particular way of relating to the world.

For one thing, think for a second of the enormous trust women place in the social contract and in men. Forget bars and late evenings: every time we go out of the house we trust men not to rape us and get us pregnant against our wishes. And sure, you might say, if you're raped you could have an abortion. Sure, but obviously: not everyone can, not everyone wants to, and jeez, that is not something that is a walk in the park under any circumstances. And yes, there are laws against rape. But not every guy is going to get caught, and not every guy is even going to care.

To some extent, of course, there are parallels with men. A man does trust other people not to assault and kill him. But I think these only go so far. A person has to be pretty dead set on mayhem to kill another -- it's always astonishing to me, actually, how often men who are brawling and fighting will defer to norms of "fair play" and fail to just annihilate each other. Rape is so much less risky. A guy can always say it was consensual. And let's face it, it's way easier to rape someone than to kill them. Unlike assault that doesn't end in death or dismemberment, rape can cause your entire life to change unalterably. You may now be carrying, inside you, a small dependent proto-person who is actually related to your rapist.

So right off the bat, I feel this colors how I relate to the world. For my life to make sense I have to live in a community that is based on mutual trust and reciprocal respect. Mutual threat containment isn't really going to be enough. The actual social relations between people matter a huge amount.

Then, too, in the case where you want to get pregnant, think of how immediately and closely you have to depend on other people in the early infant stages of the process. Imagine trying to feed yourself, all alone, while taking care of a small infant. I don't mean going to the ATM -- I mean if you were truly alone and not in a society. Virtually impossible. You're going to have to depend on people to help you out.

What these things have in common is a kind of vulnerability and interdependence. They make me feel like being somewhat vulnerable to others and interdependent on them is a natural state of things, and not some pathological state that has to be negotiated and escaped from. And I think this is true in a basic way of people -- it's just that being a woman it's more obvious.

By the way, of course this vulnerability colors how women approach having casual sex. I'm always amazed at the way people assume that because women are more leery of casual sex, they must not want it as much as men. Maybe they do and maybe they don't -- but you're not going to read that off from their behavior at bars. Because for every act of casual sex women have, they go home with the possibility of a new proto-person growing inside them. It's a substantial risk to take with a person you hardly know.

Actually, I've always been a little surprised at how little the possibility of a proto-person seems to concern the average guy. Because sure, the woman carries it, but assuming she carries it to term, you too could be parent to a new infant. A lof of guys seem never to think about this or don't care. Given the laws on child support this is really puzzling.

Anyway, the one-sex solution would solve all these difficulties, too, and make it all equalized. Everyone would be a possible pregnant person, and everyone would be a possible mom. It's a win-win situation. Just think how we'd all get along!

I'm A First-Derivative Sort Of Girl, And Maybe You Are Too

2011-05-04T16:39:00.001-04:00

Here's what it's like to be me.

Suppose I start at a 0 baseline. I'm not sure what we're measuring but maybe something like pleasure. I don't know what 0 is but it doesn't matter. Just say 0 is now.

Now imagine I have a glass of wine, and as I start drinking, I experience an increase in pleasure. The whole time I'm drinking pleasure is going up. This makes me happy and content. In fact, as long as the pleasure is going up, I'm happy and content.

If the pleasure starts to go down, because I'm sobering up, I experience unhappiness and discontent. Not, I think, because the pleasure isn't there -- it is -- but because it is going down.

This inclines me to say: for me, it's the first-derivative that counts.

Remember the first-derivative? It's the rate of change of a function, or if you're looking at a graph, it's the slope of the line tangent to the function. Like in this cute picture,

the first-derivative is negative on the left hand side, gets closer to zero toward the middle and gets positive and higher as you go along the right hand side.

So the way it is for me, my happiness and contentment correlate not with the pleasure -- in this case the parabola -- but with it's derivative -- whether it's going up or down.

It's not just pleasure it's everything. It doesn't matter how much money I have; what I want is to be increasing. It doesn't matter how fit I am, what I want is to be becoming more fit. What I don't want it to be becoming less rich and less fit; even if the static measure of these is high, it doesn't help. I'm a first-derivative sort of girl.

I guess you could say, too, that I'm a future-oriented sort of person. It matters less where I am than where I'm going.

This way of being has obvious and immediate problems, and you can probably see what they are right away. You can't increase pleasure forever -- indeed, you can't even increase it much in any given day. No matter how high your levels of wealth and achievement, there are going to be plenty of days when they're static or decreasing. Indeed, it is often when these things are at their highest that they start to waver or go down a bit, meaning that negative happiness and contentment result from high levels of actual well-being. What a pain in the ass.

When I get discouraged about it though, I always remind myself that at least I'm not a second derivative sort of girl. Because think about what that would mean. To feel happy and content, you'd have to not only experience your pleasure and well-being going up, you'd have to feel that the rate at which they were going up was increasing. And you'd feel bad as soon as that increase started to slow down.

It must be really hard to be a second-derivative sort of person. It's not only like you have to keep drinking and not sober up to feel OK (as the first-derivative person does); it's that you have to keep drinking more and more quickly. Maybe this is what it's like for Robert Downey Junior, who just couldn't stop taking more and more drugs. It sounds horrible.

So overall, I'm grateful for being a first-derivative sort of girl. It's not so bad, and I bet if people were honest most of them would turn out to be first-derivative people too. So at least there's a lot of company around here.

It's A Stilettos/Teva World

2011-04-26T19:42:00.000-04:00

This post is about shoes, but it is only metaphorically about shoes. Style-shy people, bear with me.

If you've shopped for women's shoes in the last, oh, seven years, you've maybe noticed something funny.

Super-sexy shoes? Check. There are outrageous heels all over the place, usually with delicate straps for maximum impracticability.

"Comfortable walking shoes"? Check. I guess "Tevas" are so 1990s, but Birkenstocks are still around, and companies like Nike are all over this market. Oh right - it's CLARKS now:

But if you want something in-between -- I mean, something kind of comfortable and kind of stylish -- you're pretty much SOL.

Amazingly, when it comes to women's shoes, you're more likely to find UNCOMFORTABLE casual shows than you are to find comfortable dressy ones. Have you noticed this? Style trends like the narrow-but-wedge-shaped heel and the open-no-strap-concept both make shoes less dressy and less sexy and at the same time less sturdy and less comfortable.

Wedge heel: discomfort without the high style.

No backstrap and wedge heel together!

To me this is like full-calorie beer that sucks. "Tastes bad!" "No, it's more filling!"

So this thing about shoes has been driving me crazy for years. Luckily I have a few pairs of shoes that have moderate but shapely heels and nice elegant straps and I just bring those to the shoe guy to get fixed over and over and over and over.

But it was only today that it struck me, that this isn't just a problem with women's shoes, it's the same problem with everything in modern life.

It's like there are only two ways to live: total loser and Jay Gatsby.

If you don't have a job, you can sleep on your parents' sofa and drink beer and complain, and you can daydream about and plan for the day when you become the big cheese. Then when you go to work you have to find that ticket to the top. Then if, god forbid, you lose your job, it's like you're catapulted back from aspirational-land to loser-land.

People in aspirational-land are devastated to be sent back to loser-land, and rightly so. But it didn't have to be like this. If you lose your job as some kind of cubicle management guy, and you need money to feed your kids, you might consider working at something else, like a waiter, or sales-clerk, or -- god forbid, janitor or something. But in the modern world, those jobs suck. So doing them is a kind of super-double-demotion.

Those jobs suck because we've made them this way, steadily eroding the protections, the money, and the respect that made those jobs -- and could make them again -- completely reasonable respectable jobs.

I feel like a person who loses an office job should be thinking to himself, Jeez, why are all the ordinary jobs so crappy? and why does a person who does them get so little respect? But no one seems to think that. They just all freak out at being in what they take to be loser-land instead of aspirational-land.

It's the same thing with people owning and renting houses. I mean, it's sad if you lose your house because you can't afford it, but honestly, it's not the end of the world. You can rent an apartment, just like lots of people. I did this for years and you know what? It's totally fine. It's only because we've set up home-ownership as some kind of sine-qua-non for American middle class life that this feels like some kind of caste-lowering tragedy.

You can be a Stiletto in this world, or an ugly comfort shoe, but I'm sorry, there's nothing in between.

Kantians Vs. Humeans: What If It Were Real?

2011-04-10T11:24:00.000-04:00

Maybe you know something about Immanuel Kant and David Hume. Two towering figures, with completely different ways of seeing the world -- especially when it comes to the nature of reason and desire.

Immanuel Kant

In the imaginary comic book version of western philosophy, Kant is a big, well-groomed, guy wearing a big letter sweater with an R on it for Reason and Rationality. Kant thought that reason alone could tell you how to act: it doesn't matter whether you want to lie, or whether you care about the consequences of lying, or who you're lying to, reason tells you that lying is wrong.

The details are complicated. But what I'm interested in here isn't so much the morality part as the choosing to act part. In Kantian philosophy, the idea is that because we are free and can reflect, we can only act when we have rationally endorsed the law, or principle, of our action. So, for instance, suppose you have a desire to eat bacon. That desire does not give you a reason to act, all alone. Instead, because you are able to think about your decision, you have to ask yourself whether to endorse this desire -- do you have a policy of eating bacon whenever you feel like it? Or a policy of only sometimes eating bacon when you feel like it? Or never? You have to reason about whether to act on the desire. So ultimately rationality sanctions your choice and you cannot act directly on a desire, even if you wanted to.

A cat doesn't face these choices because it can't reflect: the desire goes straight to the action -- unless, of course, there are competing factors like a person who sprays water in the cat's face to keep it away from breakfast. But those are just further desires -- in that case not to get wet -- and not reasons.

So, humans, unlike cats, have to act for a reason. Kant used this set up to show that, as in the example of not lying, you could have reasons for acting that were based on no desires at all. And thus we have morality and cats don't.

David Hume

Hume's idea was basically the opposite. In the imaginary comic book version of western philosophy, Hume is a kind of a mischief maker, massively intelligent but also incredibly good-natured. Hume is the "passions" guy. This makes him sound like some kind of free love guy but it's not that at all -- this means passions in the sense of any kind of feeling you have for or against something.

Hume said that "reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions." That is, reason can never be a source of information about what one ought to do -- except in the trivial sense that if you want something you might use reason to get it. Like, if you want bacon, you might use reason to figure out how to get to the store to get some and cook it up nicely.

In Hume's version of human behavior, if you don't act on your desire it's not because you didn't endorse it as in the Kantian version -- it's instead because, just like the cat, you had some competing desire. So if you love pigs, you might decide never to eat bacon. But the reason doesn't come out of nowhere, it has to be based on a desire.

This sounds complicated -- and it kind of is -- but the part I'm interested in is this. For Kantianism, the difference between you and your cat is -- or ought to be -- profound, because while your cat is all about desire, you are all about reason and rationality. For Hume, the difference between you and your cat is ... details details. You're basically the same: wanting stuff and trying to get it. The difference is just you can talk and think effectively about the future. If your cat had access to these abilities you guys would be the same.

Now there are a lot of philosophical questions about which I have no strong intuitive feeling. But this isn't one of them.

Because I am with Hume. I am so with Hume on this question I have trouble making the other side sound good. You tell me I'm a bundle of competing desires who uses reason to try to figure out what best to want, you tell me that when I act like a nice moral person instead of a moral monster, it's because I basically care about other people, you tell me that while it might be perverse to want what is bad for me overall, it is not irrational, and I'm like, Yes, That Is Me. That is how I experience the world.

It's normal in philosophy to think of these two views as competing theories about what we all are like.

But I have this peculiar and frightening daydream in which it's not two theories about the same group of people, but instead that there are two kinds of people in the world: people who actually act on reason alone -- the Kantians -- and people who are just animals who also happen to have speech centers, day planners and the internet -- the Humeans.

I figure the way it happened is like this. Evolution gave us early humanoids, who became Humeans, and who gradually evolved the cognitive abilities that allow us to plant crops, play backgammon, and write Lolita.

Then at some point, long long ago, aliens came. These aliens were super-Kantians -- which means they not only could act on reason alone, but always did so. Temptation, lust, gluttony, the love of addictive drugs -- these things were totally unknown to them. Valuing rational nature, which they had, they did what they had to do to perpetuate it.

At this point the details are a little foggy. Did the Kantians have to mate with the Humeans to ensure the propagation of their species? Did the Humeans trick them into having sex with them? Not clear. But whatever happened, the Kantians passed on their rationality to some descendants, who are some of us. And now here we all are, driving each other crazy.

At the very least, there's an element of fear. If you're a Kantian, I imagine the image of humans as driven by desire is very scary. I mean, it's one thing if the desires are for peaceful harmonious living and so on. But there are also desires for mayhem and violence. What's to stop us from killing each other? Just the contingent fact that we generally like peaceful co-existence? That sounds so flimsy!

But if you're a Humean, the image of humans as driven by reason is also scary. Because if the question is what's to stop us from killing each other, and the answer is "it would be irrational," that hardly seems any better. It almost seems worse. Because it invites the reply, So What? The mental image of a world of people who refrain from hurting me not because they desire peaceful coexistence and care about others, but because reason requires them to do so -- well, that is a cold, cold world.

I hope we can manage our mutual suspicion without any big show-down. Because you can see how the fight would be deathly in its being so evenly-matched: knowing one's behavior is based in reason gives a person tremendous confidence that he is doing the Right Thing, a confidence that overrides all kinds of human impulses. But, of course, we all know that feeling and desire, when they're strong enough, override everything.

In my Humean way I'm all for peaceful coexistence. If you're a Humean too, you're already with me. If you're a Kantian, try to remember: we Humeans may be more variable and less predictable than you, but we have our good qualities, and most importantly, we care about you.

Better Living Through Self-Absorption

2011-04-01T17:21:00.000-04:00

One thing that's always bothered me about the self-help and therapy establishment is how often the techniques for feeling better seem like they're really techniques for becoming more of an asshole.

Now, now, not always of course. And obviously, there are many people in the world for whom the actual right treatment probably is to become more of an asshole. I mean, if your problem is no self-esteem, and you hate yourself or feel guilty all the time, learning to care less about other people is probably just what you need. I'm the last person to begrudge you that.

But it's a mode that seems to me more widespread than I'd have thought was warranted.

For one thing, there's this huge emphasis on individualism. Like, it's really important to be happy on your own terms and not need anyone else. But this strikes me as really peculiar. What kind of relationship can you have with someone who really, when it comes down to it, can take it or leave it? Being dependent on other people is a natural state of affairs, and being dependent on the people closest to you is a good way to organize your life. I wrote about this before, so it must be true.

What we need isn't lessons on being independent. What we need is lessons on how to be a person who functions well in interdependent relationships. As in, how to be yourself, and still be part of a partnership, at the same time. As far as I can tell, you'll learn more about that from L. M. Montgomery than you will from anywhere else.

Then there's believing all these good things about yourself. I bought this self-help book that is based on cognitive therapy. One of the things it instructs you to do is to look for alternate beliefs from the ones that are making you feel bad, and to seek out evidence for those alternate beliefs. If you think your colleagues is giving you a dirty look because she's mad you took the last doughnut and thinks you're a greedy slob, you might form a new belief -- that she's just got a funny look on her face because she's having a bad day. Then you might look for evidence, like she was reprimanded for being late or something and that's why she's having a bad day and that's why she's upset.

I know I'm being hopelessly reality-based, but it really bothered me that there was no exploration of the possibility that your original beliefs are true. In the ordinary world seeking evidence to support a belief you've just decided to hold is considered just bad reasoning -- it's a way of just being wrong about the way the world is.

Isn't it strange that to feel better about yourself you should willfully ignore evidence that you're making other people unhappy?

There was an excellent New Yorker article recently about an inventive So Cal therapist who treats actors, writers, agents ... all the Hollywood types. He teaches his clients techniques like "Dust" -- in which you imagine all the other people are covered in a thick layer of dust like they've been sitting there inert for years and years -- and "Fuck You" in which you imagine all your critics and you imagine screaming "Fuck you" at them over and over.

It's not surprising to me that you can feel happier and more successful by systematically downplaying the importance of other people, by pretending they're not real, or not people, or by practicing telling them to fuck off. But unless you're starting off at empathy 400 percent, how is this not going to make you just another successful asshole?

Confidence makes everyone feel good. But confidence without self-doubt is a recipe for disaster.

Late Night Comedy and Midafternoon Philosophy

2011-03-17T16:16:00.000-04:00

Tina Fey in a "philosophical" mood.

I am loving the recent Tina Fey essays in The New Yorker, in which she talks about motherhood, working, comedy, all the important stuff.

And I have to say that I had a frisson of ... recognition? anxiety? pleasure? when I read her essay on late night comedy and men and women, and it occurred to me: many of these things apply equally well to my own work of being a professional academic philosopher.

Fey: "Only in comedy does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity."

Wow, right? Because believe me, in philosophy, an obedient white girl from the suburbs -- a girl of any kind from anywhere -- definitely counts as diversity. We're, like, one of the least gender balanced disciplines in the university.

Fey: "There is a difference between male and female comedy writers, and I'm going to tell you what it is: the men urinate in cups."

OK OK obviously no philosopher that I know pees in cups, and certainly no one leaves it around, as Fey puts it, "to evaporate back into his body through the pores on his face." Of course not.

And yet, I feel like there is something about doing philosophy that -- well, that encourages guys to be extra comfortable in their guyishness, in a way that doesn't seem to happen in other, more gender-balanced disciplines like English. Like, philosophy guys feel comfortable taking off their shoes at talks. There's a lot of rough-and-tumble style vocal arguments and trash-talking. Mountain climbing, scuba-diving, and hiking are high on the list of philosopher hobbies. It's a blue-jeans-wearing, Star-Trek-watching, electric-guitar-playing kind of discipline.

Fey: "You have to let people see what wrote. It will never be perfect, but perfect is overrated."

Probably all the academic disciplines are like this, but it can be a hard lesson to learn, just as it was for Fey. A maybe brilliant essay that isn't written down is no use at all; a pretty good one that's been published and read is. So: Don't fuss. Let it go.

The process of evaluation is also parallel. Some people gather in a big room; everyone listens to stuff being presented; those people judge whether the stuff is good. It's a lot like a colloquium -- though, I'm grateful that for the time being at least whether you look good isn't supposed to be part of the evaluation (Lesson number 5: "Television is a visual medium")

As I said, I had a mixed reaction to these similarities. Mixed partly because in a way I think it would be good if philosophy could become more like comedy. I mean, more accessible, more interesting, more fun. More like something your average person would enjoy watching/listening to/doing over a couple of cocktails.

But in another way, I think philosophy is a little too much like comedy already. Engaging personal presentation style is really valued, and lots of the most highly regarded scholars really "wow" their audiences with clever power-point slides and cute quips. Just reading an intelligent and interesting paper isn't enough any more -- you're supposed to have the chops to get up there and really put on a show.

And because philosophy is so abstract, there isn't much in the way of a standard of evaluation beyond "other philosophers thought this was good." I mean, the heart of our work isn't usually archival, or experimental, or textual ... it's having ideas. Whether the ideas are good is always evaluated by whether other people think they're significant, interesting, and clear.

But the thing is that, unlike in comedy, those evaluations have to be made by other philosophers -- indeed, by other specialists. So there's never any chance to check out what you got on a bigger playing field, to be vindicated in a way that doesn't fit with what the other "experts" think. It's the kind of thing that, if you've already got a gender imbalance, tends to encourage a gender imbalance.

Fey tells a great story about wanting to do a skit about "Kotex classic" -- an imagined return to the bulky belted maxi pads of the 1960s. The guys, she says, couldn't really picture it -- because, she suddenly realized, they didn't really know what those pads were like, because they were guys. But they listen, they do the skit, it's a success. She was, in a sense, proven right.

For me, it's one of the hardest things about philosophy: there is never any "proven right." Other philosophers either like your ideas or they don't; if they don't, there's no experiment, no proof, no live audience that's going to come along and prove them wrong.

It's just: sorry, game over.

Down With Optimism, Healthy Living, And A Positive Outlook On Life

2011-03-08T19:12:00.000-05:00

Rumpole of the Bailey, all dressed up for court.

Optimism, Healthy Living, And A Positive Outlook On Life: I'm sick of all three.

You know, a couple of years ago, I was feeling depressed about getting older and being middle aged and all that sort of thing and I happened to pick up those books by John Mortimer about Rumpole of the Bailey. Maybe you know the Rumpole character? He's an old British defense lawyer, always complaining, always angry, but always struggling to get his client off and somehow always conveying a kind of interest in the important things in life.

The genius of Mortimer is that he makes you think Rumpole is an appealing guy with a kind of nice life, even though the list of particulars is staggeringly grim. Rumpole -- or so he says -- doesn't like his wife. He likes his kid, but his kid lives a million miles away in America. He's not a very successful lawyer. He is overweight and has health problems. It sounds like the grimmest thing ever.

But it's not. What Rumpole loves is a glass of cheap red wine -- or well, let's say three to four glasses of cheap red wine. He drinks in a pub after work where he often jokes around with his colleagues -- both the ones he likes and the ones he doesn't. He also obviously loves his work, and is proud as a peacock when he pulls out a surprise win. And he has a kind of ... I don't know but a kind of honesty. Rumpole is actually a man with integrity, who says what he thinks and fights for what he thinks is right, usually against forces of inanity, bureaucracy, superficiality, and petty-mean-spiritedness. He doesn't usually win, but so what? He goes and has his cheap red wine and then goes home.

This cheered me enormously. Because I thought Oh yeah, whatever else you got, as long as you got a glass of wine after work with friends and some people to joke around with, that's an OK life all on its own. You don't have to be optimistic, striving, struggling to improve, to live the good life. You just have to find some stuff you enjoy and enjoy it. If what you enjoy isn't really good for you health-wise, well, big deal. You're going to die eventually anyway.

Healthy Living and a Positive Outlook on Life, it turns out, are also overrated. As Susan Jacoby points out in her new book, it's a myth that by healthy living we're somehow guaranteed to have a healthy active time in later years. Lots of people get sick for no reason, and by the time you really get old, odds are excellent you won't be in good shape whatever you do. All the sacrifice? not worth it.

Astonishingly, even the church of A Positive Outlook on Life is crumbling. Actual empirical research showed that the people who live longest aren't the happiest most positive ones; they're the conscientious ones. That's right: worry, and don't be happy. Happy people took risks and died. Worryers made plans and stayed alive.

I was listening to BBC comedy show The News Quiz the other day and the always awesome Sandi Toksvig (she's Danish and a lesbian! With a commanding voice and a dry wit! How cool is that? I love her) said that her father always carried around a copy of a Punch cartoon in which two old guys are sitting around doing nothing in some old-guy-chairs and one says to the other, To think that if we hadn't given up drinking and smoking we'd have missed all this!

Yeah, exactly.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go have some wine, waste some time, and do some quality worrying.

Sexism And Misogyny Are Not The Same Thing

2011-02-27T18:52:00.000-05:00

What would a post on women and France be without a picture of Catherine Deneuve?

I just returned from a short trip to Paris, France. To me, one of the most puzzling things about Paris is that even though it's a bustly city with a ton of people, crowded subways, and -- let's face it -- somewhat uncomfortable and cramped interiors, being there is somehow relaxing. Why is this?

There are a few obvious things. Like, Paris is well-organized and beautiful. Signs tell you not only when the next subway train is coming but when the one after that is coming as well. Just walking along one of those tidy streets, with those lovely building facades, all a little different but sort of the same -- very relaxing. When there are a lot of people somewhere, you can guarantee that someone has thought out how it should work.

The ads are interesting, and pretty, and they aren't everywhere.

There are things that are less obvious, though, and I think one of them is that while French culture may be sexist, it isn't really misogynist. That is, while men and women are treated and regarded differently, and women do a lot of the domestic duties (often in addition to working) and there are the same kind of gender imbalances we have here in North America, in France, people basically like women, feel warmly toward them, and enjoy having them around.

This liking of women -- it's something that seems on the wane here in North America. There's this whole guy thing here that I don't really understand but that seems to catch us in this double-bind. If you're a woman who doesn't put a lot of effort into pleasing men with your appearance, then men are hostile on grounds that you're not pleasing them -- or, sometimes, you're just invisible. But if you're a woman who does put a lot a lot of effort into pleasing men with your appearance, then you're either some kind of tease -- and men are hostile over being baited -- or you're a slut -- and men are somehow even more outraged by that than by being baited.

Talk about a no-win situation.

Now, I don't mean "all guys" or "most guys" do this -- certainly not. But there's enough guys expressing these views, in the right contexts, for it to be a real thing. Think about women who are on TV. If they're not dressing up, forget it. But if they are dressing up, forget it on the other side: they're "inappropriate" or "slutty" or whatever. And if you're dressing up and you look really good and you're unavailable, that's it: you have to be brought down a peg.

Actually I was thinking about this the other day when that annoying article came out in the New York Times about how these studies had "shown" that attached men find women who are ovulating less attractive than non-ovulating women, even though for unattached men it's the reverse. This was based on attached men rating some woman questioner as less sexy if they were attached and more if they weren't. The conclusion the researchers came to was something like, See how mother nature makes it possible for us to be in long term steady relationships!

I'm always so irritated by articles like this. I mean, consider the very first paragraph of the article:

"The 21-year-old woman was carefully trained not to flirt with anyone who came into the laboratory over the course of several months. She kept eye contact and conversation to a minimum. She never used makeup or perfume, kept her hair in a simple ponytail, and always wore jeans and a plain T-shirt."

Are you seriously telling me that these guys think that being quiet and keeping your eyes down can't be a way of flirting?! Do they live under rocks, these people? I mean, I get that for the purposes of the study, all that matters is that she acted the same way with each guy, but honestly, can't you just say that? And that jeans-and-a-simple-ponytail business. As if the whole Playboy empire wasn't based on the sexiness of the girl next door. How stupid.

And then the conclusions, geez. I mean, sure, maybe that's what made the guys rate the woman lower. But couldn't there be a bunch of other hypotheses? Like, they found her more attractive, but because they felt not free to flirt with her, they wanted to take her down a peg? "Meh, big deal, she's not so great." Really, who knows? But isn't this at least as plausible? How come we always have to leap to these stupid conclusions about What Mother Nature Intended?

OK OK back to the theme. My point is just that you can have sexism without hostility toward women, and that for whatever reason, we seem to have some hostility toward women 'round these parts. I haven't even mentioned the most uncomfortable hypothesis lurking here: that we have more hostility because we have less sexism, that somehow it's the demand for equality that is making everyone so mad. I haven't discussed it because I don't know if it's true, and I don't even know how one would figure out whether it's true.

But as to the hostility itself, trust me, if you're a woman, it kind of wears you out.

Genius, Danger, And The Meaning Of Life: What's Wrong With Boring?

2011-02-19T09:12:00.000-05:00

Gaugin, Still Life With Three Puppies.

I try be generous in spirit when people start talking about the meaning of life.

The reason I have to try to be generous is that it's so hard to say anything interesting and plausible about this question that I'm always annoyed by the answers people give.

The reason, though, that I do try to be generous is it's so hard to say anything interesting and plausible about this question that ... well, I feel like critcizing is like shooting fish in a barrel.

But I had to really struggle to be generous when reading Ronald Dworkin's discussion of the question in a recent New York Review of Books.

It wasn't so much Dworkin's idea of life as a kind of attempted performance that got to me -- though, indeed, I had some difficulties there too -- but more the idea that to live a good life requires some kind of striving, achievement, a rising to the challenge.

He puts it this way:

In my own view, someone who leads a boring, conventional life without close friendships or challenges or achievements, marking time to his grave, has not had a good life, even if he thinks he has and even if he has thoroughly enjoyed the life he has had.

Later, he talks about the good of accepting risks in a good life. The kind of case he mentions has become a standard philosophical example -- though people seem to disagree about what it's an example of, exactly. The example is the Great Artist who has to decide whether to Sacrifice His Family to Pursue His Great Art -- something like what Gaugin supposedly did when he left his wife and five children alone to go off to paint full-time.

It's commonly thought -- and Dworkin agrees -- that when the Great Artist really does produce Great Art, the sacrifice is vindicated. It's somehow worth it. Dworkin goes further, though, and says that not only does the success of such a venture make for a good life, even the attempt at such a venture makes for a good life. We might value daring in life, even if it risks making our lives worse, just as entrepreneurs and dare-devil skiers do. So the Gaugin types -- they're really onto something.

But look, we can't all be special, can we? It really bugs me, the idea that to have a good life you have to be trying really hard to create something special and magical, bucking convention, striving to really make it something distinctive and unusual. Like, it's not enough to be a nice person and good parent and generally helpful kind of guy or gal. No, to have a good life you have to climb Mount Everest, or travel among some undiscovered tribes, or fight in some war, or discover some new type of beetle or something.

Can we just pause to tally up the problems that have arisen from this way of thinking? Places like Mount Everest are becoming overrun with adventure seekers; the poor undiscovered tribes who just want to be left alone have had their habitat ruined by oil-seeking outsiders; young people around the world are set to fighting against and killing one another, and other young people who aren't all that interested in beetles are full of self-loathing and worry because, really, all they want to do is have a nice time, maybe have a beer and watch the game.

It seems to me what we need around here are more models for the good life that aren't full of adventure and striving. Models that show us how to celebrate the ordinary day to day things, like eating dinner with people, going for a walk, and looking at interesting stuff in a museum or a field or whatever.

Sure, you can turn any of those activities into a striving for achievement: "I'll make adventurous or gluttonous food! I'll walk faster, harder, longer than anyone else! I'll learn all the paintings by heart!" But doesn't that sound horrible and depressing?

As far as I'm concerned, when it comes to the meaning of live, no one has really improved on Voltaire's Candide instructing us that "we must cultivate our garden." Engage yourself in a practical pursuit, and the boring will be transformed to interesting, the flowers will entertain you, the vegetables will grow for eating, and you'll forget about all these stupid questions like what is the meaning of life.

Imaginary Diseases I Think I Have

2011-02-06T19:08:00.001-05:00

According to this site, this is a photo of Freud's actual couch. Looks kind of cozy, actually.

1. Attention Surfeit Disorder.
Attention Surfeit Disorder is, of course, paying too much attention, and being unable to stop concentrating. This happens to me a lot. I'll be driving, and scanning the scene, and something will catch my eye in the rear-view mirror. I look, I'm interested, I can't turn away. My attention lingers. What's happening to that person? Is she yelling at that guy? I wonder what's going on. The most common thing is that I'm concentrating on something in my own mind, and in that case forget it: I'm in another world.

2. Alloism.
Alloism is over-involvement with other people and what they are thinking and feeling. It's being too good at reading the expressions, faces, and emotional cues of other people. The main problem with alloism is that it wears a person out. Guy on the subway, woman at the check-out desk, kid giving me a funny look, I don't want to know what y'all are feeling; I got enough problems of my own.

3. Repression deficiency.
People with repression deficiency can't repress the uncomfortable truths that everyone else seems to just ignore all the time. Hey, everyone, did you forget that we are all going to die in the not so far away future? And we're either going to die young, or get old? And this is going to happen not just to you but to your kids and all the people you love? When I look at all the healthy repressing people out there, living their lives and not thinking about these things, I'm amazed. How do they do it?

4. Antidisposophobia.
Some people can't throw anything away. I have the opposite problem. I can't keep anything around. I hate clutter, and I fear it. I wrote about this before, how I throw away not just "real life" things but digital things too, and how I even throw away old letters and actual mementos, and how I often get carried away. I learned today that fear of throwing things away is called "disposophobia" and thus the name "antidisposophobia." Fear of clutter is evidently so much less common than fear of throwing things away that when you Google the former, what comes up is about the latter. Weird.

5. Nostalgiaphobia.
Self-explanatory.

6. Introversion.
Given that I enjoy spending time alone, often in a completely quiet house with no TV and no twitter account, and given that I get kind of worn out being with people, even when I'm very fond of them, I guess you can call me an introvert. Introversion used to be a personality trait. But these days I feel like people treat it more like a disease. Every workplace is all about being a "people person," and everyone seems to get bored and antsy without minute by minute status updates from the people they know. Even in the library people are determined to be communicating. Makes me feel like a freak.

The Modern Sad Castration Of Operatic Comedies

2011-01-30T14:02:00.000-05:00

I didn't see it at the Met, I just thought this poster by Chagall was too cool not to use.

I went to the opera, and I saw The Magic Flute. Of course it was great. It's a Mozart comedy. What's not to like?

At the same time, I gotta say that staging-wise, I got issues. My complaint is this. Going to modern productions of operatic comedies, you'd think that somehow irrationality, sex, sexism, and sexual inappropriateness were, like, so over that the audience would be mystified by their appearance. Everything weird and difficult and touchy about sex gets staged in a way to make it completely ... completely foreign. Like silly. Like, not comico-serious, as these things were clearly intended, but just comical.

In The Magic Flute, the comico-serious elements include: the idea that trusting women gets you into trouble, because women are irrational and lie; the idea that learning to become a full male adult means learning how to be cold and cruel to your girlfriend, the idea that some people are unlucky enough to never have love and sex and that's just the way it is, and the possibility that some of those unlucky people will, like the "lustful slave" Monostato, force others to have sex with them.

Can we all agree that these are all difficult and troubling things? Can we also agree that they're not at all irrelevant to modern life?

Like all great works of art, The Magic Flute doesn't tell you what to think about any of these things; it just puts them into a certain kind of context so you see them and have to think about them in a certain way.

But the production I saw just short-circuited all of that by making it unreal. In this case the unreality effect was achieved by staging the action of the opera as if it were a play-within-a-play, a cute play at an eighteenth century garden party. We're not watching Monostato; we're watching some nice young man play at being Monostato.

This way, the troubling things aren't real at all; they're rendered completely distanced from us and harmless. Now the story isn't, "Yikes, Love And Sex Make People Crazy," instead, as my friend said, the story is more like "Oh, Those Eighteenth Century People Were So Weird, Isn't It Cute And Funny?"

Right. Because now that we've had feminism and the sexual revolution everything's like hunky dory and men and women just come together with perfect understanding and part with perfect peace and nobody feels left out of the sexual lottery. Uh-huh.

Obviously I know that the distancing isn't really because people think that but probably has to do with things like "Oh, people going to the opera want a Nice Evening Out and for most people nowadays A Nice Evening Out is incompatible with thinking about things like the rape of a young beautiful woman by an ugly, unloved, and unwanted man.

Sure. But that can't be the whole story, because the operatic tragedies don't seem to run into this problem, only the comedies do. We have no problem, it seems, with the other big themes in opera. I went to see Aida last fall and it was staged in such a way as to heighten the tension about war and enslavement.

Violence is OK; it's sex we seem to be upset about. It's funny, here we are, willing to post our sex lives and love lives on Facebook and share the most intimate details, but we can't manage a post-adolescent engagement on the operatic stage.

I guess it just means in three hundred years people will be saying "Oh Those Twentyfirst Century People Were So Weird, Isn't It Cute and Funny?" Plus ça change and all that, I guess, but it seems a little sad.

I Like Human Frailties

2011-01-23T16:10:00.001-05:00


From Close Encounters of the Third Kind. These guys are cute too, don't you think?

I like human frailties. There are certain aspects of people that we sometimes treat as weaknesses, but that from a certain point of view are really endlessly endearing. It's like, if we were the pets of some super-advanced race from another planet, these are the qualities they'd see in us and say "Awww. Isn't that sweet?"

I don't know if it's because I have a more extraterrestrial outlook than your average person, but I have that feeling about people a lot. They act, and I think, OK, dumb, partial, not far-seeing, but ... somehow really sweet and endearing in their humanness.

Humans -- at least the humans we live among right now -- are obsessed with self-improvement. We're all about breaking bad habits, eating more fruits and vegetables, wasting less time on the internet. We're pretty bad at it though. Resolutions fail; self-help books don't help; a couple of months and we back in the candy drawer, munching on the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups while we look at Cute Cat Pictures on the web.

I guess there's a sense in which this is bad or discouraging, but there's also something so nice and reassuring about it. I think what's nice about it is that the reason we keep going back to these things is that we really like them. Our love of sweets, of lounging on the sofa, of cocktails, of YouTube -- it's obviously deep and profound.

And somehow it seems to me really touching and nice and sweet that among our deep and profound loves are things like foods, and idleness, and just playing around at nothing. That humans, for you: loving, pursuing, and even being made happy by, the very simplest things. It's like the sweetness of dogs when they understand they're about to go for a walk. A walk? We're going for a walk?! That is adorable, and it's nice, rather than the opposite, that we're a little like that too. It's like the way people can't stay off their cell phones. Sure, annoying, but hey -- people really really want to talk to other people, a lot. Which is sweet.

I was reminded of this reading the New York Review of Books recently. There was a review of a book by William Dalrymple called Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. The reviewer, David Shulman, says one theme of the book is that among all the weird kitschy parts of religious practice in India there is also a lot of genuine, non-kitschy, religious devotion.

To illustrate, he tells a story of his own, of visiting a conference of veteran Yogis in Hyderabad. He finds that these men, who he expects to have profound insights, instead obsess over the reception of various worldly honors and go on and on like chatterboxes with their own favorite platitudes. He then says there is one exception, an old man who speaks with long silences between sentences, "as if, after all these years, he was still searching intensely for an important truth, which he may have glimpsed once or twice." He is really disappointed and saddened by the group and their worldly behavior.

I have to say, I had pretty much the opposite reaction to this story -- at least as it was told. I'm thrilled to hear that when they get together, people who spend all their time reflecting have the same human qualities we all have -- craving love and recognition, liking to hear our own voices. It's like, Yogis, they're just like us! That's so much more life-affirming than knowing that someone who reflects a lot has to speak with long sentences in between, which in turn sounds just pompous and annoying.

So next time you're being irritated by some member of humanity who can't seem to get it together, try to take the extraterrestrial view. Humans: maybe annoying, but where would we be without them? It would be so lonely and sad.

The Andy Rooney Hour, Platitudes Edition

2011-01-16T18:48:00.000-05:00

You know what I hate? Platitudes about how to live your life. I especially hate it when people spout platitudes that they obviously don't even really believe in.

Some platitudes are kind of OK because they function as a kind of anaesthetic when bad things happen. When people say, "Well, really it's for the best," it's often not true, but I'm willing to cut them a little slack, because what they really saying is "there's no use getting all upset about it now" -- something that is true but can sound so cold when you come right out and say it.

No, the platitudes that piss me off are ones like "Live every day as if it's your last" or "Follow your bliss" or "Live in the present." Because here's the thing. The people who really do those things and don't worry about how it turns out -- they're a real problem. It's only the people who do those things and make it work that we admire. It's just a lot of hypocrisy.

Think about it. The people who really follow their bliss and don't worry about where it ends up are the ones who never help clean up, who insist on the most impractical ways of doing things, who don't cooperate or take other people's feelings into account. They're the ones that when you call them because you need a ride home, they're busy at Pilates and can't help you out.

But when people imagine following their bliss, they don't imagine being a jerk, or "just a child" like Harold Skimpole. What they imagine is more along the lines of an opera diva. You know, someone who does what they love all day, and, because they're successful at it, can pay others to take care of the practical side of life. Because they're successful, you don't notice how unhelpful they are. But without success, they'd just be annoying self-centered jerks.

Now, now, lest you think me overly dark and cynical, of course it's nice to do something in life that makes you happy. But as I've gone on about before, there is more to life than happiness. Many things we value, like caring for children, are proven to make us less happy. So can't we have a little moderation? The platitudes are always expressed as if, you know, the more the better. Gee, if a little doing what you like is good, then more of doing what you like must be better!

Obviously doesn't follow. And interestingly, the fact that it doesn't is borne out in another platitude: the importance of work-life balance. The same people who tell you to find a job that follows your bliss are the ones that will tell you how important it is to have work life balance. It doesn't make any sense. If the work is the bliss, why would you want to balance it with something else?

The answer of course is that the work isn't bliss, at least for the vast majority of us. Some work has fun aspects but most jobs are things you get paid for because they have aspects that are annoying and difficult. If they didn't have annoying difficult aspects people would just do them for free and for fun.

I'd go on about "Live every day as if it's your last" but isn't that a little like shooting fish in a barrel? "As if it's my last, you say? Bartender! Martinis for everyone, on me!"

I don't hate all platitudes. Almost once a week I say to myself, "First world problems, I have them." Great platitude. Reminds me that as crisis inducing it may feel when the internet doesn't work, the bus is late, or my favorite sweater is at the cleaners -- really, these are the problems of an almost utopian existence.

Why Don't We Have Better Designer Drugs?

2011-01-09T14:41:00.001-05:00

Just one of the millions of cool pictures of pills you find when you google images of pills. I got the image here but I don't know where they got it from or what it means.

Do we, or do we not, live in the most advanced consumer culture ever? We do.

Has there ever been a world so focused on, and so successful at, meeting the immediate desires of its citizens? There has not.

So why, exactly, am I still relying on caffeine and white wine as my go-to recreational drugs?

It's weird. In most domains we have far transcended the idea that for something to be worth buying it has to solve some problem. No one thinks shoes are just for keeping your feet from the ground; no one thinks cake is pointless because it's empty calories; no one thinks that "having a high quality TV" means you can't buy a higher quality, HD TV. We make and buy stuff that we expect to enhance our well-being, not just treat our difficulties.

But in the drug domain, we don't use this approach at all. Instead, you got two kinds of drugs: those to treat medical conditions, and those that are illegal. OK, we have three kinds of drugs: treatment, illegal and "alcohol and caffeine."

What is surprising is that the taboo against recreational drugs persists even in the face of a tidal wave of free-market, desire-satisfaction, if-it's-something-you-are-willing-to-pay-for-someone-will-make-it commodity approach to virtually everything else. I mean, you're telling me it's less weird to pay someone to carry your baby than it is to pay someone to develop some feel-good drugs?

I think the prohibition is really a lingering effect of some kind of puritanical you-shouldn't-be-having-too-much-fun kind of thinking. But there are two kinds of arguments that get trotted out for why people shouldn't take relatively harmless drugs. The first is that they're bad for you: they're addictive, they have side-effects, they'll hurt you in the long run. The second is that being fucked up is, like, somehow "letting other people down" and "not being there for them."

I hope it's obvious that the first kind of argument isn't an argument against recreational drug use, it's an argument for better recreational drugs. It's true that a lot of drugs -- recreational and therapeutic -- can be addictive and harmful, but clearly this means we need more research and better recreational drugs, ones that aren't bad for you. It's funny. I mean, in this past week's New Yorker there's a story about saving the banana from some huge blight by genetic engineering, like putting the genes of some animals and other plants into bananas so that they don't respond to the virus by killing themselves. And I'm thinking, You mean, we can put worm genes into bananas but we can't come up with an anti-depressant that doesn't cause a page of fine print conditions like decreased libido? Very strange.

The second kind of argument -- that you're letting people down -- is more complicated. Sometimes it's a sensible thing to say, like if someone is zonked out on some narcotic all day, then it's probably true that they're not really cutting it as a parent or sibling or friend or even pet owner. Even a dog can't live with someone who is out of it all the time. But here, of course, we're just back at point one, because if there were subtler recreational drugs we could feel good without being all zonked out.

Other times it's a less sensible thing to say, like when people make the claim that there's something wrong with having four glasses of wine on the weekend because gee, if something happened you wouldn't be able to drive someone somewhere, like, to the hospital. I'm sorry but that is a really weak argument. For one thing, it actually is possible to live where you don't have to drive. And secondly, Hello, You're supposed to call 911 in an emergency, not try to drive. The idea that we have to be in driving condition all the time is like driving-mania taken to an absurd extreme. Forget drug addition; that is like driving addiction.

Anyway, I was thinking about our need for better recreational drugs just the other day, when I woke feeling really tired, and also kind of sad. And on thinking it over, I realized that the reason I felt kind of sad was that I was so tired. I'm a person who really likes being involved in projects and doing stuff, and when I don't have the energy to get all involved in things, I start to muse on the pointlessness of life, and then I get depressed.

I think on this given day, I just had a bit of a cold. But it was a powerful reminder of how much a mood or feeling depends on physical elements of the body. I mean, you may be feeling sad, but maybe you're just physically worn down.

And if that's true, then wouldn't a harmless pick me up drug be a wonderful thing? You could have a whole day of being happy instead of unhappy.

Most of the recreational drugs consumer culture needs are familiar, because people have wanted them for a long time:

1. We need a kind of caffeine-like drug that has a higher quality high and doesn't make you feel bad when it wears off.

2. We need a drug that mimics the effect of alcohol but doesn't have any calories or bad health effects. Preferably one that doesn't make you feel bad or hungover when it wears off.

3. We need a kind of Adderall-for-everyone drug. A drug that makes you concentrate better, but doesn't have bad effects and doesn't make you feel bad when it wears off.

4. We need a good aphrodisiac. Don't we? Am I wrong? Preferably one that doesn't make you feel bad when it wears off.

5. How about something like nicotine? Almost perfect as is, except for the bad health effects. Oh, and the addictiveness. And make sure it doesn't make you feel bad when it wears off.

The common theme, of course, is that we need the upsides of drugs without the downsides. Shouldn't that be possible? I mean, we can put a man on the moon, yada yada yada, surely I can have my cake and eat it too?

Can't I?

Remembering The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

2011-01-03T14:21:00.002-05:00

When I was in high school, my teacher played us a record of T. S. Eliot reading his poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. It made a big impression on me. I'm not a poetry person. But there was something about it.

If I'm remembering correctly, I interpreted the poem as being about getting old, and about sex. As a sixteen year old girl, I was much concerned with both of these topics. I remember feeling acutely the sense that sense that as a girl, I would only really be youthful and attractive for a few more years. I remember the feeling every adolescent has, of how it can not be horrible to become an adult, being boring, losing one's hair, knowing one has lost the vitality of youth. How could that not be the worst thing in the world?

And I also remember identifying, to some extent, with the women in the poem, who "come and go," and with whom Prufrock has such a complex relationship, wanting their attention but somehow dismissive of them at the same time. It was one of those moments of girlhood when one is reminded of the ways in which being a woman can mean having something men want, even by doing nothing but existing, which is weird when you're young and stays weird as you get older.

I don't remember what, if anything, the teacher taught us about the poem. But I do remember vividly the sadness the poem made me feel, and the way "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons" seemed the bleakest and saddest thing ever. "Well," I thought, "that's no way to live." A message reinforced by other art experience, and of course, by rock and roll music.

But of course, now that I'm older, I know that there really is no other way of living. Even Keith Richards has stopped taking drugs and lives a quiet orderly life. Because eventually the opposite of a quiet orderly life isn't fun, it's poverty and chaos. Worse, as they say, than the alternatives.

This way of seeing things, of course, makes the poem seem even bleaker and sadder than I found it when I was young.

In the interest of science, in preparing to write this post, I checked out what other people think the poem is about, and of course it turns out there's all this complicated stuff about modernity and living the self-conscious existence of modern life that I hadn't understood at all, and about how Prufrock can't be a hero because he's worried about what other people will think of him. Which is all fine, but as usual seems to me such a guy point of view. I mean, people who don't care what others think about them aren't heroes, they're assholes, and people who aren't self-conscious around others don't know the first thing about love and infatuation. A life without the intense self-consciousness and anxiety of a crush? No life at all.

Probably I am oversimplifying something elegant and complex, and probably this is what my teacher was trying to talk about while I was daydreaming the class away imagining the women with their bare arms and bracelets and thinking about the old man walking on the beach in his cotton trousers and brooding on the tragedy that we couldn't all stay sixteen forever.

A tragedy, by the way, that I still haven't gotten over. How the rest of you are so easy-going about it, I don't understand.

The Real Self Of Love

2010-12-27T19:04:00.001-05:00

Image from a 2002 site about combining Viagra and Ecstasy. Do people still do that?

I don't know if you read that story in The New Yorker the other day, by George Saunders, about the future? It was called Escape from Spiderhead.

The story is about a guy convicted of a crime who instead of going to prison becomes a kind of designer-drug guinea pig. The main good thing about the story is the names Saunders comes up with for the drugs and technology that the guy is testing. "Verbaluce" gets you talking. "VeriTalk" makes you tell the truth. "Darkenfloxx" causes despair.

The drug they're testing makes you feel like you're in love. Like, whoever you're with when you take it, you feel superconnected to them and also like you really really want to have sex with them.

The testing is meant to feel creepy, and it does. Our hero takes the drug, sees one woman, falls in love with her, then when the drug wears off, goes completely back to baseline human indifference. Then he takes the drug again, sees another woman, falls in love with her, then when the drug wears off, goes completely back to baseline human indifference.

The drug makers' plan is to market the drug to people who can't love enough, or who love the wrong person, or who love too much, to make sure they love in just the right way. That's meant to feel creepy too, and it does.

But what exactly is so creepy about it? I was pondering this question when I started thinking about certain philosophical theories of autonomy and selfhood. Some of these theories try to articulate autonomy with reference to what a person endorses when they rationally reflect. So, for instance, suppose you smoke, but on reflection you decide that it's best to quit. Autonomy would mean quitting, in line with your rational self.

A person who fails to quit, whose desire overwhelms them, isn't really autonomous. Part of the intuition is that a desire that comes from something like an addiction comes from "outside you" since it doesn't come from your thinking self -- the self that is you. Other views dispense with the rationality part of the story but retain the idea that you and your desires can be deeply at odds, and when you are, this is a failure of autonomy. For instance, on views like Harry Frankfurt's, it is only when your desires are in line with what you want your desires to be that you are a free, autonomous person.

Now the weird thing is this: if these theories are right, then the Love Drug isn't creepy at all. Indeed, used properly, it would be an aid to a person's autonomy and well-being. Think of it this way. If you decide you ought to love your longtime spouse, and you take the drug, and it works and you love them, then you're good to go: you're desiring what you want to desire. If you want to desire one man rather than another, one woman rather than another, you take the drug, and BAM -- you're good to go. Your emotions are suddenly in line with your thoughts. A dream of unity between the emotional you, the physical you, and the rational you. It should be perfect.

So either there's something wrong with these ways of thinking about autonomy, or the creepiness is due to something else, or it's not creepy after all.

Maybe there's something to it's not being creepy after all. I mean, lots of people have said that drugs like Prozac make them feel more themselves. Why not a drug that makes you love who you want to love, and lust after who you want to lust after? Isn't that a way of being, really yourself? Actually, one might say, if you don't take the drug, you're just letting yourself be dicked around by a bunch of hormones. Aren't you?

Or maybe it only seems creepy because it happens in a lab? The love potion in Midsummer Nights Dream doesn't seem creepy in the same way. It's just sort of funny. So maybe the creepiness we feel is because we know what pharmaceutical companies are like, and they creep us out?

Or maybe there is something wrong with thinking of autonomy -- or at least well-being -- in ways that value the stable, the rational, the thoughtful, the slow, over the impulsive, the changeable, the emotional, the crazy. Because those other parts of us are still us -- and they're the real self of love. Aren't they? Or is that just an old-fashioned irrational preference for chaos?

Notes On The Title Of This Blog

2010-12-20T13:43:00.000-05:00

Weird backgammon board from gammonline.

"So," I'm often asked, "'The Kramer Is Now?' What is up with that? Is that, like, Kramer from Seinfeld?"

1. No, it's not Kramer from Seinfeld, it's a Kramer Cube, as discussed in the most under-appreciated novel ever written: Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League. The title is my homage to Cleo, the most under-appreciated heroine in noveldom. I wrote about Her Awesomeness Cleo in the first post on this blog.

2. The Kramer Cube is a device to help cure Jumping Frenchman's Disease. Our Heroine, Cleo, has a Cute Guy in her life, named Shaver. Shaver suffers from JFD, and he spends much of the novel sleeping in the Cube. This is convenient for Cleo, who then gets to run around playing hockey and having adventures. Who doesn't want a Cute Guy in a Kramer Cube in their life? Nobody.

3. There's a sidebar quote from the book on the blog front page that involves a conversation between Cleo and a nosy reporter. The reporter has come from some lifestyle magazine to do a photo-shoot-and-interview. The reporter is, of course, excited by the whole Kramer-Cube-With-Shaver-In-It. In the way of lifestyle magazine reporters, she wants details. "What's next for you two?" she asks. And Cleo says, "I don't know. I haven't thought beyond the Kramer. The Kramer is now."

4. And it's that sentiment, of not thinking beyond the Kramer, that's the important one. I'm a philosopher -- that is to say, I teach philosophy at a university and I research and publish in philosophy as an academic discipline. Philosophy is all about reason, reflection, and thinking about things. To tell you the truth, it gets to be a bit much. I mean, all that thinking can get a person down. I wrote about this before, on my old blog, in the context of the suicide of David Foster Wallace.

As usual, Hume really said it best, back in 1748:

"Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? ... I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.

Most fortunately it happens, that since Reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther."

-- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

I really like that. You get yourself out of the darkness of thinking either by "relaxing this bent of mind" or "by some avocation, and lively impression of [the] senses." Isn't Hume the greatest? Don't you think he'd have appreciated, for his backgammon game, the board at the top of this post?

5. So "The Kramer Is Now" expresses my ambivalence about reflection, and is a reminder to all of us, to Cool It With The Thinking Already.

6. I'm an "accidental" philosopher. Accidental as in "happening by chance; not planned; "nonessential or incidental." I never set out to become an expert on The Big Questions like What Is the Meaning of Life? In fact, I studied math in university and graduate school and never studied philosophy 'til I was almost thirty. I like studying philosophy a lot, but as you've understood if you've read so far, I'm not wholehearted or unambivalent about it, and I don't regard myself as being inevitably involved in the pursuit of truth or anything like that. The thing I miss most about math was the way you could go for years without being asked for your opinion about anything. In the humanities, one has to produce dozens of opinions every day. It kind of wears me out.

7. "Encounters modern life": pretty self-explanatory. Modern Life and I have a complex relationship.

8. Brenda Starr, Girl Reporter. Patricia Marino, Girl Philosopher. You get the picture.

Sex and Sexism

2010-12-13T13:30:00.000-05:00

From an article about women in video games.

I used to be a little puzzled by the connection between sex and sexism. Discussions of sexism often bring together several different things, things like discrimination against women, treating women in a way that is degrading or demeaning, and treating women as objects of sexual desire.

When I was young, it puzzled me that the first two would get put in together with the third. It seemed obvious to me that discrimination against women and treating them in a degrading or demeaning way was wrong, and really bad. Indeed, it was because this seemed obvious to me, and because I could see both things happening all the time, that I've always considered myself a feminist.

But being treated as the object of sexual desire? What's so bad about that? Don't people want to be considered attractive? Of course, for either sex, it can be annoying when someone you don't especially like starts hitting on you, and of course, it's awful when people just won't stop pestering you and it becomes harassment. But just being the object of sexual desire? How is that a problem? The question always seemed most puzzling when I considered the way men are always clamoring to be the object of sexual desire. How could what's good for them suck for us?

Not surprisingly, as I grew older and learned more about life, I came to understand that the connection between sex and sexism has to do not such much with "being treated as an object of sexual desire" but rather "being treated only as an object of sexual desire." That is, being treated as if your only possible worth or value comes in how sexually attractive you are, and in your worth as a possible sex object. If you're sexually attractive, this sucks, because you can't get men to engage with you respectfully as a whole person. If you're not sexually attractive, it sucks even more, because you can't get men to engage with you respectfully at all.

Obviously not everyone contributes to a state of affairs in which women are treated only as sexual objects, but the people who do have various methods. Men who never talk to you except to hit on you, men who remind you of your sexual status at every turn, and people of either sex who comment only on the attractiveness of women and not their other qualities all help sustain a world in which women have trouble being considered as whole persons. Even just flirting, if that's the only kind of interaction you have, helps bring about such a situation.

By the way, if you're the sort of person who wonders, "Why do women get so indignant when they're whistled at -- it's a gesture of appreciation!" this is part of the answer. Yeah, sometimes it's a gesture of appreciation. But often it comes with a jumble of mixed signals, a mixture in which "this is the only way you matter - so ha!" comes through loud and clear. Actually, in my experience, there is a fine gradation of such signals, determined by tone, context, and facial expression, that determines the extent to which the intended message is mixed up this way.

Now, there's a more complicated way that people can send the only-sex-objects message, and that's treating a woman as a sex object in a context in which she's primarily there in a non-sex-object way -- for example, when she's your colleague. The idea is that if you treat a woman as a possible sex partner in a context in which she's there to do her job, you're sending the implicit message that the job isn't the important thing, where the sex-partner thing is. This is how flirting can have so many different aspects to so many people. Is it harmless fun between equals? Or is it reinforcing a sexist status quo?

What to do about these problems? It would be possible to aim for a kind of desexualization of interactions, creating clearer no-flirting zones and the like. But I think there's another possibility, suggested by reflection on men. Men can be sexual objects without only being sexual objects. How so? Well, there are two things. First, there's an overwhelming sense in which men are always treated as more-than-sexual objects. Cultural artefacts of all kinds -- movies, TV, news, etc. -- constantly reinforce the image of men as having multiple kinds of worth and value. Second, and perhaps relatedly, it's pretty easy for men to be both the objects of sexual desire and valued colleagues, researchers, workers, dads, politicians, people with opinions, etc. etc. Indeed, an attractive guy is often an attractive guy because he's some of these things.

This suggests a crucial role for a state of mind in which a woman can be an object of sexual attraction and lots of other things all at the same time. I used to be optimistic that we could create a world in which such a state of mind would predominate, and thus, just like men, women could be sexually attractive and engage in mutual flirting, and still, at the same time, be treated as and valued as full persons in their own right. And if the woman isn't one you want to flirt with, fine - you can still value her in all the other ways.

As time goes on my optimism gets more tempered. We've still got a constant barrage of movies in which women are only around to have pretty hair and make the sandwiches, we've still got men who, instead of flirting with women, sexually harass them as a way of bringing them down a notch or two, and we've still got a shocking disregard for women who are not physically attractive in the conventional ways. We've still got women's sports leagues that can only exist if the women wear the right kind of sexualized clothing. And there is a troubling correlation between sexualizing women and being sexist. It would be nice if places like Italy were bastions both of romance and of feminism, but it doesn't seem to be happening.

All of these put pressure on the solution of getting people to recognize and value women multidimensionally. Not so easy after all. I hope it's obvious, though, that women are not going to suddenly become happy to be considered only sex objects. That is just not happening. So this would mean more of the other solution: desexualization and more flirting-free zones.

Maybe that is for the best but it seems a little sad. I mean, most people in the twenty-first century spend all their time at work as it is, and that's where they meet everyone they know. No flirting, no asking out your coworkers, no little compliments on someone's new hairstyle or snazzy high heels ... I'd be sorry to see all these things completely lost and forbidden. Hopefully we can mix in a little of the first solution.

So, the connection between sex and sexism lies not in simply treating women as objects of sexual interest, but in the the sexist attitude conveyed by treating women as only, or primarily, of value as sexual objects. What I'm suggesting is that unless we can move toward multidimensional valuing, we'll be heading for desexualization instead.

You know how they say, "If you want peace, work for justice?"

Well, if you want sex, work for feminism.

Shopping, Materialism, Ho Ho Ho!

2010-12-05T15:24:00.001-05:00

From some Italian site, natch.

I like to go to malls even when I'm not actually shopping. Yes, you read that right. I like to go to malls even when I'm not actually shopping.

Well, maybe not to suburban malls. But I live in Toronto where the main mall is the Eaton Centre, a totally awesome urban mall, and I definitely like to go to the Eaton Centre even when I'm not actually shopping. I go to the Eaton Centre on my way to the gym (a gym which is actually located inside the mall, how great is that?); I go to the Eaton Centre to get coffee at the bookstore and do a little work; I go to the Eaton Centre to check out what's going on at the Apple Store. Occasionally I sit and have a glass of wine at one of the Eaton Centre bars or restaurants.

So, as you can see, when I say I like to go to the Eaton Centre even when I'm not actually shopping, I am putting my money where my mouth is.

What I like about going to the Eaton Centre is that it's crowded full of all different kinds of people, all basically having a good time. You got your overexcited teens; you got your weary grandparents. You got your Nice Responsible Young Persons. You got children of all ages. You got Barbie lookalikes with their BCBG bags; you got homeless people hanging around the food court. Rich and poor, hip and square: everyone is at the mall.

People get down on malls. There are some reasons for getting down on malls, but I don't think they're the usual suspects. A lot of what you see at the Eaton Centre is families, speaking all the languages of the world, buying cookware, clothes for the kids, computers and toys. Sure, I guess that's materialistic in the basic sense of the word, but it's also buying stuff that just enables you to have a nice life.

To me, what's nice about the mall is the powerful reminders of the basic sameness of humanity. The man in an expensive suit, the woman in a headscarf, the kid with the newest Nikes, and me, we're all there to buy the same stuff. This feeling probably reaches its apex at the Apple Store, where were literally there to buy the very same exact thing -- but it's in the mall in a general way too-- we're certainly there for the same activities. I love that.

Now I know some people find it dispiriting to think that the thing that brings us together is shopping, but as I partly tried to explain here, I don't, really. I mean, nice stuff is nice; what's not to like? Sure, it's bad when we get into disposable crap and planned obsolescence. But you don't have to shop for crap to shop for fun.

What's easy to forget about materialism and consumer culture is that, as so often, just because something is bad doesn't mean the alternatives aren't worse. I don't know if you know that amazing book by Haruki Murakami about the Aum Shinrikyo gas attacks in Japan? Basically Murakami talks to the people who experience the attack -- it happens in the subway -- and then talks to people in the Aum Shinrikyo movement. The people in the first half of the book, reflecting on the question of how this could happen, were often inclined to cite the breakdown of morals and the new materialism. But weirdly, the movement itself is deeply anti-materialistic: the whole point is to live in an ascetic way. It wasn't materialism that led to this horrible thing; it was anti-materialism.

It's not hard to see how this would happen. For better or for worse, if you're into buying stuff, you have extra incentive to play by the rules. If you're not, and you don't care ... well, you don't care. Sure, this cuts both ways, and if you're trying to plan the next revolution, shopping is probably getting in your way. I'm just saying in terms of ordinary, everyday, peace in living together, a love of shopping can be our friend.

Getting back to malls, one thing about malls I am uneasy about is the whole private-space-public-space problem. A mall is, of course, owned, and mall owners make all kinds of terrible rules about who can hang out there and when. This does make the mall, for me, a somewhat guilty pleasure. But hey, as a non-driver, I'm putting in a fair amount of public-space-time as it is. Nobody should have to put up with staring, elbowing, harassing, and spitting all day. Speaking of which, what is up with the new habit of public spitting? Completely disgusting.

So if you're out shopping, and you're feeling worn down, just remember, if you want to know when the lion and the lamb will lay down with one another, it's happening now, at the mall. They're both trying to get a closer look at the iPad before going off to grab some fried foods at the food court.

Me, My Blackberry, And The Reasons Of Love

2010-11-27T11:31:00.001-05:00

I got a Blackberry about a week ago. It's a Blackberry Bold 9650, and it looks like this, except instead of this cool city photo I have the stupid Verizon logo on my home screen:

It's a little funny that I got a Blackberry, because I'm the ultimate Mac fan-girl. I'm the sort of person who, when forced to use a Windows machine, is constantly complaining about how I can't figure out how to do simple things like "save as pdf" from the print screen, or whatever, and who gets all mad at the stupid inelegance of the system.

So the relationship between BB and me was sort of an arranged marriage. It's not that we were so fond of one another; it's more that things like "the great Verizon data plan for North America plans" tipped the balance away from the iPhone.

So it was with some trepidation that I brought BB home. And honestly, in the beginning, it wasn't looking so good. Things that seemed to me completely basic just aren't available on the Blackberry, like the option to make an email account temporarily inactive. I do this on my iPod touch every night before I go to bed, because I don't want to wake up, see the little "email icon," be tempted to look at my mail, and have my rest disturbed. That is, I want things like "browser, ON" and "email, OFF" at the same time. Is that so much to ask?

I googled and googled, and finally found a page where my question was raised. The answer? "BB isn't really set up for that." Hmmm.

Actually, the main source of tension in the house wasn't between BB and me so much as between BB and Mac. They don't like each other, and they don't want to interact. I downloaded the "Desktop Manager for Mac" from Research In Motion and it's useless -- it doesn't seem to do anything.

In a way I understand: they represent two different philosophies of life, two totally different styles. So how could they want to cooperate? In a way though, it's a little outrageous. You're telling me Research in Motion can't figure out how to set up basic sync of contacts and so on with Mac OS? How hard can it be?

I solved the problem, in the end, by bringing in an intermediary, a go-between, a peacemaker. Goes by the name of Google. Google, turns out, can talk to BB, and talk to Mac, even if they won't talk to each other. So I set up my Google contacts and calendar to sync with both, and even though it has the aspect of a giant pointless game of telephone, in practice it is working well.

So you can see why, in those first few days, I'm thinking, Dude, you are so going to back to the Verizon store, because this is just not working out. Goodbye Verizon. I'm sucking it up, moving to AT&T, getting an iPhone.

But over the following week, something surprising happened: I changed my expectations. I started appreciating all the things unique to BB, like the excellent keyboard design, the no-nonsense fonts and style, and the physical object itself, which is beautifully designed. You can hold it in one hand, and type with your thumb, while your other hand is holding your purse or opening a door or whatever. Can't do that on an iPhone. Or, at least, I can't.

After I started appreciating BB's good qualities, rather than focusing on its limitations, I started to have that proper feeling one has for a gadget that is important in one's life: the feeling of love. You're going to deal with this object a zillion times a day, you gotta have some love. Otherwise it's just an endless struggle. This is why I'm always amused when people express their indignation with Mac. Look, I love my Mac. You don't have to love it, and thus you don't have to buy one. But don't act like it's somehow a character deficiency in me if I do. We're out of the realm of rational thought here.

And that's true for love of people, too. Sometimes you hear people talking about love as if they could respond to a person's qualities, and thus find "the right person for them." "Oh, I'd like a non-smoker, someone with a good sense of humor, someone with the right kind of career. Must like bird-watching, white-water rafting, the movies of Werner Herzog. . ."

Sure, you can hope for certain qualities, which will surely have something to do with long term living together. But they're not the main thing in love. The main thing in love isn't the qualities the person has, it's seeing the person's qualities in the right sort of way. The love itself, it's not based on reasons.

BB and me, I think it's going to work out.

Branding Canada: The "Amity" Solution

2010-11-15T18:43:00.001-05:00

I'm an American living in Canada. I've been here long enough to start to feel attached to my new home. But now that I'm "turning Canadian," I'm hyper-aware of all the ways in which Canada just doesn't get the respect it deserves. It's a great country, but what do people associate with Canada? Hockey, Tim Hortons, the occasional moose. For most of us, it's not the kind of list that stirs the imagination.

I think what Canada has is a branding problem. You know, we American's are always up on the latest bullshit, and the latest bullshit is branding. OK -- so it's kind of 1990s bullshit -- but still, this just shows how bad things have gotten, because you gotta admit that branding-wise, Canada is behind the 8-ball.

You know they know something's wrong because they put the name "Canada" everywhere. On bridges, on posters, on anything that is national, you'll see the Canada symbol with the little maple leaf. You don't see that in the US. The US doesn't need to say "US" every five seconds, because everyone knows the US is one of the big dogs. People bring it out to make points about stuff but it's not on bridges and signs, that's for sure.

So in spite of trying, that "Canada" everywhere has always seemed to me a sign of -- well, of insecurity.

What we need up here, it seems to me, are more of those kind of idealistic, overblown, self-image things that move the heart before the mind has a chance to get too analytical. Like, you know, when Americans say "freedom" -- it gets us all wound up before we get bogged down thinking about our various lack of freedoms and our coercive practices on other nations and all those ... you know ... ugly details.

And since you've read the title of this piece, you know where I'm going with this. The place to start is with the motto, and I propose amity. You know how the French are all, "liberté, egalité, fraternité"? Well, we're gonna be all "amitié, dude."

Here's what amity as a motto has going for it:

First and most importantly, it's accurate. Canada is friendly.

Of course, Canada known for the friendliness of its people. The recent Times story about immigration cited actual immigrants to Manitoba saying things like, "everyone said the people are really friendly, and it's actually true." How many places can you say that of?

More importantly, though, Canada adopts friendliness in its relations with other nations. It's a peace-keeping nation, a nation that builds relationships, a nation that tries to be nice and not to throw its weight around. "But, Afghanistan!" you'll say. Meh. Details, details. These kinds of symbols can't be undone by pesky little facts. If there's one thing you learn about branding from the US, it's that only the big picture makes any difference.

Also, "amity" is the kind of motto that could actually go up against some other mottos and win. It's no weakling. I mean, pit it against "freedom," and the results are really non-obvious. I mean, it's nice to be free, but if everyone's against you and you got no friends? Not so great, after all.

Plus, friendship is such a twenty-first century concept. Sure freedom was nice when everyone had eight million square miles of their own. But now we're living on top of each other, polluting one another's air and water, driving the planet to ruin -- time for some fucking friendship!

The final reason "amity" makes such a nice motto for Canada is that it has elegant, and similar, expressions in both French and English. Hell, it's even a word derived from French.

So really, I can't see any problems. I don't have the mental energy to turn this into any sort of movement, but if you happen to be reading and you have the ear of the prime minister, let him know about my idea, OK? I will thank you, and Canada will thank you, I assure you.

Women's Sexuality Makes People Believe Peculiar Things

2010-11-08T17:51:00.002-05:00

Stephen Fry

Maybe you followed the kerfuffle prompted by Stephen's Fry's saying recently that women don't like sex. Excerpt from the Guardian story:

"I feel sorry for straight men. The only reason women will have sex with them is that sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man, which is what they want," he said. "Of course, a lot of women will deny this and say, 'Oh no, but I love sex, I love it!' But do they go around having it the way that gay men do?"

I try to ignore stuff like this because it's stupid, and because it's annoying, and because if you think long enough about what set of mental attitudes prompt people to say it, you just get annoyed and depressed.

Keith Richards

But I was amusingly reminded of his saying that when I read the recent discussion of Keith Richard's memoir in The New Yorker. Keith, discussing girls at his show:

"They nearly killed me. I was never more in fear for my life than I was from teenage girls. The ones that choked me, tore me to shreds, if you got caught in a frenzied crowd of them -- it's hard to express how frightening they could be. You'd rather be in a trench fighting the enemy than be faced with this unstoppable, killer wave of lust and desire, or whatever it is -- it's unknown even to them."

Keith also claims he's never "put the make on a girl" in his life. They just come to him. Not just girls but women in general.

Certainly Fry's view is not so idiosyncratic. Lots of people think women don't want or like sex.

On the other hand, I hope we can all agree on one thing: no one, of any age, is seeking out sex with Keith Richards because they're hoping for happily ever after. Actually, you could write a whole blog post just on the issue of why, exactly, Keith Richards is attractive -- cause obviously he is, but the reasons are somewhat mysterious. It seem evident no evolutionary biology explanation is going to be forthcoming. But let's leave that aside for another day. As I say, the point here is just, if you're throwing yourself at Keith Richards you're not hoping for When Harry Met Sally. You're looking to have sex with Keith Richards. And evidently, wanting that can make you crazy.

So which is it, kids? Are women sexless or oversexed? Bored or out of their minds with lust?

Probable there's a respectable and intelligent conclusion to draw about this, like women-are-different and you-can't-overgeneralize -- obviously true. And yet, I feel a more interesting and more disturbing explanation lurks in here somewhere.

The disturbing explanation is that what women are interested in isn't always what the guys in their lives have to offer; what they are interested in is something more along the lines of ... well ... Keith. Or Mick -- Mick would surely do just as well.

Then the image of women as not-really-wanting-or-enjoying-sex would then be the sort of thing people come to believe not because it's true, but because what women want isn't always what every guy is offering, and people just draw the wrong conclusions from that. I remember reading Simone de Beauvoir a couple of years ago, and how she said that one thing about sexism is the way men have constructed an idea of women that is what they want women to be. I thought it was interesting and apt.

Indeed, part of what's so annoying about the whole evolutionary biology thing is how often the "explanations" it comes up with fit the image of women that's just what would suit men best: oh, gee, women are naturally sort of monogomous! men are naturally really not! hm, interesting!

Anyway, as I've probably mentioned in this space before, Richard Russo pretty much gave the final answer about women in Straight Man. What do women want? "Everything," just like men do. The interesting thing is what they'll settle for.

Life, Death, and Procrastination

2010-10-24T12:03:00.001-04:00

The recent book review in the New Yorker of the book The Thief of Time starts with the arresting story of a Nobel prize-winning economist who can't seem to get it together to mail a box of clothes from India, where he is living, to the United States. He just puts it off and puts if off. He never gets it done. Finally someone helps him out by bringing it back with him.

Nobel prize-winners: they're just like us!

The book is about the philosophy of procrastination, a phenomenon that cries out for some philosophical reflection if ever there was one. As the reviewer, James Surowiecki, explains, procrastination is puzzling in part because it involves "not doing what you think you should be doing" -- an idea that is confusing in itself.

Socrates thought it was impossible not to do what you thought you should be doing. That is, if you chose to do something, it was because you thought it was the best thing to be doing overall. If that thing seemed ultimately boneheaded -- like failing to mail the box day after day -- that wasn't because you failed to do what you thought you ought to do, it was because you were mistaken about what you ought to have done. You must have thought it was best not to mail the box, since you didn't. And you might have made a mistake in your thinking about what was best to do. But that's not the same as failing to do what you did think was best. Which is what Socrates thought was impossible.

It's a powerfully counter-intuitive conclusion. Because it sure feels like what you're doing when you procrastinate is failing to do what you think you ought to do. And yet it's not like procrastinating makes you feel better, like you're having a better time. Usually it makes you feel worse. So WTF is going on?

One way to understand procrastination is through its relation to what is called "hyperbolic discounting," which is basically the tendency we have to put off painful experiences and fail to wait properly for pleasurable ones. We are biased toward the present. An hour at the dentist today, or two hours at the dentist in a few months? We put it off. Get 100 dollars in a year, or 110 in a year and a day, we choose to wait for 110. But choosing between 100 dollars today and 110 tomorrow? We want 100 dollars now.

I've always thought hyperbolic discounting and procrastination must have something to do with mortality. I always thought if someone asked me, "Why put off going to the dentist, when you know you're going to have to?" that part of any honest answer would have to be "Well, maybe I'll die before I have to go." Hey, it's always possible.

Of course, the fact that you might die before you have to do some unpleasant thing, or before you get a chance to enjoy some far off benefit, does make some "discounting" absolutely rational, and not puzzling at all. If you could factor the likelihood of death into your calculation, you could come up with some way of knowing just how much putting things off and just how much impulsivity makes sense.

What makes "hyberbolic discounting" a kind of irrationality isn't that you are biased toward the present; it's that you're way too biased toward the present. That is, for most of us, the odds of dying before the root canal are so slim that it makes no sense at all to put it off. So to make sense of our reasoning procedure in this direction, we'd have to assume that most people are dramatically inaccurately assessing the likelihood of their own deaths.

But now we get to the very weirdest thing of all about understanding hyperbolic discounting this way: it suggests that we err on the side of death. That is, our choices make sense only under the assumption that our immanent death is much more likely than it actually is.

This strikes me as extremely strange. Because if most people err in thinking about their own deaths, it's to assume they're never going to happen, or that they're way way far in the future. They don't err on the side of thinking they're going to die.

This means one of two things must be true. Either the way we deal with our own mortality is so strange that we can psychologically overestimate its likelihood and underestimate its likelihood at the same time, or, contrary to what I'd thought, hyperbolic discounting and procrastination have nothing to do with mortality and the possibility of death.

Both are weird. It's weird to think that underneath it all, and despite our appearance of obliviousness, we have our own mortality frequently present to mind. But it's also weird to think that putting things off is something that an immortal being would have trouble with.

Or maybe I just think that because when I think of immortal beings I think of gods. Maybe you can be immortal and a procrastinator. It's funny to think of the new post-humans, god-like, unable to feel pain, living forever, but unable to get their shit together to get their boxes to the post-office, to buy birthday presents on time, and to file their income taxes.

No, I'm Sorry, Doing Moral Philosophy Is Not Like Falling Off A Log

2010-10-17T11:29:00.002-04:00

Call it the Wikipedification of ideas. The slogan is "Well, how hard can it be?"

I got nothing against Wikipedia, which I use all the time. Using Wikipedia doesn't have to lead to the Wikipedification of ideas. But some of the basic elements of Wikipedia ... well, let's just say that some people seem to get a little overly enthusiastic about them. Like the idea that everyone has equally good "information" about a topic, that it's pointless to think we need "experts," that complex expressions of ideas are just obfuscation, that every question has either an uncontroversial answer or, at worst, an uncontroversial set of plausible answers.

This just isn't true. Especially when it comes to abstract ideas and ideals. Like thinking about right and wrong. I work some in this area -- on moral philosophy -- and I can tell you: it's hard. How should we trade off the ending of one life against the preservation of others? How do you know when inequalities are unfair? How do you reason with people whose judgments are very different from your own? Are moral judgments objective or are they just fancy kinds of emotions and tastes? It's a difficult subject.

So it's infuriating to have it presented as if moral philosophy is actually easy. Like, "Gee whiz, if everyone would just calm down and be nice -- and stop listening to those obfuscating philosophers! -- we'd be all set."

In the New York Times today Robert Frank talks about income inequality. I'm roughly in agreement with his broad conclusion -- that income inequality is bad. But the way he goes about explaining it is frustrating.

Focusing on fairness, as moral philosophers have done, he says, isn't getting us anywhere, because there's too much disagreement on how fairness should be understood and what it comes to in this context.

That's right: moral philosophers don't agree about fairness and inequality. One reason for that is that the issues are complex, there are several ways of seeing things all of which seem somewhat reasonable, and even the question of how to decide among competing views is a vexed one.

Frank says that instead of trying to sort these issues out, we can look at a cost-benefit analysis. Like, we know high income inequality has costs, and we don't see any offsetting benefits, so clearly it's bad.

But there are reasons we don't just apply cost-benefit analysis to figure out the answers to complex problems. The reasons are familiar from the known difficulties with "utilitarian" reasoning in moral thinking.

Utilitarianism says that you should do the thing that brings about the best consequences for all, where everyone counts for the same amount. It sounds promising, but it leads to some surprising results. Suppose five people are in need of five different organs to live -- one guy needs a liver, another a heart, and so on. Should we kill one person and distribute his organs? Save five lives, end one, cost-benefit-wise, sounds like the right thing to do.

But obviously no one thinks this is the right thing to do. And the reason it's not the right thing to do has nothing to do with how high or low the "costs" are. Imagine the guy you kill is really unhappy. Imagine he has no friends. The "cost" of killing him is now low. Does that make it better? No. Plausibly, it makes it worse.

You can argue -- as moral philosophers do! -- about what the right explanation is. One plausible answer goes something like this: what's wrong with killing the guy has to do with something outside of costs and benefits, and has instead to do with his rights, his freedoms, his autonomy to live his life as he wants, even if it's an unhappy one.

At one point Frank says that the increased wealth of the rich hasn't made them very happy. But as we've just seen, the happiness of the person isn't the only thing you have to think about. People have the right to the pursuit of unhappiness as well as the pursuit of happiness.

The point is that even when the costs are low and the benefits high, you're don't have a simple answer about what to do. There are other things to consider. Because, well, moral philosophy is complicated and not simple.

The same problem arises in the new fad for explaining morals with science. The new neuroscientists, like Sam Harris, want to tell us that science can tell us about morality, because science can tell us what makes us flourish and feel happy and what doesn't.

As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah points out in this excellent review, knowing what will increase well-being tells you little about what to do. How should you weigh one person's well-being against another? Is it average well-being or total well-being that matters? What about the problems with cost-benefit analysis, already mentioned?

Furthermore, is it only conscious well-being that matters? Does that mean that if your spouse is cheating on you it would be better not to know? And if you know the truth will hurt someone or make them feel bad, should you lie? Neuroscience can plausibly tell you how much less happy you'll be when you find out the truth about things, but I don't see how knowing the answer to that question is ever going to help you figure out what to do in life. Even if the truth sucks, even if it reduces your well-being and leaves you in tears, don't you sometimes want to know it anyway?

I guess when the philosophy departments all disappear because of funding cuts to the humanities, no one will have to worry about these problems any more. We can just kill the guy, distribute the organs, and lie about it after. Questions? I hear the Wikipedia entry on "cost-benefit analysis" is excellent.

Yeah, But I Also Did A Minor In Facebook Privacy Settings

2010-10-04T15:19:00.000-04:00

Another humanities program "deactivated"at a major university, again primarily because of a low major-to-faculty ratio.

Here's what I don't get. Whatever you think about the value of the humanities, are people seriously suggesting that the choices of 18- to 22- year-olds, who haven't yet encountered any of the wisdom or perspective of a university education, or of, you know, life, should determine what's on the curriculum?

Really?

Confusion And Distrust, In Colonialism And In The University

2010-10-03T17:42:00.000-04:00

I just finished listening to E. M. Forster's A Passage to India the other day. It's an amazing book, and one of the many things that make it amazing is the way it shows what is ordinarily so hard to describe: the way in which mutual distrust poisons community life.

The story is set during the British colonial rule of India. The book is masterful in its depiction of the racist and condescending attitudes the British take toward their subjects. But what makes it so sophisticated, it seems to me, is the way it shows how basically well-meaning and reasonable people get drawn into terrible situations, situations whose terribleness is created and exacerbated by the inherently screwed up -- and immoral -- way the British regard the citizens they hope to govern.

The novel has a big dramatic event at the middle of it, but there are many small events that show this with subtlety. There are so few shared expectations. One guy tries to have a party to bring together some British guests and some Indian friends, and it totally fails as a party: in the absence of shared expectations about who is supposed to go and talk to whom, and who is supposed to make what kind of conversation, and how seriously offers and future plans are to be taken, the whole thing becomes a mass of confusion and hurt feelings. Because there is mutual distrust, confusion and hurt feelings turn immediately into anger and disrespect.

As I was listening, I was reminded that this aspect of power-imbalance and difference is not restricted to imperialist contexts. Mutual distrust poisoning relationships, in an atmosphere of power imbalance: it's one of the things that makes racism and sexism so very destructive.

Laurence Thomas, a philosopher, wrote an essay called "What Good Am I"? -- meaning, What Good am I as a black philosophy professor, in particular? -- about why it matters to have people of different races, and of both sexes, as professors. The answer goes beyond role models, he says, and is more about mutual understanding and trust. Learning, he argues persuasively, can only happen in an atmosphere of trust, and racism and sexism are a bar to that trust.

Think about it. In a classroom setting, learning involves being evaluated and criticized, even corrected, by someone else. In at atmosphere of distrust, it doesn't make sense to make oneself vulnerable in that way. Either you feel antagonized, or you feel like a dupe for interpreting the evaluation as well-intentioned.

And then, it's in the nature of things that people with different backgrounds will find one another sometimes hard to interpret, making that trust especially hard to establish. I know I've experienced this difficulty of communicating in academic life a ton: in my male-dominated field of philosophy, the kinds of things people think are obvious to assume, and the kind of things they say to establish a friendly but professional relationship, just often don't feel to me like the kind of things it's obvious to assume, or the kind of things one would say to establish a friendly but professional relationship.

This wouldn't really matter if there were lots of women and lots of men, but when there's lots of men and few women, it's difficult: a woman ends up always feeling a little destabilized, a little uncertain, a little like a foreign visitor to another country, trying to figure out the codes. Who's supposed to talk first? Is small talk about family nice, or a waste of someone's time? -- or worse, an invasion of privacy? Is complimenting someone's clothes considered friendly or peculiar? What about dark humor? I know everyone has to figure these things out, but for whatever reason when I'm around a lot of women, even in a professional setting, the answers seem to me pretty obvious -- small talk about family is nice -- but when I'm around a lot of men in a professional setting, they don't. And then there's the complicating factor that what seems nice coming from a fellow guy might seem peculiar or intrusive coming from a woman.

As Forster so aptly shows, misunderstandings which might come to nothing in an atmosphere of trust become toxic in an atmosphere of distrust. In his paper, Laurence concludes his reflections by saying something like this: the importance of minority professors is that their existence represents the hope that the university is a place where trust and gratitude are possible among people of all races. I've always thought this an apt observation, and I think about it often when the question comes up of why, and how, it matters to take active steps for diversity in all the academic disciplines.

If philosophy is exceptional for being lots-of-guys, it's truly outrageous for being lots-of-white-people. I don't know how to solve this problem, but these thoughts are one of the many reasons, at least, for why it's a problem.

Dear Modern Life

2010-09-26T12:38:00.000-04:00

Dear Modern Life,

You and I have to have a talk. Not just any talk. A relationship talk.

Obviously, I'm in this for the long haul: really, where else could I go? So I'm taking the long view. And I know you and I have had our ups and downs over the years -- both very intense. We had some great moments over feminism, gay rights, and the internet. Good times!

There have been struggles that nearly destroyed my commitment to you, though. A girl doesn't get over global poverty, local income inequality, and climate change without a certain amount of internal struggle. At what point does "stand by your man" turn into making a doormat of yourself?

Still, I realize that some problems are hard to solve, and all my friends will tell you I defend you often. Indeed, they're probably tired of hearing me say, "Modern Life isn't so bad! Sure it's impossible to afford a reasonable apartment on the average working wage ... but what about feminism? Gay rights? What about the internet?"

But you know what they say: it's not the big things that ruin a relationship, it's the little things. And to tell you the truth, you're getting harder and harder to live with. In particular:

Could you please be a little quieter? What's with the constant racket? It's not like we're going to forget you're there! I don't want to be listening to sexed up pop songs while I'm trying to shop for yogurt; I don't want to listen to the sounds of cellophane wrappers, mocha latte slurps, and constant chewing and lip smacking while I'm trying to study in the library; and I especially don't want to be assaulted by the 100 decibel sounds of those ridiculous new air-hand dryers!

Also, could you cool it with the inattentive driving? Every time you cross the street these days you feel like a car is about to crash into you. It's exhausting!

I know a lot of people have been on you about the whole gadget-connectivity-stupidity business lately, so I won't go into that now, except to say that this whole suggested connection between social networking, sharing, and open-mindedness ... well, who do you think you're fooling with that? I saw Mark Zuckerberg in the New Yorker suggesting that the more people put stuff on their Facebook pages, like the fact that they're gay or whatever, the more open and tolerant our society will be. You think we haven't noticed that the more information people have about others, the more intolerant they are? I don't know if this is some kind of bait-and-switch or what you got going on with that, but let me just say, I am onto you, Mister.

I know it's not easy being you, but it's not easy being me either. We're stuck with each other for now so hey, work with me a little, will you?

Man or Wife? Dilemmas In The Female Reading Experience

2010-09-18T12:02:00.001-04:00

Who knew the image results for half man half woman would include so many Halloween costumes? Not me.

A woman with an interesting job, who's involved in the world, and who lives in the modern post-sexual-revolution world, faces a difficulty in identifying with the characters of any but the most contemporary novels.

It's not hard to see how this happens. You can identify with the female characters, and for a certain range of contexts that works: you can identify with being a daughter, with receiving male callers, with the timeless weird expectations of feminine passivity and caring. But at some point identifying with female characters becomes impossible. Their lives are structured around the expectation of marriage and childbirth. After a certain time in life female characters have one of three things happen to them.

1) They're absorbed by marriage and children; their concerns are now inscribed in a circle of intimacy.

2) They're unmarried; their unmarriedness is now a striking and awful burden, rendering them objects of pity.

3) They're in a convent or something with a religious, non-family, non-sexual life.

Obviously, these options bypass most of us completely. Most married women with kids still work, which means they have a public life: a life out in the world with all the hassles, drama, and pride that entails.

In a huge amount of pre-contemporary literature, it's only men who have this sort of public life. So you identify with the male characters, and for a certain range of contexts that works. Indeed, the male characters often confront the puzzles and dilemmas we all confront now: those of public life, but also those of the clashes between that life and the needs of one's intimates.

But at some point identifying with the male characters becomes difficult too. For one thing, men have wives; for another, other men respond to them completely differently than they respond to women. For me, identifying with the male characters gets harder as I get older: being a middle-aged woman is just not like being a middle-aged man.

So you kind of go back and forth. And it's this kind of back and forth that gives being female that weird kind of double-aspect, that two-sided quality. You're a person, so there's that, but then you're a woman, which is somehow different. It's kind of exhausting.

I was reminded of this recently because I was reading Jennifer Egan's (very contemporary) book Look at Me, and there's a scene in the beginning with two teenage girls and their difficulties with sex. They want to have sex. First they try having sex with boys, but the boys have no idea what to do to make it pleasant or satisfying for them. Then they try having sex with men, but it's creepy and weird: the men are married and want to get it over with as quickly as possible and get home. Then they try having sex with guys, like college guys, but that doesn't work so great either: they guys are too drunk; they're distracted; they're more interested in impressing one another than actually interacting with girls.

Wow, I thought. Whatever else you want to say, you just don't get that kind of depiction of actual modern girlhood ... well, anywhere really.

Drudgery and the Good Life: Questions In The Philosophy of Alcott and Montgomery

2010-09-12T17:09:00.001-04:00

I've always thought of Louisa May Alcott and L. M. Montgomery as philosophical novelists. Alcott is more obvious, maybe less subtle about it: in books like Little Women the wiser are always counseling the less wise in ways clearly directed at the rest of us, and the less wise are always geting into trouble for not following wise counsel. Montgomery is more subtle and more complex: the Anne of Green Gables books do have that same wise-not-wise-counsel stuff, but they also have a kind of funny randomness and unpredictability. Montgomery doesn't seem committed, as Alcott is, to the belief that if you just approach what is happening in your life with the proper spirit it will be less sucky. In Montgomery books, somtimes life just sucks.

One theme that is big in both authors is the importance of caring for others, and the ways in which caring for other people will enrich your own life. Interestingly, both pursue this theme partly through reflection on adoptions of various kinds. Of course, Anne's own adoption is the main thing in the Green Gables books, and the main thing about it is the way it alters and improves the lives and the souls of the brother and sister who have adopted her. In Little Men (the sequel to Little Women), Jo opens a school and takes in various abandoned boys to raise and care for alongside the regular pupils. In other Alcott novels, taking care of children that are not yours is treated as an obvious thing to do, something tending toward the happiness of everyone involved. And late in the Green Gables series, one of Anne's children has to decide whether to take in an orphaned infant to care for as her own, even though at sixteen years old all she wants to think about is what color ribbons she wants to wear to the next gathering. Naturally, she decides to take in the infant; naturally she comes to adore him and is completely happy with her choice.

It's a nice message: caring for others is the way to happiness.

But this is not a simple message to carry over from their world to our world. Consider. Who is changing all those kids' diapers? Who is doing their laundry? Who is cleaning up their dishes? Who is making sure they have lunch at school?

The answer to all these questions is THE HIRED HELP. Even though none of the families in the relevant books is in any way rich, they all have help: women who work for the family and do the washing, the cooking, the darning, the scrubbing the floors -- even the nose-wiping, the infant feeding, and the nagging.

It seems to me this complicates the idea that caring for others is the way to happiness. Sure, if someone else is doing all the boring dirty work, I'm sure singing lullabies, reading stories, and giving wise counsel is pretty life affirming stuff. But that's just the nice part of caring for someone. The hard part of caring for someone is the drudgery: the shopping, the food preparation, the endless boring tasks that life just requires.

Now I'm willing to believe that doing these things is Good, but the ticket to happiness, really? Certainly no one is holding up the servants as examples of the Life Well Lived. In fact, and weirdly, in these kinds of books no one discusses the emotional life of the help. When you think about it, the existence of "help" complicates many of the themes of these books. There's often a kind of "if you are industrious and good you'll go far" kind of thing, but what if the cook is industrious and good? She doesn't go anywhere.

The fact that someone else is doing all the crummy parts in these books, it seems to me, undercuts the simple theme that the ticket to well-being is to surround yourself with dependents. The question, then, is how we should interpret Alcott and Montgomery's idea in a modern world without servants.

Is it that drudgery isn't so bad, and doing laundry at 10:00 pm, as many working moms do, is not so sucky, if you just approach it in the proper spirit, like a wise person would? Is it that there are ways of caring for people that don't require taking over the drudgery parts, and we should do more of those? Is the idea essentially yoked to a system in which only one person works outside the home?

We need a modern Alcott and a modern Montgomery, so they can help us figure it out.

Adulthood Isn't Independence, And It Doesn't Require A Nissan Quest Minivan, Either

2010-09-03T11:50:00.001-04:00

There are a lot of things to be annoyed by in the recent New York Times article on the way 20-somethings are dithering and delaying their progress toward "adulthood." But the most annoying is the way adulthood is assumed to consist primarily in independence and the pursuit of a middle-class suburban lifestyle.

The author mentions early on a sociological definition of adulthood in terms of milestones. On this view, your adulthood is scored on how many of the following five things you've done: completed school, left home, become financially independent, married, and had a kid.

It's a weird list right on the face of it, no? Obviously having marriage and kids on there is really peculiar: many people will never do these things, just by choice; if you're gay, you might even find the law trying to prevent you from achieving them. Leaving school is a bit more plausible, but not totally. If you go back to school to change careers this is surely not a sign of immaturity.

The article points out early on that people don't march in lock stop toward these five things anymore, and then explores why and how modern 20-somethings are generally avoiding them. Kids are staying at home, and moving back home, of course. They're taking a long time to decide what they want to do in life. When they don't live at home, they often travel, and move from living in one place to living in another. They delay marriage and family.

But really, what's so bad about these things? Indeed, from one point of view they seem to me admirable. It's admirable to want to see a bit of a different kind of life before settling into the kind of life you're going to live for the rest of your existence, and it's admirable to want to think carefully about what life path would be best. Many of these young people are wrestling with questions like to what extent their life should involve good works and to what extent they should be selfish -- surely a difficult matter on which the messages they receive from the culture around them are deeply ambivalent.

Now if you're a parent, you might be annoyed by your kids depending on you, and that is totally understandable. But beyond that, what is the issue here? There's nothing "non-adult" about wanting to travel, kick around, and do different things. Lots of adults are dying to do the same thing. Really, there's nothing non-adult about any of these things, once you let go of the idea that adulthood has to consist in independence and family life.

And this, I believe, is where the mistake is. What is up with the fetish for independence? What is it with this idea that seems to permeate modern discussions of relationships, politics, mental health, that somehow independence is the be-all and end all? Life is tough. That's why people band together in groups to help one another out. That's why families take care of one another. Dependence on other people -- emotional, practical, financial -- is the norm of life. It's not an exception, it's not an illness to be treated, and it's not a sign of childishness. It might be slightly better to think in terms of inter-dependence -- adulthood correlating with being able to help out, in addition to being helped out -- but really, do you want to say that people who are physically disabled are somehow less "adult"? Doesn't seem right.

And obviously, adulthood should not by definition involve marriage, children, cars, dogs, houseplants, or sofas.

Definition-wise, we can surely do better. Why not look to internal markers rather than external ones? Just off the top of my head, two things come to mind. Adulthood -- or, at least, maturity -- has to do with thinking for yourself and it has to do with being able to take other people and their needs and desires into consideration. Intellectual and moral adulthood.

As a university professor, I see young people all the time, and interestingly, I'd say there is some cause for optimism on the moral maturity front. Young people are thinking about others; they'd like the suffering of the world to disappear; they'd like to be able to help out others more without having to worry so much about their own futures and what those hold. The same behaviors that are immature on the standard definition could be signs of maturity on this one: people find it hard to figure how they ought to live in the world.

It's on the thinking for yourself front that I'm a little worried. Thinking for yourself is work, and it's often difficult, and if you're used to just absorbing information, it can be a real pain. If you're worried about the effects of the new kinder, gentler, parenting, or the effects of endless "self-esteem" praise, or the effects of huge classrooms on young people, the thing to be worried about isn't so much whether the kids are ready to pick out and pay for living room furniture by the time they're 25; the thing to be worried about is whether they believe everything they read on the fucking internet, or find in a textbook, or see on TV, or hear from their friends.

Against Authenticity

2010-08-27T08:23:00.001-04:00

When J. D. Salinger died early this year, the accounts of his life in places like the The New York Review of Books described a man desperate to live some kind of life he could believe in. Reading about it you get the feeling that, like his protagonist Holden Caulfield, Salinger couldn't stand phoniness, and thus couldn't stand the possibility that he, himself, would be leading an inauthentic, fake sort of life. In Salinger's case, this seemed to have manifested itself primarily through a rejection of the life of literary fame in literary circles in literary cities like New York, in favor of ordinary life in simple towns like Cornish, New Hamphsire.

I've always had a complicated relationship to The Catcher in the Rye, and reading about Salinger made it feel more complicated. When I first read it as assigned reading in high school, I was indignant: "What a BOY'S BOOK this is," I thought. "So, at 14 years old I'm considered to young to see racy movies but I have to read a book about a guy visiting prostitutes??" I'm no prude, and I wasn't one then, but it really bugged me that so few of Holden's problems or adventures seemed to carry over to my female adolescent experience. As I got older I came to like the book a lot, perhaps because it's actually easier for the grown-up me to identify with Holden's problems than it was for the 14 year old me to do so.

In fact, as I got older, I began to enjoy all of Salinger's books. But I was always bothered by something I felt I didn't understand. These characters all seemed to be seeking something, wanting something, wanting life to be something other than what it was, and I could never tell whether the point was, Hey, These are intelligent, reflective people, reflecting on the meaning of life, or whether it was more like, Hey, These people are in the grip of a massive illusion, that reflection will tell them something about the meaning of life.

For whatever it's worth -- and probably not much -- Salinger's life details sure do suggest the former. When I read about Salinger's attempt to escape his life of literary fame, and his attempt to live a kind of authentic life, it seemed to me he had immediately created for himself an impossible situation. I mean, here's a guy who is a famous author. That is his actual reality. But he's going to go live in Cornish and try to live the life of a guy who is not a famous author? To try to live a more authentic life? It's almost by definition an inauthentic life. How can you live as what you really are if you're always pretending to be something else?

The whole story just added to a feeling I've long had, the the problem in such cases isn't the "living as what you are not" as much as the "trying to be authentic."

People always talk about authenticity like it's such a great thing, but I think for all its appeal, it's got a dark side. For one thing, the whole concept of authenticity implies a kind of essentialism. If you're just becoming what your social world expects of you, obviously that doesn't count, so authenticity must mean instead something like being the way your really are inside. But when you put it like that, it starts to seem weird. I mean, we grow up with families in communities -- are their influnces somehow making us inauthentic? And if not, why would the social world of our adulthood be any different?

Furthermore, as Lynda Barry so memorably puts it, what if your real self is awful? What do you do then?

And what about change? As you know if you're an adult, it's hard to change, even when you really want to. Pascal, of course, tells us that if you want to change, the first step is to live as if the change has already happened: if you want to believe in god, he says, go to church, hang around with believers, and do good deeds. And it's true, if you want to change, just having different habits is the first step. But obviously that would be forbidden if you were trying to be all "authentic" and non-phony all the time. What Pascal recommends is like the essence of phoniness.

Anyway, I've got a theory about why people like authenticity, and it's this: ironically, what people like about authenticity isn't the truth of authenticity but the appearance of authenticity -- even the artifice of authenticity will do.

This comes up over and over whenever people have occasion to discuss other people's manners at length. A lot of those occasions are in European novels of the past, where the ultimate praise for others' manners is for how "natural" they are -- and I take this to mean, the person does not seem to be pretending, does not seem to be nervous, does not seem to be acting out a set of etiquette rules, but rather has an simple and comfortable way that suggests confidence.

But it's not just a thing of the past. We criticize people now for manner that seems not quite natural, not quite at ease, somehow seeking to create an effect. But I don't think it's because care about people's true selves; I think it's for the same reason Jane Austen criticized these things: such manners are unpleasant.

The manners of people living who they are can be very appealing. The sort of characters we associate with authenticity ... they convey a kind of self-assurance that makes you think, Hm, I'd like to be like that. But the moral of that isn't to try to become those characters; the moral of that is just that self-assurance is attractive, however you go about getting it.

This kind of authenticity is more like the courage of your convictions than it is about being true to one's self, or contrasting one's true self to one's social self. We like that courage. Even when it's faked.

If you want this kind of authenticity, you've got to either relentlessly say what you really believe, or you've got to be a really good actor, or some combination of the two. But either way, it's got nothing to do with true selves, or with living an ordinary life, or with being "some guy in Cornish" rather than "a famous author."

Wanted: Lively But Comatose Best Friend For Life

2010-08-20T13:52:00.002-04:00

The title of this blog comes from my favorite book, Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play Hockey in the National Hockey League, by Cleo Birdwell. The book is really by Don Delillo together with maybe some co-author; for reasons I cannot fathom Delillo has disowned the book, refusing to acknowledge paternity.

The book is, naturally, about Cleo Birdwell's career as the first woman in the NHL. Cleo isn't like other female characters in novels. She's straight ahead; she's funny; she's cheerful. She likes to sleep around. She's kind of a small-town girl, but she's great friends with her loony New York agent, Floss Penrose, who likes to make soup and play strip monopoly with younger men. Cleo is all about simplicity and not over-thinking things, and in tough times she repeats her life's organization scheme: "I just want to play hockey."

Early on Cleo meets up with Shaver Stevens, another hockey player, whose career has been cut short by a rare disease called Jumping Frenchman's. The treatment for this involves being put to sleep in a Kramer cube, which is like a glass box with tubes, and Shaver spends about half the book asleep in Cleo's apartment, having his various needs tended to by Cleo, then by a goth teen from "Nurses Anonymous" while Cleo is at some away games, and finally by Floss herself, while Cleo is on vacation back home.

Women love Shaver -- or, rather, women love a man-in-a-Kramer. First it's Floss, who tells Cleo she must have one for herself. Someone "sensitive, wryly humorous . . . Likes movies, being spontaneous in the Hamptons . . . The longer the sleep period the better." Then it's the woman from Success magazine who comes to do a profile. "That's the most beautiful face I've ever seen . . . If he were mine, I'd keep him in there as long as I could . . . I guess that sounds selfish and cruel doesn't it? I'm sorry." They see his striped pajamas, his serious but kind face, his fit body, and they think, Why can't I have one?

OK, so maybe you're thinking Oh ha ha, cheap throwaway jokes about a certain type of superficiality. But I think the desire for the Kramered partner is more widespread than you might think. Think about it. A TV is kind of like a Kramer box, rendering you temporarily passive while your nutritional needs get met. And people often prefer to have their loved-ones rendered passive by TV than actually interacting with them all the time. Interaction is dangerous. A person engaging with you might say something challenging, or hurtful, or even just slightly less loving than you'd expect. But a person watching TV ... you know he's there; you know she cares; like Floss, you can rely on the knowledge that you've got a companion -- without all the trouble and risk of actual interaction.

Have you never had that feeling, sitting with your friends or your spouse watching some show they like, and thinking, Well, I know for the next little while things will be completely predictable? It's further evidence for my hypothesis that couples, as time goes on, watch more and more movies at home. It suggests a lot of us kind of want what Floss wants, a best friend for life, someone who shares our interests, someone who will always be there, someone who likes being spontaneous in the Hamptons but will probably sleep forever.

At one point Cleo asks the obvious. "I know this is a dumb question, but if he's asleep, what's the point of all those things?" And Floss says, "Just to know something about him. To be secure within myself that I'm involved with someone compatible." I guess it's like having a virtual boyfriend or something, but isn't it nicer and more interesting that he's physically present?

The title of this blog, by the way, refers to Cleo's good-natured refusal to consider the question of what happens when Shaver wakes up. That's when Cleo says, "I don't know. I haven't thought beyond the Kramer. The Kramer is now." That's Cleo for you, living effortlessly in the present. Is it any wonder I try to make her my guide to life?

Boring Movies Are Boring

2010-08-13T06:00:00.009-04:00

I didn't like the movie but I kind of love Russell Brand.

I went to see the movie Get Him to the Greek a couple of weeks ago. Guess what? I found it kind of stupid.

I don't mean that it's "a stupid movie" in the ordinary, predictable way that some movies are stupid. In that sense I went to see it because it was a stupid movie: a movie with silly jokes, over the top character acting, an implausible plot, and charismatic and attractive stars -- well, one charismatic and attractive star anyway.

What was stupid about it was that it was, aside from the quick jokes and cultural satire, completely boring. I had kind of high hopes from the initial set up, which seemed to me full of promise: nerdy young man meets the fading rock star he used to idolize. So many things could have happened. Was the guy going to challenge the rock star by being the only person willing to tell him the uncomfortable truth? Was the rock star going to hate him for it? Or was the rock star going to love him for his honesty? Would the guy be disillusioned by being up close to that which, from far away, seemed so appealing and cool?

The movie kept having weird disconnected moments related to these themes, but they just never added up to anything. One minute the nerdy guy is sucking up, one minute he's not, you never really understand what is going on with that. It's supposed to be about friendship, but you never really get why they become such unlikely friends. It's not Aaron's honesty, because he isn't honest. It's not because of Aaron's fidelity, because Aaron isn't really loyal. I think it's just because poor Aldous is so very unhappy and Aaron ... well, he just happens to be around.

There's no parts of the movie that make you feel challenged in anything, or thoughtful, or ambivalent. Indeed, with respect to themes, the most you could say is that the writer and director want you to know that Taking Drugs Is Bad, Having Casual Sex Will Get You Into Trouble, and You Should Love Your Family Members.

I thought maybe this was just a flukey thing, like you know, sometimes movies don't come out right for complicated unexpected reasons. That was the impression I left with. But then there was a New Yorker article profiling Steve Carell and describing the new way of making comedies. Basically, someone comes up with a basic idea, and then a "bucket brigade" of funny guys like Judd Apatow come around and punch it up with ideas and then the actual dialogue of the movie is just improvised.

I get what these people are trying to do, but you can see how the resulting movies are kind of pointless, because aside from things like "wouldn't it be funnier if you said 'banana' instead of 'fruit'? Ha ha ha, hilarious!!" basically no thought is going into these movies at all.

I gather the new movie made with this strategy is the Dinner for Schmucks movie. If ever a plot cried out for a dollop of reflection it's this one: dinner is a competition for who can bring the most idiotic guest, with none of the guests knowing why they're there. But The New Yorker describes the creative process as revolving around moments like the one in which Carell changes one line from "She's talking to a lobster" to "She's talking to a manatee" and everyone explodes in laughter. Ha ha ha! Manatee! hilarious!

I have to confess, my reaction on reading this was some serious eye-rolling. These guys are like, Hey, we're funny! We can just say stuff and it'll be funny! Movies Made E-Z.

People, it doesn't have to be this way. All you need is a script. You can improvise more jokes after you write it. Do it for me, and do it for Russell Brand, who really deserves better.