I would meet a man, and our first date would consist of that lovely unraveling of mundane details. Then would come the second date. With our vital stats out of the way, we'd begin to discuss other, seemingly benign, topics. But somehow, every road led to sexism. A comparison of our favorite movies turned into me complaining about Quentin Tarantino's senseless misogyny. Perusal of the dessert menu somehow ignited a screaming match about women's socially imposed body-image issues.
Often there was no warning. One minute we would be talking baseball, and the next we'd be embroiled in a standoff about pornography, which would end with me refusing to return his calls and express mailing him a copy of Catharine MacKinnon's "Only Words" without a note.
Astounding. Condescension is the only appropriate response, but how effective would it be? You'd run right up against "Oh, this is meaningful to young people, and speaks to their concerns."
And like she has absolutely no sense of who she should be dating. I mean, I've had conversations with dates about misogyny, but not ones that got ugly, mostly because if you have any sense you can figure out who's going to have a problem with talking about misogyny over dessert before you go out with them. This is not that difficult.
And, you know, what does the Southern accent have to do with anything? You know what this is? It's a plot to make urban coastal liberals look insane and unpleasant.
I'm pretty sure that all of the "Modern Love" pieces are submitted by freelancers and that the Styles section editors aren't terribly picky and don't pay very well for them. One of the first "Modern Love" pieces I ever saw was a sarcastic review of contemporary dating manuals by a grad student in my department, though, so perhaps I'm biased.
Huh. A man who I once xeroxed a Dworkin article ended up marrying me. And I'm pretty sure I've bitched to him about Tarantino's misogyny, too. Good thing he didn't get the memo about how my having opinions about sexism made me a castrating bitch.
I doubt that the writer is conscious of or in control of the gruesome ironies of the piece. But that's because she's probably about 23. 25 at the oldest.
The editors, though, are probably being very very cynical. They can excuse the piece with "hey, it's the legitimate experience of the young, clueness feminist on the dating scene!" But what they're really looking at is the bottom line--which, these days at the NYT, is measured at least in part by screenloads. Another grad student friend of mine--this one has an actual career as a freelancer and a staff writer at another publication--successfully pitched a piece to the NYT and asked all of her friends to view it as often as possible from as many IPs as possible. The stories that get emailed around or blogged are the successful ones, especially for the comparatively fluffy features sections. So, the editors are happy that we're sitting around talking about how stupid this article is.
Okay, I just wrote something really bitchy and castrating in response to this article, but I deleted it because, you know, the most important thing about upholding my ideals is to ensure that everyone still thinks I'm sexy.
An ex-boyfriend once told me that he couldn't stand two-faced women. "And by two-faced," he explained, "I mean the sort of woman who wears so much makeup that she looks one way when you're out with her at night, and then totally different the next morning. That's why I love the way you look. You don't feel the need to get all dolled up in blue eye shadow -- you're just so natural." When we moved in together nine months later, the jig was up. Living together has plenty of benefits, but preserving the "I just rolled out of bed looking this way" myth isn't among them.
Calm yourselves, children. Rest easy in the knowledge that the man she ends up marrying will start sleeping with her little sister or best friend in a little under a decade. And, thanks to this article, we won't have to feel bad for her.
23: It was mostly screaming and then doing my imitation of the NYT saying, "Now, honey, we know you care about things like 'the environment' and 'women's rights' and 'the poor' and we think it's really really sweet that you have such big, nice thoughts! But wouldn't it be nice if you'd just put on some makeup, get in Grandma's SUV and head out to the Hamptons with us? Maybe there will be cute boys there!"
Are you saying he moved in with you, natural conceptions and all, never having seen you just rolled out of bed, or that he must have overlooked or been blind to momentary lapses, and when he was living with you, the scales fell from his eyes?
One of my roommates actually is very much that sort of woman. I lived with her for at least three months before I saw her without her makeup. She looked totally different: skin color and texture, shape of face, eye color. I think she looks better without the makeup, but controlling that aspect of her self-presentation is very important to her. She's a Judith Butler devotee, btw, and rarely lacks for, ahem, intimate companionship. But I've always wondered how she negotiates that moment of "darling, I'm now going to slip out of my makeup..."
Patty, who has lived with her husband, Ben, for almost a year, bought porcelain bathroom canisters as soon as she moved in, placing them on a wicker shelf. "I put tampons, Monistat, and anything else that's unpleasant to look at in them,"
Yeah, if you're going to keep your used tampons and Monistat applicators, it really helps if you pretty them up with a wicker shelf.
I suppose if you have sex with the lights out, and then get out of bed and dash for the bathroom to cosmeticize first thing in the morning, it's plausible.
36: No, you can leave the lights on if you use waterproof mascara and the new non-smudging lipsticks and makeup. After all, guys who are hung up on mystery and prettiness aren't all that likely to actually do anything that's going to muss your foundation. 'Course, you still have to get up before him, but that's okay because men like to be greeted with a hearty breakfast on awaking.
LB, I don't think that's what she does, though. At least not the "dash out first thing in the morning" part: since she doesn't put on her makeup before she's done her full exfoliation-washing-treating-lotioning regime, I tend to know at what hour the bathroom is occupied, and it's late.
My dad and I used to argue about that poem; he found it effective and as you say, disgusting, my response was "so what if she does? it's all good." I'm starting to thing/k I may be a fetishist.
Kristina and Matt, who have lived together for 14 years, brush, floss and use teeth-bleaching trays every night. "It gives us some quiet time together while we watch TV and chill before bed," says Kristina.
Yes, there's nothing sexier than curling up with each other and your teeth-bleaching trays.
I am now completely convinced that this is a plot to make feminists look bad.
See, I don't think so. For example (clicking on my name), from the Smith Alumnae Quarterly:
Karen Kosztolnyik ’90 is a senior editor at Warner Books, where she acquires fiction and nonfiction for all divisions, including hardcover, trade, and mass market. Her acquisition interests are commercial women’s fiction, chick lit, romance, suspense, and nonfiction concerning women’s issues, current events, and pop culture. She has acquired and edited New York Times bestseller Carly Phillips; Deanna Kizis (How to Meet Cute Boys); and Megan Crane (English as a Second Language). At press time, Kosztolnyik had just signed J. Courtney Sullivan ’03’s post-postfeminist take on the dating world, Dating Up: The Ultimate Guide to Finding the Man You Deserve, due out next fall. Kosztolnyik lives in New York City with her husband.
I feel like a lot of commenters here have thought through a lot of the feminist issues; I don't think this is true for most of the population. And so there is a big market for contrarianism and contra-contrarianism re: "romance."
Oh, she takes it all off at night, though. I'm not exactly sure whether it's before or after sex, and I doubt there's a strict law about it. No, I suspect she and her partners have figured out some kind of complex dance around her makeup regime. (I haven't asked because she's rather reserved and would take questioning on such matters as rude and judgmental. She's abroad this year, but otherwise it would be SIX YEARS now that we've lived together.)
As for the Swift poem, dude, if Strephon is poking around in a lady's chamber pot, he's getting what odors he deserves.
The fact that J. Courtney Sullivan went to Smith's and "joined a campus women's group and studied up on gender issues," and apparently is now pursuing a career as a romantic advice writer, is a damning indictment of somebody, I think. Probably her.
Barbar, the link command is [a href="link"]text[/a]. Where the square brackets are replaced by the little left and right angle thingies above the comma and period, link refers to the code in "link to this comment," and text, obviously, refers to what ppl actually read when it posts. If that makes sense.
In other words, Unfogged commenters should probably pitch their ideas about "Modern Love" to the fucking NYT because, hell, we're not getting paid as it is, and we might as well raise the Gray Lady's hemline tone.
Babar, I read you as denying JM's cynicism theory, which convinced me, and saying "No, they think it meets a need, and is what they really think" Which is what I thought first until I realized I would rather believe in cynicism. What do you think? Whose fault is it that a Smith graduate thinks and writes on this level, and gets published?
I heard a story from a friend that one of her classmates, a Smith grad, claimed all they did there was smoke pot and talk about hot boys. Her profs were really nurturing and never criticized, and when she showed up at her Ph.D. program, burst into tears every time a prof told her she was wrong. She ended up leaving school to RV around the country with her totally-hot pot dealer.
I'm sure this isn't the quintessential Smith experience, but it sounds quite possible. I worked in the Northampton area for a summer and man, Smith's local vibe is odd.
I guess I think the median response to the Times article will be something like:
"Yeah that's true -- feminism is good and stuff, and I'm a feminist, but women like men to hold doors open for them, which is kind of ironic, but that's life." Which is actually exactly what the surface message of the article is. I don't think the rationale for the article is just to piss readers off (it could be, but I think the % of readers who will be pissed off by it is disturbingly small).
I agree that the feminism is attacked as being for man-hating lesbians who shave their heads; let's call this portrayal the Plot Against Feminism. What is distrurbing is that this self-proclaimed feminist, who went to Smith's and supposedly was very concerned with women's issues, sees no problem with furthering the Plot Against Feminism.
So what does this mean? I don't know for sure, but my first guess would be that her interest in feminism in college was somewhat superficial. She's just a kid, it's giving her a cause to rally around and identify with. It's not quite mature. She graduates from an all-women's college and heads off to New York and life is more complicated than she thought. Big surprise. Her interest in feminism apparently never went deep enough to cause her to think about the Plot Against Feminism, so reality disarms her and she basically joins forces with it, while still aware of unequal wages and domestic violence issues.
So she's young and stupid. But, a lot of people think like her. So many, in fact, that I don't think the people publishing her are even that cynical. They engage in the Plot Against Feminism but many of them are probably self-described feminists who don't think the Plot Against Feminism is wrong (because they think that some feminists are just really "extreme"). And if they don't even consider themselves feminists, then they almost surely don't think the Plot Against Feminism is wrong, or even a plot. So I don't think it's that cynical.
Now eventually people make money off of the Plot Against Feminism (Caitlin Flanagan), and they will make transparently stupid statements -- things they know full well are ridiculous -- just to sell books. This is cynical. Even then, however, someone like Caitlin Flanagan thinks that her "deep-down" idea -- that feminism doesn't quite work -- has something to it. At least I think so.
Whence the Plot Against Feminism? I guess I think that most people are pretty attached to the status quo. They can get riled up about salient injustices (men beating women, men out-earning women, women not being able to vote) but a lot of them don't spend too much time thinking about the less salient ones. When they get older and more comfortable with life, they can inoculate themselves from challenges by saying, "Hey, I'm a feminist. But..." And when the status quo is challenged, they take it personally.
I might be underestimating the control that centralized media has on our thoughts. Maybe the Plot Against Feminism is more plot-like than I am giving it credit for. Cable news in particular seems remarkably shameless (the Daily Show does a good job exposing them by juxtaposing clips from a variety of shows). But I see the Plot Against Feminism as something that foot soldiers will carry out without much supervision.
Oh, I agree with you Barbar, re. foot soldiers. But I do think that there's a plot, and I think it has to do, really with various things--most importantly the increasing pressure that women's participation in labor markets has to do with unpaid labor at home.
I actually think that the whole "I'm a Feminist, but. . ." thing is something people tend to grow out of, rather than into. IME, women get more radical as they age. I think partly it's just maturity, and worrying less about what other people think, and partly its because the illusions one has when young and single about how really all the battles have been won tend to run into some hard realities the further on you go, work-wise or relationship-wise.
So young women, at say twenty, are inclined to be "feminists, but" because of the dissonance of being attracted to, capable of loving, men and their crude, antagonist, caricature idea of what feminism is and what its issues are. And the PAF is at its most effective in having given them this idea of what feminism is and stands for. And the readings, courses and examples that would complicate this picture, as it were innoculating young miss against such thinking, reaches only a fraction of the people to whom these ideas will be important. And the PAF mostly operates through media, and stories like this reenforce it even while representing an attempt to be true to experience, because the young reader will accept that her story of what she learned of feminism at Smith was the real thing, and not a caricature, thereby framing the reader's expectations of what "feminism" is likely to have to say to her. So she thinks she knows what it means and says even if she doesn't. And God help the young men.
I don't pay: well, to be more optimistic, part of this problem has to do with treating "feminism" which as a package that you can accept or reject, or identify with or not identify with. I've always thought of myself as a feminist even though I haven't always been a feminist. The transition didn't have anything to do with the label.
When I teach Freshman writing, every single semester I do the gendered language talk. I've condensed it to about 20 minutes of the following:
1) the universal pronoun "he" makes a giant presumption, 2) many female (and male) readers will be offended, 3) avoiding the rhetorical problem with gender-neutral language is simply polite--but 4) investigating more closely how gender differences inform your argument or data is also very worthwhile.
Of those steps, I would consider 1-3 battles feminism has largely already won, and I present them as pretty much the minimum bar for writing at the college level. 4 I regard as the ongoing work of feminist scholarship, from which I admit straight up that I've benefitted even though it's not my specialty.
Which has gotten me labelled in a few anonymous professor reviews as a radical feminist.
My friends who actually do feminist or gender-theory scholarship just laughed.
I mostly just use "he", as I've already admitted at the Weblog, at least partially because "he or she" quickly becomes unmanageable when one's in the business of constructing tasty syntax bombes.
"Each student should finish his homework on time." (Sexist!)
Or:
"Each student should finish his or her homework on time." (Wordy!)
Or:
"Each student should finish their homework on time." (Subj-verb disagreement! Ungrammatical!!!1!1!)....
The gender neutral should be, when possible:
"Students should finish their homework on time."
Mixing it up is, I'm afraid to say, a pretty terrible solution. The average reader will be totally confused if the pronouns switch around arbitrarily, and if the order isn't arbitrary, then the writer should put a little more thought into why one pronoun is appropriate in one place and not another. And if a writer does that thinking, it would be important to present that case to the reader: undergraduate research papers aren't often read like poetry, as it were...
"A best-selling legal author with more than a dozen titles to his credit, Bryan Garner is also the editor-in-chief of Black's Law Dictionary in all of its current editions. He has taught at several law schools, and is the president of LawProse, Inc., a Dallas-based company that provides writing and drafting seminars to lawyers and judges throughout the United States."
Being the constructed language nerd that I am, I would be in favor of introducing some set of gender neutral personal pronouns and using those throughout, damn the weirdness. You know, like "ve, ver, vis, verself", or others. But, there is much to be said for singular they, not the least being that the construction was used by such writers as Shakespeare and Austen.
I've come around to singular they myself, despite having been Fowler-catechised as a child. The reason Shakespeare and Austen used it is that English has obviously needed such a construction for hundreds of years.
My illusions are shattered. Bryan A. Garner? No bells?
If you don't know Garner's American Usage, I think you'd like it. Seriously. He's not shy about calling some usages "vulgar" and others "pretentious," but he's not stuck in the 1940s. It's a good resource.
I'm not really as strict about the singular they as I pretend to be in Freshman Writing. I don't really like it, but it doesn't grate as much as the universal he does. However, at the freshman writing level, even at my snooty university, enough students show a poor grasp of basic grammar that I think it advisable to be somewhat grammatically dogmatic.
I knew the universal he trampled out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, but I didn't know he grated.
Were we surrounded by gendered objects, like the speakers of Romance languages, we could keep our pronouns and our fingnails too. But for us, gender means gender, and all of our objects except ships are its.
I knew the universal he trampled out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, but I didn't know he grated.
You're daring to make universal He jokes with a female jack mormon? Have I told you the one about Heavenly Mother, whom He wanted to keep out of the world's ugliness? And, no, I don't really think that Julia Howe meant something so different.
Damn, this would really be a perfect time to link to Bitch PhD's "How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb" joke.
An update on my comedy career, everyone: the problem is my short-term memory. I need to print out that thread, study it on the damned subway, pick out the jokes I could ever plausibly carry off, and practice. First, I need a printer... and then, um, the world will be mine!
It's the first time I've read it, but Cassinus must have been familiar with the poem in 39. (I've linked this before, but that comment is no longer linkable.)
Oh my god, y'all. I need help. I have a commenter at home who is plaguing all my posts with long explanations about how the progressive liberal movement has to be SEXY *and* SMART to be effective. He thinks reading critical theory and pondering it is far more important than actively doing anything about suffering. He commands all women in his presence to exercise at least five hours a week and spend the rest of their time reading Derrida. He thinks he agrees with me, but just wants to brush up my rhetoric, which is dumpy, frumpy, and altogether too lumpy for the masses by getting rid of any hippie-sounding language of kindness, feminism, and anti-suffering. And he won't stop commenting, despite many many suggestions by everyone. He's ruining my discussions. What can I do?
Oh my god, y'all. I need help. I have a commenter at home who is plaguing all my posts with long explanations about how the progressive liberal movement has to be SEXY *and* SMART to be effective. He thinks reading critical theory and pondering it is far more important than actively doing anything about suffering. He commands all women in his presence to exercise at least five hours a week and spend the rest of their time reading Derrida. He thinks he agrees with me, but just wants to brush up my rhetoric, which is dumpy, frumpy, and altogether too lumpy for the masses by getting rid of any hippie-sounding language of kindness, feminism, and anti-suffering. And he won't stop commenting, despite many many suggestions by everyone. He's ruining my discussions. What can I do?
Disengage? by which I mean, don't respond, certainly not in detail. I stopped reading him, maybe others will do the same. Only now, after this plea of yours, did I go back and find a post where he brought up all of those themes, wow.
I may get to that point, but he's so tone-deaf he seems to have no idea why his opinions aren't wildly popular with us. He keeps saying, "Why is everyone deliberately misreading me? All I said is that we need to realize that the objectification of women has nothing to do with women's rights!" Shudder. I have told him I'm tired of his comments, he's said he's tired of making them, and I've suggested he find other places to make them. Still, he returns. Banning may be in order, but I keep hoping we can ignore him out of existence.
There's nothing to respond to in detail because it's the yammering of a self-absorbed moron. So all I do is say, "Yes, sweetheart, you have read some big books, haven't you! How wonderful! Now scoot along!" but to no avail. I will be patient. He will get tired soon.
Well, if he's inflammatory at all, there's not a way to ignore him out of existence without enforcing the "ignore him" command, which is to say, either deleting comments that engage him or asking commenters who engage him to not continue to do so. And anything in that direction is so much more complicated than simply deleting his posts. I would advise you not to be so squeamish about moderation. If looking at it this way helps: It's your community, and I think it's more than your right to keep the level of discussion high, it's your obligation to your readers.
The odd thing is, I know who this guy is, irl. He's a real pig, and everyone who's met him says so. Makes the whole thing doubly gross, because I knew when he started in that it would only go downhill.
Hee, hee. Yes. Except more about himself, too. "Hillary Clinton can't do what no other woman has done because I myself couldn't do it, and certainly I wouldn't hold women to any standard I don't hold myself! Plus, she is getting older, and only attractive women receive praise! Can't she get surgery to look really really hot? Then we'd maybe be talking!"
Back to the gender neutral language thing. You're all wrong. There's nothing wrong with "he or she" in moderation (or, for variety, "she or he"); "their" solves a real problem, and I let my students use it, with the caveat that they realize that more anal-retentive types will consider it "wrong"; and the best solution *is* to alternate between "she" and "he," both because doing so forces one to be more self-conscious about the very things JM, in her feminazi radicalism, articulates in (4), and because it solves *another* problem, that of confusing pronoun referents when discussing, say, the difference between two hypothetical people's reactions to X.
I have a commenter at home who is plaguing all my posts with long explanations about how the progressive liberal movement has to be SEXY *and* SMART to be effective.
We'd better started. The Right already has Katherine Harris shaking her tits on national television.
The "Modern Love" column skews personal. Ergo, Matt Weiner's lovelorn, underhanded attempts to set up other people on the blog should be perfect. The pseudonymous would have to have a damned good pitch to break through the prejudice--even for a one-off, let alone a regular thing. That's not to say it's not worth trying--or trying again. I don't know when you pitched that idea, B, but I have the sense that, in the last six months, the NYT has gotten hip to how blogs could mean cheap revenue.
AWB, I'm not a frequent visitor to your blog, but even at a brief glance, this "blainerunner" character is obviously detrimental. Even apart from what he's saying (which is pretty foul), the sheer volume of his comments is putting a bad dent in the comment culture. I second the motion.
tch, that article brings out my inner taxi driver:
[And now I have fallen for a man who understands and respects my feminist beliefs, and who also takes me to dinner, holds the door, calls me Babydoll in a slow Southern drawl. ]
Its basic message is "see these feminists, bless'em, they act all angry but what they really need is a good seeing-to". Which makes it somewhat unsurprising that it got commissioned; there is *always* an audience for that message.
I reiterate, btw, my iron rule that someone writing in the newspapers about how much they love their new partner who is in many ways the perfect example of their gender, is usually engaged in displacement activity and the odds are good that this Southern gentleman will have dumped, thumped or murdered her within the quarter.
(semi ontopic: actual conversation from last weekend:
Ms Digest, pointing to her lipstick: Is this crooked?
Me: Well yes a bit darling, but it's the face you were born with and I love you.
I thought that joke deserved a better response than it got)
On blaine runner: I wouldn't ban him yet -- I'd move to dismissive abuse first: ("From what you're saying, you simply don't understand that, while you're calling yourself feminist, actual women find the positions you state oppressive and sexist. So which are you, lying or stupid?") You've been quite respectful, engaging him as if he had something useful to say.
This may not work, in which case I would ban, but his schtick seems to be "Reasonable man having a reasonable discussion" and that only works as long as people are taking him seriously at face value. In the face of abuse he'll either have to go away or change his schtick.
I could write something about the tragedy of growing up named "LizardBreath". (Actually, people in high school did call me Lizard, and it wasn't a problem.)
Many times in the last 300 years pseudonymity has stood for frankness, "what we really think", things that would get me in trouble if they knew it was me, etc. The stupider the name the better.
That's true, IDP, but I suspect the NYT editors are aware that part of the pleasure people get out of the "Modern Love" feature is incredulous mockery of anyone who would sign their real name to that.
There you go again, JM. You and Babar had me perfectly whipsawed yesterday: Believe in mind and self-awareness! They're cynical! versus They really think that and those of us who know better are a tiny, tiny minority!
I'm thinking that the problem with the boys that the author used to know before she had this amazing epiphany that she Could Be A Feminist and Still Find Love was that she's a) probably 22, so b) in high school boys weren't interesting because they were high school boys.
On the pronoun thing, the only thing I tell my students is that there must be subject-verb agreement, so 'they' is right out with 'each', and that they should recognize that picking a gendered form, or using 'one', will lead their readers to a certain impression that they, as writers, should control. Also that naming examples ('Michael is a baby confronted with the color red for the first time. Does he have a concept blahdy bladhy') can help sidestep the problem.
And that repetitious 'he or she' makes me sneeze uncontrollably. And that I give Cs when I sneeze.
I think it's likely that we're both kinda right, that a lot of the features editors are probably calculating, deluded with life in their bubble-world, and market- and deadline-driven.
I endorse the nomination of "Ben Wolfson" as our ambassador to Modern Love and move that his proposed column consist of relevent sentences from Unfogged chosen at random.
'He or she' perpetuates the mistaken notion that we live in a universe of binary opposites. It deprives people of the more interesting alternatives: 'undecided', 'not elsewhere classified', 'some or all of the above', 'decline to state', and 'if it's Tuesday this must be male'.
How can we insure that they are relevant, if they are chosen at random? Do you propose that we extract from unfogged all relevant sentences, and then run the selection algorithm on them? Or that we do a larger-than-necessary selection, and then cull from that appropriate sentences?
Slightly OT -- a friend whom I e-mailed Apo's "Simon and Garfunkel" link writes back today to say that she calls her girls "Night and daaaaaaaaaaaaay", and sings to them, "you are the ones, only you beneath the moon or under the suuuuuuuuuuun!" (This is a friend whom I am trying, unsuccessfully so far, to get interested in Mineshaftery.
I endorse the nomination of "Ben Wolfson" as our ambassador to Modern Love and move that his proposed column consist of relevent sentences from Unfogged chosen at random.
nose rings . I haven't read it. That's not a dash.( This is probably "cheap "is a prop to the dismay of American editors. So adorable. Apo, I don't name the shoes, ogged, how to operate the internet, but "kohl "is just using their computers to post my address. Royal Air Battalion? Residual Acid Benefits? Jung gur uryy ner fcbvyre gntf? V2hhdCdzIHdyb25nIHdpdGggdGhhdCBvbGQgc3RhbmRieSwgUk9UMTM/ "who's a national treasure ". There were two possibilities: 1. have you got no in with him, FL, that nothing about my high school period, and John, but we see Cheung along with for a day, poonhound by night! Old? Good to be fast-forward function Almost certainly false, since actually I think I fell asleep at work. But that their aesthetic judgments are sound. There's an AP article that makes coin tosses display predictable behavior over many iterations, and the Mansion, though. Actually what she has in an obsession with Miss Manners, but just in the total cost inclusive of airfare and accomodations is less than just their constantly being together, you have me, sounds reasonably early.) Sort of— the vacillation isn't an attribute of faith. That's all. I'm heading away from the NYRB( pay article, but since when? latus,-um sunt Nope! I don't share your predilection for excellence, in the thread after one( the one where Face goes undercover. Salad nicoise is really the case? Given the sorts of highly individual statistics coming into play depending on how many of you wiseacres would have brought in mad ca$h. The Cecil Taylor thing, you've got to pitch your attempt at a reading in LA some years ago. "I Just didn't respond RIGHT AWAY? Isn't that the one with either of those annoying servers that demands the www prefix. http:// elsa-benitez. nude-celebrities-site. It's a purely ceremonial utterance. I revealed the lie to your ankles........... us and. info don't appear too often either.
I endorse the nomination of "Ben Wolfson" as our ambassador to Modern Love and move that his proposed column consist of relevent sentences from Unfogged chosen at random.
I wasted at least an hour clicking on that random Unfogged generator when it was first posted, and I'm pretty sure I'm about to do the same again. It's even more fun when I imagine the results as a pitch to the NYT.
It looks like we still are having intermittant problems with mt-comments.cgi that cause it to spike the server. So, we definitely do need to go with a "the long term fix is to fix this, not just throw CPU/memory at it".
Very disappointing to have slowness on our own server but the good news is that we won't get shut down for it.
AWB, I assumed your commenter was either an elaborate troll or someone working out his own private obsessions. I have trouble believing he's a professor of anything. At the very least he's a boor. Since he's already declined to take your hints to go somewhere else, I'd take out the Banhammer.
A White Bear, you could always try the direct approach with blainerunner.
It actually worked with abc123. He did post one more time on Unfogged, several weeks or so later, but then stopped after ogged reminded him that he'd been asked to leave.
In the interests of keeping this site as wonderful it can be, and making sure Ben never reads any Hegel, when you click on "Right" at the top of the page M/tch linked it doesn't take you to the right place.
Also, when you click on a "link to this comment" link in a thread that's been archived, the whole thread gets reloaded. Clicking intra-thread links in Innocence, for example, is v. painful. Is there a way to manage the redirects so this doesn't happen?
Yes, PM means add 12 to the number of hours. I'm noting your comment about Astrid Lindgren's (Somebody) on the Roof character, which books I remember seeing recommended a while back -- was it perhaps here? by you? -- Last time I was at Scandinavia House I asked about those but they only had a couple of non-Pippi Lindgren books, not including those ones.
Yes, now I remember. It all makes sense. It's a long weekend in the US, everyone has Monday off, so I think a lot of people are travelling somewhere, and most are inclined to get away from the internet.
As I recall, my grandmother wasn't very self confident then and Tove was self assured and full of vigor. She always tried to boost farmor's confidence. And she was sweet and kind, a good friend.
Ah -- so, this hasn't been relevant for 15 comments, but, after I had very exhaustedly explained to the commenter in question that we had reached an impasse and it was time for him to peddle his wares elsewhere, he couldn't stop himself from posting one more big one about how objectifying women is really centrally important to the success of feminism, and that I should listen to him because he's a "sexually successful male." After I deleted that one for its complete inability to inspire any response other than screaming obscenities, he hasn't returned.
I am trying to figure out what a "sexually successful male" is. Does that mean someone who (a) finds the right hole to stick his penis in 7 out of every 10 tries? (b) sticks his penis in many different holes every day? (c) sticks his penis in the same hole many many times per day? (d) is pretty sure he could stick it in any hole he wanted to, but he's too much of a gentleman to prove it? (e) is able to force any hole he wants to yield to his penis by ridiculing the attached female's looks or intellect?
Shit. See, I have this habit of doing things wrong, but hitting "POST" and then yelling, "Fuck!" and hitting "Back" and then correcting it and hitting "POST" without seeing if the mistake was registered. My server is fast when it wants to be.
You shouldn't admit it. Just attribute it to some kind of server error, and then watch Ben and Becks run around in a panic. It's so cute when they do that.
There used to be an old-school 70's-style feminist website all about the myth of the vaginal orgasm, and when you clicked on the linked words "vaginal orgasm," you got a "This site was not found!" error. I don't think it was intentional, since everyone knows feminists don't have a sense of humor, but I laughed and laughed.
198 is an example of a problem I've seen a few times, namely that the "link to this comment" link doesn't link directly to that comment but just to the archinve page the original post was on.
I've been working around it by copying and pasting from View Source, and the href is correct there, and I've been meaning to report this issue, but have always before forgotten in the heady rush of using links in comments.
198 is an example of a problem I've seen a few times, namely that the "link to this comment" link doesn't link directly to that comment but just to the archinve page the original post was on.
I have experienced no such wrongness. Can you give an example of a link doing the wrong thing? (It's true that the links cause the page to be reloaded, but that's because they still point to the cgi script which redirects one once again to the static page. I don't consider this a bug and it won't be changed.)
It's cool that urls automatically become links now though. When did that happen?
Also, while I'm thinking about it, how's about requiring that commenters input a Name, to avoid the "Oops, 84 was me" phenomenon? Not a big deal, but it might be nice.
The way I got the correct url for the comment was by viewing source, so I knew that part was right. It's just that for some reason in what I'll stipulate is a sucky browser, though a very commonly used one, when I click on the "Link to this comment" link, it doesn't cough up the correct url, but this one:
Ben, clicking the second link in M/tch's comment does indeed result in Firefox redirecting to the 3rd link. That does not go to the specified comment, but to the top of the comment thread.
Yeah, that's the thing. I haven't changed anything in my "links to old comments" protocol, but it no longer works the way it used to, back in the good old days. I can work around it, but I just wanted to let the Unfogged tech support team know, since they asked us to report anything weird that we see.
Which reminds me, the raccoon(s?) stopped growling and hissing after that initial day I reported it.
229 In IE I get the 3rd link, but the browser window ends up in the correct spot. This is true of other "link to this comment" links, too.
Yeah, this is exactly what happens for me too. The window opens in the correct spot but the URL bar shows the third url:
They're deliberately trying to make us want to club all their columnists to death like baby seals, and make coats from them, aren't they.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:07 PM
Boy, she sounds like fun:
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:09 PM
Astounding. Condescension is the only appropriate response, but how effective would it be? You'd run right up against "Oh, this is meaningful to young people, and speaks to their concerns."
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:11 PM
And like she has absolutely no sense of who she should be dating. I mean, I've had conversations with dates about misogyny, but not ones that got ugly, mostly because if you have any sense you can figure out who's going to have a problem with talking about misogyny over dessert before you go out with them. This is not that difficult.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:13 PM
And, you know, what does the Southern accent have to do with anything? You know what this is? It's a plot to make urban coastal liberals look insane and unpleasant.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:15 PM
I'm pretty sure that all of the "Modern Love" pieces are submitted by freelancers and that the Styles section editors aren't terribly picky and don't pay very well for them. One of the first "Modern Love" pieces I ever saw was a sarcastic review of contemporary dating manuals by a grad student in my department, though, so perhaps I'm biased.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:16 PM
I don't think it's a plot. I think it's a management that doesn't know or value what it should.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:18 PM
Huh. A man who I once xeroxed a Dworkin article ended up marrying me. And I'm pretty sure I've bitched to him about Tarantino's misogyny, too. Good thing he didn't get the memo about how my having opinions about sexism made me a castrating bitch.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:18 PM
I was waiting for someone to comment on that piece.
"On one hand, I have all these stupid ideas. On the other hand, reality indicates that my ideas are really stupid. What a paradox the world is!"
Posted by Barbar | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:19 PM
"article for ended."
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:20 PM
If JM is right, there's the possibility this is tongue-in-cheek at least on the part of the writer. Doesn't excuse the editors.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:23 PM
Good thing he didn't get the memo about how my having opinions about sexism made me a castrating bitch.
Oh, I'm sure he knows by now.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:24 PM
OMG that illustration below the jump is not something Al found as a clever reductio of the implicit message of the piece.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:28 PM
Oh yeah, that was right in there in the print edition.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:30 PM
What is that women erasing in the picture?
Men are not damn good.
Men are hardly damn good.
Men are typically prevented by the patriarchy from being sufficiently damn good.
If feminists are going to change the world, they should come up with better graffiti.
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:31 PM
I doubt that the writer is conscious of or in control of the gruesome ironies of the piece. But that's because she's probably about 23. 25 at the oldest.
The editors, though, are probably being very very cynical. They can excuse the piece with "hey, it's the legitimate experience of the young, clueness feminist on the dating scene!" But what they're really looking at is the bottom line--which, these days at the NYT, is measured at least in part by screenloads. Another grad student friend of mine--this one has an actual career as a freelancer and a staff writer at another publication--successfully pitched a piece to the NYT and asked all of her friends to view it as often as possible from as many IPs as possible. The stories that get emailed around or blogged are the successful ones, especially for the comparatively fluffy features sections. So, the editors are happy that we're sitting around talking about how stupid this article is.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:31 PM
12: Yeah, but it's too late. Bwahahahaha.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:34 PM
What JM said.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:35 PM
She's published a book called "Dump the Schlump" about how to find "A Quality Man."
Um, wow.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:39 PM
J. Courtney Sullivan’s first book, Dating Up: The Ultimate Guide to Finding the Man You Deserve is due out from Warner Books in February 2007.
Posted by Barbar | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:42 PM
Okay, I just wrote something really bitchy and castrating in response to this article, but I deleted it because, you know, the most important thing about upholding my ideals is to ensure that everyone still thinks I'm sexy.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:43 PM
And, you know, not some shaven headed Smith girl or similar.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:45 PM
Can't those of us already in thrall to your mystery and beauty, and therefore in no danger of not finding you sexy, see what you wrote?
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:46 PM
I wish I weren't anonymous so I could link to the picture of me, bald, with pink ink streaming down my head. I love that picture.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:47 PM
Dating up?!? Ok, now I officially hate this woman.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:47 PM
An ex-boyfriend once told me that he couldn't stand two-faced women. "And by two-faced," he explained, "I mean the sort of woman who wears so much makeup that she looks one way when you're out with her at night, and then totally different the next morning. That's why I love the way you look. You don't feel the need to get all dolled up in blue eye shadow -- you're just so natural." When we moved in together nine months later, the jig was up. Living together has plenty of benefits, but preserving the "I just rolled out of bed looking this way" myth isn't among them.
Posted by Barbar | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:47 PM
the sort of woman who wears so much makeup that she looks one way when you're out with her at night, and then totally different the next morning.
Oh. Wow.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:50 PM
Calm yourselves, children. Rest easy in the knowledge that the man she ends up marrying will start sleeping with her little sister or best friend in a little under a decade. And, thanks to this article, we won't have to feel bad for her.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:51 PM
Geez, Barbar, don't do that. Until I clicked through your name, I thought that was you talking, and was wondering what to say.
I am now completely convinced that this is a plot to make feminists look bad.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:52 PM
23: It was mostly screaming and then doing my imitation of the NYT saying, "Now, honey, we know you care about things like 'the environment' and 'women's rights' and 'the poor' and we think it's really really sweet that you have such big, nice thoughts! But wouldn't it be nice if you'd just put on some makeup, get in Grandma's SUV and head out to the Hamptons with us? Maybe there will be cute boys there!"
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:52 PM
Didn't 26-7 get gone over extensively in old comments (snf) in re Ogged's (hbuh) complaint about women who wear makeup?
I was going to say I just now realized that Barbar is a woman, but I clicked on the link and 26 is a quote from J. Court. So, nemmine.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:53 PM
Actually, I think 26 pretty much definitively answers the question posed in today's other post. (I hope linking with new stuff is okay.)
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:53 PM
Are you saying he moved in with you, natural conceptions and all, never having seen you just rolled out of bed, or that he must have overlooked or been blind to momentary lapses, and when he was living with you, the scales fell from his eyes?
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:53 PM
One of my roommates actually is very much that sort of woman. I lived with her for at least three months before I saw her without her makeup. She looked totally different: skin color and texture, shape of face, eye color. I think she looks better without the makeup, but controlling that aspect of her self-presentation is very important to her. She's a Judith Butler devotee, btw, and rarely lacks for, ahem, intimate companionship. But I've always wondered how she negotiates that moment of "darling, I'm now going to slip out of my makeup..."
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:54 PM
Patty, who has lived with her husband, Ben, for almost a year, bought porcelain bathroom canisters as soon as she moved in, placing them on a wicker shelf. "I put tampons, Monistat, and anything else that's unpleasant to look at in them,"
Yeah, if you're going to keep your used tampons and Monistat applicators, it really helps if you pretty them up with a wicker shelf.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:57 PM
I suppose if you have sex with the lights out, and then get out of bed and dash for the bathroom to cosmeticize first thing in the morning, it's plausible.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:57 PM
OK, I was fooled by 26 too. But no, I don't think it answers the question posed in today's other post.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 3:59 PM
Whoops, 26 is actually a quote from a piece by the author of the Times piece (click the name on the post).
Posted by Barbar | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:00 PM
There is, of course, a wonderfully disgusting (and misogynist!) Swift poem on this very topic. Highly recommended reading.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:00 PM
36: No, you can leave the lights on if you use waterproof mascara and the new non-smudging lipsticks and makeup. After all, guys who are hung up on mystery and prettiness aren't all that likely to actually do anything that's going to muss your foundation. 'Course, you still have to get up before him, but that's okay because men like to be greeted with a hearty breakfast on awaking.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:01 PM
LB, I don't think that's what she does, though. At least not the "dash out first thing in the morning" part: since she doesn't put on her makeup before she's done her full exfoliation-washing-treating-lotioning regime, I tend to know at what hour the bathroom is occupied, and it's late.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:04 PM
She only sleeps with men with corrected vision, and withholds their contacts/glasses in the morning until she's done her face?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:06 PM
My dad and I used to argue about that poem; he found it effective and as you say, disgusting, my response was "so what if she does? it's all good." I'm starting to thing/k I may be a fetishist.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:06 PM
41: I'm telling you, smudge-proof makeup.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:06 PM
Kristina and Matt, who have lived together for 14 years, brush, floss and use teeth-bleaching trays every night. "It gives us some quiet time together while we watch TV and chill before bed," says Kristina.
Yes, there's nothing sexier than curling up with each other and your teeth-bleaching trays.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:06 PM
I think 43 officially crosses into TMI territory.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:08 PM
43: Well, it's where Swift comes down:
Such order from confusion sprung,
Such gaudy tulips raised from dung.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:08 PM
45 made me laugh out loud. I thought the same thing, sort of, but ne'er so well expressed.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:09 PM
I'll auto-pwn myself in advance, but what's TMI territory?
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:10 PM
I am now completely convinced that this is a plot to make feminists look bad.
See, I don't think so. For example (clicking on my name), from the Smith Alumnae Quarterly:
Karen Kosztolnyik ’90 is a senior editor at Warner Books, where she acquires fiction and nonfiction for all divisions, including hardcover, trade, and mass market. Her acquisition interests are commercial women’s fiction, chick lit, romance, suspense, and nonfiction concerning women’s issues, current events, and pop culture. She has acquired and edited New York Times bestseller Carly Phillips; Deanna Kizis (How to Meet Cute Boys); and Megan Crane (English as a Second Language). At press time, Kosztolnyik had just signed J. Courtney Sullivan ’03’s post-postfeminist take on the dating world, Dating Up: The Ultimate Guide to Finding the Man You Deserve, due out next fall. Kosztolnyik lives in New York City with her husband.
I feel like a lot of commenters here have thought through a lot of the feminist issues; I don't think this is true for most of the population. And so there is a big market for contrarianism and contra-contrarianism re: "romance."
Posted by Barbar | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:11 PM
Too Much Information.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:12 PM
Oh, she takes it all off at night, though. I'm not exactly sure whether it's before or after sex, and I doubt there's a strict law about it. No, I suspect she and her partners have figured out some kind of complex dance around her makeup regime. (I haven't asked because she's rather reserved and would take questioning on such matters as rude and judgmental. She's abroad this year, but otherwise it would be SIX YEARS now that we've lived together.)
As for the Swift poem, dude, if Strephon is poking around in a lady's chamber pot, he's getting what odors he deserves.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:12 PM
"Oh, this is meaningful to young people, and speaks to their concerns."
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:13 PM
I'm sure this is explained elsewhere, but how do you create links in comments?
Posted by Barbar | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:14 PM
50: There is. But isn't that partly because of the plot to make feminists look bad?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:14 PM
The fact that J. Courtney Sullivan went to Smith's and "joined a campus women's group and studied up on gender issues," and apparently is now pursuing a career as a romantic advice writer, is a damning indictment of somebody, I think. Probably her.
Posted by Barbar | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:17 PM
Like this. And in a recent enough comment that it can still be linked to, yet.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:17 PM
Barbar, the link command is [a href="link"]text[/a]. Where the square brackets are replaced by the little left and right angle thingies above the comma and period, link refers to the code in "link to this comment," and text, obviously, refers to what ppl actually read when it posts. If that makes sense.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:18 PM
55: But who is creating this plot? Smith graduates working as publishers and writers?
Posted by Barbar | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:18 PM
In other words, Unfogged commenters should probably pitch their ideas about "Modern Love" to the fucking NYT because, hell, we're not getting paid as it is, and we might as well raise the Gray Lady's
hemlinetone.Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:19 PM
The Man, duh.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:19 PM
57, 58: Thanks.
Posted by Barbar | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:19 PM
I vote for the mysterious Alameida.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:19 PM
No, no. The plot's been around for ages. Think of Rush Limbaugh, Fatal Attraction, and all the Hillary-bashing.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:20 PM
I got a big ass lecture yesterday from one of my commenters about how using the phrase "The Man" proves that I'm sexist.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:21 PM
text, obviously, refers to what ppl actually read when it posts.
Actually, he frequently goes off on a tangent, and anyway his gender's pretty well known, no need to dance around it.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:22 PM
Clearly, The Man is attempting to keep you down.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:22 PM
67: Yeah, that was pretty much my response.
66: Where is he, anyway?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:24 PM
Babar, I read you as denying JM's cynicism theory, which convinced me, and saying "No, they think it meets a need, and is what they really think" Which is what I thought first until I realized I would rather believe in cynicism. What do you think? Whose fault is it that a Smith graduate thinks and writes on this level, and gets published?
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:25 PM
Speaking of "The Man," where in the world are these lyrics from? I can't remember, and it's annoying me:
You're never going to get ahead
Giving head to the man.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:28 PM
Never mind, found it.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:29 PM
I heard a story from a friend that one of her classmates, a Smith grad, claimed all they did there was smoke pot and talk about hot boys. Her profs were really nurturing and never criticized, and when she showed up at her Ph.D. program, burst into tears every time a prof told her she was wrong. She ended up leaving school to RV around the country with her totally-hot pot dealer.
I'm sure this isn't the quintessential Smith experience, but it sounds quite possible. I worked in the Northampton area for a summer and man, Smith's local vibe is odd.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:41 PM
There are so many syntactical errors in 72 that I realize I must go home and make dinner.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:45 PM
72,73: perfectly clear, though
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 4:47 PM
I guess I think the median response to the Times article will be something like:
"Yeah that's true -- feminism is good and stuff, and I'm a feminist, but women like men to hold doors open for them, which is kind of ironic, but that's life." Which is actually exactly what the surface message of the article is. I don't think the rationale for the article is just to piss readers off (it could be, but I think the % of readers who will be pissed off by it is disturbingly small).
I agree that the feminism is attacked as being for man-hating lesbians who shave their heads; let's call this portrayal the Plot Against Feminism. What is distrurbing is that this self-proclaimed feminist, who went to Smith's and supposedly was very concerned with women's issues, sees no problem with furthering the Plot Against Feminism.
So what does this mean? I don't know for sure, but my first guess would be that her interest in feminism in college was somewhat superficial. She's just a kid, it's giving her a cause to rally around and identify with. It's not quite mature. She graduates from an all-women's college and heads off to New York and life is more complicated than she thought. Big surprise. Her interest in feminism apparently never went deep enough to cause her to think about the Plot Against Feminism, so reality disarms her and she basically joins forces with it, while still aware of unequal wages and domestic violence issues.
So she's young and stupid. But, a lot of people think like her. So many, in fact, that I don't think the people publishing her are even that cynical. They engage in the Plot Against Feminism but many of them are probably self-described feminists who don't think the Plot Against Feminism is wrong (because they think that some feminists are just really "extreme"). And if they don't even consider themselves feminists, then they almost surely don't think the Plot Against Feminism is wrong, or even a plot. So I don't think it's that cynical.
Now eventually people make money off of the Plot Against Feminism (Caitlin Flanagan), and they will make transparently stupid statements -- things they know full well are ridiculous -- just to sell books. This is cynical. Even then, however, someone like Caitlin Flanagan thinks that her "deep-down" idea -- that feminism doesn't quite work -- has something to it. At least I think so.
Whence the Plot Against Feminism? I guess I think that most people are pretty attached to the status quo. They can get riled up about salient injustices (men beating women, men out-earning women, women not being able to vote) but a lot of them don't spend too much time thinking about the less salient ones. When they get older and more comfortable with life, they can inoculate themselves from challenges by saying, "Hey, I'm a feminist. But..." And when the status quo is challenged, they take it personally.
I might be underestimating the control that centralized media has on our thoughts. Maybe the Plot Against Feminism is more plot-like than I am giving it credit for. Cable news in particular seems remarkably shameless (the Daily Show does a good job exposing them by juxtaposing clips from a variety of shows). But I see the Plot Against Feminism as something that foot soldiers will carry out without much supervision.
Posted by Barbar | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 5:22 PM
Oh, I agree with you Barbar, re. foot soldiers. But I do think that there's a plot, and I think it has to do, really with various things--most importantly the increasing pressure that women's participation in labor markets has to do with unpaid labor at home.
I actually think that the whole "I'm a Feminist, but. . ." thing is something people tend to grow out of, rather than into. IME, women get more radical as they age. I think partly it's just maturity, and worrying less about what other people think, and partly its because the illusions one has when young and single about how really all the battles have been won tend to run into some hard realities the further on you go, work-wise or relationship-wise.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 5:38 PM
75,76: I think class is doing most of the work in this phenomenon.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 5:52 PM
So young women, at say twenty, are inclined to be "feminists, but" because of the dissonance of being attracted to, capable of loving, men and their crude, antagonist, caricature idea of what feminism is and what its issues are. And the PAF is at its most effective in having given them this idea of what feminism is and stands for. And the readings, courses and examples that would complicate this picture, as it were innoculating young miss against such thinking, reaches only a fraction of the people to whom these ideas will be important. And the PAF mostly operates through media, and stories like this reenforce it even while representing an attempt to be true to experience, because the young reader will accept that her story of what she learned of feminism at Smith was the real thing, and not a caricature, thereby framing the reader's expectations of what "feminism" is likely to have to say to her. So she thinks she knows what it means and says even if she doesn't. And God help the young men.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 6:00 PM
Where is he [text], anyway?
In Nashville (O old comments!), and I believe working at a non-law firm job that provides less occasion for obsessive procrastination.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 6:40 PM
I don't pay: well, to be more optimistic, part of this problem has to do with treating "feminism" which as a package that you can accept or reject, or identify with or not identify with. I've always thought of myself as a feminist even though I haven't always been a feminist. The transition didn't have anything to do with the label.
Perhaps this is of relevance:
Median household income for Sunday Times readers: $146,998
Median household assets including primary residence: $1,479,608
Posted by Barbar | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 6:41 PM
78, in many respects, hits the nail on the head.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 6:44 PM
When I teach Freshman writing, every single semester I do the gendered language talk. I've condensed it to about 20 minutes of the following:
1) the universal pronoun "he" makes a giant presumption, 2) many female (and male) readers will be offended, 3) avoiding the rhetorical problem with gender-neutral language is simply polite--but 4) investigating more closely how gender differences inform your argument or data is also very worthwhile.
Of those steps, I would consider 1-3 battles feminism has largely already won, and I present them as pretty much the minimum bar for writing at the college level. 4 I regard as the ongoing work of feminist scholarship, from which I admit straight up that I've benefitted even though it's not my specialty.
Which has gotten me labelled in a few anonymous professor reviews as a radical feminist.
My friends who actually do feminist or gender-theory scholarship just laughed.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 7:02 PM
82: That's a great way to inject your commie pinko agenda, while seeming to discuss grammar. Huzzah.
Do you suggest to your students that they use "he or she" {or "she or he"}? Or just mix it up: sometimes "she," sometimes "he"? Or something else?
Posted by Stanley | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 7:12 PM
I mostly just use "he", as I've already admitted at the Weblog, at least partially because "he or she" quickly becomes unmanageable when one's in the business of constructing tasty syntax bombes.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 7:39 PM
It's more like, instead :
"Each student should finish his homework on time." (Sexist!)
Or:
"Each student should finish his or her homework on time." (Wordy!)
Or:
"Each student should finish their homework on time." (Subj-verb disagreement! Ungrammatical!!!1!1!)....
The gender neutral should be, when possible:
"Students should finish their homework on time."
Mixing it up is, I'm afraid to say, a pretty terrible solution. The average reader will be totally confused if the pronouns switch around arbitrarily, and if the order isn't arbitrary, then the writer should put a little more thought into why one pronoun is appropriate in one place and not another. And if a writer does that thinking, it would be important to present that case to the reader: undergraduate research papers aren't often read like poetry, as it were...
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 7:40 PM
Ok, Wolfson is the sexiest. And you'd be IN TROUBLE in my class.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 7:41 PM
David Vell/eman is on my side! I have a greater self-understanding than you!
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 7:47 PM
Bryan Garner is on my side, yo.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 7:52 PM
I don't know who that is.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 7:53 PM
"A best-selling legal author with more than a dozen titles to his credit, Bryan Garner is also the editor-in-chief of Black's Law Dictionary in all of its current editions. He has taught at several law schools, and is the president of LawProse, Inc., a Dallas-based company that provides writing and drafting seminars to lawyers and judges throughout the United States."
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 7:57 PM
Being the constructed language nerd that I am, I would be in favor of introducing some set of gender neutral personal pronouns and using those throughout, damn the weirdness. You know, like "ve, ver, vis, verself", or others. But, there is much to be said for singular they, not the least being that the construction was used by such writers as Shakespeare and Austen.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 8:02 PM
"Each student should finish their homework on time." (Subj-verb disagreement! Ungrammatical!!!1!1!)....
Geoff Pullum is on my side. (Actually I usually use generic "she.")
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 8:05 PM
I've come around to singular they myself, despite having been Fowler-catechised as a child. The reason Shakespeare and Austen used it is that English has obviously needed such a construction for hundreds of years.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 8:07 PM
I don't know who that is.
My illusions are shattered. Bryan A. Garner? No bells?
If you don't know Garner's American Usage, I think you'd like it. Seriously. He's not shy about calling some usages "vulgar" and others "pretentious," but he's not stuck in the 1940s. It's a good resource.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 8:07 PM
I'm not really as strict about the singular they as I pretend to be in Freshman Writing. I don't really like it, but it doesn't grate as much as the universal he does. However, at the freshman writing level, even at my snooty university, enough students show a poor grasp of basic grammar that I think it advisable to be somewhat grammatically dogmatic.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 8:13 PM
I would sooner use "ve" than a generic "he" or "she". And I would sooner rip off my fingernails one by one than use "he or she".
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 8:18 PM
Garner's American Usage is great. I like the small caps he uses to write something off as a NEEDLESS VARIANT.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 8:21 PM
I knew the universal he trampled out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, but I didn't know he grated.
Were we surrounded by gendered objects, like the speakers of Romance languages, we could keep our pronouns and our fingnails too. But for us, gender means gender, and all of our objects except ships are its.
They it is.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 8:24 PM
I prefer "e" to "ve".
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 8:24 PM
I knew the universal he trampled out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, but I didn't know he grated.
You're daring to make universal He jokes with a female jack mormon? Have I told you the one about Heavenly Mother, whom He wanted to keep out of the world's ugliness? And, no, I don't really think that Julia Howe meant something so different.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 8:31 PM
Damn, this would really be a perfect time to link to Bitch PhD's "How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb" joke.
An update on my comedy career, everyone: the problem is my short-term memory. I need to print out that thread, study it on the damned subway, pick out the jokes I could ever plausibly carry off, and practice. First, I need a printer... and then, um, the world will be mine!
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 8:36 PM
I prefer "e" to "ve".
I prefer "My Humps" to either.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 8:37 PM
It's the first time I've read it, but Cassinus must have been familiar with the poem in 39. (I've linked this before, but that comment is no longer linkable.)
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 8:46 PM
Oh my god, y'all. I need help. I have a commenter at home who is plaguing all my posts with long explanations about how the progressive liberal movement has to be SEXY *and* SMART to be effective. He thinks reading critical theory and pondering it is far more important than actively doing anything about suffering. He commands all women in his presence to exercise at least five hours a week and spend the rest of their time reading Derrida. He thinks he agrees with me, but just wants to brush up my rhetoric, which is dumpy, frumpy, and altogether too lumpy for the masses by getting rid of any hippie-sounding language of kindness, feminism, and anti-suffering. And he won't stop commenting, despite many many suggestions by everyone. He's ruining my discussions. What can I do?
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 8:53 PM
Oh my god, y'all. I need help. I have a commenter at home who is plaguing all my posts with long explanations about how the progressive liberal movement has to be SEXY *and* SMART to be effective. He thinks reading critical theory and pondering it is far more important than actively doing anything about suffering. He commands all women in his presence to exercise at least five hours a week and spend the rest of their time reading Derrida. He thinks he agrees with me, but just wants to brush up my rhetoric, which is dumpy, frumpy, and altogether too lumpy for the masses by getting rid of any hippie-sounding language of kindness, feminism, and anti-suffering. And he won't stop commenting, despite many many suggestions by everyone. He's ruining my discussions. What can I do?
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 8:54 PM
Oh fuck. Sorry about the double.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 8:55 PM
And 103: I love Cassinus and Peter. Swift is best when he's stealing his own best lines.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 8:58 PM
What can I do?
Tell him he's being disruptive. Then ban him. Liberal sites ban people far too rarely (not here, but other places...).
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 9:02 PM
Disengage? by which I mean, don't respond, certainly not in detail. I stopped reading him, maybe others will do the same. Only now, after this plea of yours, did I go back and find a post where he brought up all of those themes, wow.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 9:05 PM
I may get to that point, but he's so tone-deaf he seems to have no idea why his opinions aren't wildly popular with us. He keeps saying, "Why is everyone deliberately misreading me? All I said is that we need to realize that the objectification of women has nothing to do with women's rights!" Shudder. I have told him I'm tired of his comments, he's said he's tired of making them, and I've suggested he find other places to make them. Still, he returns. Banning may be in order, but I keep hoping we can ignore him out of existence.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 9:07 PM
There's nothing to respond to in detail because it's the yammering of a self-absorbed moron. So all I do is say, "Yes, sweetheart, you have read some big books, haven't you! How wonderful! Now scoot along!" but to no avail. I will be patient. He will get tired soon.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 9:10 PM
It's the right thing to do: turn a shoulder to the person being tedious. It's been done to me, and I feel I learned from it.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 9:11 PM
Well, if he's inflammatory at all, there's not a way to ignore him out of existence without enforcing the "ignore him" command, which is to say, either deleting comments that engage him or asking commenters who engage him to not continue to do so. And anything in that direction is so much more complicated than simply deleting his posts. I would advise you not to be so squeamish about moderation. If looking at it this way helps: It's your community, and I think it's more than your right to keep the level of discussion high, it's your obligation to your readers.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 9:15 PM
The odd thing is, I know who this guy is, irl. He's a real pig, and everyone who's met him says so. Makes the whole thing doubly gross, because I knew when he started in that it would only go downhill.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 9:16 PM
Is it this guy?
Posted by Barbar | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 9:19 PM
Hee, hee. Yes. Except more about himself, too. "Hillary Clinton can't do what no other woman has done because I myself couldn't do it, and certainly I wouldn't hold women to any standard I don't hold myself! Plus, she is getting older, and only attractive women receive praise! Can't she get surgery to look really really hot? Then we'd maybe be talking!"
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 9:26 PM
AWB - How did your double-post come about? Did you get a 500 error? What happened?
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 9:26 PM
My server went offline just as I hit "post" so I reloaded when I came back online. My fault, not the server's.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 9:30 PM
118 - Great. Thanks. I'm a little over-cautious right now.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 9:35 PM
I've been at a (hated)Mets game for what feels like 12 hours. Does the outside world stil exist?
"Hated" modifies Mets, not Mets game.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 9:53 PM
*chirp, chirp*
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 10:08 PM
I thought this was a union gig.
Posted by Crickets | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 10:17 PM
AWB will join the union after a month.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 10:20 PM
Man, pwned by invertebrates.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 10:22 PM
AWB, you must ban him.
Back to the gender neutral language thing. You're all wrong. There's nothing wrong with "he or she" in moderation (or, for variety, "she or he"); "their" solves a real problem, and I let my students use it, with the caveat that they realize that more anal-retentive types will consider it "wrong"; and the best solution *is* to alternate between "she" and "he," both because doing so forces one to be more self-conscious about the very things JM, in her feminazi radicalism, articulates in (4), and because it solves *another* problem, that of confusing pronoun referents when discussing, say, the difference between two hypothetical people's reactions to X.
So there.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 11:35 PM
I totally disagree.
Posted by Feminazi Grammarian | Link to this comment | 05-23-06 11:55 PM
I have a commenter at home who is plaguing all my posts with long explanations about how the progressive liberal movement has to be SEXY *and* SMART to be effective.
We'd better started. The Right already has Katherine Harris shaking her tits on national television.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 12:16 AM
So who thinks the commentariat should gin up within itself a modern love submission?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 12:24 AM
Check submission guidelines first?
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 12:28 AM
You know, I once tried to pitch to Nerve that they should have a "sex advice from bloggers" thing with me and Ogged, but they didn't bite. Dummies.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 12:29 AM
Seriously? That's awesome.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 12:33 AM
It would be awesomer if they actually had let us do it.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 12:35 AM
The "Modern Love" column skews personal. Ergo, Matt Weiner's lovelorn, underhanded attempts to set up other people on the blog should be perfect. The pseudonymous would have to have a damned good pitch to break through the prejudice--even for a one-off, let alone a regular thing. That's not to say it's not worth trying--or trying again. I don't know when you pitched that idea, B, but I have the sense that, in the last six months, the NYT has gotten hip to how blogs could mean cheap revenue.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 12:43 AM
AWB, I'm not a frequent visitor to your blog, but even at a brief glance, this "blainerunner" character is obviously detrimental. Even apart from what he's saying (which is pretty foul), the sheer volume of his comments is putting a bad dent in the comment culture. I second the motion.
Posted by Vance Maverick | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 12:57 AM
Vance Maverick's comment does not currently appear in the recent comments sidebar. I hope this is not a bad sign.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 1:15 AM
tch, that article brings out my inner taxi driver:
[And now I have fallen for a man who understands and respects my feminist beliefs, and who also takes me to dinner, holds the door, calls me Babydoll in a slow Southern drawl. ]
Its basic message is "see these feminists, bless'em, they act all angry but what they really need is a good seeing-to". Which makes it somewhat unsurprising that it got commissioned; there is *always* an audience for that message.
I reiterate, btw, my iron rule that someone writing in the newspapers about how much they love their new partner who is in many ways the perfect example of their gender, is usually engaged in displacement activity and the odds are good that this Southern gentleman will have dumped, thumped or murdered her within the quarter.
(semi ontopic: actual conversation from last weekend:
Ms Digest, pointing to her lipstick: Is this crooked?
Me: Well yes a bit darling, but it's the face you were born with and I love you.
I thought that joke deserved a better response than it got)
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:00 AM
On blaine runner: I wouldn't ban him yet -- I'd move to dismissive abuse first: ("From what you're saying, you simply don't understand that, while you're calling yourself feminist, actual women find the positions you state oppressive and sexist. So which are you, lying or stupid?") You've been quite respectful, engaging him as if he had something useful to say.
This may not work, in which case I would ban, but his schtick seems to be "Reasonable man having a reasonable discussion" and that only works as long as people are taking him seriously at face value. In the face of abuse he'll either have to go away or change his schtick.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 5:33 AM
I thought that joke deserved a better response than it got)
You mean she didn't throw something at you? Slacker.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 5:34 AM
The pseudonymous would have to have a damned good pitch to break through the prejudice--even for a one-off, let alone a regular thing.
We wouldn't tell them it was a pseudonym.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:01 PM
I could write something about the tragedy of growing up named "LizardBreath". (Actually, people in high school did call me Lizard, and it wasn't a problem.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:05 PM
Good point, Ben. If the public can accept "Berke Breathed" as a real person, surely an editor could take "Liz Ard-Breath" or "S.C.M. Timbot."
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:06 PM
w00t.
Posted by Rudy Persiffler | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:09 PM
Oh, we're supposed to use our real fake names?
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:10 PM
Many times in the last 300 years pseudonymity has stood for frankness, "what we really think", things that would get me in trouble if they knew it was me, etc. The stupider the name the better.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:12 PM
That's true, IDP, but I suspect the NYT editors are aware that part of the pleasure people get out of the "Modern Love" feature is incredulous mockery of anyone who would sign their real name to that.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:18 PM
Great, so we'll come up with an adequately piss-taking column, and sign it "Joe Drymala".
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:23 PM
There you go again, JM. You and Babar had me perfectly whipsawed yesterday: Believe in mind and self-awareness! They're cynical! versus They really think that and those of us who know better are a tiny, tiny minority!
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:25 PM
We'll sign it "Ben Wolfson". Not the blogger but the Modern Love columnist of the same name.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:30 PM
I'm thinking that the problem with the boys that the author used to know before she had this amazing epiphany that she Could Be A Feminist and Still Find Love was that she's a) probably 22, so b) in high school boys weren't interesting because they were high school boys.
On the pronoun thing, the only thing I tell my students is that there must be subject-verb agreement, so 'they' is right out with 'each', and that they should recognize that picking a gendered form, or using 'one', will lead their readers to a certain impression that they, as writers, should control. Also that naming examples ('Michael is a baby confronted with the color red for the first time. Does he have a concept blahdy bladhy') can help sidestep the problem.
And that repetitious 'he or she' makes me sneeze uncontrollably. And that I give Cs when I sneeze.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:31 PM
I'm all over singular 'they' -- there are some sentences where it clangs, for me, but rewriting to make it sound okay is fairly easy.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:33 PM
I think it's likely that we're both kinda right, that a lot of the features editors are probably calculating, deluded with life in their bubble-world, and market- and deadline-driven.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:34 PM
And AWB, ban him if he's giving you that much of a headache. You blog for fun; if he's not contributing anything, show him the door.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:35 PM
151 to 147.
I endorse the nomination of "Ben Wolfson" as our ambassador to Modern Love and move that his proposed column consist of relevent sentences from Unfogged chosen at random.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:37 PM
Headline: "Really, don't we all want to sex Motumbo?"
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:39 PM
'He or she' perpetuates the mistaken notion that we live in a universe of binary opposites. It deprives people of the more interesting alternatives: 'undecided', 'not elsewhere classified', 'some or all of the above', 'decline to state', and 'if it's Tuesday this must be male'.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:40 PM
How can we insure that they are relevant, if they are chosen at random? Do you propose that we extract from unfogged all relevant sentences, and then run the selection algorithm on them? Or that we do a larger-than-necessary selection, and then cull from that appropriate sentences?
Slightly OT -- a friend whom I e-mailed Apo's "Simon and Garfunkel" link writes back today to say that she calls her girls "Night and daaaaaaaaaaaaay", and sings to them, "you are the ones, only you beneath the moon or under the suuuuuuuuuuun!" (This is a friend whom I am trying, unsuccessfully so far, to get interested in Mineshaftery.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:43 PM
)
156 -> 153
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:45 PM
I endorse the nomination of "Ben Wolfson" as our ambassador to Modern Love and move that his proposed column consist of relevent sentences from Unfogged chosen at random.
nose rings . I haven't read it. That's not a dash.( This is probably "cheap "is a prop to the dismay of American editors. So adorable. Apo, I don't name the shoes, ogged, how to operate the internet, but "kohl "is just using their computers to post my address. Royal Air Battalion? Residual Acid Benefits? Jung gur uryy ner fcbvyre gntf? V2hhdCdzIHdyb25nIHdpdGggdGhhdCBvbGQgc3RhbmRieSwgUk9UMTM/ "who's a national treasure ". There were two possibilities: 1. have you got no in with him, FL, that nothing about my high school period, and John, but we see Cheung along with for a day, poonhound by night! Old? Good to be fast-forward function Almost certainly false, since actually I think I fell asleep at work. But that their aesthetic judgments are sound. There's an AP article that makes coin tosses display predictable behavior over many iterations, and the Mansion, though. Actually what she has in an obsession with Miss Manners, but just in the total cost inclusive of airfare and accomodations is less than just their constantly being together, you have me, sounds reasonably early.) Sort of— the vacillation isn't an attribute of faith. That's all. I'm heading away from the NYRB( pay article, but since when? latus,-um sunt Nope! I don't share your predilection for excellence, in the thread after one( the one where Face goes undercover. Salad nicoise is really the case? Given the sorts of highly individual statistics coming into play depending on how many of you wiseacres would have brought in mad ca$h. The Cecil Taylor thing, you've got to pitch your attempt at a reading in LA some years ago. "I Just didn't respond RIGHT AWAY? Isn't that the one with either of those annoying servers that demands the www prefix. http:// elsa-benitez. nude-celebrities-site. It's a purely ceremonial utterance. I revealed the lie to your ankles........... us and. info don't appear too often either.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:46 PM
I endorse the nomination of "Ben Wolfson" as our ambassador to Modern Love and move that his proposed column consist of relevent sentences from Unfogged chosen at random.
Call Modern Love! Ben's already written his column.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:48 PM
Oh man, dig this randomly-generated sentence: "I wish I had to consult the dictionary much less than your own jam, Ogged.".
Don't we all.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:48 PM
Hey, so is comment posting incredibly slow for others as well?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:50 PM
Pwned.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:50 PM
161 - Yes, I'm emailing you about that right now.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:52 PM
Testing
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:57 PM
I wasted at least an hour clicking on that random Unfogged generator when it was first posted, and I'm pretty sure I'm about to do the same again. It's even more fun when I imagine the results as a pitch to the NYT.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 2:58 PM
It looks like we still are having intermittant problems with mt-comments.cgi that cause it to spike the server. So, we definitely do need to go with a "the long term fix is to fix this, not just throw CPU/memory at it".
Very disappointing to have slowness on our own server but the good news is that we won't get shut down for it.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 3:00 PM
"Ben Wolfson"'s "Modern Love" column could discuss with relationship with ogged's mom, as in:
"So ogged's mom will move in with someone without having read any of the animal displayed cut-up, and that didn't suck ass."
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 3:05 PM
"Shaggy dog stories are not legally enforceable, probably inhumane."
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 3:16 PM
AWB, I assumed your commenter was either an elaborate troll or someone working out his own private obsessions. I have trouble believing he's a professor of anything. At the very least he's a boor. Since he's already declined to take your hints to go somewhere else, I'd take out the Banhammer.
Posted by Paul | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 7:22 PM
Myself, I enjoyed "There's an AP article that makes coin tosses display predictable behavior over many iterations". Wow. That's quite an AP article.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 05-24-06 7:32 PM
A White Bear, you could always try the direct approach with blainerunner.
It actually worked with abc123. He did post one more time on Unfogged, several weeks or so later, but then stopped after ogged reminded him that he'd been asked to leave.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 05-25-06 1:26 PM
In the interests of keeping this site as wonderful it can be, and making sure Ben never reads any Hegel, when you click on "Right" at the top of the page M/tch linked it doesn't take you to the right place.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 05-25-06 1:45 PM
Also, when you click on a "link to this comment" link in a thread that's been archived, the whole thread gets reloaded. Clicking intra-thread links in Innocence, for example, is v. painful. Is there a way to manage the redirects so this doesn't happen?
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 05-25-06 1:52 PM
Is there a way to manage the redirects so this doesn't happen?
Yes. But I might not do it. I have reasons.
Anyway, the solution to your problem is, avoid Innoncence. Innocence: actually nocent!
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-25-06 1:55 PM
You know, I'm mostly on board the Innocence sucks train, but there actually are some good bits.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 05-25-06 1:58 PM
172: Yes, that is impressive, although provoked and not so "reasonable" and all as blainerunner. That abc123 post was pure, unadulterated Trollery.
I like the new, bf "closed thread" message at the bottom of the page.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 05-25-06 2:01 PM
[This was spam, but people have responded to it so I'm not deleting it. LB.]
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 05-26-06 3:29 AM
Nadir, not zenith. Zenith is the highest point. Nadir is the lowest point.
Posted by ajay | Link to this comment | 05-26-06 3:34 AM
Hey 177, there's already a Michael who used to post here. Choose another name.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 05-26-06 6:34 AM
Choose another name.
And another product! Dude -- phenermine is so 2005.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 05-26-06 6:52 AM
freedom-style makeup
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 05-26-06 6:19 PM
Fucking spam. I was going for having all comments on the recent comments list.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 3:30 PM
Where is everyone anyway? Is it night in all the US timezones now? That's never stopped people before, though.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 3:32 PM
Doesn't PM mean 15:30? I can never keep track of that either.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 3:33 PM
Yes, PM means add 12 to the number of hours. I'm noting your comment about Astrid Lindgren's (Somebody) on the Roof character, which books I remember seeing recommended a while back -- was it perhaps here? by you? -- Last time I was at Scandinavia House I asked about those but they only had a couple of non-Pippi Lindgren books, not including those ones.
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 3:57 PM
Not me.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 3:58 PM
Also I'm a bit jealous of you for your personal connection to Tove Jansson. Did your grandmother have any good stories to tell about her?
Posted by The Modesto Kid | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 3:59 PM
Yes, now I remember. It all makes sense. It's a long weekend in the US, everyone has Monday off, so I think a lot of people are travelling somewhere, and most are inclined to get away from the internet.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 4:10 PM
None I can remember at least, to my great chagrin. I really regret I never asked her about it. Farmor wasn't the most talkative person.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 4:12 PM
As I recall, my grandmother wasn't very self confident then and Tove was self assured and full of vigor. She always tried to boost farmor's confidence. And she was sweet and kind, a good friend.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 4:20 PM
Ah -- so, this hasn't been relevant for 15 comments, but, after I had very exhaustedly explained to the commenter in question that we had reached an impasse and it was time for him to peddle his wares elsewhere, he couldn't stop himself from posting one more big one about how objectifying women is really centrally important to the success of feminism, and that I should listen to him because he's a "sexually successful male." After I deleted that one for its complete inability to inspire any response other than screaming obscenities, he hasn't returned.
I am trying to figure out what a "sexually successful male" is. Does that mean someone who (a) finds the right hole to stick his penis in 7 out of every 10 tries? (b) sticks his penis in many different holes every day? (c) sticks his penis in the same hole many many times per day? (d) is pretty sure he could stick it in any hole he wanted to, but he's too much of a gentleman to prove it? (e) is able to force any hole he wants to yield to his penis by ridiculing the attached female's looks or intellect?
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 5:57 PM
Really, A White Bear, I think you're reading too much into this.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 6:05 PM
So did you end up getting into Tia's pants?
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 6:10 PM
And if so, M/tch, were you successful?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 6:21 PM
When did we learn that M/itch was trying to get into Tia's pants?
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 6:25 PM
When he asked Tia on her date if she wasn't reading too much into the film they saw.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 6:31 PM
When he asked Tia on her date if she wasn't reading too much into the film they saw.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 6:31 PM
Shit. See, I have this habit of doing things wrong, but hitting "POST" and then yelling, "Fuck!" and hitting "Back" and then correcting it and hitting "POST" without seeing if the mistake was registered. My server is fast when it wants to be.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 6:33 PM
You shouldn't admit it. Just attribute it to some kind of server error, and then watch Ben and Becks run around in a panic. It's so cute when they do that.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 6:40 PM
B is banned!
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 6:41 PM
When did we learn that M/itch was trying to get into Tia's pants?
Isn't it assumed that we all are?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 6:43 PM
Are they appropriate opera attire or something?
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 6:54 PM
See, they've learned to use the word "cool." It's like they know our secret young hip fresh language.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:01 PM
You know you're a sexually successful male when your partner pats you on the back post-issue and says, "good job." It's all about feedback.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:03 PM
That happened to me once! I was having first-date sex with a stranger, and when I came, he said, "Good job," all serious-like. It was unnerving.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:11 PM
Before I get into anyone's pants I think I should to get to the bottom of this "female orgasm" rumor.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:19 PM
My server is fast when it wants to be.
Server?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:25 PM
Server? I hardly even know 'er!
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:28 PM
There used to be an old-school 70's-style feminist website all about the myth of the vaginal orgasm, and when you clicked on the linked words "vaginal orgasm," you got a "This site was not found!" error. I don't think it was intentional, since everyone knows feminists don't have a sense of humor, but I laughed and laughed.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:34 PM
198 is an example of a problem I've seen a few times, namely that the "link to this comment" link doesn't link directly to that comment but just to the archinve page the original post was on.
I've been working around it by copying and pasting from View Source, and the href is correct there, and I've been meaning to report this issue, but have always before forgotten in the heady rush of using links in comments.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:34 PM
198 was a failed attempt to link to the actual post, not comments. 197 was an earlier failed attempt.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:37 PM
198 is an example of a problem I've seen a few times, namely that the "link to this comment" link doesn't link directly to that comment but just to the archinve page the original post was on.
This is simply false.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:40 PM
Still, there's something wrong with the "Link to this comment" links in archived threads.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:40 PM
Okay I'm not being clear.
I'll try to supply and example:
In the comments to this post:
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2006_05_07.html#004930
If I click on the "Link to this comment" link for this comment:
http://www.unfogged.com/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/unfogged/managed-mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=4930#343199
I get this url:
http://www.unfogged.com/static/comments_4930.html
That url, when pasted into a comment, does not lead where it should.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:46 PM
I have experienced no such wrongness. Can you give an example of a link doing the wrong thing? (It's true that the links cause the page to be reloaded, but that's because they still point to the cgi script which redirects one once again to the static page. I don't consider this a bug and it won't be changed.)
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:46 PM
If I click the "link to this comment" link for that comment, I get this URL:
http://www.unfogged.com/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/unfogged/managed-mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=4930#343199
My conclusion is that at most one of the following things is true:
(a) you suck.
(b) your browser sucks.
(c) you suck and your browser sucks.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:48 PM
It's cool that urls automatically become links now though. When did that happen?
Also, while I'm thinking about it, how's about requiring that commenters input a Name, to avoid the "Oops, 84 was me" phenomenon? Not a big deal, but it might be nice.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:49 PM
Indeed, should we "view" the "source" for that page, we find this:
<a href="http://www.unfogged.com/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/unfogged/managed-mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=4930#343199">Link to this comment</a>
Can you even begin to bear the weight of your wrongness?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:50 PM
I love you too, ben-ben.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:51 PM
wrongness isn't heavy, but unbearably light, young ben
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:53 PM
The way I got the correct url for the comment was by viewing source, so I knew that part was right. It's just that for some reason in what I'll stipulate is a sucky browser, though a very commonly used one, when I click on the "Link to this comment" link, it doesn't cough up the correct url, but this one:
http://www.unfogged.com/static/comments_4930.html
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:54 PM
I was having first-date sex with a stranger, and when I came, he said, "Good job," all serious-like.
I'm never condescending like that to the strangers who sex me.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:56 PM
I was having first-date sex with a stranger, and when I came, he said, "Good job," all serious-like.
He was talking to himself, obvs.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 7:59 PM
This never occurred to me, SB. A great weight has been lifted from my mind.
I think.
No, no, I'm pretty sure he was talking to me.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 8:17 PM
Re: wrongness.
Ben, clicking the second link in M/tch's comment does indeed result in Firefox redirecting to the 3rd link. That does not go to the specified comment, but to the top of the comment thread.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 8:26 PM
Maybe on a Mac? I clicked on it in Firefox and got sent to
http://www.unfogged.com/static/comments_4930.html#343199
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 8:29 PM
Oh, and I'm using windows. I guess I only implied that in 228.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 8:30 PM
I'm using Firefox, and it does the right thing for me.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 8:33 PM
In IE I get the 3rd link, but the browser window ends up in the correct spot. This is true of other "link to this comment" links, too.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 8:34 PM
What shows up in the URL bar when that happens?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 8:42 PM
I'm lacking clarity today. Sorry.
Every "link to this comment" link in IE sends me to this URL:
http://www.unfogged.com/static/comments_4930.html
But the window acts as if each link has been directed to the correct place.
(Except at the bottom of the page when it just loads the end of the thread. But that's always been that way when there's no more page to load, right?)
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 8:47 PM
AWB, at least he didn't say "good girl."
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 8:48 PM
That's funny, because afterward, he gave me a biscuit.
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 9:10 PM
I hope he at least let you sleep on the bed. And took you for a walk in the morning.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 9:30 PM
Maybe on a Mac?
Yes, quite so.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 9:36 PM
That's funny, because afterward, he gave me a biscuit.
Marvellously done.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 9:38 PM
But isn't the one who doesn't come supposed to get the biscuit?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 9:39 PM
D'oh! Works in Firefox for Mac, but not in Safari. That will teach me to have multiple browsers open at once.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 9:40 PM
That will teach me to have multiple browsers open at once.
That's a funny way to spell "use Safari".
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 9:43 PM
Well, someone better fix the Safari stuff, damnit.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 9:43 PM
My recommended solution is to use Firefox.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 9:44 PM
Safari worked when Ogged ran the place.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 9:57 PM
But all of the complaints about Safari drove him to quit.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 10:14 PM
And then they gave him cancer.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 10:15 PM
(too soon?)
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 10:16 PM
There were no complaints, b/c it worked. You see.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 10:17 PM
(too soon?)*
*This joke does not render properly in Safari.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 10:30 PM
Mean.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 10:39 PM
It's a short comment thread. I'm sure you can figure it out (comment 6).
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 10:52 PM
The good news is that closing the old comments has seriously cut down on the spam. The bad news is that now they are spamming active threads.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 11:11 PM
249: Actually, I used Firefox. But I am not going to make it my default browser, because it's just slower than Safari, I'm sorry.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 05-27-06 11:50 PM
There were no complaints, b/c it worked. You see.
Yeah, that's the thing. I haven't changed anything in my "links to old comments" protocol, but it no longer works the way it used to, back in the good old days. I can work around it, but I just wanted to let the Unfogged tech support team know, since they asked us to report anything weird that we see.
Which reminds me, the raccoon(s?) stopped growling and hissing after that initial day I reported it.
229 In IE I get the 3rd link, but the browser window ends up in the correct spot. This is true of other "link to this comment" links, too.
Yeah, this is exactly what happens for me too. The window opens in the correct spot but the URL bar shows the third url:
http://www.unfogged.com/static/comments_4930.html
Before I would just paste what was in the URL bar into the href, but that no longer works. So I view source and find the right url and paste that in.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 05-28-06 10:06 AM