Dance Like No One Is Watching? The Existential Question Of Zoom Video

Before the lockdown I used to go to dance classes. Dance was something I had done as a young person and then didn't do for like ... thirty years or something. Then when I started up again it literally took me years to work up the nerve and motivation to go -- which could, itself, be the topic of another blog post whose conclusion would be something like "just because years have passed doesn't mean you won't do it eventually." I mostly do Contemporary -- but I also supplement that with classes in other styles like ballet and hip-hop.

It's an interesting question why dance class creates anxiety. The most obvious answer is that dancing well can be difficult, and class creates an atmosphere where people are together and naturally you worry that others are judging you. Or maybe you are judging yourself. I feel like one of the weird lingering effects of Anglo-Saxon culture is that there is something about dancing itself that feels especially vulnerable. But I wouldn't know how to connect those dots.

With the lockdown, dance classes are happening online, some through Zoom. It works OK, but I have had a hard time articulating to my friends why dance class via Zoom is such an impoverished experience for me compared to dance class in person. Zoom works OK for me for fitness: the instructors says to do a lunge or a burpee and I do a lunge or a burpee. It's not the same as being in person, but I get a workout and have some echo of the experience of working out with other people.

But with dance? It's just not the same. Part of it is communicative: in class, there is a back-and-forth between the instructor and the students with respect to what students are getting or not getting and how they're feeling about what is happening and what the instructor has in mind for the choreography. In addition to obvious things like "oh you're supposed to turn to the left, do it this way," there is also a complex interplay about the mood and the feeling of the dance. I guess it's not impossible for some of that mood to pass through the internet. But it's not easy.

A more significant factor more me seems to be just the essential pleasure between dancing-with-people -- even for something like Contemporary which is not, on the face of it, what we'd call a "social dance."

And that pleasure brings me to the great question of dance-via-Zoom: video on, or video off? For students, video-on is optional. And I feel like we're still working that out. I've been to classes where almost no one has video on, and I've been to classes where almost everyone has video on. Even though I'm seeing everything through a MacBook Air-sized screen, which means that from the recommended 6-8 feet away I can barely see anything, it is still way better for me when people have their videos on. It's a far cry from being together in a room, but at least there's the feeling of interaction and dancing-with-people.

It's an individual thing of course, and people have all kinds of reasons for choosing video off. I chose it myself recently for a ballet class that I feared was above my level (and it turned out I was right). But I feel like there is definitely a social norm aspect to it. Like, if you log on and everyone has their video off, you think "oh I guess I should too" -- it's embarrassing to be the only one putting yourself out there. But if you log on and everyone has it on you're like "oh ok, we're doing this? I guess I will too."


So I feel like livestream has changed a situation that was necessarily collective -- you're all in a room together, you all have to suck up the vulnerabilities -- to one of those weird individual versus group things where you have to ask yourself whether everyone is doing it and if not whether you're willing to put yourself out there as the only person doing it or what. It's a little sad.

Anyway, unless I have reasons, I try to always turn the video on for dance class, and I always hope that everyone else will too. Even though it's "optional," I was happy to hear a recent instructor admonishing the class to "clean up your room next time" so you can have the video on. Meetings are something else altogether -- but when we're dancing? I miss seeing y'all when your names appear in those black boxes.

I had never really thought much about that thing people say of "dance like no one is watching." I get it -- you're supposed to go all in or something. But one thing I have learned from lockdown is that, like a lot of inspirational quotes you find on coffee mugs and placards, it's not really solid advice when you take it too literally.

Life's Confounding Open-Endedness And The Problem Of How To Spend Your Day

I don't know if you read this in-depth piece in The New Yorker about the opiate crisis and how it is affecting a community in West Virginia.

West Virginia has the highest overdose death rate in the country, and mostly the article describes how communities are responding to the crisis -- in some cases blaming drug users, but mostly doing heroic things to save them and to increase the measly support for people who want to quit.

My attention was caught, though, by something that might seem a bit to one side of the main topic. Toward the end of the article, the author describes a person formerly addicted who points out how hard it is for people who've never had the experience to understand what it's like to be addicted, how everything is grey and your mind just shuts down. And then the author says:

"As she described it, the constant hunt for heroin imposed a kind of order on life's confounding open-endedness. Addiction told you what every day was for, when otherwise you might not have known."

I was struck by this description of opiate addition. I had heard of the idea that opiate addiction transforms the vast range of human motivations and emotions into a single kind of thought -- do I have access to drugs, and if not, how can I get them? But it had never occurred to me how that might be a relief from something.

Regular readers won't be surprised to hear that this resonated with me -- I mean, the idea that "life's confounding open-endedness" could be a burden. At first I was inclined to see it as part of the human condition. As humans, we have to make decisions about what to do, and this means putting yourself behind something, in a sense. Unlike with other animals, even our less reflective decisions can feel like they are the result of decisions --  even if you're not going to think about something, you often have to choose not to think about it.

But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that life's confounding open-endedness might be a particular burden in our particular time and place. We live in a culture that has take to an extreme the idea that you should be free to do as you please, that one way of living is as good as another, that happiness involves finding your particular "passion" or developing some personalized "dream," that the things you chose are somehow more important than the things that just, somehow, choose you.

This is not only a departure from previous less "modern" forms of living, it's also largely bullshit. I think one reason it can be hard to see it as bullshit is that the sometimes less modernity seems less "progressive." When the contrary to "everyone can do as they please" is "women do this, men do that, gay people shouldn't exist," it's horrible. But the fact that X is bad doesn't mean everything not-X is good. We're already asking people to create their own personalities, branding, and entrepreneurial selves. Maybe  asking them to craft a day out of nothing is too much to bear.


Ages ago I wrote a post about our "independence fetish" and how strange it is. People talk about how important it is to be "happy within yourself," and to have a sense of self that doesn't depend on family, job, friends, home. There's the idea that you have to assert the rights of that self within relationships. But these ideas seem directly at odds with basic beliefs most of us have about how close relationships work, and why they're so valuable. I mean, isn't caring about someone a kind of dependence on them? Isn't thinking of your own good as separate from, and maybe at odds with, the good of others a way of keeping them at arms length? Isn't being needed by someone one of the best things in life?

Maybe the kinds of activities and relationships that relieve the burden of the "confoundingness open-endedness of life" require the opposite perspective: that you're radically dependent on other people, and they are on you, and sometimes the things you find yourself immersed in are just yours, whether they're the ones you'd have chosen or not.

Since I had seen the "confounding open-endedness" of life as somewhat to one side of the main point of the article, I was struck that a New Yorker letter writer mentioned it as well, as a manifestation of a "spiritual crisis" and in that sense a central cause of addiction. Correctly observing that detox, rehab, etc. do not really address these causes, the letter writer then goes on to way that what really is needed is job creation -- some New Deal type of thing that would put people back to work.

Being immersed in my own interpretation of the burden of life's "open-endedness" I was startled to see the idea of "jobs" being proposed as a solution. Of course, there's no question that having meaningful work, and being able to support a family, are crucial elements of well-being! And yet, the idea that this kind of spiritual crisis could be cured with a little extra dose of capitalism -- well, I guess it just seemed to me a little sad.

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.

Guest Post: The Special Warmth Of Social Approval

This guest post is by my former co-blogger at Commonwealth and Commonwealth, Captain Colossal

For fifteen years I smoked a pack of Malboros every day. Then, a little over five years ago, I quit. After that I started exercising and also started taking Prozac. This was because without smoking the (pretty precarious) accommodations I had made with the world completely fell apart.

My life got better after I made these changes, exactly the way you would think. When I don’t want to go to the gym, I remind myself of how happy and triumphant and okay I feel walking away from the gym, totaling up the number of times I’ve worked out that week, reliving my most recent victory over the forces of inertia.

And I try not to think too hard about how that mechanism (wherein I feel better) works. There are real physiological analyses of the effects of exercise and Prozac on the mood, and it’s possible that we’re in the realm of the purely physical here.

But I also think about how much society endorses going to the gym. And not smoking. And although there are pockets of weirdness around Prozac, I would say in general society smiles on people taking active pro-social steps to address their mental health issues. And I wonder whether what’s making me feel better is the knowledge that I am living squarely in the sunshine of social approval.

I tell people I used to smoke and they say, “You did?” They say, “I never would have pegged you for a smoker.” I have always wanted to be a little bit mysterious and opaque and so there is something thrilling in that, and then also a little sad, because smoking was so much a part of who I was, and now it is not.

I think about social approval a lot with driving. I live in California, where driving is a thing most people do. And after I quit smoking and started working out and taking Prozac I decided to deal with the fact that I was too terrified to drive. And I took driving lessons and I bought a car and now I drive every day on the freeway and I’ve driven myself to Yosemite more than once and it’s great — it makes my life so much easier and grocery shopping is so much easier and also I never have to explain to a single person ever again why I don’t drive. And yet me driving is not actually a net gain for the world in the ways that you could argue (sort of) that my other changes are. I’m consuming more fuel and producing more pollution and taking up more of other kinds of resources because one thing that driving really makes easy is consumption of various kinds. And yet, being a driver rather than a non-driver makes me less of a conspicuous eccentric, and that in itself, without taking into account all the other ways in which driving is convenient, makes my life so much easier.

Once, before I made any of these changes, I was in a car being driven somewhere by a guy that I knew a little but not all that well. Because when you don’t drive third parties tend to bully other people into driving you places. Especially when you go to a picnic that’s all couples and people with children in Los Angeles. Those people often worry about you taking the bus across town; it makes them feel bad for you and concerned for you. I’m being a little mean here because I had such mixed feelings about it at the time. Part of me wanted the concern and the arrangements and the being-tended-to, and part of me just wanted everyone else to treat the way I lived my life as if it was normal.

So I was leaving this picnic filled with really nice people with really nice families and I was being given a ride by the one guy who was also single and we were talking about that and I was saying that it was a little hard for me to meet guys who wanted to date me, being as I was a smoker and having at the time really short hair cut in an ostentatiously unstylish way and never doing my dishes or cooking anything healthy and this guy said, “Look, there are a lot of guys who like exactly that in a woman,” and I knew immediately what he meant and I said, “Yeah, but those guys don’t want somebody like me.” And what I meant was that I had those attributes, but I wasn’t rebellious and cool in a way that would go along with them; I worried about hurting people’s feeling and I cared about being nice and I didn’t even jaywalk. And he thought about it and he was like, “I see what you mean.”

When I think about that conversation now, I think that I was not very good at understanding that we all contain multitudes, that what I was trying to say is that I was complicated and human and I was assuming that it was less than true of other people, who were either straightforwardly in compliance with the world or defying the world in a perpendicular fashion. And of course I was wrong about the other people.

But I wasn’t wrong in thinking that I was paying a cost in being weird. And I thought it was a cost in terms of opportunities lost but what I didn’t know, and what my current line of thinking suggests, is that it was also a cost inside my tangled self. And what I sort of knew then, and know clearly now but try not to think about too much, is that the value of being weird is directly related to that cost. Smoking is a bad thing, and I am glad I don’t smoke, and yet to the extent I am less visibly a weirdo now it seems like a loss of some kind.

Sometimes I dream that I am smoking. In the dream, I think, “But I quit! What am I doing? Now I’ll have the whole thing to do all over again!” And then in the dream I realize that I never quit, that I’ve been lying to people all along, that I am still a smoker.

Diagnosis: Hypersobriety. Or, What's So Bad About Self-Medicating?

I love to drink. I drink more is recommended by the medico-establishment powers that be, but I think in 2015 that's not the shocking thing. The shocking thing is that I don't really worry about it too much.

There are several reasons I'm not in a moral panic about my own drinking. For one thing, I used to have a wide range of bad habits and I've managed to quit almost all of them. Even Diet Coke, which I love and regard as the pinnacle of human taste perfection, I haven't had in about five years. Really, you can't expect a person to give up everything.

For another thing, I suffer zero noticeable bad effects from my drinking. I never have a hangover or feel bad, and pace the omnipresent freak-out over "relationship problems," my loved ones agree: drinking makes me, if anything, kinder, happier, warmer, more patient, and more fun.

Also, and as I've written about before, I feel like drinking makes me more me. A better version of me. I don't know if you remember that book Listening to Prozac, from the early 90s? The author, Peter Kramer, argued that some patients on anti-depressants experience a sense of being more themselves. The widespread fear that psycho-pharmaceuticals always make you less you is wrong, just a prejudice, based on some implicit mistaken metaphysics of personal identity.

Listening to Prozac quotes one patient as saying that being on Prozac makes them feel "Unencumbered, more vitally alive, less pessimistic" -- and when I read that I was like, "Yes!" That's how drinking makes me feel. Without drinking, I tend toward sadness and low life-force. When I stop for a while, I run into trouble: my mind gets filled up with stuff, clogged with emotion, the mental equivalent of a hoarder's living room. Drinking, I'm fresh and alive.

Pursuing the medical model analogy, I was thinking about what it is about me that makes this the appropriate treatment, and I noticed that I often have the feeling that two drinks makes me feel normal, well, brought to some imaginary baseline. Feelings of sadness and dread are kept at bay. I was struggling to interpret the underlying feeling. What is this? Anxiety? Depression? Melancholia?

And then it hit me: if drinking is the solution, maybe my problem is just sobriety. I have an excess of it. Hypersobriety. Though there are probably many, this condition has one obvious and natural treatment option: namely, drinking.

The diagnosis actually fits my personality in other ways as well. I'm organized, I don't really procrastinate, and I read books for fun. Plus, I often feel excessively clear-eyed about the world, a characteristic of sobriety that is known to lead to trouble: as we know, self-deceiving, overly optimistic people do well with life while seeing things as they are leads to sadness and depression.

For me, part of being excessively clear-eyed is a deficit in the repression direction. I seem to have trouble blocking out those kinds of facts that, when you're aware of them, get quickly overwhelming. We are all going to die in the not so far away future. And we're either going to die young, or get old. This is going to happen not just to you but to your kids and all the people you love.

The only healthy response to these facts is to frequently repress awareness of them. But if you suffer from hypersobriety -- well, you need a little boost in the repression direction.

I feel like there's a lot of resistance to the use of alcohol and other fun substances to make people feel better. Some of this is based on the very real fact that for a lot of people, using fun substances doesn't work so well in the long run, leading to addiction and other problems. But what about the rest of us? If it's working reasonably well, what's the big deal?

I think a lot of the resistance comes from the idea that self-medicating might come with health risks or side-effects, and this leads to free-rider type indignation, like "OMG, you are doing this thing to make yourself feel better, but that might lead, in some vague and long-term way, to some way in which the rest of us have to pay more to help you down the line. Even though lots of treatments come with other health effects down the line, we'd hate to think that somehow your self-medication might be enjoyable, so that you're somehow having a good time."

But I think this form of indignation is a little overblown and ridiculous. Lots of medical treatments come with downsides and side effects, many of them serious. Just yesterday in the New York Times Ezekiel Emanuel wrote about how astonishingly often more medical care can lead to much worse outcomes. Having the best, most senior cardiac doctors led to more deaths. Stopping medications in elderly patients made them better off.

Again, I'm not denying that in some circumstances self-medication doesn't work. But I don't think the relative frequency of failure justifies the negativity. I guess what I'm saying is, next time you see someone eating a lot of cake or chewing nicotine gum or drinking a lot of Diet Coke or Pinot Grigio or whatever, don't think you have to immediately moralize about it. Maybe overall, it's just the thing they need.

Universalizing The Female Niceness Tax

Woman on a Striped Sofa with a Dog, by Mary Cassatt, via Wikimedia Commons

Frequently I find myself dealing with what I think of as the female-niceness-tax. If you're a woman you probably know what I'm talking about. It's the way some men, men we don't know, talk to us in a way that asks for care, concern, a listening ear, some moments of our time, a bit of sympathy. Not all men. But enough men that it's a thing.

Sometimes it's men you're attempting to deal with in a consumer or economic transaction, like you're taking a taxi ride and the driver won't stop talking to you, and other times it's just people you run into when you're trying to do something. Like the other day, I was getting the snow scraper out of the car of someone I know and someone else was kindly wiping snow off their car, and it turned into this whole like let-me-tell-you-some-things "guy confidential."

Often it's a tale of woe, like when someone wants to tell you about how they had some illness, or got screwed by some other person, or got fired unfairly, or got rejected from school, or whatever. Sometimes it includes Q + A, which in this context means Questions and Advice, like where you say you live in X place and the guy says "You live where? Why do live there when you could live in this other place? You should live in this other place, it'd be much better for you."

Snow scraper guy talked to me for about ten minutes, and hit most of the big categories, including details about how he, too, was going to do a PhD but there was X problem and the police got involved (we'll just leave that story there for now). It was about 15F, and it was still snowing, but I was clearly expected to be nice and stay and chat and listen and make appropriate sympathetic sounds.

The nature of this "expectation" is interesting, because obviously nobody is forcing you. But usually, at least in my experience, the implicit trade-off is pretty clear: you can stay and listen and be nice, or you will be thought to be a bitch, or called a bitch to your face, or worse.

It can be annoying. You're there hoping to get back to your thoughts or your book or your project or your music and instead you are thrust into this dilemma: stop what you are doing and do a little niceness work, or deal with some angry fall-out. Either way, it's like a niceness tax: pay up or else.

The reason I think of this as a female-niceness-tax is that for some reason I'm not clear on, the men who talk to female strangers this way don't seem to talk to male strangers this way. These men, when they encounter other men, seem to have a different game going on altogether. Either they say nothing, or they want to impress, or they want to exchange opinions, or show off some knowledge. But silence among men often seems acceptable. One of the advantages of being out in the world with a guy instead of alone is getting to dodge the female-niceness-tax.

In the modern world, the payment of the tax feels unfair to me, a constant drag on my ability to do the things I need to do or the things that gain modern would currency like accomplishing things or making money or getting tasks done so I can move on to something else.

Here's where it gets complicated, though. Because it's easy to be indignant about the tax and it's easy to express that indignation by saying the tax should be abolished, that women must be left alone to go about their business, that this constant interfering in their mental lives is bad, a wrong, a problematic way that people relate to one another.

But do you really want to say that a small attempt at human connection is an essentially problematic way to relate to others? I don't. I actually wish people could be a bit nicer and warmer to one another all the time, not a bit colder and harsher. So someone needs a pat on the back, an attentive listener for a few minutes, someone to say "wow, that sucks that that happened to you."

In my view, the problem with the tax isn't that it's there, it's that we're the only ones paying it. I wish it didn't have the particular gendered component that it has. Even the negatives of the gendered component really count as negatives only because our society has become so peculiar in making the pursuit of exchangeable commodities like money status and prestige so essential to an OK life.

So rather than abolish the female-niceness-tax, can't we just make everybody pay it?

Guest Post: A Dry Rob Roy

This guest post is by my former co-blogger at Commonwealth and Commonwealth, Captain Colossal

My father’s mother died Thursday night. She was 97 years old, which I find easy to remember because she was born in 1917 and I was born in 1977. She died in her sleep after about two years of mostly waiting to die.

My father and his partner happened to be visiting me at the time. We decided to honor her memory by making dry Rob Roys and cooking beans and greens. The beans and greens were a more straightforward tribute than the Rob Roys. I lived with my grandmother for about three months after college. It was a time when I had no idea what I wanted to do with myself and I took over the cooking because my grandmother’s idea of dinner was a single hot dog on a little plate without a bun.
After the first night I cooked, she said, “Do you think you could make beans and greens?”

I had never heard of beans and greens. This was a number of years ago, so instead of going on the internet I went to the library and checked out the cookbook section. I found a recipe and made beans and greens. When I went to visit her this spring, she told her caretaker that she had taught me to cook, which is true, in a certain sense. My husband reminded me, when we were talking about the beans and greens, that beans and greens were the first thing I ever cooked for him. My grandmother loved being cooked for; she loved being taken care of.

My grandmother also enjoyed drinking. She was not, at least to my knowledge, a rowdy drinker -- she was a quiet drinker. She drank beer in summer, but in winter she said she needed something to warm her up. When I was a child she became very concerned about the American trade imbalance and so she switched from drinking Scotch to drinking rum.

The story with the dry Rob Roys is that there was a time when she was on a long-distance car trip with my father and his partner and they stopped for lunch at some kind of diner-type place. The three of them were on their way to an event and they were running late. They had hours of social engagement ahead of them. The teenage waiter came over to take their order, and my grandmother pursed her lips thoughtfully. I wasn’t there, you understand. This is an imaginative re-creation. “I’d like,” she said, “a dry Rob Roy.”

Do you even know what a Rob Roy is? The teenage waiter didn’t, in any case. In any case, it was a strange time to order a cocktail and a strange place to order a cocktail. Several years later I read a Lydia Davis story in which the narrator’s elderly father requests a Rob Roy under similarly inappropriate circumstances. It gave me a funny feeling about the world, a feeling that the world, rather than being a place of infinite possibility, is more of a Tetris-type situation, where certain pieces will always have to be combined with certain other pieces.

A dry Rob Roy is Scotch, dry vermouth, and Angostura bitters. At least, that’s what the internet and the Joy of Cooking tell me. It is one form of alcohol combined with two other forms of alcohol. I don’t usually drink cocktails, and so I was surprised that all three of the ingredients were alcoholic. The grocery store nearest my house sold all three forms of alcohol, which surprised and pleased me. I didn’t have a single cocktail shaker, although at one time I had two. I got rid of them because I never used them. When I do drink a mixed drink it usually means that I have added some significant quantity of non-alcoholic mixer to the alcohol in my glass. You don’t need a cocktail shaker for that.

We mixed the ingredients in a pint glass. We used crushed ice, which was a mistake, because it started melting almost immediately. When we poured out the dry Rob Roys my father’s partner used a coaster to keep the ice in the pint glass. The recipe said to use two dashes of vermouth and one dash of Angostura bitters per cocktail. I wasn’t sure what a dash multiplied by three looked like.

The dry Rob Roys were very pretty looking, all golden in the glass. We raised our glasses and took a sip. My father made a face. “It’s so sweet,” he said. I didn’t think it was sweet. It burned. My father drank about a third of his. My father’s partner drank hers. “It makes me feel weird,” she said. I drank mine very slowly. Because I drank it so slowly it got warm, which did not make it taste better. It made me feel drunk, not in a fun way, but in a way where the room seemed a little askew. I couldn’t get past the idea that the taste was made by combining different varieties of alcohol.

I could tell you endless stories about my grandmother -- how she kept her belongings beautifully clean and took care of them for decades, how she declined to get a new cat when her last cat died almost fifteen years ago because she thought the cat might outlive her, and that would be unfair to the cat, how she loved being kidded -- she loved it when I or my father, telling her goodbye, would tell her to behave, to stay out of trouble. “I try,” she would say, and she would shake her head a little bit with the difficulty of the task. There are a lot of things I know about her, a lot of things I could tell you, and even more that I couldn’t. I knew her better than I know most people and she remains mostly mysterious to me. The desire for a dry Rob Roy at midday in a roadside diner, with a long day ahead, is only one of those mysteries.

To Assume Or Not To Assume?

It's old news that people say offensive, annoying, and insensitive things to one another when they're trying to ask simple questions.

People of color get asked "where are you from? No, really, where are you from?" as if "Canada" can't be the real answer. Gays and lesbians get quizzed about dates and hot prospects of the incorrect sex. Women get grilled over when they're going to have children. I'm sure you can multiply the examples.

It's sometimes suggested that the underlying problem that explains this kind of oafish behavior is that people make assumptions about one another -- which they ought not do.

I get the appeal of this idea, and certainly it's partly right, but I don't think it can be quite the whole story. Because I think failing to make assumptions can be just as offensive as making assumptions.

Imagine if you were introduced to someone of a different race or ethnicity or background or sexual orientation from yourself and you started asking questions like "Are you a person? Do you breathe air? Do you have a mother and father?"

These questions would be the height of offensiveness, not because they make assumptions, but because they fail to acknowledge what ought to be obviously correct assumptions to make.

These examples are extreme, but I think the same applies to real and ordinary questions. Since I'm a prof I often talk to students I don't know. Whenever we turn away from the scholarly and toward the personal, I try to ask them open-ended questions to learn about their life and point of view, to let them guide the discussion. But in doing so I'm often struck that even asking a good open-ended question often requires some kind of assumptions -- and hopefully understanding -- of their likely situation.

For example, if a student is considering majoring in philosophy and wants to talk, they're often not even sure what questions to ask, so I find myself asking questions to draw them out. I generally assume that they'll want to know about job prospects, that their parents will have some opinion about the matter, etc etc.

It seems to me it would be more offensive and annoying to start the conversation back one level with questions like "will you be planning to work for a living as you grow up?" "Are you in touch with your parents, do you talk to them?" I mean, the answers to these questions might be "no," and yet, if I were talking with a student different from me it seems to me those questions would open, not close, conversational distance.

If you're not going assume, you have to ask. But questions make their own assumptions -- about what's common knowledge and what isn't, about what the asker thinks significant and worth discussing and so on.

An acquaintance of mine recently emailed and happened to mention he was writing from a middle-eastern country known for a turbulent history. Since he brought it up, it seemed to me it would be weird to not mention it in my response, weird to assume somehow that violence or threat of it were affecting his visit, and perhaps weird not to assume that violence or the threat of it were affecting his visit. Even a question would, it seemed to me, goes one way or the other. I'd recently learned about some aspects of this place not associated with turbulence and politics, I asked about those. Probably best, but who knows? In circumstances like that, it seems to me you could be stereotyping if you ask about violence and annoyingly ignorant if you didn't -- depending on details, context, and so on.

I don't think there is any blanket strategy for avoiding the problems of offensive and annoying questions, by which I mean -- the only way to avoid them is to know what they are and know how to avoid them. Listen to other people, take it seriously when they talk or write about what's on their mind, use it to inform your next conversation, and go from there.

It's not about avoiding making assumptions, but rather about knowing which assumptions are apt and sensitive to make -- and this seems to require actually knowing something about the world and the other people in it.

Mommy, Where Do Preferences Come From?

If you're trying to think about what is the thing to do or what you owe to others or how society can be organized and you want to avoid making grand pronouncements about Good v. Bad and Right v. Wrong and Wholesome v. Debased, your fancy may lightly turn to thoughts of "preferences."

People all along the ethical and political spectrum have treated preferences as a kind of neutral building block for impartial decision-making.

The utilitarian Peter Singer, who argues that middle class Americans to give up most of their money, does so on grounds that we ought maximize universal preference satisfaction. As long as your ten dollars will bring about more satisfaction to a poor person far away then it will to you today, Singer says, you have to give it away.

The contractarian David Gauthier, taking our interactions to be negotiations, argues rational people won't give up too much of what they otherwise could have had; the powerful may use their power in making deals to get more of what they want. What forms the basis for judging outcomes? Preferences. 


When Leavitt and Dubner -- surely representing some extreme version of something -- infer, in Freakonomics, that fighting climate change is pointless because "[i]t's not that we don't know how to stop polluting the atmosphere. We don't want to stop, or aren't willing to pay the price" -- they're appealing to -- yes, preferences.

All this to say: they are everywhere. And you can see how something like this might have gotten going. For a long time there was talk of what was in people's "interest" -- but how can we say a thing is in someone's "interest" if that person does not, themselves, prefer it? Isn't that patronizing? Then the utilitarians back the day (like Mill, 1863) talked about increasing pleasure and decreasing pain. Not a bad idea -- but as is often pointed out, pleasure and pain aren't the only thing we care about. We have other things we want - other, "preferences," if you will.

A move to preferences and -- voilà! problems solved. Appeals to preferences answered various puzzles in one fell swoop: what's in someone's interest is just whatever they think is in their interest, i. e. whatever they prefer (assuming their preferences are transitive and obey other complex conditions that you could write a whole post about but we won't bother going into here).

But with preferences -- can we just say, "I have issues"? And you should too.

As is often noted -- indeed, as is said so often it's become like background noise -- preferences don't come from nowhere. They are shaped by our socio-cultural surroundings; they are shaped by the options available to us, and they are shaped by our own choices.

As we've known for -- oh, only a few hundred years -- things like "habit" or "custom" are profound shapers of preferences. As Jon Elster clarified in the 20th century, preferences are sometimes "adaptive" -- as in the fable of the "sour grapes" we often come not to want, or even think about, those things that seem unavailable to us.

It never ceases to weird me out that in our world we've set things up so that powerful forces -- a. k. a. advertising, are set up to induce in us preferences, whose satisfaction is then regarded as a "good thing" -- on grounds that a preference was satisfied.

There's something shell-game-ish about that -- and I think the reason is that in some sense, the neutrality and impartiality of "preferences" is a fake-out.

Because you can't say you're setting aside Good v. Bad and then say the satisfaction of preferences is Good. As soon as you deem the satisfaction of preferences a good thing, you're already on that train, you've opened that can of worms, there's that whole ball of wax, insert your favorite complexity metaphor here.

And as the advertising example shows, deeming equally strong preferences as equally worth of satisfaction will always give an advantage to anyone who can shape other people's preferences. We all know who that will be: the rich, the connected, and the politically powerful.

Finally, the fact that we know preferences can be shaped means we're constantly confronting the question of which preferences are good and which ones aren't. We're evaluating our preferences. Some, like a preference for kindness, are worth fostering. Others, like a preference for cruelty, are worth eliminating. To evaluate your preferences you need some other standard of judgement.

It seems to me that standard cannot simply be one's own further preferences -- because if nothing else, that doesn't explain parenting. In parenting you confront, for real in the most serious way, the question of which preferences to encourage and which to discourage in another person. A parent who did this by consulting what would be most convenient and satisfying for them personally would be universally acknowledged to be committing a parenting FAIL.

The upshot of all this, it seems to me, is that while preferences are certainly significant, it is crucial to remember that preferences are not just things we have, they are things that come from somewhere, and some of those sources are better than others, and they are things we take a certain standpoint toward. Even with respect to ourselves, we endorse some; we decry others.

It's from the standpoint of this kind of evaluation of preferences that we know what matters to us. And once you're talking about what matters, you're pretty much back at Good v. Bad and Right v. Wrong and the whole nine yards.

So yes, appeal to preferences, but don't kid yourself you've somehow slid out from under the Big Problems of Life.

The New "What Do Women Want"?

I was annoyed to see this book shelved only under "Gender Studies." Why not "Health and Well-Being?"

I just finished reading the new book What Do Women Want, by Daniel Bergner.

1. My super-double-extra number one favorite thing in this book is the way it challenges the twin stereotypes of women-want-intimacy-and-love and women-are-naturally-monogamous. Bergner compiles an impressive array of empirical research suggesting a radically different picture: that women want novelty and variety; that desire in a long-term monogamous relationship often wanes; that desire wanes with boredom for women more than for men.

It's true that the book pushes its "naturally promiscuous" alternative without a lot of nuance or in-depth consideration of opposing views. But this didn't bother me, because the twin stereotypes have such a strange crazed grip on people.

2. Indeed, with respect to monogamy, Berger's arguments are particularly effective at challenging the evolutionary argument, you know, that women have to invest a ton of energy in offspring and so are naturally picky whereas men want to spread their seed. Bergner cites a ton of animal studies in which females are sexually aggressive, and sexually promiscuous, and mentions quite astonishing examples of cases where scientists of the past seem to have seen what they wanted to see rather than what was there.

Of course, taking what seems "obvious" to some science guys and cooking up a story to show how it's "adaptive" and thus an essential aspect of our biology instead of the result of social and cultural forces has always been the problematic strategy of evolutionary biology applied to things like sex. And the risk is always high when we're talking about things people want to be true. And a lot of people -- men and women -- seem to want the women-intimacy-monogamy thing to be true.

3.  One of the most interesting -- OK, to me frightening -- parts of the book was the description of how female desire drugs are being consciously interpreted as supports for monogamy, appropriate and approvable only if they don't make women just, you know, really want to have sex. Desire drugs for middle-aged married woman who love their husbands but compare the pleasure of sex with them to the pleasure of returning library books? We are on it! Girls just want to have fun? Not so much. Various people want the drugs to be "good but not too good." You can read more about this part of the story in Bergner's piece in the Times.

4.  Though I get why it had to be this way, I wish the title/argument didn't have to be expressed in terms of What Do Women Want -- in fact, I wish the word "want" wasn't here at all. In addition to the obvious invitation to stupid remarks like the one on the back cover from Gay Talese (it's "a subject that often exceeds our intelligence" -- women, so kooky, so strange, so Other!) it also invites misinterpretation because the word "want" is used in a "desire or interest, conscious or unconcious" sense, in a "this is what I ultimately want to do sense -- i. e., intend, always conscious and reflective, and in a "this is what will satisfy -- ultimately make happy" sense. All very different.

There are women in this book who describe fantasies, sometimes disturbing to themselves, of being forced to have sex, sometimes violently, sometimes with multiple strangers. While it's essential to recognize these as important and genuine parts of these women's sexual lives and desires, connected to "want" in the first sense, fantasies need not be connected to want in the second or third sense, of this being something these women ultimately want to do or have done to them in reality. It's complicated.

Also, saying "What Do Women Want?" makes it sound like women in some obvious way don't know themselves, but I don't think that's an apt description of what is going on.

5. While I admired, and was persuaded by, the frank discussion of the possibility that women are turned on by the desire and interest of others and thus have a sexuality that is to some extent "other-directed," I wish the word "narcissistic" didn't come into play in describing that. As I discussed a bit in this previous post 1) it would be better if both sexes had a mix of self-directed and other-directed desires and 2) other-directed isn't "narcissistic" - why not a nice word like "generous"?

6. Everyone should keep in mind the possibility that women are different. It's wrong to say women really want X or Y or Z -- people vary a lot. It's because the alternative intimacy-monogamy narrative has been so outrageous on this score that I think it's OK that this book does a bit of generalizing in opposition to that narrative.

But do remember, one woman's meat is another woman's poison.

Sex In The Future Will Be Boring

 Three items, assembled here for your interest:

1.  Unexcited? There May Be a Pill for That

It sounds like the opposite of boring:  a pill to enhance women's sexual desire.

But as all things to do with women and sex, it's complicated. Daniel Bergner's article in The Times last month puts the matter into a medico-sociological context. Contrary to longstanding myths that men want sex and women want love, hugs, and kittens, Bergner says, recent evidence suggests that women do want sex.

At least -- and here's the kicker -- they do when there's novelty.

The article is interesting if you can get past the ridiculous photos of women making sexxxy-time faces. Basically, the research Bergner presents says that women's desire dampens when they're in long-term monogamous relationships. He describes the hopeful participants in the study of potential drugs as fitting a pattern: middle-aged women in otherwise happy marriages, who enjoy sex with their husbands, but no longer feel the desire for it. They're all asking,"Am I going to get my freak back?"

You can't help but think: wait, so this whole thing is a buttress to convention?

And indeed, there's a fascinating passage toward the end where one researcher is quoted as saying, "You want your effects to be good but not too good," because, as he discovered, people are afraid of creating "a sexually aggressive woman" -- a "nymphomaniac."

Oh I see. We're aiming for a woman that wants sex, but just with one guy, and not too much. Haven't I heard that somewhere before?

2.  Natural Selection, Childrearing, and the Ethics of Marriage (and Divorce): Building a Case for the Neuroenhancement of Human Relationships

Speaking of monogamy, this scholarly paper argues that if, in the future, "love drugs" were to become available that would make you love a particular person, some married couples would not only be free to take those drugs, but might also be obligated to take those drugs. 

Because we evolved to spread our genes around and lifelong monogamy serves no particular adaptive end, we're a mess: we value loving, exclusive, relationships that last forever but we want to screw around. Love drugs, the authors say, can bring our values and our desires into coherence.

Actually, we've encountered the idea of love drugs on this blog before, in response to George Saunders' incredibly creepy story "Escape from Spiderhead." Among other things, that story uses the disturbing image of a human guinea pig lurching from one love target to the next to make you feel how awful the whole thing would be.

But these authors aren't thinking "lurching." They're thinking the Holy Grail of Matrimony: 2gether, 4ever, U and only U.

But if it's really an obligation, your refusal to become not only faithful in practice but also faithful in your dreams, your fantasies, the recesses of your mind, would become a moral failing.

Call me crazy, call me a sinner, but Sorry, No, Do Not Want.

3.   Book review:  Ethics, Sexual Orientation, and Choices about Children

Here's a review of a book that asks, if a treatment were available that could be administered prenatally, to fetuses who would otherwise grow up into homosexual adults, should parents be free to use it? 

The book answers "Yes."

Potential implications for the boringness of sex in the future are obvious.

Dating, Hetero Gender Roles, Gay Men, Philosophy, And Other Stuff

Here's some dating advice for women who want to date men, from an expert, who claims to have interviewed tons of actual straight guys.

You want a guy to call you back after a date?  The number one reason guys don't call back attractive, accomplished, interesting women is simple:  those women were too challenging, too direct, and not soft and feminine enough.  But don't despair.  If you have tendencies in this direction, just be sure to "use softening words" instead of making statements -- preface your remarks with "I think" or "maybe" -- don't use your Blackberry, and be sure to change out of your work clothes into something girlish and flirty before the date.

There are a number of things to say about this, but here are a few.

First, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with wanting a partner of either sex who will be supportive and kind and warm, and I don't really blame a straight guy for wanting women to be those things in a certain kind of soft way.  All people need a lot of nurturing, and it seems to me understandable for one person to have preferences for how another person manifests that nurturing. 

So I don't think straight men wanting a date with these qualities is somehow evidence of a flawed personality.  It reminds me of the irascible H. L. Menken and how he loved to sit and tell his troubles to an intelligent and sympathetic woman, and be comforted, and I think, "Well, yes, I can see how that would be very appealing and nice." 

However.  Replicate this desire across many many straight men in their preferences, and plonk the whole thing down in an already sexist, competitive society that rewards assertiveness and combat in the workplace and you have some major societal problems.

One major societal problem one is pretty obvious:  women can either have dates or career success but not both.  Aside from the obvious -- how sucky is that? -- there's also the deep problem of financial inequality and dependence.  If a women takes a lower-paying nurturing job and a man takes a high-paying combative job, and then they split up or divorce of whatever, the woman is screwed.

I've hadn't had much personal romantic engagement with this whole problem, partly because I can't really avoid the direct interpersonal style.  I'm a look-you-in-the-eyes kind of person.  As a friend once said, "Uh, you're just not demure."  The men in my life have liked that; I suppose men who wouldn't just kept their distance in the first place.

But it's definitely a thing.  Certainly in the media it's a huge thing.  Modern media almost always depict a dynamic in conformity with the pattern:  in a movie or whatever, you're pretty much never going to see the straight-shooter, no weasel-words accomplished woman as the heterosexual love interest.

How did this become such a thing, and why does it remain?   You'd think everyone would want their wives and daughters to bring in home the bacon, which would seem to cut in the opposite direction. 

I really don't know.  But whatever else you want to say, it sometimes makes me wonder if there's a connection between these phenomena and some aspect of the particular fondness some straight women have for gay men.  Obviously these things are complex, but perhaps one strand goes something like this:  many gay relationships show a model of male sexuality in which men are attracted to, and not threatened by, assertive and masculine styles. 

So for a straight woman it's like, you can see a guy in action actually being attracted to the qualities typically associated with anti-attractiveness, qualities that for some women are pretty essential to their make up.  It's appealing, even if it's at a distance. 

Of course, the accidental philosopher, being a philosopher, can't help but also notice that the things you're supposed to do to be attractive to straight men are exactly the opposite of the things you're supposed to do to be a good academic philosopher. 

For a philosopher, stating one's views in a non-assertive way, stating facts as opinions, and using weasel-words like "maybe" or "I think"  -- it's a direct route to career suicide, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 dollars.

Say what you will about the other humanities, at least they're generally safe spaces for uncertainty, weasel words, and indirect communication.  At least, I think they are.  Maybe. 

The Nature of Fandom in the Age of Social Networking

Being a fan is a pretty one-sided relationship.  Up until recently  -- and I'm going to get to this in a moment -- it was almost completely one way and non-reciprocal.  There is no mutual recognition in being a fan. 

Fandom is based on things like buying records and things, showing up at huge arenas and stadiums, and being an anonymous admirer.  Being a fan of Cheap Trick does not mean they're going to call you up to consult on song lists or invite you to hang out and talk music -- you pretty much have to be content to admire them from afar.

I don't know if I'm some kind of narcissist, or stuck in an adolescent phase of celebrity relationships, or what, but this non-reciprocity has always bothered me, and truth be told, I always wondered why it didn't bother other people. 

Like if you're talking about some creative/artist fan object -- a musician, filmmaker, writer, whatever -- for me love and admiration for the artistic object (the song, the book, the movie) immediately makes me want to spend some quality time with the fan object -- the creator.  Doesn't it for you?  Don't you find yourself thinking that person has some special insight into life?

Well, I do.  And it makes me want something back.  It's not always easy to sort out what this "something back" is supposed to be, but sometimes it's more like friendship and sometimes it's more like parenting; sometimes it's like romance or sex; sometimes you just want to know they're there, listening to you, thinking you're special and awesome. 

Often I try not to be a "fan," and to stick to just liking things -- this is an essential difference.  For example, I read a lot of novels, and with novels I make a point of trying to read and enjoy them without becoming a fan of the author.  Because it's necessary for the proper experience of a novel that you don't know too much about the novelist.  Otherwise, you're just constantly like "oh I bet that character was based on her awful first husband!" and so on and so forth and then forget it, you are just not reading the novel in the proper way.  This is, of course, itself getting harder in the age of social networking. 

With some things, though, it is really hard to like the thing without becoming a fan.  Do you know that NPR news comedy show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me?  I love that show.  I tried to stick to loving the show, but it was impossible for me to avoid becoming a fan -- of Paula Poundstone, of Maz Jobrani ... and most of all, of Peter Sagal, the hilarious over-caffeinated host. 

But it's no good for me, being a fan of Peter Sagal.  Because now I want him to be my friend, to crack his wisecracks specially to me over a glass of wine, to listen to my problems in life, and mostly just to think, reciprocally, that I am really special and interesting and awesome.

Sorry Patricia, that is not going to happen.

Now, you might think that in the age of social networking this problem is going away, or getting better, or something. Because it is no secret that social networking, and especially Twitter, are eroding the one-sided nature of fandom.  Now anyone can aim their tweet at anyone else, and anyone can engage with anyone, and armies of fans have, if not access, at least a way of getting the attention of the fan object.

Is it the end of one-sided fandom?  Does the fan concept now become reciprocal and mutual, the fan concept of my dreams?

No, I'd say the opposite is true.  Now, the fan concept is more troubling rather than less.  Because now, the one-sidedness of fandom isn't just built into the space-time continuum, like it used to be -- instead it results from actual choices of the participants.

Now, if you're a person with Twitter-wit (a Twit?), who can pack a paragraph of cleverness and humor in 140 characters, you might be able to get that reciprocity.  If you could craft the perfect fan email, with the perfect combination of humor and emotion and narrative peaks and valleys, you might get the attention of that fan object.  It can happen.  The possibility of reciprocity and mutual recognition is there.

But that means if you're just some ordinary person, some humble blogger, some everyday looker-at-pictures-of-cats-on-the-internet, you're still basically SOL.

Which just brings home even more the essential sad truth of fandom for the rest of us:  you're not special; you're just a fan.

Can Vulnerability Be A Good Thing?

Harriet McBryde Johnson, a few years ago, before she died.

I'm interested in the question, Can vulnerability be a good thing?  I think maybe yes.  I think it can be a positive aspect of femininity for everyone, and that more of it might improve the way we relate to one another.



Though I think that ultimately the answer to this question is yes, I find it almost impossible to reflect properly on the matter, especially in writing.  We can't even ask the question properly, because we're so immersed in a world view in which vulnerability is bad.

The model of humanity that sees persons as individual atoms, as free agents wheeling and dealing with one another, ultimately looking to serve our own good, whatever that may be -- this model is so pervasive I feel like it's gone beyond serving as a "model" to understand people and is now attaining the status of common sense.   It's just the go-to metaphor.

And in that model of personhood, I feel like the answer to the question about vulnerability has to be an obvious and resounding No.  Of course it's worse to be more vulnerable.  Because almost by definition in the model, to be vulnerable is to lose.  You lose the opportunity to control a situation; you lose the ability to confer a benefit or pose a threat; you thus lose in the real sense your ability to get what you need.

These facts ground, I believe, part of the explanation for why people with disabilities are marginalized in our society in such a particular way.  This isn't something I can say I have clear conclusions about, but the idea is that because incorporating people with disabilities into regular public life requires a conceptualization of humanity that can conflict with the model, it puts certain members of the general public into some kind of fight or flight mode. 

Like:  if you're going to spend resources constructing wheelchair ramps, making things visible and auditory, and so on, this raises questions about why we do those things for some people and not other things for other people.  There are good answers to these questions, some of which have to do with fairness and justice and some of which have to do with other virtues.  But those answers -- they don't fit very well with the model.  Let's just say -- they put pressure on it. 

I was thinking about some of these things a few weeks ago when I taught, in my Intro to Philosophy class, this excellent piece in the New York Times magazine, in which Harriet McBryde Johnson -- a lawyer and disability rights activist who was, herself, disabled -- described a debate she had with the utilitarian Peter Singer, over whether disabled infants that no one wants to adopt can morally be helped to die (or maybe simply killed) if their parents wish it.


Singer, a utilitarian who counts up costs and benefits, says Yes:  the benefits outweigh the costs in such cases.  Johnson, naturally, says No:  it's unfair and discriminatory to adopt such a policy with respect to disabled infants when we clearly would not do so with other conditions that affect wantedness. 

If you're at all interested in these questions you should read the essay -- she brings up a lot of interesting things.  One of the things they both touch on in their discussion is the question of whether certain disabled people -- like McBryde Johnson herself-- are "worse off" than typical non-disabled people. 

One of the things Johnson says about this is "Are we 'worse off?  Not in any meaningful sense."    

As I interpret her, I think Johnson means two things with this.  First, of course it's true that some people can't walk or run, but those aren't activities in any way essential to human happiness.  And second, of course it's true that some people need assistance with things -- she needs help eating and exercising her limbs and so on -- but this assistance is often not medical as much as just a bit more of the ordinary things people do for one another all the time.

Lots of people need assistance.  It's not just children and old people and the sick and disabled.  Think about all the moments of vulnerability in your life, where sadness or the events of your life made it seem impossible to put it all back together, or the prospect of doing what you felt you had to do just felt like too much.  Really, the state of needing assistance is more like the norm than the exception.

Expanding on her thought about not being "worse off," Johnson writes,

"There are too many variables. For those of us with congenital conditions, disability shapes all we are. Those disabled later in life adapt. We take constraints that no one would choose and build rich and satisfying lives within them. We enjoy pleasures other people enjoy, and pleasures peculiarly our own. We have something the world needs."

I think she's absolutely right, and I think that one of those things they have that the world needs is a challenge to the individualistic model of humanity that forces us to see vulnerability as a bad thing. 

The New Self-Help: Problems With Work? Work Harder!

Ivana Kobilca, Ironing Women [Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons

I don't know about you, but I am getting so irritated by this whole trend of solving work problems with work. 

I mean, it was bad enough when "self-help" meant taking baths with candles, drinking herbal tea, writing things down, and talking everything over with a therapist.  But it turns out we didn't know the half of it.  Who knew the main advice for a better life in the new millennium would be Problems With Work?  Work Harder!

It's revolting.  First we have things like this Thomas Friedman opinion piece, which, like so much garbage these days, argues that because of the changes in the way "jobs" are compensated and created, people should become their own job creators. 

Here Friedman is particularly talking about education, and how it needs to teach students to be innovators -- so they can create their own jobs.  Nothing against creativity, guys, but it's ridiculous and offensive to think that this is a scheme that makes sense for the majority of people.  I mean, seriously?  The ability to network, out-think your friends, amass capital, and show off the result at SXSW should not be requirements for a basic life existence.  That is nuts. 

Then, too -- even though this case is more complex -- the return of the Millennial Work Ethic seems to be at least one facet of Sandberg's Lean-In theory of feminism:  that to succeed as a woman with a career, you must push harder at work just at the moments -- as, when you're first having children -- you might think of stepping back a bit.

Yes, Virginia, the solution to too much work is to just, you know, work harder. 

But the thing that pushed me over the brink was this article in the New York Times about "giving" in the workplace.

Did you see it?  Let me refresh your memory.  The article focuses on Professor Adam Grant, the youngest-tenured and highest-rated professor at Wharton Business School who ... well let's just say he's just a guy who can't say no.

His research -- massively prolific and hugely rewarded -- has to do with "giving" in the workplace.  His idea is that people are motivated by the rewards of giving.  Because he practices what he preaches, the people he can't say no to are his students and basically any one around who wants advice, an introduction, a letter of reference, more advice and what have you.

It sounds nice, doesn't it?  Like someone eager to help.  But it's creepy. 

First of all, it's one thing to take some powerful people with good jobs and point out to them the benefits of giving (and thus perhaps cooperation, though that word doesn't come up).  It's another thing entirely to take a bunch of people at a call center and motivate them to work harder by showing them how their work is helping someone, and it's yet another thing altogether to show that bookstore employees who donated money to a fund felt more attached to the company than people who didn't. 

As the reporter points out, it's a manager's wet dream:  motivate your employees to do more underpaid annoying difficult work not by increasing their well-being or even by making their work more meaningful but by making their work seem more meaningful.   And it costs nothing.

But even worse is the way "giving" really means doing stuff for people who are in your little business world.

In the best part of the story, the reporter tries out the credo of giving, starting with sending emails offering to help people:

The first time I exchanged those e-mails, I usually felt good; after the second exchange on a given topic, I thought perhaps I had done my duty. But I noticed that every offer of help I initiated or granted engendered four or five e-mails, at the end of which I sometimes felt surly and behind on my work — and then guilty for feeling that way. Worse, those exchanges often even ended with the person on the other end wanting to meet for coffee. Coffee! Now I struggled to find a way to say, gracefully, that there was no way I could meet for coffee — not this week or next or the week after that, because there are only so many hours in the day, and if I do not get home in time to make dinner, my children will dine on Pirate’s Booty and Smarties, which would not make me feel helpful or productive or good.

Why doesn't Professor Grant have this problem?  Duh:  he has a wife who takes care of the kids and the home full time. 

The article says Grant is "devoted" to his family:  "he has dinner most nights at home and takes his daughter to a preschool activity on many afternoons. But he also works at least one full day on the weekend, as well as six evenings a week, often well past 11."

So now "having dinner most nights at home" then going immediately back to work is "devoted to the family"?


As the great Ninotchka said, "It won't be long now, comrades."

The "Tyranny" Of Choice: It's Not Because There Are Too Many Choices

It's old news that having too many choices is annoying the hell out of the modern western consumer.  A few years ago some social scientists set up a jam tasting operation in a supermarket.  When they offered 24 kinds of jam, only 3 percent of tasters bought some jam.  When they offered 6 kinds of jam, it shot up to 30 percent.  Fewer choices meant more satisfied consumers.

When I first heard this I was a little bit like "Oh, thank god we've moved on from stupid things like "under what conditions are people willing to follow an authority figure" and onto the important stuff about how we poor denizens of the first world are dealing with the oppression of having 48,750 items in the average supermarket.  The Economist even goes so far as to say we're living under a "Tyranny of Choice."

Whatever.  I'm sure having a lot of options does exhaust people.  But as so often happens, the frame of this problem focuses on something relatively trivial and sets aside the difficult and important question, which is how having more choices affects people socially.  Because sometimes having more options doesn't just mean you have to choose.  It means you have to explain and justify your choice in different ways.  Your "no" now rejects more things, and takes on a different significance.

A tiny example.  When I was a little kid I got hit on the head with a swing, and I have a small scar in the middle of my eyebrow.  My feeling is basically like "who cares?"  It is not a big deal.  Then as an adult I broke my nose falling off my bike, and I had a plastic surgeon putting it back together, and he was all "I can fix this eyebrow! Cheap! I'll give you a discount!" and I was like "No, thanks, I'm fine the way I am" and he was all "WTF is wrong with you?  You want your eyebrow to be all fucked up?" 

Having a new option definitely made it more difficult to choose what I wanted to choose in the first place.  In the end I told him that I didn't want too many changes in my face all at once, which was pretty close to the truth.  But now whenever I encounter the Beauty Industrial Complex there's this constant discussion about eyebrow pencils and how I can just be filling that in and why don't I do that and it's exhausting saying over and over that, small as it seems, I don't want to deal with the hassle of an eyebrow pencil everyday.   These conversations are so annoying, I can't even deal with the situation.  I mostly stay home and do the amateur pluck.

The eyebrow is a tiny thing.  But what if it was your job?  Suppose you had a family, and a job you really liked that didn't pay very well, and no other employment options.  Then one day you're offered a much less pleasant job that pays much better.  Suddenly you are in a very difficult situation.  It's not at all clear that your situation hasn't been made worse by having this new option.  If you choose the new job you'll hate it.  If you choose to keep your old one, your relations with your family will be forever affected by the way you chose to put your own needs first. 

In this way having more options can be worse, not for the relatively small reason that you have to make an exhausting choice from lots of options -- there are only two! -- but for the more complex and difficult reason that your choice now has a different significance for you and the people close to you.

In the Economist article, the "tyranny" of choice is attributed to the fact that the more options you have the less confident you can be that you've made a good choice.  They conclude that the more choices you have, the more you try to control what happens, when in fact you'd be better off just choosing something and sticking to it.  Applying this interpretation to the availability of procreation choices, they say:

"Fifty years after the contraceptive pill was first licensed in America and 37 years after the Supreme Court legalised abortion, women seem to agonise more than ever about breeding. “We've grown up with a lot more choice than our mothers or grandmothers; for them, being child-free wasn't a choice, it was pitied,” says Beth Follini, an American life coach who specialises in the “maybe baby” dilemma. “The anxiety comes from worrying about making the wrong choice.” Having options seems to make people think they can have control over outcomes too. Sometimes, says Ms Follini, choosing is about learning to live without control."

Sure, people are anxious about making the wrong choice.  But this passage treats the question as if it's just a woman in a room alone thinking about babies.  That's nuts.  For one thing, obviously a person's reproductive choices are shaped by a million social factors:  will I be able to finish school, what if I can't make enough money? and, for Americans, what if I lose my health insurance?  The "anxiety" a person feels about making the wrong choice has as much to do with the social conditions that shape the results of that choice than with how well one looks into one's inner heart.      

Furthermore, as I've been arguing here, the increase of options affects the way your choice is embedded in your own social world.  There can hardly be a choice that impacts more on the people close to you than a reproductive choice.  Because of increased options, whatever you do now, you have to be able to explain and justify your reproductive choices in terms that make sense to a lot of people.

And of course the more the options, the more questions arise about why this or why that.  When people ask me if if I'm planning to have kids and if not why not, I sometimes try to avoid a long discussion by saying "I'm too old now to have kids," which I am.  But people often respond by pointing out that this is not, in fact, literally, true:  with the new reproductive technologies, I could have kids at almost any age!  The simplest part of the answer becomes the most complicated. 

I'm not prone to anxiety about things like this, but for someone who was, it'd be a minefield.  Not, I'll say again, because choosing from among a lot of options is difficult or exhausting, and not because of fear of making the "wrong" choice for me personally, but because what could be the simplest "no" in the world is now a powerful, public statement about values, desires, and what matters in life.  If people are fearful and anxious about choices, it's more over the constant need to make these statements, and not so much a 24-kinds-of-jam-sort-of-thing.   

Notice how the "tyranny of choice" problem, in the "too many choices" interpretation, has been framed as a problem about individual human psychology, a problem we humans confront from within our individualistic consumer culture -- a culture that is simply taken for granted.  "Oh, look, those humans, they have trouble deciding from too many kinds of jam, poor things." 

The natural corollary to this "too many choices" interpretation is obvious:  we'd be better off with fewer choices.  That may be so when it comes to jam:  I'm not a 24-kinds-of-jam-person myself.  But I hope it's clear how sinister it is when applied to reproductive choices.  Oh, poor people, they have choice anxiety, they have too many choices!  Let's take some away.

We Love The Bad, The Stupid, The Vapid, The Obsequious

A poster for the movie "Tilt," starring Brooke Shields.  Who knew?

What's the Parisian equivalent of a "dive bar"?  I don't really know, but I was in one the other day.  This being Paris, it wasn't so much a dive bar in the sense of being dark, noisy, and full of drunks.  It was more a place for drinking, buying lottery tickets, placing bets on things, watching sports, and pretending to do all these other things while really flirting with the cute Chinese waitress.  It was also a place for playing pinball. 

You remember pinball, right?  Its heyday was just before PacMan, back in the paleo-agonic era.  Pinball machines are endangered now, but maybe you've seen a few of them tucked away in their modern sanctuaries: hipster bars.  Instead of a "screen" they have an actual ball that bounces around; instead of a "joystick" or "game controller" there are these flipper things. 

I always try to avoid saying things that make me sound like an old man, like "You kids with your Wiis and your X-boxes and your games of war and shooting-up-prostitutes, you don't know nothing."  But in this case what else can I say? 

I could go on and on listing points in favor of pinball.  The main one relevant here is that it is possible to be sexy and cool while playing it.  Video games, not so much.  Using a joystick looks ridiculous, and the new machines, where you have to wave your arms around to make the motion of a tennis racket/baseball bat/fist/whatever -- they're even worse.

Part of the appeal of pinball is that you have to interact in a masterful but gentle way with a 300 pound machine.  Nudging the machine a bit:  essential strategy.  Nudging the machine too much:  TILT! your ball is over.

Anyway, in my dive bar there were these guys playing pinball.  And one guy had on a nice suit, and nice shoes, and he had a nice haircut and a reasonably intelligent look on his face.  He also had -- what's the equivalent of road rage for pinball?  He had TILT RAGE. 

He could barely contain his anger.  Every time he lost it was like a new tragedy.  He hit the machine; he stomped his feet; he swore at the people around him.  I don't think he every really technically tilted the machine.  He was just really pissed off about losing.

And now we're finally getting to the point of this post, which is that I found this an attractive quality.  I didn't find it an admirable quality.  I think getting really upset about a pinball game is stupid.  This is a case where a quality I find attractive in a person is not a quality I find sensible or good, and isn't even a quality I'd be looking for in a friend.

I think this situation -- that what's attractive isn't always what's good -- is more common than people would like to admit.  When people date the Bad, the Stupid, the Vapid and the Obsequious ... it really gets under everyone else's skin. 

In particular, when a woman dates a Bad or Stupid Guy, there's often a whole narrative about it: Oh, She Must Have Been Mistreated As A Child and That's Why She Likes Him. She needs to regain her self-esteem.  The implication is that the normal healthy person finds attractive in the opposite sex the qualities of goodness, patience, and generosity.  But isn't this contradicted by the facts?  As I've mentioned before, Keith Richards has to fight them them off with a stick.  Nothing against Keith, but it's not because he's a Good and Virtuous Man.

This whole problem had been much on my mind before seeing Tilt Rage Guy, because I'd been thinking about it as it arises in the books of Anthony Trollope.  I've just been rereading The Palliser series.  Because they concern the English aristocracy, these novels contain a lot of plot elements having to do with the marriages and marriage-longings, suitable and unsuitable, of various young persons. 

In The Prime Minister, poor Emily Wharton is swept off her feet by one Ferdinand Lopez, a man we know ahead of time to be fast-talking, good looking, and easily angered, and a man we later come to know as truly despicable.  Of course Emily's family is deeply mystified by her choice, and also angered by her rejection of Mister Suitable, a long standing family friend.

I was talking over Emily's problems with my friend and he pointed out how many of Trollope's heroines were in the same situation.  They love the scapegraces, the smooth talkers, the passionate lovers and the cutters of fine figures.  The upstanding and quiet young men everyone else approves of for them?  Meh, not so much. 

It drove everybody crazy then, and it's driving everybody crazy now.

Modernity Boot Camp, Or, When One Lives Among Madmen, One Should Train As A Maniac

Over the weekend I went to see a classic Bollywood movie:  Kal Aaj Aur Kal (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) from 1971.  It tells the tale of a family, a grandfather, father, and son  -- played by a real life grandfather, father, and son from the famous Kapoor family -- in which the son and the grandfather clash generationally, and the father is caught unhappily in the middle. 

Among other things, it's a movie about modernity.  The son and grandfather fight over food, clothing, music, parties, religion, the caste system, individuality, tradition, sex, love, and marriage.  Are these or are these not the flashpoints of modernity the world over?

In the central battle of wills, the grandfather insists that the son marry the pious daughter of his friend from the village.  The son wants to marry the elegant and super-modern Monica, whom he met, of course, on an airplane.  Here's the young couple getting to know each other:

Cute, huh?  The sixties were so much the sixties the world over.

Anyway, although she's modern, Monica is a good girl.  She comes from a respected family; she gets yelled at by her mom for not being ready for dinner on time; she's shocked when a mutual friend turns up pregnant by her fiance.  The grandfather's only substantive complaint seems to be that she doesn't know how to cook.  So this isn't so much a movie about marrying outside your cultural circle as a movie about marrying a woman you chose yourself.

For most of the movie, I assumed this conflict would resolve itself through mutual recognition of Monica's essential status as a good girl.  There's a touching scene where Monica serves the grandfather some food, and I thought "Oh, surely he'll see now that even though she's not his choice, she's a good girl, and he'll relent and let the grandson marry her."

And that, I figured, would be the lesson about modernity:  that underneath it all, the things we value aren't all that different. 

But no.  I'm not going to spoil the ending for you, but instead of commonsense and compromise, there is drama, self-sacrifice, and secret plotting.  If there's a lesson about modernity in this movie, it's not underneath it all we're much the same but rather modernity:  it's a fight to the death.

And the more I thought about that the more it grew on me.  Individuality and choosing for yourself -- they're just not the kind of thing about which there are compromises.  Either you choose for yourself or you don't.  And we've gotten into a habit of -- of kind of sugarcoating the difference.  Of treating modernity like a kind of increase in common sense rather than a radical experiment in human life. 

Because promising and lovable as it is -- and let's be clear, no one loves modernity more than I -- modernity creates conditions that are destabilizing, dangerous, and wildly unpredictable. 

The idea that we should make decisions for ourselves, in the absence of bowing to tradition, it's an extreme idea for beings like us -- beings that are impulsive, emotional, and fragile.  Think about how dependent we are.  We're easily carried away.  We crave happiness and warmth.  We're so physically delicate we need food and water every few hours.

And now you plonk us down, rudderless, in the middle of consumer culture and expect us to thrive?  We're supposed to figure out how to fight temptation and laziness all day every day?  To walk calmly past a million displays of baked goods, candy, cigarettes, and just say no?  To delete the spam that offers better bods, better sex, instant cash?  To decide how to save for retirement, to select a mortgage, to pick insurance packages?  To decide to go to the gym, day after day, after eight hours at work?

Not easy. 

Given how hard it is, you'd think that there would be some training program for modernity.  Like a modernity boot camp.  They'd teach you how to have massive self-directedness, endless self-control, and an imperviousness to small sufferings.  Maybe you remember this post on ego depletion?  Well modernity boot camp would give you huge muscles of willpower alongside your huge pecs and six-pack abs. 

When I was young I had a daydream of modernity boot camp, and I thought I might satisfy it by joining the actual real life military.  You know, toughness, discipline, getting it together.  That didn't work out for me because of the whole having-to-kill-people aspect, which was a deal-breaker.

Weirdly, not only don't we have modernity boot camp, it's almost like we have anti-training for modernity.  Young people are more left to their own devices than ever; the crime of being "late to dinner" has been erased in a world of sports practice and music lessons; and it's become elitist to go around saying you don't watch Mad Men or whatever because you were busy reading a book.

I don't know what form modernity boot camp should take, exactly, but perhaps we can take as a starting point for reflection the real life story of the actress who played Monica in the movie -- Babita Kapoor.  She and the actor who played the son really did get married in real life.  And what do you think happened next?  Her new family told her she had to quit acting, because women in their family weren't supposed to act. 

I don't know how exactly how Babita Kapoor responded to this, but whatever she did was effective, because her two daughters have become highly successful actresses and stars of Bollywood.  So as far as I'm concerned, Ms. Kapoor can be first headmistress of our new training school.

And for a school motto, we can't do better than to follow the Count of Monte Cristo, who said,

when one lives among madmen, one should train as a maniac.