Why Do I Care About The Gender Of Elena Ferrante?

When I first encountered the kerfuffle around the true identity of the novelist Elena Ferrante, I had two immediate and diametrically opposed reactions. First, smugness: I never concern myself with the autobiographical details of authors I love. So who cares? Second, freak out: wait, "Elena Ferrante" might not be a woman?

Normally I use mental discipline to avoid finding out about fiction writers. If I love a novel, thinking about which parts might be based on real life leads me down a mental rabbit hole of pointless philosophical questions. "If that part is real, did it really happen like that? Or is the author changing the details to manipulate me into feeling one way or another about a thing?" Then I'm like "What do you mean, 'manipulating,' anyway"? Talk about pointless and dumb.

However, I have also been shaken to learn certain facts about books I love, especially books representing the experience of women, especially books representing the experience of women and sexuality.

As a young person, I fell in love with Colette, the early twentieth-century French writer whose work and life challenged gender norms and all other kinds of conventions. Colette is best known now for the book that inspired the movie Gigi, but if that's all you know about Colette then you have the wrong idea -- as so often happens, the novel is darker, weirder, and more interesting. Colette is also famous for her many short stories. But the books I feel hardest for were the Claudine series.  

Over the course of the four Claudine books, Claudine grows from a precocious and rambunctious fifteen-year-old into a comfortably bourgeois but also free-thinking and unconventional adult. The first book, Claudine at School, gives an amusing side-on look at French social life in the provinces and the complex emotions of mid-adolescent feminine life. Among other complexities, Claudine has a massive crush on her young school teacher Aimée; they have a budding sensual romance when Aimée throws her over for the head schoolmistress, mystifying Claudine and giving her minor heartbreak. Aimée's younger sister Luce develops an unreciprocated love for Claudine, who doesn't understand her own desire to hurt Luce and cause her pain.

The way Claudine has romantic feelings for women and men and the way at fifteen she is both highly sensual and also a child both profoundly resonate with me. So I was disturbed to learn that the first version of Claudine at School may have been a more chaste and childlike story, and that Claudine's husband -- the writer Willy, who first told her to write up her memories and initially published the Claudine books under his own name (!), may have told her to tart them up, to liven them up with sex. I don't have sophisticated thoughts about this, but the idea that my favorite things were in there because some guy wanted them in there made me feel sad and weird.

Then a similar thing happened with erotic novel Story of O. That's not a book I loved (and the kind of submission/dominance thing in that book is not my kind of thing), but I always appreciated Story of O as a frank and explicit presentation of a certain version of positive sexuality from a woman's point of view. How many stories depict a woman being sexually adventurous and just basically enjoying it and having a great time? It's not a lot.

So, again, I was unsettled to learn late in life that while the author is a woman, the book may have been originally written for a man. That is, the author was in a relationship with a man, and wanted to get his attention, to turn him on, and to flirt with him. Again, I don't have sophisticated thoughts about this, but I find it disappointing to think that this, too, like so many things depicting women's sexuality, was ultimately crafted to appeal to a man's taste.

I loved Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, and I found The Days of Abandonment conveyed vividly what if feels like to be trapped in your life and in despair. Like Claudine at School, The Lying Life of Adults shows a textured experience of girlhood-womanhood adolescence.

It's been suggested that Ferrante may be a woman, or may not be a woman, or may be a woman and a man writing together. I feel like there's some sense in which I shouldn't care: the books are the books whoever the author is, and Ferrante herself has suggested that it's misogyny and sexism that makes people want to know.

But I also can't shake the feeling that the thoughts and feelings of people who aren't women so often affect what gets presented as the truth about women. It happens in pornography, it happens in movies, and it happens in books; given the way social gender norms work, it probably happens whenever there is an audience. While the books are the books whoever the author is, I also don't want the books by Elena Ferrante to be another example where the tastes, attitudes, and feelings of people who are not women are shaping narratives of our woman- and girl-hood experience.

The World Is Ending. What Should I Wear?

Since a young age, I've had a keen sense of living in a radically screwed up and unjust world. I remember when I learned in elementary school about the American enslavement of people from Africa, about killings in war, about the brutal genocide of Native Americans, and about the likelihood we were all going to die in nuclear war, and I was like Gee we are fucked up. I'm not saying I understood the proper range of things -- I was a white kid in the US suburbs -- just that I knew things were deeply not OK.

When I was a young adult, you would have known from just looking at me that I felt this way. My self-presentation was ... weird. I guess style-wise it was mostly a mix between punk and something like goth, but it was more non-conformist than that. My clothes from the thrift store were often shabby and falling apart. I wore boots with my summer dresses, which for some reason drove people crazy. I let my hair become knotted into permanent tangles -- not like dreads, but like just a person who doesn't brush her hair. I had a lot of piercings, before that became a normal thing.

Looking back on my arrival at philosophy PhD school years later, one mentor said, "Well -- we thought you were really out there."

Over the years since, my self-presentation has become much more conformist. For one thing, I found that teaching undergraduates pushed me way toward conformism. There are many things that make teaching stressful and anxiety-producing, and for me one of them has to do with relating to a pretty wide range of people. I've never been that popular person, I'm not an extrovert, and the things that interest me often don't interest other people (and vice-versa!). Navigating the student-teacher relationship alongside the complexities of self-presentation non-conformism is too emotionally complicated for me.

Another pressure toward conformity has to do with my relationship to femininity and the way that changes with getting older. I've always been somewhat a girly-girl, and I love dresses and feminine clothes. Some of my earliest memories involve trying to talk my mother into buying me various skirts and cute crop-tops and heels -- her style of feminism pushing hard in the direction of denim and "clothes you can do things in."

It's one thing to be both girly and non-conformist when you're young, but I feel like it gets complicated when you get older. I'm a professor, but sometimes when I'm not "dressed up," strangers ask "Are you a student?" I know, whatever, but it gets annoying. Plus, it's easy to look good when you're young, even if you're wearing weird clothes, because duh -- young people are cute. Not so easy as time goes on.

Now that I look more conformist, though, it's disturbing to me that people might look at me and think that I'm a happy part of the system, or that I think things are mostly just peachy, or that I'm optimistic about the future. As time has gone on, I feel like more people now share the feelings I had back in the 1980s, that things are radically not-OK, and maybe I'm also more aware of people who feel this way. Racism and police brutality continue to be outrageous. Workers in the US need to earn $22.10 per hour to afford to rent a modest two-bedroom apartment; according to Forbes, the median US hourly wage is $16.71. Looming climate change has made dystopianism a mainstream mood. It's not just for goths anymore.

Whenever I'm on this train of thought, at some point I think to myself: why are you thinking about self-presentation, when action is what matters? Isn't it silly to be worrying about how you look, when what matters is what you do?

But I think they both matter. Years ago a student came up and asked me something about a slightly non-conformist thing, and I was like "of course!" and she was like "well, I didn't know, because you you look so normal." And I was like "Hmmmm." Plus, in our Instagramish age, where everything has to come with a photo, self-presentation has become a central form of communication. 

I'm not really sure what would be next. On the one hand, I hardly wear makeup, and I don't dye my grey hair, and it's a measure of how bizarre the world is that these things really are seen as non-conformist. But on the other hand, I'd like to do more. Maybe I should learn to sew and start wearing jeans with brightly colored fringe. Maybe I should put sparkles on everything I own. Maybe I should become that kind of ultra-femme who transcends conformist femininity. Maybe I should start wearing only sports-wear -- which would be conformist for some people, but pretty non-conformist for a woman in academia. Obviously, I don't have an answer or a plan, and hence the question of the title is really a question. The world is ending. What should I wear?

Anthony Trollope And The Texture Of Human Unhappiness

As you may know, I am a fan of the novels of Anthony Trollope. For those of you who aren't Victorian-novel-enthusiasts, Trollope was a contemporary of Dickens -- and, in certain respects, sort of an anti-Dickens. Partly because of the political overtones of their differences, Dickens is far the more popular writer these days. And I get that. But I still think we need Trollope.

Dickens and Trollope are different in topic and style. Topic-wise, Dickens's books often feature poor and lower-class characters, and often have a sort of point to make about them. The poor are downtrodden; they are noble and worthy; they deserve better treatment. Trollope's books feature aristocrats, and they focus on family, money, and politics. Who will marry? Who will inherit? Who will prosper?

Style-wise, Dickens's books are often humorous, and I hope I'm being fair to Dickens when I say that they feature characters who are painted in vivid and simple colors. Good people. Bad people. Angry people. Grateful people. Trollope's books, on the other hand, are psychologically realistic and, as a result, full of ambiguity. There are people who are kind but also weak. People who are loving but also scheming. People who are torn between their commitments and their longings and, like all of us, bumble through as best they can.

Nathaniel Hawthorne said that Trollope's books were so realistic, they were "just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were made a show of." Trollope's books are so realistic that even though Trollope himself was sort of an anti-feminist, the books are plausibly feminist: they are full of complex, multifaceted female characters who think and reflect, act on their own internal motivations, accomplish a wide variety of things, and often bridle at the limits of their social roles. It's like Trollope found himself forced to tell the truth about women's inner lives and social status -- even when that conflicted with his beliefs.

So part of Trollope's unpopularity is the potentially suspect nature of writing only about rich British people. It's also that Trollope's topics are seen as soap-opera-ish and light. And Trollope's reputation took a hit when it was revealed that he made himself write a certain number of lines every morning -- for most of his life, every morning before starting his day job working for the postal service. This seemed to people unserious, workmanlike, and not consistent with literary genius.

I feel these views of Trollope are unjust, but I don't spend a lot of time talking and thinking about it. I mean, we're hardly lacking for stories about rich British people. But Trollope was on my mind recently as I was thinking recently about our bizarre cultural climate.


One thing I feel we learn from Trollope's books is the vast range of misery-sources that have nothing to do with money and social status. You can have money, status, even servants, and still feel not only unhappy but also cruelly shafted out of the good things in life. Maybe you're oafish or unattractive to others. Maybe you're a figure of fun. Maybe the person you love doesn't love you back. Maybe you're inextricably attached to someone who is driving you crazy. Maybe you devoted your life to a project that the world, moving on, decided was pointless. Maybe your life is predictable and dull. Maybe, despite -- or because of! -- your privileged life, you just can't get your shit together. 

I think this lesson is crucially important. First, it's important to know for yourself, so you can think about your life. Yes, you need a certain amount of money and social status to live. But more of those things is not a ticket to happiness, and neither is anything else, really. Instead of trying to get to misery-elimination, why not aim lower? Misery-management is, perhaps, a more appropriate goal.

I don't know if you remember when the DVD of Sesame Street was first issued, and it came with a warning: "These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child." Writing in the New York Times, Virginia Heffernan wrote that "People on 'Sesame Street had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you 'out' of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, 'Sesame Street' suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off -- taking baths, eating cookies, reading."

An era in which we're constantly told to live our best life and be thrilled about it could use this kind of acknowledgement of the basic principle-of-conservation-of-unhappiness.

A second reason we need to be reminded that people can have money and social status and still feel miserable and shafted is that these days, a lot of people with money and social status feel miserable and shafted. And sometimes because of this, they're making a certain amount trouble for the rest of us.

I'm not saying "oh boo-hoo for them" and I'm not saying "oh the poor rich people" and I'm not saying "oh, we should care more about rich people's problems." It's more like: we should remember, as we think about human nature and how we're all going to live together, that this is, in fact, a thing.

I'd never deny that books should give us insight into the lives of others and that -- duh -- when those lives are only those of British aristocrats, something has gone off the rails. But with all the stories and narratives out there, I hope we can make some room for the Trollopes of the world.

Frankenstein And Feminist Ethics

Mary Shelley

I've always had a thing for Mary Shelley. I love the book Frankenstein, and have always thought it a seriously philosophical work -- nothing like the monster movies that came later. Shelley's life, full of adventure, literature, politics and parenting, was incredible.

So I was excited to read Jill Lepore's New Yorker article contextualizing some of the history of Frankenstein. I already had the opinion that the book is more about motherhood than about science, but it was cool to see everything assembled in a tidy package. As I wrote about before, if you've read the book, you know that what changes the creature from a kindly awkward creature into a violent monster is that his creator despises him. He has no one to love him. He has no mother. This leads to the violence that ruins the lives of everyone in the story. Lepore talks about Shelley's miscarriages and how many infants she gave birth to who died soon after being born -- basically, "eight years of near-constant pregnancy and loss."

I learned two new things about Frankenstein. One is that the story wrapped within a story wrapped within a narration allows the novel to depict different perspectives all at the same time. Lepore says it's like nesting dolls. and because of this, people debated whether the politics of the book are revolutionary or counter-revolutionary.

A second, more interesting, thing is that the creature's account of his eduction closely follows the conventions of the slave narratives of the time and that the creature's experience was understood to implicate the institution of slavery.

You may remember that the creature, on being chased out of the lab and roaming the countryside trying to find warmth, shelter, and companionship, then listens to a family through a hole in the wall and later comes upon books by Milton, Plutarch and Goethe. This is how he learns to read and write and think in language. I learned from Lepore's piece that despite Sir Walter Scott finding this "preposterous," it actually echoes stories like that of Frederick Douglas, who learned to read by trading with white boys for lessons and later from reading books. I had no idea that Shelley and her contemporaries were following debates over abolition, or that the relationship between the creator and his creation was widely seen as a parallel for the United States and slaves who, if freed, were sure to seek vengeance. Now I want to read Elizabeth Young's Black Frankenstein.  

One thing Lepore doesn't discuss, that I've always wondered about, is the relation between the motherhood themes of Frankenstein and the philosophy of Shelley's father, William Godwin. Shelley was the daughter of Godwin and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, but Wollstonecraft died soon after giving birth, so she was raised by Godwin (and, eventually, a stepmother). Godwin was a utilitarian and a famous impartialist -- meaning that ethically we ought to treat each person as equally deserving of our moral consideration.

I learned from reading Peter Singer that Godwin proposed a thought experiment: you are outside a burning building and inside is a famous author and also your father, who happens to be the author's valet. The author writes the kind of books that bring moral uplifting and happiness to many people. You have to decide whether to save the author or your father. 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 don't know much about Godwin, but doesn't that sound like the opposite of the themes of Frankenstein? Part of the point of the book is that without that deep and highly partial love that a parent can give you, you cannot develop into a proper human (or, proper creature in this case).

I'm not saying utilitarianism is pro-monster, obviously. It's more a question of how love fits into it, and how caring is essential to ethical life. Shelley's perspective fits with contemporary feminist ethics and ethics of care, but now I'm curious of what she thought of her father's philosophy.

In the end, one of Shelley's children lived, and after a serious of difficulties, Shelley devoted her later life to bringing up her son, educating him, supporting him and her father, while traveling and writing. Along the way, she helped all kinds of people, especially women whom society disapproved of. We love you, Mary Shelley!

The Problems of Love and Autonomy

I was invited to join others in contributing a post about love to the Daily Nous in honor of Valentine's Day. Mine is cross-posted below, but you can check them all out here. 

It's Valentine's Day, so let's talk about ... death! In the grand tradition of philosophical debate, I'll start with an anecdote:

Kay Sievewright and Ernie Sievewright of British Columbia were married for 55 years, and when their health declined, they hoped to die together. They were each approved for Medical Assistance in Dying, which became legal here in Canada in 2016, but their request to die at the same time was turned down. Instead, they died four days apart, in early 2017.

A spokesperson for the Canadian Medical Protective Association, which provides legal advice to physicians, said they couldn't comment on this case, but they did make a general statement: "The legislation is quite clear that the request has to be voluntary and they are not under any influence ... It may well be that one member of the couple is being influenced by the other member of the couple and the reason why they're agreeing to the pact is not entirely without influence."

You might think this has little to do with Valentine's Day, but I think this case highlights in an interesting way some deep complexities of love and personal autonomy. It's often thought to be in the nature of love that you come to feel the way you do about things partly because of the influence of the other person. In union theories of love, merger can mean curtailing individual decision-making, and in caring concern theories, the fact that something will increase the well-being of the beloved is a reason to do it. Drawing on accounts of shared agency, Andrea Westlund proposes shared egalitarian deliberation, in which each person should be open to guidance by the perspective of the other.

On the face of it, love is thus in tension with autonomy, where there is an emphasis on the importance of doing things for your own reasons, free, as the statement says, even of "influence" from others.

This tension can be resolved in various ways. Some concern theorists point out that if you act for the other person because you love them, this is acting for your own reasons. And as relational theorists of autonomy like have long emphasized, what enables people to be autonomous is not isolation, but relationships. Westlund says that autonomy is about being "answerable" for your commitments, so love means mutual answerability. 

These ways of resolving the tension aptly show how autonomy and love are compatible, but as is often pointed out, they may not fully resolve deeper questions of undue influence from our intimates. What makes influence inappropriate? When one person prioritizes the interests of another, this can be because of love, but it can also be because of pressure, coercion, or socialized deference. How should this distinction be understood?

Even when deference is systematic and gendered, a result of feminine socialization, there is debate over how "autonomy" should be conceptualized. On the one hand, a person who is systematically deferential to another in this way seems paradigmatically non-autonomous, since they are not deciding for their own reasons. On the other hand, if a person chooses deference, that's their choice; who are we to say they are not being themselves?

Anita Ho highlights the relevant complexities in bioethical decision-making. Given the vulnerabilities and stresses of illness and treatment, relational perspectives force us to acknowledge that for whose whose family is central to their existence, consideration of family members' "advice, needs, and mutual interests" is part of being autonomous. Still, she says, exploitation, indoctrination and false consciousness are real possibilities. Clinicians should "listen to the family’s concerns and reasoning process, and then explore with them various options that can best respect the interests of all parties." By default, however, Ho says that health care teams should trust the patient's own final expressed wishes -- not because manipulation is impossible, but rather because family relationships are highly complex and typically opaque to clinicians.

This brief investigation highlights some of the limitations of appealing to autonomy to solve complicated ethical problems, especially where love and intimacy are involved. It seems appealingly simple to say that for important decisions, we should prioritize individual autonomy. But autonomy is complicated and contextual, and may not be able to bear all this theoretical weight.

The Sievewrights may have come to their decisions in a context of mutual respect, or one may have felt obliged to go along with the other out of love, or one may have pressured the other. From the outside, we may never know -- and in a deeper sense, there may be no answer to this question, even if we had the transcript of the Sievewrights's intimate thoughts.

The same is true for any difficult and important decision, no matter when or how it takes place. The presence of people we love has a powerful effect on us. Sometimes that shapes us to make us who we are. Sometimes it shapes us in more disturbing ways. We may not ourselves always know how to tell the difference. 

Partner Dancing Needs A Queer Revolution

I used to dance when I was young, and then I didn't dance for a long, long time, and then I started to want to dance again. So I started thinking about "what kinds of dancing," and one aspect of the contemporary dance scene that one immediately confronts is that a lot of dancing is geared either toward performance or toward what I learned is called "social dancing." And a lot of social dancing is partner dancing, where two people dance together.

In North America, partner dancing seems to include ballroom dancing, waltz, tango, salsa, and related styles. I want to dance to have a good time, not to perform, so on the face of it, social dancing is just what I'm looking for, and I like the idea of partner dancing -- dancing with someone. As I've known for decades, though, social partner dancing presents a person with an immediate problem: one person has to follow the other.

I've tried partner dancing a few times in my life, and leading and following is one of the first lessons. A shocking amount of partner dancing seems to still involve a man and a woman paired up together, and when it does, it's the man who leads and the woman who follows. OK, it's 2017, so that's a little nuts right off the bat. But when you start being instructed on how to follow, you realize it's even crazier than its sounds.

I remember in one class being told that to be a good follower, you had to be ultra attentive to the tiniest gestures and glances of your partner, so you could sense, as immediately as possible, what direction they were going to go in, and what move they were going to do. It's not like a "Simon Says" situation. It's more like immersing yourself in a study of the physicality of the other person, to sense them, understand them, and respond to them.

I remember when I heard that I was kind of horrified. I mean, one of the things that makes it difficult to be a woman in the modern world is that women are socialized to study men, sense them, understand them, and respond to them. And while it would be nice in romance if everyone would study, sense, understanding, and respond to others, in public life and work the gendered difference in this activity becomes a huge problem. know a lot of women share my sense that in those contexts, studying, sensing, understanding and responding to men's every motion and glance is what we're trying to unlearn. And now doing it is going to be part of my dancing? My dancing I am doing for fun?

If you think I'm exaggerating the creepiness of following, notice that the "following" advice on this page includes the sentence: "I tell women 'you are a food cart, with steel arms and really good wheels.'"

This is no good. Something should change so social partner dancing can get away from all these heteronormative styles and norms. Maybe there are already queer social dances and places that I just don't know about. But even if there are, they haven't made their way to my local dancing class studios, which are in a big city and probably have a lot of queer clientele already. So, what to do?

What does it mean to dance "with someone" if neither person is following? One idea would be for there to be more set and choreographed dances that people would learn. What's wrong with dances that follow a specific script of where you go and what steps you do and when? Then if both people know the dance, they can do it together, without anyone following.

In fact, if the steps are choreographed and always the same, the sensing and responding that is an annoying part of gendered following could become a lighter and more mutual thing. Making sure the dance moves smoothly is something both people could do together. Weren't there European dances that like this back in the day?

If you look at this description of The Quadrille, you'll see a highly structured dance with multiple couples. Interestingly, the Quadrille is related to modern square dancing -- a form in which dance figures are "called." Why can't that structure be danced to cool new music with cool new moves? That seems like it would be really fun.

I thought about this idea before, when I was in BodyAttack. As regular readers know, I'm obsessed with this class, which is officially a "sports inspired" workout class -- but if you've been, you know it has a lot of goofy moves and a hilarious anthemic track 8 with a chorus-line feeling. Anyway, a few years ago a release came out where the "agility track" involved getting into groups on either side of the room, and moving toward one another and then away, facing front and then facing one another, all set to this incredibly infectious electronic dance song "Hardcore Salsa 2K14 (Hardstyle Edit)."

It was really fun. When I did it in Paris at the gym near Place de la République, it was in the dark with disco lights on, and it was awesome. I remember thinking: this is like a dance. If I'd known what a quadrille was, I might have thought, "This is like a quadrille." Why not more things like that? Not only could the people identify in any way gender-wise, the partners could shift around during the dance, which would actually be cool and awesome.

In some ways partner dancing is such an antidote to the ills of modern life. It is an essentially in-person activity, it is artistic, it encourages everyone making themselves a little bit vulnerable, and it doesn't require expensive equipment. Plus -- it is dancing! If only we could solve the leader-follower thing, we'd really be getting somewhere.

My Brush With The Implict Threat Model Of Guy-Guy Interactions

One day I was walking along in Buffalo, New York and I had an interestingly gendered interaction with some strangers.

It was winter, and everyone was really bundled up: I was wearing jeans, and boots, an old coat an old boyfriend had kindly given me because I liked it so much, a hat, a scarf, and, I think, sunglasses. I was walking on a major street, but since the sidewalks were imperfectly shoveled, and it was icy and snowy, there was a bit of a narrowness to the path ahead.

I saw two guys coming toward me, walking along the sidewalk together. I didn't think anything of it. As we got close to each other, and I started to step slightly aside to let them pass, the guys crashed into me -- deliberately. Not quite hard enough to knock me over, but almost. I looked up at them, like WTF? And then I heard one of the guys say to the other, "Hey, it's a girl! Stop, stop, it's a girl!"

I understood immediately what had happened. Thinking I was a guy, they had a guy-guy interaction with me. I don't know if they were trying to start something, or if something about my clothing -- girlish, if you thought I was a guy -- struck them as a problem, or whether they were just crabby and wanted to take it out on someone. On realizing I was a woman, their whole way of relating to me changed. I was no longer a stranger with whom being physically combative would seem like the thing to do.

I am not sure whether the guys were white guys, or black guys, or guys of some other race. Maybe I didn't notice at the time or maybe I forgot. I am white; I wonder, if I actually were a guy, whether the racial aspect of the situation would have struck me as more salient, as an insight into the kind of aggression being put out there. I don't know.

Anyway, I was disturbed enough to want to put some distance between us, so I just turned away and went on my way. And they went on theirs, past me in the opposite direction.

It was just a few seconds, but I have thought about this interaction so many times since then. I have always known, intellectually, that the way guys relate to one another often has an implicit-threat aspect to it -- whether that's a physical threat or one involving subtler forms of social power. But experiencing it first-hand made me appreciate this fact in a deeper and more visceral way.

The fact that guy-guy interactions often have this implicit-threat aspect to them seems to me relevant not only to understanding masculinity and guy-guy relations, but also to understanding feminism and any-gender relations. One reason is that there's a certain kind of guy who always takes feminism to be asking for "special" or "favorable" treatment for women. To which feminists have -- correctly -- pointed out that feminism isn't about special or favorable treatment, but rather about equality, respect, and dismantling sexist gender norms. But there's no question that feminism does not seek to replace other-gender relations with the "implicit threat" model of guy-guy interactions. It's not: "please treat me the way you would treat some guy." So, in some sense, the matter is a bit complex.

I was talking this over with my friend, and he pointed out that while guy-guy interactions do often carry an aspect of aggression, he also thought that the kind of aggression guys often show toward women has a distinct aspect, so that misogyny involves a special kind of motivated anger and ill-will. I think that's true, and so it would be too simple to conclude that if men treated other men with more respect they might, in the name of equality, treat women with more respect.

But it does suggest that, in some sense, a call to "equality" is insufficient for bringing about the gender-happy utopia. Because nobody wants the implicit threat model of guy-guy interactions to become the more widespread model of person-person interactions.

My Mother Audrey Would Not Just Follow Your Stupid Rules

My mom in her twenties

As regular readers know, my mother had been in ill health for quite a while. Last week I posted that picture of my parents from back in the day. The following day, my mother died.

As you may know if you read the obituary, my mother was a political activist, feminist, cat-lover, and Red Sox fan, known for her open-mindedness, humor, warmth, and compassion. But she was also what you would call an "independent thinker."

People toss around phrases like "independent thinker" to be nice about eccentrics, intellectuals, or weirdos, but my mom was the real deal. She just refused to go along with things just because they were things everyone else was doing, or things someone else wanted her to do, or things you'd be expected to do just because doing them was part of how the system works.

When my mom was just out of high school, she moved out of her parents house, got a job, and got an apartment in Boston with her friends -- something single women never did in the mid-fifties. Though she never went to college, she read widely in a range of subjects and especially in politics and education. She thought elementary school should have more freedom and more play and more unstructured learning -- and she said so to anyone who would listen -- even while my father was running for school committee in our town on almost the opposite platform.

My mom played the piano and was seriously into classical music, but she refused to play in front of people -- she said it drove her crazy if she was playing and people were talking, so she just said, "Nope!" In 1976, when everyone was arguing about Carter versus Ford, my mom campaigned for Senator Gene McCarthy. Her favorite movie was Auntie Mame.

I'm not going to lie: being the child of an independent thinker wasn't always easy. My mom's feminist commitments included the concept that children should be dressed in jeans, t-shirts, and sneakers -- basically, clothes you could run around in. But I was a girly girl from the earliest age. Why couldn't I run around in a dress? My mom valued eduction, and sometimes said she wished she'd gone to college -- but then she also said she only wanted to go if she didn't have to do any assignments she didn't want to do. Why couldn't she just suck it up, like everyone else? When she drove around without car insurance or registration because "nothing bad is going to happen" or wouldn't go to the doctor because she was "mad at the American health care system," I went nuts.

But my mom's habits of independent thought have obviously had a profound impact on who I am as a person. I myself enjoy challenging the status quo. Even though my mom seemed to think academic philosophy was an unimaginative and irrelevant way to think about things, the impulse to ask "why are things way rather than some other way" is one that clearly forms a basic part of my intellectual approach to the world. Also, I don't mind being thought a weirdo. For these things, crucial to who I am, I have my mother to thank.

My mom had a heart condition that caused her to have heart failure last fall, and after a hospital stay she was weakened enough that had to move permanently to a nursing home. In a way, she was OK there: reading, following politics, and watching the Red Sox were all activities easy to continue, and her warmth and caring attitudes were appreciated. But she didn't like the rules. She didn't like being told that she had to do physical therapy, or that she had to take a shower at a certain time. She didn't like that she had an identifying bracelet with her doctor's name written on it. She didn't like being part of the system.

Over the last few weeks my mom's health declined rapidly, likely because of her heart. On one of her last days, the doctor came in to check on her. "Audrey," he said, as he leaned down to speak into her ear. "It's me, Dr. Sharma."

My mother had just been lying there with her eyes closed, but at this she perked up. "Oh!" she said, raising her braceleted wrist, her tone eye-rolly and sarcastic. "I guess I belong to you." Everybody laughed. Complaining about the system, right to the very end. That's my mom!

Consent Is A Really Low Bar For Most Human Interaction

I was talking with someone yesterday about consent. I often think about consent in connection with sexual consent, because I teach and research in that area, but then our conversation moved on to other kinds of consent -- consent to have certain kinds of verbal interactions or other exchanges or engaging in other activities together.

And one of the things I started thinking about was about how consent is a really low bar for most human interaction. What I mean by that is: when you're interacting with people, there's a wide range of things you might concern yourself with that go way beyond whether they're consenting to something. These include things like how your words and actions make them feel in the moment, or how your words and actions are going to make them feel later, or how your words and actions are going to seem in retrospect. You might consider whether the person is is in a moment of difficulty, or doubt, or peer pressure. You might consider whether the nature of the relationship between you, or the specific tone or context, makes it difficult to disagree with or go against you.

Often with sexual consent the same things apply. We talk a lot about consent (and properly so) in the sexual domain, partly engaging in sexual activity with someone without their consent is a particularly egregious harm, so this is a morally bright line. But here, too, consent is often a low bar. If you're in a relationship with someone, and you want to discuss your sex life, and they just keep coming back to how you "consented" to every activity, that person would be acting like an asshole: shutting down the conversation that ought to be happening, about pleasure, and desire, and the texture of life and so on.

And the same thing applies more broadly. If you're asking someone personal questions, or requesting help with your school assignment or something at work, or you're trying to figure out a good way to share share domestic tasks or childcare with you, a respectful and kind person pays attention not only to agreements but also to how the other person seems to feel and the background context and so on.

Sometimes I feel like the whole consent framework is becoming so deeply woven into our way of thinking that it's hard to even see it as a thing -- it just feels like the "way things are." In so many domains we refer back to the idea that if someone agreed to something, then they have to take their lumps: if you said OK, then don't come crying to me. But this is an awful way to interact with the people you care about, and by extension, it's often a crappy way to interact with people in general.

Years ago I wrote a post about how the idea of pursuing self-interest through contract and negotiation had somehow expanded beyond the domains of business or market exchanges and into the fabric of our personal lives. In addition to the points above, I tried to say how constant negotiation was exhausting us: there's no port in the storm, no part of our lives where we can stop trying to create the self-image and situation that will allow us to get the things, like love and caring, that we need to survive.

In that older post I mentioned an idea I'd remembered reading from Simone de Beauvoir: that one reason Western patriarchical gender norms constructed "woman" as naturally nurturing and passive was just in response to this kind of problem: if you take one whole gender as naturally providing the love and care and attention -- not because of negotiation and who is consenting to what, but because that's part of who they are -- well, then the necessity of negotiation and looking out for yourself in "public life" is ameliorated. Some woman -- maybe your mother, maybe your wife -- will be there to offer care and concern. Not necessarily in public life, but domestically, at home, in personal interaction,

Currently, our ideas of "public life" and whatever is the alternative to that are mixed up together, and we're often operating in some weird hybrid domain where we're forming a friendship but also forming a career contact, or we're flirting but we're also hoping for a useful introduction, or we're hanging out but we're also hoping to impress. It's complicated and exhausting. We now know that gender equality means we're all in the problem in the same way together.

The moral, I think, is that taking other people's point of view into account is something we should see as part of normal, respectful, human interaction. Sure, consent is important. But most of what we want to do with one another is not like getting a bank loan, where you sign on the dotted line and you're good to go.  Even if it is helpful as one morally bright line, consent is not the only thing, and in fact it's often pretty minimal for a way of thinking about how you treat the people around you.

The Thing On The Other Side Of "Political Correctness" Is (Often) Not "Free Speech"

Often when people argue over political correctness, you hear the opposing point of view framed in terms of "free speech": proponents of political correctness, it is suggested, want to restrict speech, and opponents want not to restrict it.

But for a long time I've felt like something about this doesn't fit. The term "political correctness" is typically used to refer to a specific content -- speech that respects certain norms surrounding certain issues. Those norms are themselves contested, of course -- but still, if a neo-nazi party put a ban on anti-racist speech at their convention, no one would use the term "political correctness" to describe that. The term "political correctness" is about a certain set of ideas.

By contrast, "free speech" is a general principle -- a principle about speech that does not refer to specific content surrounding certain issues. In the classic formulation, speech should be in some sense protected as long as it's not harming other people. Again, these boundaries are themselves contested -- does "protection" mean just legal protection or does it mean you shouldn't lose your job? what is "harm"? But again, even those questions are general ones, potentially applicable in the same way to any content.

This suggests that there is something wrong with treating the two as if they're directly opposed. I think that this is true, and I think it's possible to see it by thinking about how often the concept of "political correctness" is used in contexts where it doesn't refer to formal policies or punishments but just with what ideas of appropriateness will inform which contexts. This contextuality means that the real question often isn't about "free speech" but rather about the specific content in specific contexts.

As is often pointed out, in a lot of cases where people talk about "free speech," there is no policy or punishment in question, it's just a matter of getting criticized a lot -- and criticism is an exercise of free speech not a way of limiting it. But it's also important to notice that in a lot of cases, the question turns not on general considerations but rather on "appropriateness" in context.

There's a lot of agreement, I think, that for many contexts, there ought to be standards of appropriateness. And this means that when we argue about "free speech" versus "political correctness," the real disagreement often isn't over abstractions like "free speech," but rather over the specific content in the specific context.

For example, if there are guidelines about appropriate speech and conduct in a classroom, that is something context-specific, and there is wide agreement that some such standards make sense. I can't find it now, but in the aftermath of one of the big US campus controversies, someone wrote a humor piece in which a student claimed a "free speech" restriction because they weren't allowed to spend the entire class shouting over and over that fellow-student "Bob" was a moron. Of course, it's funny because that's not a restriction on free speech because the guideline in question -- you can't disrupt class to personally malign other students -- is a context-specific and reasonable one.

Other contexts allow people to create guidelines. If you have people over and one of them says something horrible and offensive, you can ask them to leave: it's your house; you can set the guidelines. If a visitor calls your spouse an ugly, lying, piece of shit, you're not violating their free speech when you ask them to leave.

The real question, I think, often isn't "free speech" but rather what's appropriate in what context and why. In a classroom, it's reasonable to have guidelines that foster a learning atmosphere. If some forms of speech destroy that atmosphere, it's reasonable to restrict them. In a home, the people who live there get to set the guidelines.

What critics of "political correctness" often have in mind, I think, really has to do with what they feel is regarded as appropriate in certain contexts: they think this "appropriateness" criterion is often set too broadly, or includes the wrong things.

I often disagree completely with these critics about specific items (like, of course I think names like "Redskins" are racist and offensive) but I think at the abstract level the question of what is and isn't appropriate in context can be fraught, unclear, contested, something without an obvious right answer. In these cases, though, we're not arguing about "free speech" at all -- we're arguing about the actual content of the actual example and the actual context in question.

For example, in the case of the Yale Halloween controversy, the initial email asked students to think carefully about their choices, and to consider the negative impact that culturally insensitive costumes could have. It's been framed as an issue about "free speech." But not only was there no policy or punishment suggested, the question of costumes in a community of students is one that is obviously bound by *some* standards and guidelines. If a student had a physical disability or an unusual appearance and a hundred other students got organized to mock them via costume on Halloween, this would be inappropriate and wrong. The question has to do not with freedom of expression but rather with how the standards and guidelines should be interpreted and set.

If this is right, then contested speech really turns on discussion of the ins and outs of the particular content in question. This, I believe, can be simple, or it can be very complicated. In the case of the costumes, I think the initial email proposed a guideline that was completely reasonable: your costume could hurt and alienate someone else, and on the other side ... what? Some important truth is going unseen?

But in other cases, it might be less clear. In what contexts is it appropriate or inappropriate to say that women belong at home taking care of domestic matters? I think if you're debating a policy or intellectual issue with someone who happens to be a woman, it's completely inappropriate. But what if you're debating the nature and limits of multiculturalism? Or what if you're trying to challenge the Western feminist orthodoxy that choice and autonomy always make for the good life? What if this is part of your brand of communitarian radical feminism?

When matters are contested, I think we're often really debating the particular speech in question, and how it fits into the particular context. If this is right, there can be reasonable disagreements, even among the most well-meaning people -- and even among people ultra committed to "free speech"! -- over what speech should be regarded in what way and when and so on. If this is right, it also means that speech that gets criticized for being politically incorrect needs more than "free speech' as a defense: it needs a specific reason why the speech is appropriate or potentially important to protect in the given context.

I think one reason these matters have come to seem so confusing and flattened out these days is that so much speech is happening on "the internet," which is something tech people want to pretend is like a street corner soap box -- no particular context, free speech! -- but which functions in people's lives as as series of very specific mini-contexts where many things are not OK. As I've said before, it drives me crazy to see the tech companies treat as simple and algorithmic problems that are ultra complicated and require thought and judgment.  

Again, I don't mean to imply here that all free speech debates are of the category I'm discussing in this post. If you're talking about a law restricting speech, that is a free speech issue, and there are a lot of grey areas, such as policies that create punishments for forms of speech.

It's just to say that in a lot of cases, the issue has more to do with the content of the speech than any principle of "free speech." As a corollary, it would follow that, contra what we keep reading on the internet, being in favor of "free speech" and also in favor of "political correctness" is a coherent and consistent position.

Culture And Identity Everywhere, Or, Where Are The Reluctant Vegetarians?

For a long time, I used to be a vegetarian. It was for ethical reasons only: I've always loved to eat meat. OK maybe it wasn't for such a long time, but it was .. maybe 15 years or something.

For various reasons it all kind of fell apart around the time I moved from California to Canada in 2004. For one thing, I had persistently low ferritin -- and yes, you can take iron supplements for that, but no, it's not easy or straightforward, since they upset your stomach and make you feel gross. For another, I suck at pre-preparing food; I found that in Canada, going out for a quick lunch as a vegetarian often meant a pile of pasta or a pile of French fries or a grilled cheese sandwich -- all foods that are fine as a one-off but disgusting if you eat them every day. And then I accidentally ate some mistranslated poultry while traveling in France, and I was like "OMG, this tastes amazing."

Even my feminism tended me toward meat eating: as a steak-lover, I was super-pissed about all the men out there enjoying steak, and never giving it a second thought, while here I was worrying and depriving myself. Well -- I thought -- I'm going to eat it too, so there. 

All this time I've had some vague cognitive dissonance, but honestly there's so much else going on in the world to be upset about that I found it hard to prioritize. But then recently I kept seeing references to meat-eating's effect on the environment and contribution to climate change, and I kept remembering the reasons I'd been a vegetarian in the first place. I read Oryx and Crake, which paints a disturbingly plausible dystopian future of our relations to our animal friends. Plus, I remembered the symbolism of it -- the feeling that regardless of whether your actions are "making a difference," at least there's that feeling that you're standing up for something that isn't actively contributing to a status quo that is frankly pretty deeply screwed up.

So a few months ago I decided I could at least do this: eat vegetarian when it's easy to do so. It's easy at a lot of restaurants. It's pretty easy when I'm at home by myself -- especially since I actually like tofu. Where I teach, you can now get some decent felafel, so it's pretty easy to do on campus.

Since I started doing this, I keep finding two things: one, how few restaurants offer decent vegetarian food, and two, how many people associate vegetarianism with somehow not liking meat or not wanting to eat it or regarding it as somehow unhealthy or gross.

These are bizarre to me. I mean, it's 2016. Aren't vegetarians everywhere? And don't they want to eat with non-vegetarians? Sometimes fancier restaurants do OK, though often it's just some crappy pasta thing like pumpkin ravioli that is basically starch on starch filled with starch. Kind of blech. The real puzzle, though, is casual places and pubs. If you're serving burgers already, is it that hard to add a veggie burger? Don't they come pre-packaged and frozen? 

I think in some deep sense this restaurant problem is related to the other thing -- that is, with the way avoiding meat somehow is seen as a distinctive identity or approach to the world, rather than just a relatively simple and possibly occasional way make an environmentally friendly and animal-friendly choice. I was recently in a large group of people where the conversation turned to meat, and someone told a story about how they'd cooked something in meat that isn't usually cooked in meat, and how some nearby vegetarian had said, "oh that smells so good!" and everyone in the room laughed knowingly, as if that poor vegetarian had been outed as some kind of hypocrite -- which is, of course, ridiculous.

I love to eat meat. I think it tastes delicious, and it makes me feel good. If I'm eating a veggie burger, it's not because I have some weird identity commitment to pasta being a virtuous food, or meat being decadent, or beef being disgusting. It's not even that I think veggie burgers are healthier. Given the latest research, I expect they're not. It's just, you know, a bit of less factory farming misery and a bit of saving the planet.

As I say, I think somehow the two things to together: that seeing vegetarianism as a taste and thus identity is related to how hard it is to find vegetarian food in casual eating places. I don't know how it works, but maybe it's something like this. As with so many things these days, the choice to do one thing or other is seen as reflecting not just a means-end calculation you made (avoiding meat better for environment) but rather something about what kind of person you are. And since it would be weird to be the kind of person who thinks meat is somehow wrong or evil or bad or gross, and still go around saying you like it, it's expected that you'll present a coherent identity choice on the issue. Then, naturally, it's expected you'll choose your friends and restaurants accordingly. Vegetarians will hang out with other vegetarians at vegetarian restaurants; pub people will hang out with other pub people at burger places.

I don't know what else to say about this except - "I don't like it." I feel like a burger person who is trying to eat vegetarian food, and I feel like a pub person who is in the wrong restaurant. I feel like saying I am avoiding meat even though I like it makes people feel weird, like I'm doing something bizarrely out of character or something.

Last semester when I was teaching philosophy of sex and love, we discussed Foucault, and we got talking about the idea not all societies had/have a concept of "sexual orientation," because sometimes you can just have a set of things you choose and it's not seen as revealing something deep or unchangeable about who you are. It's just: you chose that thing that time. I feel like with almost everything we're going in the other directions. Every choice is taken to reflect something deep or important about who you are. But why?

Weirdly, I feel like even most of the vegetarians I know seem happy with their vegetarianism. I don't hear a lot of other people talking about how they wanted steak but they ate tofu instead. Why not? Is it true that most people who don't eat meat don't want to? Or is it that it's easier to sacrifice if you convince yourself you didn't like the thing in the first place? Is it some deep manifestation of the harmony myth of human nature?


Or is it something much simpler: that the people who feel this -- the reluctant vegetarians -- just don't talk about it much?

The "Surrendered Person" As A Model For Us All

My mother raised me to be a feminist (thanks, mom!) and so when I see a headline like "I Am a Surrendered Wife," I know there's going to be trouble. When I think "surrendered wife," I think a person who has agreed to sublimate her own will and well-being to that of her husband, to give up on shared decision-making, and to have sex on demand.

But when I read the article I got a little weirded out, becuase a lot of what she was saying seemed to me to be ... like normal relationship advice. In fact, a lot of what she was saying seemed to me to be good advice for just being a person and relating to other people.

For one thing, the author describes constantly hectoring her husband, disagreeing with him, trying to change him, and not respecting his opinions. Um -- that's not equality, that's being an annoying pain in the ass. For another thing, most of what she was recommending seemed to be about respect for others and being kind, receptive, and grateful.

Let's look at the "six principles" of being a surrendered wife. The surrendered wife:

• Relinquishes inappropriate control of her husband
• Respects her husband's thinking
• Receives his gifts graciously and expresses gratitude for him
• Expresses what she wants without trying to control him
• Relies on him to handle household finances
• Focuses on her own self-care and fulfillment

Leaving aside the financial business, aren't these all things everyone should be doing for everyone else all the time? Don't try to boss other people around. Respect others' opinions and views. Be grateful for the kindnesses you receive, and try to be kind in return. Don't try to control other people.

One of the more interesting items on the list is the last one: that the "surrendered wife" needs to make happiness for herself instead of expecting her spouse to magically provide the happiness and meaning in her life. This is a bit weird, because it's like the opposite of being "surrendered." It's like, "Take responsibility for your own happiness! Your relationship isn't the end-all-and-be-all!"

One of the more potentially contentious aspects of being a "surrendered wife" that doesn't come up on this list has to do with sex. Part of the idea is usually that even when you don't feel like it, you should have sex with your husband even when you're not in the mood.

Of course, there is a way of understanding this in which it is awful and sexist: that no matter how you're feeling your feelings don't matter, you just have to have sex when the other person wants it. But there's another way to think of it that seems to be completely normal and good advice for everyone, both men and women: if the person you love wants to have sex with you, and you don't feel like it, you don't have to say "no" immediately. Maybe try it out a bit. See how it goes.

In fact, recent research into women's sexuality has raised the idea that maybe expecting desire to arise "spontaneously" is a male-centric model of sexuality. For many women, desire is "responsive" and emerges in connection with sexual activity itself. To think spontaneous desire is "better" is just another form of taking women to be "lesser."

So that just leaves ... money. And no, of course partners should engage in shared decision-making about money. So that one, I think, doesn't translate over. But frankly, it seems an odd fit with the rest of the list anyway.

I don't know how normal relationship ideas got so strange that respecting the other person's opinions and being grateful and not trying to control them became "surrender" rather than just, you know, normal life, but I guess that's just another one of those insane things about the early 21st century.

My Encounter With A Creepy Guy At A Bar, Or, How Is It That Other People Structure Our Experiences?

I was in Connecticut visiting my mother this past weekend, and when I'm visiting my mother I always stay at the same hotel, and when I stay at that hotel I always go at least once for dinner at the nice Italian restaurant that's about thirty feet away from the hotel.

So on Sunday night, after hanging out 'til early evening with my mom, I went over there to eat. It was late for a Sunday evening dinner, probably around 8:15. This place has a bar area as well as a restaurant; it's a small bar and the whole place is set in a kind of down-market suburban town, on one of those roads where you can't walk there from anywhere else -- except the hotel. So -- it's not a very "bar-like" atmosphere. There are TV's, though, and a bartender, and sometimes people drinking.

I like to sit at the bar when I'm eating alone at a restaurant. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I often like to sit alone at a bar and eat and drink. I bring something to read or I watch TV or I just zone out while I drink my wine. I listen to the chit chat. I'm usually pretty good at just doing what I want and being impervious to people's judgments so I almost never feel embarrassed or ashamed or weird for being out alone and eating and drinking at the bar.

On this occasion, there were two guys also at the bar -- guys who seemed not to know one another from before but who were deep in conversation. There was a regular-seeming guy and a creepy guy. I say he was a creepy guy because at one point he said something about how awful it was having to do his line of work which required doing awful things to people and the regular guy said, very tentatively, well you could quit and do something else, couldn't you? and the creepy guy said no, he couldn't, because "the wife" needed her nice things.

He then told a story about how, because the wife didn't like car shopping, he'd brought home a Mercedes, an Audi, an Accord, and something else and let her pick one. He asked the regular guy to guess which one the wife had chosen and the regular guy guessed "Mercedes." It's what I would have guessed too, but no, the creepy guy said she'd chosen the Accord. The regular guy said, "Well .. the Accord is a nice car." And the creepy guy said, "I thought she'd pick the Mercedes too."

I was avoiding glancing over at them because while I'm not averse to a bit of chit chat at the bar I could tell that the creepy guy was not a guy who would have light chit chat with a woman alone but would obviously try to turn it into something creepy. I was concentrating on reading my book on my iPhone -- (don't knock this method of novel reading 'til you have tried it, BTW).

Then the creepy guy started in. He was saying something about women and he said ".. and then there's this type here. Beautiful but totally unapproachable." I didn't look up. The regular guy must have looked uncertain because the creepy guy said, "This one, over here. Looking at her iPhone." The creepy guy said something under his breath to the regular guy and they both started laughing loudly.

Then the creepy guy turned to me and said "So. You live around here?" I don't want to be rude, I just want to read my book and avoid too much creepy conversation. So I turned to them and said, "I'm here visiting my mother." The creepy guy started in with more questions, but I decided it would be best to just convey my point of view unambiguously. So I read my book and didn't answer.

Not surprisingly, this caused the creepy guy to become agitated. In a tone of indignation verging on anger, he began a long disquisition on how outrageous it is that while he's "just trying to strike up a conversation" someone could be so rude as to not answer him back.

I struggled to concentrate on my book as I finished my dinner, and I thought about this whole experience, which I've had a few times over the years, and why it is so troubling. For me, it's not a feeling that it's somehow wrong to try to talk to or flirt with strangers at a bar. I am in favor of talking to and flirting with strangers at bars, when it's the right context and circumstance and tone. In fact, just a few weeks before, when I'd been in the same exact bar, the woman bartender and a guy client were deep in conversation about horses and horse-back riding, and they included my briefly in the conversation, and the guy may even have asked, "So, you live around here?" and I would have said "No, I'm visiting my mother." We definitely chatted briefly and it was absolutely fine and not weird because it was a normal conversation.

A conversation at a bar with a guy like the creepy guy is never a normal conversation. You know, and he makes it known, that he is there to make a point, and to make you feel uncomfortable, and that no matter what you do he will use it against you somehow. If you're too nice you'll be a trashy slut; if you're not nice (like me) you're a bitch, and if you're nice but not nice enough you're a tease and a manipulative bitch to boot.

As someone who is, as I've said, pretty impervious to things, it's always interesting to me that there are ways that other people can structure my experience. I was reading my book, but I was no longer happily reading my book and enjoying my food. I could ignore the creepy guy, but I couldn't go back to the same carefree mood I'd had before. Even though I don't care about what that guy thinks, and even though I didn't feel in literal danger, he can still get under my skin, which is interesting in and of itself.

Eventually the regular guy proposed going out for a smoke. I learned from their conversation they were both staying at the hotel next door as well. They paid, and walked out, and I figured they were gone. I enjoyed the rest of my dinner and got ready to go myself.

As I walked out, I saw they were sitting on a bench outside the restaurant, smoking. I walked right past them, and they watched me go. As I walked, I felt a surge of gratitude for being in this particular place and time, where hotels have locks and it's considered reasonably normal for a women to staying in a hotel alone. 

Airspace, Cosmpolitanism, Frictionlessness, And Global Gentrification

Last week in my post about cash I mentioned this idea about how the drive toward the frictionless world sometimes ends up leading us away from where we want to go. Silent cars are dangerous unless we build in fake noises. Virtual payment schemes screw up our spending unless we build in fake pain. As we've noted before, dreams of a frictionless world run into the hard fact that even the internet needs things like energy-sucking data centres and so on.

After the post went up, my friend directed me toward this discussion of "Airspace." "Airspace" is that space of modern capitalist nowhere: the coffee shop, office, or shared work space that all have the same comfort symbols: fast wifi, innocuous background music, wood tables, exposed brick, minimalist furniture.

Noting the increasing homogenization in AirBbB rentals, this article explores the "aesthetic gentrification" that is causing the rise in global sameness. As Lambert says over at Naked Capitalism, one thing about Airspace is that it's frictionless.

This was all on my mind  a few days ago when I encountered this profile of a guy who only owns fifteen objects. James Altucher, described here as "the world's least likely success guru," got rich from being involved with a successful start-up, lived lavishly, tried to make even more money through investments, then went broke.

After losing all his money, he had various epiphanies. He gave away or threw away everything he owns, and now he travels with his laptop and three pairs of chinos and three T-shirts, staying with friends and in AirBnB rentals.

In a way, this whole "own nothing" trend is really the height of frictionlessness, and of course it goes hand in hand with Airspace. To me, it is also annoying. "Own nothing" is always treated as some kind of anti-materialism, but in fact it's only the most ultra privileged, and usually male, people who can live with no objects. Most of us have objects because we are using them to do things -- often with and for other people. We cook meals with our pots and pans, we eat off our dishes, and we sit on our sofas with friends. If we have kids, we provide them with toys and educational materials and things they like to wear. Shared activities require objects, so either you own those objects or you're using someone else's.

And speaking of this whole "other people" thing, there is one moment in the interview where Mr. Altucher makes a joke about his "kids." Does he have children? Did the reporter ask? If he does, how does he make food for them? Where are their toys? As we've noted before, if you're reading about "Mister Interesting," somehow the whole fatherhood thing never comes up. If "Ms. Interesting" was running around being the "Oprah of the internet" and owning fifteen objects -- wouldn't the very first question be "OMG, how do you take care of your children?!"

Anyway, this was all percolating in my mind when I read this article about how "Intellectuals are Freaks." The article points out that intellectuals are atypical, which is absolutely true. I think often about how my hours and hours of education and time alone in a library reading make the texture of my life radically unlike that of most other people. Many intellectuals probably start off atypical, and then become even more atypical as they go along.

One of the ways the article says intellectuals are atypical is in their cosmopolitanism. Intellectuals often consider themselves "citizens of the world" and see borders and boundaries as arbitrary and meaningless. Sometimes this extends to the idea that being invested in the local -- a family, a community, a nation -- is somehow stupidly parochial or naive. Intellectuals, seeing their own experience, are likely to endorse education as a means of curing the inequality and other ills that forces like globalization sometimes create.

I consider myself an intellectual, and I think this critique points to something real and important. It's not naive or stupid to want to live in a particular community, tied to particular people, with a particular way of life. For many people, these are the things that make up a good life.

And while education is wonderful, it's not a cure for inequality. As long as there are agricultural workers and baristas and Amazon warehouse workers and call center employees, there are going to be people who are deeply vulnerable to the forces of inequality. It doesn't matter what degrees they have.


I feel like that whole idea of cosmopolitanism, of feeling at home anywhere, a citizen of the world -- it has something to do with frictionlessness, with the idea of transcending specifics and ties, with owning nothing, with the feeling of Airspace.

This is not to say that frictionlessness is always bad. I spend a huge amount of time in Airspace, and I feel like I thrive there. Traveling the world is wonderful, and it's one of the great things of our time that we communicate with a zillion different people and feel like citizens of the world.

It's just that there's lot to say for friction too -- for the feeling that specific people, specific ways of life, and even specific objects are part of what makes human life what it is.

I Liked Ghostbusters (2016)

I saw the new Ghostbusters movie on Sunday and I liked it.

Thoughts:

1. There were many small, funny jokes that were also commentary on gender politics -- like when Abby is scrolling down the comments and reads out "Ain't no bitches gonna hunt no ghosts." But my favorite moment in the movie happened when the Ghostbusters are facing down the bad guy, Rowan.

Rowan wants to destroy the world because he feels he hasn't gotten the admiration and attention he deserves. At a climactic moment, he shouts to the women about how no one recognizes his true qualities, his worth, his genius!

It may have been my imagination, but I felt like after he shouted that there was pause, while the camera lingered on the faces of the Ghostbusters. What I saw in those faces was "We're women. You're going to try to tell us about having unrecognized worth and unappreciated qualities?!" Priceless.

2. All the ridiculous drama about the movie -- WTF? Sometimes when I disagree with people I sort of get what they're on about. But the rage that people seemed to feel over having four women ghostbusters -- it's truly mystifying to me.

I mean, it's not mystifying in the sense that yes, there are sexist people who just want to see men do things and women look pretty and they're threatened by anything else. But people don't like to state this as a bald fact, so they come up with "reasons." Like -- this movie is going to "ruin my childhood."

You know what? There are a lot of movies with premises I don't appreciate. I don't want to see a movie that guts the social satire of a Jane Austen book and turns it into a rom-com. I don't want to see Sherlock Holmes turned into an action franchise. I don't want to see anyone portraying Bertie Wooster and supplanting the mental Bertie Wooster I have in my head (who is a surprisingly good guy, BTW).

I might have confided to my closest friends that I regarded the making of these films as a perversion of art  and all that is good in the world. But, gee, somehow I managed to refrain from shouting all oer social media that anyone who wanted to make or watch these movies was a horrible cretin who was destroying everything and should go immediately to hell. FFS, people.

3. There's a very good subplot involving a moronic but conventionally attractive guy, Kevin, who becomes the Ghostbusters' receptionist. Some of the jokes are about how the Ghostbusters ogle him and act inappropriately and all that -- obviously a reference to the eleven million other movies in which a bunch of men hire a cute and ineffectual secretary to ogle and flirt with.

This reviewer describes the Kevin bit as "deserved reverse sexism." And I know the reviewer means well, but no, no -- it's not "sexism," and it's not "reverse sexism."

"Sexism" doesn't mean "inappropriate sexualization" and it doesn't just mean anything that is gendered. There's room for various definitions, but plausibly, "sexism" is whatever promotes or props up a certain system -- a particular system of gender difference and gender hierarchy.

If you're in an all male office and the male superiors ogle and flirt with their male subordinates, that is sexual harassment, but it's not sexism, because it's all men.

If you're in a mixed office, and the male superiors ogle and flirt with their female subordinates, that is sexual harassment and sexism: it's harassment that promotes and props up the existing gender system in which men get to do jobs and women are there to be ogled and flirted with.

If you're in a mixed office and the female superiors ogle and flirt with the male subordinates, that is sexual harassment, but it is not sexism -- because it challenges, rather than supporting, the dominant gender system in which men get to do jobs and women are there to be ogled and flirted with.

What happens in the movie is sexual harassment. It's not "deserved," but it is cinematically appropriate and good in the sense that by subverting, rather than promoting, the existing gender system, the depiction is anti-sexist and shows up the sexism of the vast majority of Hollywood blockbusters as movies. 

Sorry to be pedantic. But calling it "deserved reverse sexism" is so confused and wrong, it just plays into the whole misguided idea that calling out sexism is somehow, itself, sexist.

4. Many people have pointed out that it was weird to have the one black Ghostbuster also be the only non-scientist Ghostbuster. I thought that was true. If you want to hear Leslie Jones talk about it, you can, in her excellent interview on the WTF podcast.

5. I was astonished by the degree to which it was a big deal to me to see women -- particularly women scientists -- in a movie. I mean, I know we talk about this all the time, how it matters to see people like you doing your thing, and how there are almost no movies that pass the Bechdel test (must have at least two female characters, they have to talk to one another, about something other than a man), and about how women are virtually always just arm candy, or moms, or absent altogether. But somehow I didn't expect to feel so emotional about it.

I'm not a scientist, but I am an intellectual, and I spend a lot of time having conversations, often with other women, involving big words, and technical details, and complicated ideas, and differences of opinion. Seeing this activity finally depicted on film blew my mind. It's crazy to realize that I'd never, ever seen this activity, which makes up so much of my adult life, in a movie.

At the end of the movie, there's a scene where Sigourney Weaver plays the older, more experienced scientist mentor of the zany, young scientist and Ghostbuster Holtzmann, and tells her to do some things, and to not do some other things. And I got so excited: older, more experienced, female scientist mentor! Unfortunately, since it was a three-second cameo, just like that it was over.

Are Internet Trolls Otherwise Ordinary People?

Trolls from a kinder, gentler era.

I used to think that people being horrible assholes on the internet were, generally speaking, people who were horrible assholes off the internet. I thought they were exceptional, unusual -- the kind of people that if you met them in real life you'd be like: "Oh my god, get me away from this person."

But I keep reading stories -- true ones -- where people got to know their trolls, and these stories share feature that is, to me, really disturbing. Namely: that trolls are otherwise ordinary people -- ordinary people who somehow feel entitled to act out wild murderous rage when they feel like it.

The first one that sticks in my mind is from 2012. This guy -- a writer and blogger in Ireland -- started getting relentless messages on Twitter calling him a "dirty fucking Jewish scumbag" and sending images of concentration camps and dismembered bodies. The abuse went on and on, his Facebook account was hacked, violent racist messages, etc etc. Eventually it escalated, with parcels of ashes arriving at his home with notes like "Say hello to your relatives from Auschwitz."

The writer was understandably freaked out. He hired a friend to try to figure out the IP address of his troll, and -- long story short, it ended up being the 17 year old son of an old friend of his. He talks to the friend. They decide to all go out to lunch, and toward the end they show the kid printouts of all the abusive and threatening messages. Kid bursts into tears. Pressed, he says "I don't know. I don't know. I'm sorry. It was like a game thing."

Then in 2014, there was this great piece about the classicist Mary Beard in the New Yorker. The story covers many topics: Beard's scholarly approach, the general misogyny she encounters whenever she does anything, her boundless energy for engaging with, and showing up, people who say hateful and stupid things to and about her on the internet. And there are a lot of hateful and stupid things. This, for example, from a university student: "You filthy old slut. I bet your vagina is disgusting."

Instead of ignoring the trolls, Beard engages with them. She retweets, calls out, talks to the press. When she retweeted the university student, someone who knew him offered to tell his mom; he later apologized. To the BBC, she said, "I’d take him out for a drink and smack his bottom."

When she was on Question Time, commenters vilified her online, and one posted an image where a woman’s genitals was superimposed over Beard’s face. Later, she posted the image to her blog at the Times Literary Supplement website. The site was overwhelmed with traffic, and the story made international news.

Then, what happened was this: the man who ran the site where the image originally appeared contacted Beard to apologize, via a long and personal letter. He said he never should have done it. He said he was in difficult circumstances: he was married with kids; he wanted to move to Spain; he couldn't understand the bureaucracy. Mary Beard looked up the documents he needed and sent them along. Now, whenever she gets in "internet trouble," he gets in touch with her -- to make sure she is OK.

Understandably, Beard resists the interpretation of these stories as "happy endings" where a wise and maternal woman takes men to task and teaches them a lesson. What the attacks show, she says, is the persistence of misogyny and the way gender hierarchies persist. Still, she finds the outcomes emotionally satisfying. That university student who called her a slut with a disgusting vagina? After he apologized he took her out to lunch, and she's going to write him a letter of reference. After all, when you google his name, calling Beard a "filthy slut" is what comes up, and he is going to need all the help he can get.

The final story is from 2015. Lindy West is a writer who often deals with feminism and body size issues -- and so receives a ton of vitriol, abuse, and threats online. In this essay, she describes how she usually deals -- by deleting, by useless blocking, by trying to ignore. But then eventually, a troll set up something that reached a new level of awfulness, by setting up a Twitter account in the name of West's recently deceased father -- with a photo of him, and a username like "[Lindy's father] Donezo."

West found she couldn't ignore it. She wrote an essay on Jezebel about the issue and mentioned the account. Astonishingly, she then received an email from the troll, apologizing. He said he was wrong and he shouldn't have done it, and that his trolling hadn't been caused by something particular she said. He wrote in part, "I think my anger towards you stems from your happiness with your own being. It offended me because it served to highlight my unhappiness with my own self."

Later, West invited him to participate in an episode of This American Life, talking about what happened. He said he'd felt fat, unloved, passionless and purposeless." Though he was unable to explain why this made generalized rage at women seem like a good idea, he did say that he had changed. He'd become a teacher, and he took better care of his health. He apologized, again, for the hurt he'd caused: as a teacher, he could now see how hurt and sad his students were when other kids were mean to them.

There's so much to say about these stories -- and I agree with West and Beard when they call attention to the special role that misogyny plays. But among the other things, I'm still just astonished at the way these trolls all seem like ordinary people who got caught up in something even they don't really understand.

It's destabilizing to me to think that otherwise ordinary people who are sad, or bored, or self-hating can get something out of abusing and threatening other people on the internet. At the deepest possible level, I just don't get it. Even a playground bully at least gets status, or attention, or something. But these internet trolls are mostly anonymous. What motivates them to act this way? What positive feeling for them makes them do this?

It's like finding out I live among people of a completely different species.

French Islamophobia, Fashion, And Freedom

From Tommy Hilfiger's Ramadan Collection

Here at TKIN we usually avoid the low-hanging fruit. I figure, if something is just really obviously stupid and wrong, you don't really need a whole blog post about it. But we're making an exception today -- because I can't help myself from saying something about this article that appeared in the New York Times in April, describing French reactions to the introduction of modest clothing from various clothing lines.

What started it all is that big name fashion brands, like Dolce and Gabana, H&M, and DKNY put out modest clothing lines -- long skirts, long sleeved tops, a swimming outfit that covers up -- with the implicit suggestion that they were hoping to attract Muslim consumers. Tommy Hilfiger had a "Ramadan collection," and Dolce and Gabana offered abayas and hijabs. Marks and Spencer offered a "burkini."

Some people in France are very upset. The minister for women's rights said the clothing represented "social control over women's bodies" and should not exist. The co-founder of Yves Saint-Laurent said the designers were exploiting a misogynist system and should "have some principles." Philosopher and influential feminist scholar Elisabeth Badinter called for a boycott of the brands that sell "Islamic fashion."

I'm sorry but -- has everyone gone completely insane?  I mean, we are talking about modest clothing. Has it really come to this? That the mere existence of modest clothing for women is some kind of radical problem?

Just a few decades ago, women were shamed and assaulted for not wearing modest clothing that was not modest enough. And today, even though the lines are drawn differently, women are still shamed and assaulted for wearing clothing that is not modest enough. You're telling me a world in which people say "she asked for it" because a woman wore a miniskirt to a party is also a world in which long skirts and covering clothing are banned? FFS.

In the most "reader recommended" comments at the Times, there are two ideas floating around, both of which seem to me ridiculous. One is that the clothing in question is misogynistic because it reflects a cultural double-standard -- in which women have to cover and men do not. The other is that the clothing in question is misogynistic on grounds that women wear it because they're "forced" to.

The commenters at the Times like to think they're very clever, but both of these are a logic fail. The clothing itself isn't anything. Selling modest clothing just gives people the option of modest clothing -- an option anyone I would think anyone has a right to.

To deny this entails saying that the world would be a better place if women didn't have the option of long skirts and covering clothing. So, what -- now we all have to show some tits and ass to save the United Federation of Planets?

From a philosophical point of view, the whole thing recapitulates the essential problem that Francophone culture has with the idea of banning clothing as religious symbols. Because things -- and especially clothing things -- are symbols only in virtue of how they are interpreted. As articles of clothing, they are also just articles of clothing.

As a million people have said before me, how can you say something is wrong when some people do it but "fashion" when Jackie O. does it?

More abstractly, I think there's a tendency to think about cases like this in terms that pit one absolute against another. Like: either you're for radical freedom of the individual in all cases because that's Truth, Justice, and the American Way, OR, you think society and social reality impact on people in complicated ways so that "individual freedom" is just a code for "we'll leave you alone to sort out your own damn problems."

But these things are highly contextual. At this point in my life, I believe that clothing, like food, has entered the category of appropriate radical individualism. That is: let people wear what they want, for the reasons they have, and don't have a lot of opinions and judgments about other people. Let people eat what they want, for the reasons they have, and don't have a lot of opinions or judgments about other people.

For me, it's not that these things follow from some abstract universal truth about things always go best when you leave people alone to do what they want and never judge. I don't think that's true. Instead, it has to do with the contextual space that food and clothing now occupy. They're both intensely personal, uncomfortably politicized, domains where someone always thinks they know better than someone else. As, indeed, all of these French fashion people seem to think they know what's best for a whole bunch of other people.

But above all, modest and covering clothing for women should always be an option. How is that not obvious? And I say all of this as someone who loves to wear sexy, revealing, and flashy outfits. Because in addition to all the reasons already mentioned, there's this: how can I freely choose to wear the clothing I love, when there's no option to choose otherwise? Without any other options, I'd be essentially forced into it! Talk about "social control over women's bodies."